Quick Hits – 11-17-09
by Bill Dusty
‘MEEP’ BANNED AT HIGH SCHOOL
DANVERS, MA – In a story that made headlines last week, Danvers High School Principal Thomas Murray has banned the word “meep” from his school because he says students were using the word to interrupt classes.
In an Associated Press story on the unfolding situation, Murray said students ignored his request for them to stop meeping, and so the ban was necessary. Murray reportedly sent out automated phone calls to parents alerting them to the ban.
“Meep” is the utterance used by the Muppet Show character Beaker, lab assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew.
FRANKIE KEOUGH SCREWS UP AGAIN
Former Springfield City Councilor Frankie Keough, who headed up the local Friends of the Homeless, Inc., before his own villainy finally overwhelmed his career, was arrested late last week in Rhode Island for breaking and entering and larceny of over $500 after he entered a home he formerly owned in an attempt to reclaim what his lawyer said was his own belongings.
Keough lost the home recently at auction after failing to come up with $145,000 in restitution money ordered by the court. According to Keough’s attorney, Daniel Kelly, in a November 13 Republican article on the arrest, the entire episode has just been a huge misunderstanding. Keough, said Kelly, was under the impression that he could retrieve his belongings from his former residence after talking with U.S. Marshals in Rhode Island. “He didn’t take anything else,” said Kelly in the Republican piece. “It may be that his method of retrieval was not appropriate.”
Keough, still on probation after being released from jail following a 36-month prison sentence that began in 2007, was apparently not supposed to leave the state of Massachusetts without the consent of his probation officer, which is still in question. There is also the rather large matter of him breaking into a home that no longer belongs to him. The property’s new owner, who took possession of the home at the government auction, reportedly wants to file charges against Keough, according to the Republican story.
Keough was convicted back in March 2007 after pleading guilty to various charges in connection with his corrupt tenure at Friends of the Homeless, where he was apparently not much of a friend to the homeless, after all. His 36-month sentence included 20 months of time already served. (Keough had originally been out on bail awaiting trial, but was locked up in early 2006 after authorities discovered he had approached a witness in his case and reportedly tried to get the witness to lie to investigators, according to a January, 2006 Republican story.)
VIRGIN MARY FADES
In an undramatic ending to a story that made headlines last year, the apparition of the Virgin Mary that appeared in a window at Mercy Hospital is apparently fading away.
Reporter Jim Kinney writes in a Republican story that the rainbow-hued apparition is fading into a “white crystalline residue” that experts say helps confirm their contention that the image was merely an artifact left over as a result of moisture leaking into the double-paned window. Since the window was removed and placed in storage, that moisture has subsequently dried up, leaving the white residue.
Below is a short video I shot at the time.
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