August 31, 2005
Purging the Random Thoughts from My Mind: Stephen King, the Penguin Movie, People with Bad Teeth Making Dumb Decisions in British Schools, Autos, Abortion, and a Dick!
Some people throw up food. I throw up thoughts (unless I have food poisoning in which case I throw up food too - that's always a fun experience. How people are bulimic is beyond my comprehension). Anyway...
Today, I started reading On Writing by Stephen King. The book is AWESOME through the first thirty pages! Hopefully, it doesn't become boring much like March of the Penguins did after its first thirty minutes. The movie is a great documentary about penguins, but it'd be more fun to watch it in an IMAX theater or at home on the Discovery Channel. The best part of my theater experience was listening to a member of the audience howl in laughter at "funny" scenes. This guy must have left the theater thinking the documentary was a shoe-in for a Golden Globe nomination in the Best Comedy category! Now, HE was entertaining! (Have you ever noticed that people with unusually strong laughs can make films far more entertaining? My brother is such a person. Seeing Wedding Crashers with him made the film ten times funnier than it would have been had he not been in the theater.) Thinking Fool's Final Grade for the Penguin Movie: C.
In the "Do These People Have Mad Cow Disease?" category, did you hear about the British high school which has decided to allow students to drop up to five F-bombs during each lesson? Apparently, two particular classes of 15 and 16-year-olds at one particular school have students who have been less than stellar citizens in the classroom. Thus, administrators have decided that letting the students say "Fuck" will help with the overall decorum of the class (obviously). Although they will not condone the use of the f-word, teachers will tally the number of times it is used on the board so all students can keep track of just how many times their peers have said "fuck" in the classroom. Apparently, if the students see how often fuck is used, they'll be deterred from using it more. (Yeah, maybe in Fantasyland.) And the penalty for over-fucking? The teacher will have a talk with the class. (I am not making this up.) Does it trouble you as much as it does me that there are actually adults who got together one day and came up with this particular plan? (Keep in mind that these thoughts are coming from a person (me) who believes that if he doesn't use every swear word at least five times every day, he might never get to use another one again.)
After going to car dealerships for my auto service needs for almost eight years, this week I decided to jettison a local dealership in favor of a local mechanic shop. (When you get screwed enough times by the same people, you start to realize that those people are probably not the ones you want to voluntarily visit.) Even though I dropped a fair amount of money on repairs at the new shop, on the way home, I didn't feel as though I had just been sodomized.
Speaking of people who just got sodomized (by Mother Nature), does everyone agree that people who CAN afford to leave New Orleans permanently and relocate elsewhere SHOULD leave New Orleans permanently and relocate elsewhere? What a sad event.
I received a courtesy ride to the auto repair place from a 47-year-old man who was incredibly nice and incredibly well-spoken. When the man told me that he had never really learned how to read or write, my heart dropped. How in the hell is it possible that a person living in the 21st century in America cannot read or write? A few of my Street Law students couldn't read either. Tragic.
People still ask me what the bar exam was like. The essays were tolerable, but as I was taking the multiple choice portion of the exam, I kept thinking, "This must be what a third trimester fetus feels like when its mother decides to have it sucked out of her womb."
Finally, since I've been in DC for the last few days, I'm wondering whether it's time to finally walk outside my apartment complex in the morning, stand on the sidewalk, and greet Vice-President Cheney's motorcade as it passes by with a poster board that contains the following words: "HONK IF YOU LIKE DICK!" You've got to admit that it'd be cool if Cheney's driver actually honked the horn!
