Losing his sheen
Wow, watching Charlie Sheen being interviewed this week was like gaping in disbelief at a slow-motion train wreck.
This guy kept delivering amazing, whacked-out quotes that you can’t make up, a journalist’s wet dream, and in multiple interviews! Usually these circus acts are isolated events, but in this case, Sheen is making the rounds, prolonging the pain — or entertainment, depending on how you look at it.
He keeps insisting he’s clean, that he’s rehabilitated himself, but he keeps talking like he’s still on something. It’s almost hard to watch, because you nearly feel sorry for the guy, or at least his publicist, who just resigned. Here are a few gems:
“They picked a fight with a warlock,” Sheen says of CBS, which has canceled his show, Two and a Half Men.
“I’m tired of pretending like I’m not bitchin’, a total frickin’ rock star from Mars.”
“I am on a drug, it’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it you will die. Your face will melt off, and your children will weep over your exploded body.”
“I’m not bi-polar, I’m bi-winning. I win here, and I win there.” “AA was written for normal people. People that don’t have tiger blood and Adonis DNA.”
“[I was] bangin’ 7-gram rocks and finishing them because that’s how I roll. I have one speed, one gear … go!” “I mean, what’s not to love? Especially when you see how I party. Man, it was epic. The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards, all of ’em just look like droopy-eyed armless children.”
“You borrow my brain for five seconds and just be like ‘Dude, can’t handle it! Unplug this bastard!’” “It’s been a tsunami of media, and I’ve been riding it on a mercury surfboard.”
OK, we’ll stop. The tears of laughter make it too hard to type any more.
The ugly truth
There was something else painful to watch this past week, and that was the treatment that CU’s journalism school got at the Feb. 23 Board of Regents meeting.
Finally, the truth comes out! The chancellor, Phil DiStefano, who started the school’s discontinuance process last fall for reasons that were murky at best, finally acknowledged that he doesn’t think the school is “first-rate.”
Now, why couldn’t he have just come out and said that six months ago?
Why must academia be so obtuse and talk about things like “strategic realignment” ad nauseum?
At least a couple of regents, like Joe Neguse and Sue Sharkey, are finally asking some tough questions about what is really behind all of these committees and studies into what should be done with the journalism school.
Maybe we should take a hard look at other schools and colleges on the CU campus that are not ranked in the top 20 nationally.
Thankfully, some have come forward to ask whether this is really an attempt to improve journalism education at CU — or gut it. As one rabblerouser pointed out to us this week, there has been an alarming pattern emerging at the university in recent years against truth-telling — especially when it runs counter to the administration’s interests — and we just wonder how far up the chain of command it goes. Can’t imagine what CU President Bruce Benson will recommend to the regents, now that it’s his turn to weigh in on the fate of the J school.
We encourage the accreditation team that is visiting the journalism school this week to tune out all of the noise and take a hard look at the quality of the program and its faculty, staff and students, and judge them on their merits, not on the politics at play.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
