Much has been written about a legal challenge to the LEARNS Act and the job insecurity of Don Bobbitt as president of the University of Arkansas system in light of the University of Phoenix debacle.
Those published words haven't amounted to much in either case.
When I found myself making that spontaneous observation in a podcast with Roby Brock of Talk Business and Politics last week, Brock suggested I take up the matter with my old pal Bubba McCoy to learn what the used-car mogul with all that rurally connected common sense made of it.
"I have no idea what you just said," Bubba replied when I shared with him what I just wrote.
He said he never heard of "whatever that act was" or "a pod something-or-other" or "anyone from Phoenix named Dave Boblitt."
I said was distressed to hear that Bubba was not keeping up with the news any better than that.
"I can't read the paper anymore, even I wanted to, or even if I missed it, which I don't," he said.
"I'm 74 and fat. I need to use my time more wisely than reading stuff that's just going to run up my blood pressure.
"The wife has one of those things the paper put out for you to read the articles on. Is that that iPod thing you're talking about? And she's shown me several times how to use it, but I don't ever remember. And now I'm plumb out of the habit.
"But I will ask her to show me your article Sunday to see if you've slandered me again."
Now when might I have slandered Bubba?
"How about last Christmas when you put it in the paper that I got down in the floor to put the tree in its stand and couldn't get up and had to crawl across the living room floor to leverage the couch, which I pulled over on myself?"
Well, was it true?
"That's not the point," he said. "The point is that it's nobody's business if I find myself down on a rug with a couch on me, unless I'm bad hurt, which I wasn't much, even though the bruise is still there."
To the ego?
"That, too."
Bubba said that, actually, he knew a little about Gov. Sarah Sanders' education law. He related that his last surviving coffee-shop partner had told him that I can't write anything anymore without revealing that I let Sarah live under my skin. He said all he knew was that Sarah had a new idea for those kids not getting an education down the road in Elaine and Marvell, and some Hillcrest liberal lawyer in Little Rock had sued her.
"Let me ask you something," Bubba said. "What better idea have you got for the kids in Elaine and Marvell?"
I acknowledged that I'd have been at a loss if he'd asked me that a few days earlier. But I related that I had since read about the "Mississippi miracle," by which third-graders and fourth-graders in that chronically cellar-dwelling state had moved from 49th in reading comprehension in 2013 to 21st last year.
We need either to emulate what Mississippi is doing or re-channel the Mississippi River around Elaine and Marvell to let Mississippi see what it can do with our children.
"Seriously, what is Mississippi doin'?" Bubba asked.
From what I've read, they sent an army of teachers to 55 hours of training in the most proven methods of basic reading instruction. Then they developed a system of classroom group chants by which letters were sounded out and put together for production of words by low-performing kids. Then, no kid lacking grade-level reading proficiency could be passed on to the next grade unless taking and passing an intense remedial reading class.
"None of that sounds new," Bubba said.
I agreed that the only thing that sounded new was that Mississippi--Mississippi--had improved vastly.
One thing Sanders has said that is true is that Arkansas kids can't succeed in school or grow up to compete until they are brought to grade-level reading skills. And there's some provision about improving that in her school-voucher monstrosity of a law.
"So, if I understand what you're saying," Bubba said, "then you're telling me that Mississippi has some good results in education and Sarah tells some truth at least on education."
Yes, I suppose I was.
"Hell, if that's so, I may ask the old lady for another lesson on how to use that newspaper-reading gizmo," he said.
I told him he ought to do that because he'd missed a nostalgic column of mine the other day. It was about the Hula-Hoop, among other things.
"Oh, I saw that. The wife brought me that gizmo and made me read it. It was sweet."
I asked Bubba how the used-car business was going.
"Not bad. I'm selling 'em about as fast as the bank's repo man can retrieve 'em."
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.