Month: June 2003

It all started with Mr. Bill making some comments on his show on Fox News. He commented that some Web sites had picked up a San Francisco Chronicle article about a local station dropping his radio show — which was wrong, he said, because the show was merely moving to another Bay Area station.

But then he got angry. Quoting the rant:

“All over the country, we have people posting the most vile stuff imaginable, hiding behind high tech capabilities. Sometimes the violators are punished, but most are not. We have now have teenagers ruining the reputations of their peers in schools on the Internet. Ideologues accusing public officials of the worst things imaginable. And creeps gossiping about celebrities in the crudest of ways.

“The Internet has become a sewer of slander and libel, an unpatrolled polluted waterway, where just about anything goes. For example, the guy who raped and murdered a 10-year old in Massachusetts says he got the idea from the NAMBLA Web site that he accessed from the Boston public library. The ACLU’s defending NAMBLA in that civil lawsuit.”

Them’s fighting words.

So damn near every respectable blogger responded, as quoted in this article.

There is one thing that Mr. Bill has that other folks don’t have is that he has a megaphone to spread his voice. The problem is that the minute he starts bad-mouthing the ‘net, his megaphone is no louder than anybody elses.

If you hadn’t heard before, police in Naples, Florida, were forced to shut down a lemonade stand that Avigayil Wardein — a brown-haired, 6-year-old who just lost two front baby teeth — had been running. Someone reported her, saying it was against the law for her to sell lemonade with out a permit from the city. And the city shut it down (though offered her a free permit as the Mayor of the city was a client of hers, saying it was good lemonade). The girl’s lemonade stand is back in business, after it made national headlines and talk shows and hundreds of people offered to pay for the permit. There’s even a college scholarship fund setup for the little girl at a local bank.

But the greatest part, and I’ll quote the article, is that the little girl is famous, but doesn’t seem to realize it.

She’s still a normal 6-year-old who wants to spend what little money she has on candy, art supplies and dresses she can wear when she practices her ice skating moves. She likes to show off her fingernail polish — blue on one hand and purple on the other — as she fills the plastic cups with her mother’s homemade lemonade.

But she doesn’t realize how many people know about her. She bases fame on how many coins and dollar bills are in her tip jar ? a glass vase with a sign taped across it letting customers know spare change can be tossed inside.

Since news of the lemonade stand began spreading earlier this week, she expects to be “famous” for a long time.

“It makes you get lots and lots of money,” Avigayil said, while holding her tip jar. “It’s really fun.”

Avigayil, we salute you, and if I were anywhere near Florida, I know I’d be buying your lemonade.