BARBWIRE by ANDREW BARBANO Pirate Laureate of the High Desert Outback of the American Dream The Barbwire Molly Ivins Memorial Columniator Hall of Flames

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Photo: Debra Reid, Sparks Tribune

 

Everybody knows the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.    Everybody knows the war is over. Everybody knows the good guys lost.    Everybody knows the fight was fixed. The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.    That's how it goes. Everybody knows... Everybody knows the scene is dead    But there's gonna be a meter on your bed That will disclose    What everybody knows...    Everybody talking to their pockets. Everybody wants a box of chocolates    and a long red rose.    Everybody knows. Everybody knows. That's how it goes. Everybody knows. — Leonard Cohen, 1934-2016 By Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) & Sharon Robinson © 1988 CBS Records, Inc.

I hope you understand I just had to go back to the island. — Leon Russell, 1942-2016

Upsy daisy Nevada crazy
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 11-8-2023 / Expanded 12-20-2023 Expansions in blue

Greatest Hits Dept. WE WON: BIG NEWS FROM THE NEVADA PRESS ASSOCIATION CONFAB IN GOMORRAH SOUTH —> BARBWIRE NOMINEE GUY RICHARDSON INDUCTED INTO HALL OF FAME ON FIRST BALLOT Barbwire nominee Dennis Myers elected to NPA Hall of Fame Support Don Dondero and Jake Highton and David Toll and Foster Church and Norman Cardoza and Guy Louis Rocha next. Send endorsements Eee-yo-leven! Barbwire wins 11th Nevada Press Association award GOLD 2017-18 2018 First-Place Winners From the depths of despair to the den of iniquity & holy of holies "Excellent work. These are some of the most moving columns I've read." — NPA contest judge/9-29-2018 The Grasshopper and the Dragonfly 9-6-2017 Kicked off the Ledge 4-18-2017 NATIONAL NEWS FIRST-BREAK Back to the Future in Mississippi West Nevada 10-18-2017 Gold 2017 Don't ask Renown Med for marijuana to help your chemo 10-4-2016 We Don't Need No Education Toxic turf threat ignored 12-13-2016 Kate Smith & Lady Gaga 2-14-2017 Bronze 6-pack In the Uber-Nevada legislature, words can kill 4-28-2015 On artificial turf, don't breathe unless absolutely necessary (above) 11-24-2015 Leading questions, lead-headed leaders 1-19-2016 Hopelessly trying to win an earthquake 4-18-2013 2013 Loony Tunes Legislative Lexicon 5-30-2013 The politics of media ga-ga boosterism 3-20-2014 More statewide and national award winners We Don't Need No Education—> Neverending Barbwire Series 1997 Pulitzer Prize entries Barbwire.TV: 15-year overnight success Daily Sparks Tribune 2-10-2008 The Barbwire's Greatest Hits BEATING LUSH RAMBO AT HIS OWN GAME: Highlights from radio days mp3 file The Dean's List    The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites. RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006 Tomorrow's news today —> Subscribe to Barbwire Confidential TOP SECRET— HushHush!

A Carson City judge just nuked the state teachers union's petition to place the Oakland A's Gomorrah South corporate welfare stadium to a vote of taxpayers who will get stuck with the tab.

Letting people vote? In Nevada? Outrageous.

At the same time, a new union of sorts for renters was announced.

One outta two ain't bad.

Said renters' rights outfit is about half a century too late. Back in northern Nevada's previous boomtown era c. 1978, even casino execs were living in tents by the river. (I've still got the film I shot.)

The coming of the MGM Grand (now the Grand Sierra) spurred a population boom as irritating as anything today.

BELIEVE IT OR ELSE Once upon a time Reno City Council passes rent control Barbwire 7-17-2019 MUCH MORE at Rentvolution.org

More traffic than small town roads could handle and nowhere for people to live.

Rents skyrocketed resulting in skyrocketing fortunes for real estate speculators.

I am not exaggerating when I say California hustlers were driving around town with briefcases full of cash looking to pay whatever the market would bear for housing and "sewer fixture units."

One sewer fixture unit equals one faucet. NVEnergy nee Sierra Pacific Power was out of water. (This was before Warren Buffet's outfit dumped a junky, poorly maintained water system onto the public for a premium price, spawning the birth of the Truckee Meadows Water Authority.)

