Legendary American humorist Will Rogers was asked where he got his material. "I don't make jokes," he said, "I just watch the government and report what they do."

I am willing to wager that ol' Will never saw anything like the Cobb County Board of Education. This crowd can make the U.S. Congress look like a bunch of Amish farmers.

Recently, I wrote that my column commandos had infiltrated one of the school board's numerous closed-door meetings and reportedly overheard board member Dr. John Crooks wistfully contemplating changing occupations from a church doctor to a veterinarian doctor because he liked gerbils. The humor-impaired Crooks did not think it was funny, to put it mildly.

He called MDJ reporter Jon Gillooly not once but twice to rail about the insinuation he felt I was making by linking him and gerbils.

It pains me to confess that I didn't have a clue what he was talking about. Later, I received an intelligence briefing on the meriones unguiculatus, including an urban legend about nefarious people using gerbils for something other than looking cute and eating pumpkin seeds. That's disgusting and makes me wonder how a Baptist preacher would know this stuff.

I was tempted to ask Dr. Gil Watson, the World's Greatest Preacher, if he could shed any light on the love life of gerbils, but he is so busy trying to save my sorry soul and making it rain on atheists that he can't worry about what gerbils do with their free time. (Thank You-Know-Who.)

I am told the reason Dr. Crooks vented to Gillooly and not to me is that he and his crack communications staff have no idea how to reach me, never having read all the way to the bottom of the column and discovered my address sitting there. (Admittedly, you have to wade through a lot of commas to get to it.)

My own view is that he knew if he contacted me directly and told me what gerbils and weird people are capable of, I would have laughed so hard I would have fallen out of my chair and wounded my sacroiliac. He really didn't need that on his conscience.

To be fair, I went back to my columnist commandos to see if there was any chance they might have misunderstood what Crooks said. Sure enough, after listening to the tapes again, they admitted that they had screwed up. Good commandos are hard to find these days.

What the doctor really said was he wanted to be a botanist, not a veterinarian and that he liked geraniums, not gerbils. While I am happy to set the record straight, I now must go to the Internet to see if people do weird things with potted plants. A columnist's work is never done.

While all of this gets sorted out, I would suggest to the crack communications staff at the Cobb School Board that they advise John Crooks that gerbils and smart-aleck columnists are the least of his worries right now and that he might want to zip his lip and focus on the effort by citizens to toss him out on his humorless, thin-skinned rump.

The recall effort charges Crooks with intent to mislead the public, lack of constituency engagement, violating the Georgia Open Meetings Act and conduct unbecoming of an elected official. Nice.

I read in Around Town that John Crooks reportedly has hired a law firm to defend him against the recall, which stems from his deft political skills in getting the Eastvalley Tower of Babble approved, and that there is a possibility that Crooks might put Cobb School Board attorney Glenn Brock on the stand to testify that he advised the board the law didn't require advance notice to the public of the original vote on the cell tower.

Brock has also told the board that Crooks could submit any bills to the board for their consideration as to whether payment of such a bill would be "legal or appropriate."

Wait a minute! Does that mean that if Brock is wrong, Cobb taxpayers might be on the hook to pay Crooks' legal expenses and that whether he is right or wrong, Glenn Brock and his law firm will still get paid $2 million a year to dispense it?

That's not thunder you hear; that's Will Rogers laughing his head off.

You can reach Dick Yarbrough at yarb2400@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139.