Tom Foley lost twice election night: he lost his post as Speaker of the House, but it got worse when he conceded defeat to GOP newcomer George Nethercutt. Foley, a 15-term congressman, becomes the first speaker to lose re-election since the Civil War. Even if Foley had won had won his election in Washington State, the Republicans would still control the House, making Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich the pick for the speaker’s chair.
Today Jordan’s King Hussein makes his first public visit to Israel. His trip makes him only the second Arab leader to visit in full view of the world. The king will exchange ratified copies of the Israeli-Jordan peace treaty at a cultural center today with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Partly cloudy skies today with highs in the upper 60s; fair and cool tonight with a low near 44. Currently, at 7:02, it’s 50 degrees.
I’ll be honest: a few weeks dealing with Dr. Propel felt more like months. And months after the school year started it felt like a lifetime of reading, writing, listening, viewing, and being quizzed in Dr. Propel’s introductory class had flown by and I was more than ready for his class to end. Whatever happed in his class – anything discussed, anything written on the board, anything viewed on the monitor, anything hands-on we did in the introductory lab course – was fair game for what Dr. Propel lovingly called the “regurgitation.” This was, of course, the dreaded end-of-the-semester final test. And don’t think for a minute the test, much less this guy’s regular pop quizzes, were restricted to broadcasting.
What was one of the first things driven into our head far back at the start of the semester? Ah, yes: Dr. Propel’s office location and telephone number. This was not the sort of “memorization” that I had expected in college. Honestly the concept of office hours was new to me, as high school teachers had a designated classroom that served as an oversized make-shift office when needed. Not so here. Every instructor had his or her own office whose size and shape correlated to his or her position in the department. In short, the new guy got the three-sided room under the stairs and the head of the department got the spacious area with coffee maker and “secret” entrances.
The actual occasion when the instructor would be found in the office was also something lost on me – I really didn’t care when Dr. So-and-so or Dr. Whosis would be in their office. I was not making plans to stop by. But office hours were something nearly every student clamored about, though I found this comical. Many students circled or highlighted the days and time on the syllabus. It went without saying that many never utilized these office hours until late in the semester when, to be fair, obtaining an A was all but impossible and coming in to schmooze with the teacher wasn’t earning either of them (the instructor or the student) any brown-nose points.
Anyway, Dr. Propel was in office 247. He repeatedly bragged he was the only radio/television instructor on the second floor (the rest of the offices belonging to print journalism instructors), though how and why he ended up where he did was never discussed or mentioned. By what can only be called pointless coincidence his phone extension was 1365.
The importance of all these numbers was lost as we students read the syllabus (and later watched Propel read the document in character. This was always a hoot, watching a fellow of infinite jest recite “serious” class rules in his nasally sing-song voice). With his trademark half-toothed grin, he eventually asked one session early in the semester if any of us caught on to what made his office and phone number special or unique. Our answer, in unison: no.
He couldn’t keep the secret any longer. You didn’t pronounce his office “two forty-seven,” you pronounced it “twenty-four seven” – as in twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Yeah, we got it. And from there it didn’t take us long to bridge the “three-hundred sixty-five days in one year” mantra that was abbreviated by his phone extension. Dr. Propel was ecstatic about this fact and his attempt to hide it from his students erupted in giddy fashion that day in class.
You see, this is one of those trivial moments from college...this, the correct spelling of potentiometer, the inane theme song of Mentos candy, and on and on....
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24/7
(Gerald B/T.J. Jackson/Taryll Jackson)
3T
From the album Brotherhood
1995