To build something, you have to bring water to get a building permit. I knew a guy named Blackie who ran a dry cleaner and laundromat — with lots of sewer fixtures.

A suit walked in one day and asked how much to buy his operation.

Blackie told me he thought about it for a minute, came up with his wildest-dream figure and doubled it.

The suit said "deal."

"When I got up off the floor after fainting, I thought I was dreaming, Blackie said."

Blackie soon retired. His former laundromat is now a bar near downtown with far fewer sewer fixture units.

Then as now, calls for rent control erupted. Reno City Hall actually held a hearing and gave mobile home renters rights leader Barbara Bennett a cold shower. (I was there.)

She asked for a "rent justification" ordinance, mandating that landlords justify rent increases with facts and figures until the crisis subsided. That model has been copied many times elsewhere.

A Democratic state senate candidate advocated for temporary rent control until vacancies exceeded five percent.

The power company and the Republican establishment, with a little help from city hall and the gambling-industrial complex, saw to it that he lost in an upset to a self-described Republican "slumlord."

In the aftermath, then as now, the little people were hopeless.

In 1979, Reno voters made Barbara Bennett the city's first woman mayor. She was up against a roiling Red Sea without Moses to help her part the waters.

She called city hall "infested with special interests." She told me of the curious case of a local construction company that always submitted the low bid on city contracts about five minutes before the deadline.

She suspected a city hall night janitor of opening the locked cabinet containing competitors' bids and giving them to the outfit in question.

There is justice in the world. The crooks went bankrupt and out of business a few years later.

A high city official, who retired rich, was also implicated.

Barbara Bennett was a senior citizen and the fight wore her down. When new Gov. Richard Bryan (D) offered her the position of director of state youth services in 1983, she took it.

She remains the only mayor to have a park named after her and the only mayor to make the Reno Gazette-Journal's 1999 "100 Who Made a Difference" in the 20th Century.

Bennett's resignation gave Vice-Mayor Pete Sferrazza the gavel but neither he nor a vocal minority on the council could affect the entrenched power.

Into the breach came a Democrat and a Republican, Marshall Schultz and Brent Tyler. Schultz was a renter and Tyler was a sales exec for Young Electric Sign, builders of the current Reno Arch.

Brent also had sideline: He was the best political pollster — and the best damned Republican -- I ever knew. (I said so when when I wrote his obituary.)

Brent and Marshall started a renters' rights advocacy organization. After a few years, it withered as construction caught up and then faded when Mr. Schultz died.

I got an e-mail from an Oregon reader this week with a link to a Nevada Independent story headlined "Group thought to be first tenants union in Nevada seeks to tackle high rents."

Well, they thought wrong. Also, it's not a union, which is a workers' rights organization, but I appreciate their co-opting the name and the spirit of organizing.

Solidarity forever! Rock on.

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN. I tried to use the power of the Internet to start a renters' rights information exchange a little before the pandemic hit.

I launched Rentvolution.org and offered to post tenant compliments and complaints. KRNV TV-4 covered the story.

I got lots of interest but no one — not one renter — would participate.

One guy said it all: "If I make a complaint, my landlord will know who I am and evict me."

As in 1978, renters have no rights save the cosmetic in this no-cause eviction state.

It's the equivalent of fire-at-will for workers without a union. Alas, at least weak federal laws protect union employees, who are today only about 15 percent of Nevada's workforce.

Renters can only complain. So make rent control an election issue, dammit! Get some enlightened people elected for a change.

As Frederick Douglass advised: Agitate, agitate, agitate.

Organize. Organize. Organize!

DIVINE INSPIRATION DEPT. I was motivated to write the following heresy while watching an episode of "Law & Order Special Victims Unit."

Intrepid detectives were desperately searching for a woman based on a single clue: a closeup photo of her upper body cleavage wearing a pseudo-leopardskin halter.

Needless to say, the director of the show displayed the display frequently, the better to increasingly build, er...suspense?

QUESTION: Why do men who are obsessed with large female breasts become Christians?

A: Because they can't wait to be born again.

¡Sí se puede!

