Michael Montenegro takes us to MacArthur Park in Los Angeles to see the gigantic mural of an iconic public school teacher — Jaime Escalante — and the actor who portrayed him in Stand and Deliver, the homie Edward James Olmos.
PREVIOUSLY ON TEACHERS:
hero
Marina’s Way: A Cyber-Novela [Chapter One]
Marina is exhausted but exhilarated. Her entrails are convulsing violently as she pumps hundreds of rounds into the hordes of CSA Minutemen coming at her from all sides. After two sleepless nights of hard battle, she can barely hold onto the trigger, which is a throttle gyrating wildly in her hands.
She is emptying magazines from eight different machine guns placed strategically on the exoskeleton of her BattleBot or “Bot.” Bots are oversized suits of armor, equipped with lasers, machine guns, rocket launchers, grenades, poison gas canisters and other weapons systems.
Bots are operated by specialized Bot Pilots working deep inside the steel behemoths, which weigh thousands of pounds and stand five stories high. BattleBots were secretly developed by the U.S. Army and were now widely used by armies around the world.
“Incoming,” squawks Marina’s radar. “Shit! Some pinche vendido traitor ratted us out,” Marina hisses into her headset as fighter jets roar overhead and the forest explodes all around her.
Controversial magazine cover photos? Ask Oprah! (photo)
Of course we are sensitive to the complaints from Beantown (they’re beaners after all) about Rolling Stone’s decision to make controversial Caucasian-American Dzhokhar Tsarnaev their glamorous cover boy.
But as recovering ñewspeeps ourselves, we have to point out that the accused terrorist isn’t the first villain to make it to the cover of a slick zine:
- Mass-murdering terrorist Osama bin Laden was featured on the cover of Time with nary a protest.
- Pedophile-junkie Michael Jackson has been on every magazine cover everywhere and there are no crowds of moonwalkers with picket signs.
- Few heads were turned when serial bankrupter and ignorant liar Donald J. Trump graced Modern Toupee (his issue was the second-biggest seller after the Sen. Rand Paul cover.)
And there was no outrage when Oprah Winfrey put these two masterdeporters on the cover of O magazine in March of 2012.
We have to confess, though. POCHO’s biggest dream is to get banned in Boston.
Cleveland hero Charles Ramsey’s story: Dead Giveaway (music video)
The Cleveland man who helped the escaped kidnapping victims, Charles Ramsey, says his accused neighbor must have had really big testicles. “We ate ribs with that dude, but we didn’t have a clue!” he explains. Ain’t nobody got time for that! Songified newscast by schmoyoho.
Year after shooting, modest Giffords aide still says he is not a hero
Daniel Hernandez Jr., the Congressional intern who saved Rep. Gabby Gifford’s life on Jan. 8 last year, still declines to call himself a hero.
A mentally-ill man fired on Giffords and her constituents, killing six people and and wounding 13, including the popular liberal Democratic representative.
Only on the job five days, Hernandez, a student intern who had accompanied the congressmember to the Tucson shopping center for a voter registration event, rushed to her side when he heard gunshots and held her bleeding head and comforted her until paramedics took over her care.
In a TV interview, Hernandez still declines the “hero” label. Presidential candidate wannabe AK Half-Governor Sarah Palin was also singled out for scrutiny at the time because of an ad on her website that put gunsite cross hairs on Gifford’s congressional district.
Hernandez was just elected to the Tucson school board.
Palin has never been elected to anything since.