Stomp the Worm

"It's Lois' way or the highway," Saylor says glumly. "And I'm choosing the highway."

Pounding Pavement

Tailpipe sure hopes Larry Deetjen saved a chunk of his $149,500-a-year salary from his former position as city manager of Deerfield Beach, since his new job search doesn't seem to be going too well. It looks like his past — with the help of Google — is haunting him.

If you recall, Deetjen resigned under pressure in December. In recent years, he had developed stormy relationships with other commissioners, best illustrated by a 2005 altercation with Commissioner Steve Gonot that involved Deetjen's calling for deputies to remove Gonot from office. Later, Deetjen lost the public's trust when he was accused of conspiring with a plaintiff who was suing the City of Deerfield. Then, he topped even himself in 2006, allegedly going off on a racist tirade against a black parking cop at the airport.

Since then, Deetjen has applied as city manager of Provincetown, Massachusetts — but was passed over. Minutes from a meeting there February 17 of the Board of Selectmen show that elected official Sarah Peake Googled him, then found that Deetjen didn't satisfactorily answer her questions regarding an article that came up. Peake's fellow administrator, Michele Couture, said that Deetjen "came off as a little hostile." Blaaat.

Two weeks ago, the City of Titusville, Florida, narrowed its city manager search down from 89 to seven applicants — but Deetjen, who applied, didn't make the cut there either. Blaaat.

Now, he's set his sights on Belle Glade, where's he's applied to be the interim city manager until a permanent replacement is found. Since three other people have tried and left the position in less than a year, the city is determined to do a more thorough candidate search this time around. Belle Glade Commissioner Gwen Asia-Williams told her local paper, The Sun, that officials are looking for a "people person — someone who knows how to manage with compassion." Well, good luck to Deetjen. Belle Glade's population is 70 percent black. And as part of the hiring process, commissioners have vowed to do a Google search on each candidate.

50 Cent Cares Less

Dana Winrow of Fort Lauderdale had been helping her mom (who asked that her name not be used because she's publicity shy), an English teacher, prep students for the SAT, but when it came to concepts like subject/verb agreement or dangling participles, the young'uns "just weren't getting it," she says. "Kids don't realize that [many colloquialisms] are wrong, because they hear them all the time." Enter an unlikely helper: 50 Cent. Winrow caught an interview with the rapper in which he said he "could care less" about Oprah not inviting him on her show. What he really meant was that he couldn't care less! Grrr!

Ah, well, one man's grammatical flub turned out to be a schoolmarm's treasure, as it sparked Winrow's idea of starting CelebrityEnglish.com, a website where she uses celebrity gossip to explain the rules of formal writing. There was no dearth of examples on sites like PerezHilton.com and TheSuperficial.com, and soon, Winrow was running scandalous headlines of her own — like "Shiloh, Angelina, Brad, and an Error in Pronoun/Antecedent Agreement!"

Recently, Winrow expanded CelebrityEnglish to include a "jukebox" section. Music critics, she notes, are often awesome writers — and they use a lot of big vocabulary words that commonly pop up in the SAT test booklet. So she pastes music reviews from pitchforkmedia.com and fluxblog.org, highlights the vocabulary words, and links to their definitions.

Winrow says she receives about 2,000 to 3,000 hits a week from sites around the world. "What's more interesting to me is not the number of hits," she says, "but how deep people go — how many pages of the site they look at. Some people will spend a lot of time, looking at 50 pages of explanations. That makes me excited because it means somebody's actually trying to learn."

— As told to Edmund Newton