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)
être bien, élever l'enfer (Pardon my French.) Stammi bene. Scatenare l'inferno. (And Italian.)
___________________
Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com, SenJoeNeal.org, DoctorLawyerWatch.com, BallotBoxing.US, ConsumerCoalitionv.org, ChantalCoalition.org, Rentvolution.org, MIssissippiWestNV.org and CesarChavezNevada.com among others. He is a longtime member of the Reno-Sparks NAACP and Sparks-based Communications Workers of America Local 9413/AFL-CIO. As always, his comments are entirely his own. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since August 12, 1988.

Breaking News —> Masks work!

 

“I have no mother now. I have no father. I cannot bring another brother to the world.” — Antigone*

You got him at last, Mars, Lord of War. My bro cheated your curses for 56 years but you finally took him last week, you devil's spawn of rabid dogs.

Larry as artist Renate saw him In a younger day, when he had more hair on his scalp and less on his face, he couldn't buy a beer in San Francisco because so many people mistook him for the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia.

Barbwire Man as Renate saw him

In his final days, you mocked him with your dandy little sport in Ukraine. Then, you shamed him with the beginnings of what is evolving into World War Three in the formerly holy land.

At least he missed the global expansion of the violence. He was on life support by then.

His name was Larry Barbano, make sure you get it right. Lawrence Vincent Barbano, 75, would have made 76 in December.

He came home despite everything you threw at him in Vietnam. He beat our family inheritance of diabetes, then you forced him to live a year under Agent Orange, so he contracted it anyway, not the only residual he carried home.

Lord Mars, your cruel jokes, like your legions, are legion.

My brother was nominated for a Silver Star for charging into heavy fire when his second lieutenant screamed "we need a machine gun on the right flank."

He didn't hesitate, running directly into a hail of bullets, saving his pinned-down platoon. Somebody in the brass gave that lieutenant the medal instead.

My bro always outworked me. He used his Fresno Bee paper boy earnings to buy the coolest metallic blue 1960 Olds convertible, complete with chrome reverse rims and baby moons.

My bro worked his way through Fresno State, earning bachelor's and master's degrees and spending the rest of his life caring for veterans — before he needed them to care for him.

He counseled old soldiers in both southern and northern California and attended many gatherings across the country.

He lived a stone's throw from a Mountain View, Calif., Bay Area Rapid Transit station so he and family members could quickly ride to San Francisco Giants games. He also spent a few summers in these parts, working alongside me to elect Democrats.

He was a humble man. When his unit at the Loma Linda VA medical center received national attention, he pointedly avoided the cameras of NBC's Today Show. Keep the focus on the patients.

Life support was removed at 12:45 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, Oct. 18, at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center in Menlo Park. His wife, Dr. Donna Horn, was by his side. My nephew Mark and his wife, Molly, looked on from Oregon.

He was going to move there but since he didn't make it, he will be interred at the Igo, Calif., vets cemetery near Redding. He wanted to stay in his home state. Igo is the closest facility to Oregon so his family can visit more easily.

He leaves two grandchildren, numerous Barbanos and countless Italian cousins worldwide, and me.

A full obituary will be posted at Barbano.org/

UPDATE: FAMILY OBITUARY + MEMORIAL SERVICE NOV. 2.

LADIES OF THE GREENING VALLEY. This Saturday Oct. 28 marks the anniversary of the passing of noted Nevada educator Beth Elise Jacobs, 91.

She taught mostly at the high school level in Ely, Fallon and Gerlach. Among her stellar students, she counted recently retired Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Dale Erquiaga and U.S. Army Brigadier and Nevada Army Guard Assistant Adjutant General Mike Hanifan, Ret. Full obituary at BethNVedu.org/

Nevada education lost another star with the passing of Roy Gomm Elementary's Sue White Broderdorf Oddo, 84. Her memorial service will be held at St. Paul's Episcopal in Sparks, 11:00 a.m. this Saturday, Oct. 28 — exactly a year after her colleague's adios.

Beth and Sue were my longtime neighbors and left our 'hood permanent mementoes, a glorious Rose of Sharon and a mini-forest including two evergreens, now more than 25 feet high.

Mrs. Vegetable completes this classroom hat trick. Jane Klump, who died April 28 at 87, taught for 30 years at Sparks' Greenbrae Elementary.

I worked on talk radio with her late husband Gene, famous on all media as Nevada's Mr. Vegetable. (Barbwire 2-14-2010)

The union musician was an ingenious horticulturist, master gardener and credentialed climatologist.

