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Feb. 23, 2006 Tomorrow, and Friday, and then culminating in a two-month-down-the-road, in-depth special (will it be renamed 20/20?), ABC airs its eagerly awaited interview with Aruba’s van der Sloot family. Despite desperate (and desperately short-sighted) attempts by HMI to litigate the van der Sloot family out of New York before the audience could be given, ABC rallied around the family and was able to film two-and-one-half hours of an open, uncensored and unscripted question-and-answer session that has been distilled down to fit their morning and evening news formats. No entertaining talking heads, masquerading as newspersons, for the van der Sloot family. Their first, in-depth, filmed-in-America-for-American-audiences press conference has been conducted by some of ABC’s most-respected production and reporting personnel. HMI, and the entertainment news networks, has not sat idly by waiting for the ABC shoe to drop. Two days ago, they tapped and threw into the breach a previously unknown coach-cum-chaperone, Bob Plummer, who had accompanied the students on that ill-fated trip. We first met Plummer Bob when he bobbed up last Monday on an Alabama radio station in an ill-fated attempt to match wits with Steve Yuhas, a decorated, disabled, war veteran who is also a highly respected columnist and radio talk-show host on KOGO in San Diego. Mr. Yuhas, who seemingly hasn’t bought into the HMI line, has covered the Holloway vanishing in four columns, through appearances as a guest speaker on various prime-time, on-air, news shows, had suffered through a previous Alabama radio interview, and therefore should not have been an unknown to bobbed-up Bob. However, after being an unhealthy scratch in the battle of wits (the nuts on Steve’s wheelchair came across as being considerable brighter the Bob), Mr. Plummer fled, muttering ”Whoa, that right there puts me out of this”, when Mr. Yuhas responded to a question about having children by stating that he was gay. We were spared the ignominious sounds of Mr. Plummer racing from the studio (his participation was by way of telephone), but one could imagine him, clutching the ten-pound, brass-bound family Douay Bible to his chest, racing out to find the nearest Holy water font and open confessional box. Does Plummer Bob think that his orientation is so precarious that an on-air debate with an articulate, intelligent homosexual will switch him from AC to DC? What do they teach in sex-ed classes in fabled Mountain Brook (which is looking more and more like Al Capp’s comic-strip Dogpatch every day)? What ever. It got worse tonight, when the Plummer resurfaced on MSNBC’s Dan Abrams show. Seemingly no brighter, but perhaps fortified against nearness to hovering homosexuals by a spanking new, newly blessed crucifix and a pair of Beth-blessed, true blue-coloured Don’t Touch boxers (http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/06feb/article161.html), Bob set himself down to set the record straight (as a non-chaperone, but still chaperone-wise, of course). In a series of bungled answers (which would have had me calling for my lawyer if it were my daughter who went missing), the transcript reveals that the following treasures were trotted out: 1..That people from all over the island complimented him on the well-behaved MB trip participants (but the Holiday Inn has informed the media that they advised, due to the conduct of the 2005 trip participants, that they will not accept any future group reservations from Mountain Brook HS). 2...That the participants (and presumably the non-chaperoning chaperones) never left the HI premises except for a half-day scuba trip and to ‘check out’ C&C’s. 3...That Natalee was not drunk (yet Beth has been carping on about force-fed booze and in-and-out since early June), and that anyone who was drinking too much was sent back to their rooms for a self-enforced time out. 4…That the chaperones were told at 10:00 a.m., Aruba time, that Natalee was missing. The students’ statements state that the chaperones were informed at 8:00 a.m. 5…That some students were only 17 (the legal age for drinking on Aruba is 18), and that, unchaperoned and unsupervised, these 17-year-olds were expected to walk away from temptation and their drink-til-you-drop buddies and not go into the bars (and they wore the same free-booze bracelets as the 18-year-olds). 6…That everybody except Natalee was in the Holiday Inn lobby for roll call on the morning of the departure, yet he also states, “next morning when checking passports, checking off the list, (I met with the kids every day, we met with them everyday, physically seen each one of them. We knew where they were), we realized Natalee was missing. We immediately went to the room and talked to her roommates, after that we determined she was not with the group, we notified security there at the hotel, told them...this was not in Natalee's character.” If all the participants were already in the lobby, why did the non-chaperoning chaperones have to go back to some room to talk to Natalee’s roommates who, according to his previous statements, should have been in the lobby, already checked out of their room (and HMI has advised that the roommies placed Nat’s luggage in the lobby because they knew she wasn’t going to be catching the plane)?” Whew! More meaningful misinformation here than in all of Joran van der Sloot’s statements. If this is the best that the plumber can do, let’s hope that they ground the electrician with some facts and give him a good jolt of reality before sending him in to face the cameras. ------------ About the author: Dayo Gould is a frequent visitor to Aruba, and is a volunteer ESL teacher in a Christian school. Email: ed_asp@hotmail.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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