{"id":1004,"date":"2004-07-31T20:03:54","date_gmt":"2004-08-01T04:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/07\/31\/one-bad-joke\/"},"modified":"2004-07-31T20:03:54","modified_gmt":"2004-08-01T04:03:54","slug":"one-bad-joke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1004","title":{"rendered":"One bad joke…"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post from “LauraJMixon,”<\/a> in the comments at Electrolite, has stuck to my mind since I read it:<\/p>\n

A friend of mine, Rick Berthold, is that UNM professor who made that idiotic crack right after 9-11 (He said “Anybody who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote.”)<\/p>\n

The thing is, nothing has ever been sacred to Rick. I remember him showing us one time, gleefully, that a post-doc publication of his on ancient history had a reference in the index to the famous Greek philosopher “Testicles.” He used to jog in sumo wrestling garb.<\/p>\n

He’s just a really smart and incredibly eccentric guy whose humor is usually right on target. It can be annoying at times, but he had made a career of skewering institutions and people who badly needed skewering — he’d been a huge positive influence on many student’s lives — and then he made one stupid remark at a bad time, and the resulting firestorm that came down on his head has pretty much ruined his life.<\/p><\/div>\n

I suspect that Mr. Berthold is someone who often wishes life had a “rewind and redo” button. It’s true, I believe, that we are all more than our worst moment; it’s unjust to have one’s entire life defined by a unwise three-second quip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post from “LauraJMixon,” in the comments at Electrolite, has stuck to my mind since I read it: A friend of mine, Rick Berthold, is that UNM professor who made that idiotic crack right after 9-11 (He said “Anybody who … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whatever"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}