Eight bite-size Lemmon Drops to nibble on while waiting to climb aboard the Ben Roethlisberger bandwagon:
Let s rewind to June. The university board of trustees, acting on Mr. Johnson s recommendation, approved a $21,683 raise for Provost Alan Goodridge, boosting his annual pay to $210,233. (The timing of Mr. Johnson s request was awkward, you ll recall, because UT had just announced it would be increasing tuition and fees by 9.9 percent.)
UT and Mr. Goodridge lived happily ever after, right? Well, not exactly.
Less than six months after receiving the raise, Mr. Goodridge applied to become chancellor at Louisiana State University. He lost out to former NASA Administrator Sean O Keefe.
It is my belief that the Teamsters are posturing themselves to show just how powerful they are, a toll collector said in an enlightening e-mail. They are playing chicken with our livelihoods.... A great many of our workers feel that the fact-finder report was indeed fair and don t think the turnpike commission will or should, for that matter budge on concessions. As reasonable people, we would be ashamed to strike.
Talk about a worst-case-scenario start for the $821 million program.
We would chat on the phone occasionally, and just last month I stopped by for a visit. A voracious reader, he always impressed me with his knowledge of current events, particularly on issues pertaining to seniors.
His dry sense of humor was endearing. One time I asked how he and his wife of nearly 70 years, Marguerite, were doing. His response was, in retrospect, rather poignant.
We re doing OK, he said. We re just trying to delay the inevitable.
Thanks for getting me off my butt to walk to the bookcase to check the definition of pusillanimous, Harold wrote. Surprisingly, the dust on the Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories didn t set me off on a five-minute sneeze-a-thon.