The Jacksonville Daily News website has a poll related to the Register of Deeds pay controversy. Go vote. It’s fun.

It appears that the Onslow County Board of Commissioners has no interest in discussing Becky Pollard’s pay during their December 15th meeting.

Says Commission Chairman W.C. Jarman:

"It is not on the tentative agenda and as far as I am concerned there will be no discussion of the salary,"

That means Ms. Pollard will be earning the minimum pay of $41,331.

Lindell Kay has a post that includes a quotation from Tommy Pollard about the awkward swearing in ceremony.

Pollard had this to say:

I do silly things sometimes

I suppose “silly” is one word that could be used to describe Mr. Pollard’s actions of late…

Lindell Kay reports in the Jacksonville Daily News:

Tommy Pollard passed out information to county officials last week comparing the salaries of several registers of deeds across the state to what former Onslow register May Kay Washington was earning. The paperwork shows a list of the pay for the register of deeds in 10 North Carolina counties with a population of 168,000. The average pay is around $70,000. Washington earned a salary in the mid-$50,000 range.

Let’s ignore that Ms. Washington, the previous Register of Deeds, had worked in the Onslow County Register of Deed’s office for decades longer than Ms. Pollard. Let’s ignore that Ms. Pollard hadn’t even been sworn in when Mr. Pollard provided his unofficial and unrequested study to the Onslow County Commissioners. Let’s even ignore that three of the members of the Onslow County Board of Commissioners hadn’t been sworn in when they received this unrequested study.

We’ll toss all that aside and look at the most significant factor:

Tommy Pollard has been accused of using his political clout for personal benefit before and he’s clearly interested in using his wife’s clout now.

My friends, that’s not change I can believe in…And if Becky Pollard wants to have a significant political career in Onslow County, it may not be change she can live with.

Added to Update: Lindell Kay blogged about Mr. Pollard’s actions, as well. He even pointed out an oddity with a photograph taken during Ms. Pollard’s swearing in…Can you spot it?

Added to Update: The commenters at the Jacksonville Daily News article are clearly not happy with Pollard’s efforts. I’ll go into more detail later, but I wanted to point them out now.

(Note from Thomas Brock: What follows is a guest post from Lindell Kay. Read more of Lindell’s writing at the Jacksonville Daily News and at his blog, Off the Cuff.)

My father, soon to be 79, has only one testicle. He has never disclosed to me exactly how that came about. In fact, it took me 30 years to find out where he picked up the long purple scar that stretches across his stomach. He told me at various times he was bitten by a ‘gator in Vietnam and bayoneted by a communist in Korea. The truth, I found, was less thrilling – doctors removed his appendix many decades ago.

My father’s one testicle is gigantic. Not surprising, Kay men have always been know for their large cojones, literally and metaphorically. And my father’s limited testicles count never interfered with his libido. I am the
youngest of eight children and there have long been whispers of several big-balled Vietnamese kids running around Da Nang in the years after my father’s tour of duty.

So why am I telling y’all all of this? Because I wanted to tell you about a visit my father recently had to his doctor’s office. To fully appreciate that tale, you need some background.

He had an appointment with a new physician and had to wait in the aptly named waiting room for about an hour. My father had his prostrate cut out about 15 years ago and has to make frequent trips to the little boys room.

Around 48 minutes into the wait, my father had to go. Now here is another slightly weird family secret  admission necessary to tell this story. Kay men like to sit down to urinate. It has not been fully explored whether it is the exhausting endeavor of lugging around large gonads all day that forces us to sit on the can, but it has long been suspected.

Now we don’t sit down in most public restrooms, at least I don’t. Thank God for urinals. But at home and in other clean bathrooms we usually take a seat.

One last necessary fact – my father has a ridiculously stretched out scrotum. He told me his one gigantic  nut dangles like a bowling ball hanging inside a plastic shopping sack.

So my father did his business in the bathroom and was called into see the doctor. As soon as he doc examined my father, he started ordering tests and asked whether my father felt OK.

My father asks what’s wrong and the doctor points down at my father’s genitals and says, “You don’t know? Take a look, man!”

My father looked down and panicked when he saw his entire sack had turned blue. He said he felt lightheaded and had to sit down.

“I thought I was a goner,” he told me.

Then it finally donned on him that the bowl on which he sat in doctor’s bathroom had blue cleaner in the toilet water. My father’s scrotum had been died blue.

When he relayed this story to me I told him I HAD to put it on my blog. Then he asked what a blog was and I tried to explain it to him.

“And people read that crap?” He asked incredulously.

Good grief. Everyone’s a critic…

Schoenberger has a great writing style and has had quite a few adventures while cycling through Eastern NC. I’ve been a big fan of the “Man on a Bike” for several months and I’ll miss his weekly column.

Good luck, Justin, your column will be missed.