Gene and Jane were mainstays in a campaign that planted now-mature trees and shrubs along much of the southeast McCarran loop c. 1990.

Adios, mi familia.

Vade cum Deo, frater meus.

Stay safe, get vaxxed and pray for those cruelly afflicted by the cruelly small minds on this small planet, especially victims of our perpetual wars.

Happy Hallowe'en / All Hallows Eve
All Souls Day/All Saints Day
Dia de los Muertos
Nevada Day

¡Sí se puede!

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)
être bien, élever l'enfer (Pardon my French.) Stammi bene. Scatenare l'inferno. (And Italian.)
___________________
Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com, SenJoeNeal.org, DoctorLawyerWatch.com, BallotBoxing.US, ConsumerCoalitionv.org, ChantalCoalition.org, Rentvolution.org, MIssissippiWestNV.org and CesarChavezNevada.com among others. He is a longtime member of the Reno-Sparks NAACP and Sparks-based Communications Workers of America Local 9413/AFL-CIO. As always, his comments are entirely his own. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since August 12, 1988.

* Opening quote by the title character of "Antigone" by Sophocles (c.496-c.406 BC).

Breaking News —> Masks work!

Wasting workers where everybody knows your name
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune 10-18-2023
Expansions in blue / Updated 10-19-2023 GMT

If your sister or daughter were killed on the job because the boss didn't care about safety, you'd do something, right?

For years, I've been waiting for Hollywood to right an old wrong, so let's reopen the wound and let it bleed anew.

America has reached one helluva low ebb if the most bearable story in Monday's New York Times involved the deaths of 146 workers.

The Triangle Shirtwaist holocaust happened in New York on March 5, 1911, when fire broke out on the eighth floor of a Greenwich Village sweatshop. The two rich guys who owned the place had locked doors to keep the workforce of mostly young immigrant women from taking breaks.

The fire escape, which had been poorly constructed, collapsed as panicking workers tried to flee. More than 50 jumped nine stories to their deaths rather than be consumed by the flames. In addition to the 146 dead, 71 were injured. Fire crew ladders could only reach the sixth floor, well below the conflagration.

First responders charged with snuffing the embers and removing the bodies had to be regularly relieved of duty because the emotional strain became so great. All those young people, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrant girls, needlessly burned or choked to death.

They had been forced to work up to 84 hours a week for the princely sum of seven dollars. Seven. Dollars. A week. About eight cents an hour, $2.51 in 2023 money.

The Triangle disaster birthed the modern labor movement which won protections for workers, safeguards under employer attack to this day.

Triangle's trauma finally motivated New York to mandate sprinklers in high rise buildings.

Always doing too little, too late, Nevada suffered instant replay in 1980 when the Las Vegas MGM Grand caught fire.

The late great Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, introduced a bill mandating sprinklers in buildings higher than 55 feet. He could only interest a single co-sponsor, wealthy KVBC TV-3 owner Bill Hernstadt, D-Las Vegas.

The measure was given no chance of passage due to opposition from the gambling industry, those poor impoverished darlings.

A few weeks later in the 1981 legislative session, the Las Vegas Hilton caught fire and many more tourists got torched.

All of a sudden, everybody wanted to sign on to Neal's bill. He politely refused.

The measure passed easily but the gambling-industrial complex would not countenance such an attack on profitability.

They lobbied and finagled a skullduggerous financial deal, sticking U.S. taxpayers with paying millions to retrofit Nevada high rises.

The Golden Rule was once again obeyed: The guy with the gold makes the rules.

The two blackguards directly responsible for the 1911 mass slaughter were indicted a month later for the death of only one, Margaret Schwartz. The trial of Max Blank and Isaac Harris began eight months later. They were acquitted of responsibility on Dec. 27, 1911.

Three years later, 23 individual civil suits were settled for the princely sum of $75 per dead employee. According to U.S. Dept. of Labor statistics, $75.00 in 1913 (the oldest date available) would be worth a whopping $2,355.53 today.

The guy with the gold makes the rules.

These days, the shirt factory building is a national historic site and houses New York University's chemistry and biology labs. Only a bronze plaque commemorated the Greenwich Village tragedy...

Until last Wednesday with the unveiling of large stainless steel plates placed on two sides of the building bearing the names and ages of the dead along with testimony of survivors and eyewitnesses.

