Camp Dick

Illustration by Bob AulIf you register your kid by April 19, you get a $10 early sign-up discount for the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace's summer day camp. However, we must take the library to task for its incomplete camp announcement. For instance, it says children ages 8 to 12 get to take part in a scavenger hunt inside the library, but it fails to mention they'll be searching for the 18 minutes of missing Watergate tape. Ben Franklin, Betsy Ross and Abraham Lincoln are noted as sharing historic tales with the kids, but there's not one word about Bebe Rebozo the Clown. And though you learn that campers get to create a time capsule, nothing is said about filling it with John Dean and a roll of Nixon's presidential bathroom toilet tissue—made out of the actual U.S. Constitution. By the time the little bastards leave, they'll think Uncle Dick was the swellest! Call now—opera DON'T TORCH THAT DIAL Over the past year and a half, members of Orange County's Vietnamese-American community have filled Little Saigon streets to protest a store owner's hanging of a Vietnamese flag and Ho Chi Minh poster; picketed outside the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana because they considered an art exhibit there to be communist propaganda; and taken a road trip to Oakland to join a demonstration against an art gallery showing multimedia images of Uncle Ho. But beginning April 30, locals can get their panties all in a bunch over the advancing Red Vietnamese Menace in the comfort of their living rooms. Vietnamese state television plans to mark the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War by beaming satellite broadcasts directly into U.S. homes, broadcasters announced on April 3. Four hours of daily programming—mostly sports, cultural affairs and, gulp, politics—will be targeted at the million-strong Vietnamese-American community, a Vietnam Television official told Agence France Presse news service. Since Clockwork has so far struck out when it comes to pitching shows to those rude, refusing-to-pick-up-the-phone, multiple-stalking-charge-filing TV producers in Hollywood, we'll be sending treatments to VTV for pilot episodes of Dharma and Nguyen; Malcolm in the Monsoon; and Two Guys, a Girl and a Rice Paddy.

BLOWN AWAY A Los Alamitos High School teacher's arrest for alleged unlawful oral copulation with a 16-year-old student had the PTA Council president wondering in the April 5 Orange County Register if this and similar incidents can be attributed to the amount of sex in movies and television. "I think it's a sad reflection of what we accept as a society," said Meg Cutuli. Two thoughts: honey, there was probably just as much oral copulation going on in classrooms before sex started popping up in movies and television; we just hear about it more nowadays. Second, as for our accepting it as a society, didn't someone get arrested? Is that accepting it? It's not like someone assumed it was some kind of current-events lesson on the White House and let it go at that.

NO SCRUBS We couldn't resist passing along this tidbit from the April 6 Independent (United Kingdom) regarding the strategy employed by striking janitors in Los Angeles: "In a brilliant propaganda coup, they have guaranteed themselves extensive media coverage by refusing to clean the toilets at the downtown headquarters of the Los Angeles Times." Which means there'll be plenty of internship opportunities there for journalism students this summer.