It took a decade of work by labor organizations and survivors' descendants.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su attended and spoke.

Secretary Su noted that one of those who "looked on in horror" was Frances Perkins who became secretary of labor under President Franklin Roosevelt. The first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet, she held the office longer than anyone before or since, 1933 to 1945.

Later this year, the memorial will be completed by installation of a stainless steel ribbon reaching to the ninth floor from which so many jumped to their deaths.

Despite all this time and all the reforms — even after a New York Philharmonic oratorio, there remains one untold story, documented only here.

Many Americans remember the hit 1982-1993 "Cheers" TV series and its spinoff "Frasier." They lasted a combined 20 years. (An updated "Frasier" returned last week on a subscription channel.)

"Cheers" won many awards, including an Emmy for the producers of its opening credits — featuring one of the Triangle sweatshop owners.

WTF?

To this day, you can't find the story anywhere save the Sparks Tribune and NevadaLabor.com/

In February 2018, I recommended that readers watch a rerun of the PBS "American Experience" documentary about the Triangle debacle, which was scheduled against President Trump's second state of the union address.

I followed my own advice and noticed that "there was something eerily familiar about the recurring still photos of the greedy owners of that firetrap New York sweatshop. Isaac Harris looks identical to the smirky sot in the bowler hat with a drink in his hand on the Emmy-winning opening credits of the popular 'Cheers' TV sitcom." (Barbwire 2-21-2018)

Don't believe me, believe your own eyes. Scroll to the bottom of every expanded Barbwire at NevadaLabor.com since 2018 and read "$75 dead or alive: A mass murderer becomes famous on TV a century later."

I contacted the PBS producers in Boston and their Cheers counterparts in Los Angeles. I'm still waiting for a response.

The series, complete with the smirking Triangle owner, is currently available on 11 television channels.

I will keep including that tableau with every Barbwire as long as Cheers continues to glorify that smarmy mass murderer in the derby hat.

¡Sí se puede!

Stay safe, get vaxxed and pray for those cruelly afflicted by the cruelly small minds on this small planet, especially victims of our perpetual wars.

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)
être bien, élever l'enfer (Pardon my French.) Stammi bene. Scatenare l'inferno. (And Italian.)
___________________
Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com, SenJoeNeal.org, DoctorLawyerWatch.com, BallotBoxing.US, ConsumerCoalitionv.org, ChantalCoalition.org, Rentvolution.org, MIssissippiWestNV.org and CesarChavezNevada.com among others. He is a longtime member of the Reno-Sparks NAACP and Sparks-based Communications Workers of America Local 9413/AFL-CIO. As always, his comments are entirely his own. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since August 12, 1988.

Breaking News —> Masks work!

"The most dangerous animal in world" was probably the title of one of the greatest speeches I ever heard, a work of ironic perfection: It was never given.

I witnessed that jungle-worthy admonition as a 16 yeard-old kid almost seven decades ago.

They came as part of a ridiculous competition to see who would be named valedictorian of the boys' side of my segregated Catholic high school graduating class.

Fresno's San Joaquin Memorial was segregated. Boys and girls never dared matriculate together (or did anything else together, if the nuns had their way).

The writer of that speech was a young man named John Chakmak, the top student among all us guys in the Class of 1963.

Those damning words haunted me over the past few days as "this monster mannunkind" edged closer to World War III. (Props to poet e.e. cummings.)

SJM was a heavily academic school run the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of the Holy Cross.

If you lasted for years, you left with the equivalent of your first or second year of college.

Us kids were taught the officially sanctioned dogma of the word of God. Fortunately, some of the brothers did so with a mischievous wink in their eyes.

Grains of salt, anyone? How about a salt shaker?

The selection of the valedictorian in my senior year provided one of my earliest lessons in politics.

The ladies side valedictorian was rightfully chosen by grade point average, as usual.

However, a new boys principal changed the rules of the game at the last minute.

The top five guys, including me, would compete in a speech contest.

WTF?

I have never been known for my shyness, but I couldn't get into it and didn't write anything. As a contestant, I was able to witness the closed-door competition.

The judges included the male student body president, who was also the school's starting quarterback, and two other dudes I don't remember.

All appointed by His Highness, Righteous Principal Brother Mel.

Four of the five finalists went on to distinguished careers: two lawyers, a renowned pediatrician, a university philosophy professor. And me.

The first three contestants gave addresses ranging from mediocre to pretty good.

Then came Mr. Chakmak's memorable advice to teenagers entering a world bristling with nuclear weapons which had just barely survived the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

The assassination of a president and the first foray by the boys from Liverpool were just one summer away. Vietnam already festered.

If a valedictory address ever lived up to its purpose as a look back and a look forward, John Chakmak's was it.

I carry his closing lines to this very day.

He informed us that New York's Bronx Zoo had launched an exhibit entitled "The Most Dangerous Animal in the World." It consisted of a mirror, caged behind bars, and reflecting the image of the viewer.

"You are looking at the most dangerous animal in the world," read a title atop the enclosure, adding "It alone of all the animals that ever lived can exterminate (and has) entire species of animals. Now it has the power to wipe out all life on earth."

Zounds. The truth hurt.

Chakmak's opus was thought provoking, profound and a graduation challenge to all supposedly smart kids to jump in and do something before it was too late.

Here I am almost 70 years later and I keep hearing John's words over and over as the flames rise high into a dark night.

John never gave that speech. The judging jocks went for the most pedestrian address exactly because it was mediocre.

"It didn't go over our heads, we felt it was for us," the quarterback told me later. The winner was his backup QB.

So here we stand, as close or closer to WW3 as we have ever been since 1962.

And nobody seems to have solutions about anything.

I offer only two.

First, an old line from the Sixties: The only way to stop killing is to stop killing.

And my oft-stated admonition which may one day come true: Moms. Women. Let females rule. Men, their egos and their greed cause wars and privation.

Some woman "leaders" get into office feeling compelled to prove they have as much warrior macho as any hairy guy.

So they go to war, too. Witness the first female British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, back in the fantasyland of her BFF Ronald Reagan.

Much more enlightened female leaders have emerged since, most of whom are not rock stars. But some are.

Consider recently retired New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Shortly after she got to the top came COVID-19.

She had to shut her country down to keep the plague out. And succeeded admirably.

She set a standard almost unmatched in the world.

For an encore, she became the first head of state to give birth while in office in more than a century.

Women are just plain wired differently than wannabe warriors.

Us dudes have failed. Miserably.

Wise men like John Chakmak get silenced. Or worse.

For centuries, artists and philosophers have put mirrors up to our faces.

And we look away to go to the concession stand for popcorn to feed the monkeys.

The most dangerous animals in the world are running out of time.

¡Sí se puede!

Stay safe, get vaxxed and pray for those cruelly afflicted by the cruelly small minds on this small planet, especially victims of our perpetual wars.

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)
être bien, élever l'enfer (Pardon my French.) Stammi bene. Scatenare l'inferno. (And Italian.)
___________________
Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com, SenJoeNeal.org, DoctorLawyerWatch.com, BallotBoxing.US, ConsumerCoalitionv.org, ChantalCoalition.org, Rentvolution.org, MIssissippiWestNV.org and CesarChavezNevada.com among others. He is a longtime member of the Reno-Sparks NAACP and Sparks-based Communications Workers of America Local 9413/AFL-CIO. As always, his comments are entirely his own. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Sparks Tribune since August 12, 1988.

*Opening lyrics from "Life in a Northern Town" by Gilbert Gabriel and Nick Laird-Lowes, Dream Academy, 1985.

**BLASTS FROM THE PAST: 1963 UPDATE —> The May 20, 1963 edition of Memorial High's student newspaper, the Red & Blue, carried a long feature of "last wills and testaments" of the senior class. On page 3, Mr. Chakmak wrote "I, John Chakmak, bestow on all future debaters my firecrackers and my half-used cans of shaving cream."

Gotta hunch I know what debate he was talking about.

I was less diplomatic: "I, Andy Barbano, Esq., will my title Esq., my hat, my disk jockey job, my trumpet and my position on the football team to Brother Mel."

Either way, it appears we shared the same opinion of Brother Mel's valedictory "competition." John went on to become a top gun attorney and I defeated Lush Rambo on the radio. So I guess we both learned how to talk real good.

FYI, I still have my trumpet and I was third-string center. So perhaps I was telling Brother Mel to get bent over.

Breaking News —> Masks work!