If you missed last week (and if you did, click here), I’m listing all the truly random thoughts over the last year that I wrote down in various little notebooks, fully intending at some later date to turn them into pure blogging gold. For whatever reason, weeks later I decided these ideas were, at best, fool’s gold.
Here are the remainder of ideas that didn’t make the cut:
· It might very well prove that historians are not really competent in any field. History is just the area where they exhibit the least incompetence.
· Heron of Alexander, a Greek mathematician, invented a water clock during the time of Alexander the Great. Its sole purpose was to limit the time a lawyer could speak in court.
· If President Obama were to suddenly blow a hole in the space time continuum and produce that mythical Nigerian birth certificate long sought by the brainless…. He could move to Nigeria and run for President. If successful, he would be (by their criteria, anyway) their first white president.
· Did the Roman Empire really use flaming pigs in battle? I know lots of books say they did, but…. Really?
· Just what is the point of non-alcoholic beer? Or soft porn? Did anybody ever say, “I want to see someone naked! But only a little naked!” Why is there decaffeinated coffee? Or the College of Education?
· Presidential Debate—a process where a political party is guaranteed to pick the worst possible candidate.
· 'Listen is an anagram for ‘silent’.
· At age 13, Warren Buffet filed his first income tax return. Instead of using the standard short form, Buffet itemized deductions against his income for a newspaper route. He claimed a $55 deduction for his bicycle.
· I finally watched The Lion King, only to discover that it is nothing more than Hamlet with meat eaters.
· If the British Navy has actually declined to the point where it cannot handle the threats of the Iranian Navy, then the biggest problem facing Great Britain is not Brexit.
· Question: How many Grammar Nazis does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: Too.
· We need a new federal law—Any television news anchor that says “Déjà vu all over again” needs to be fined a year’s pay and demoted to weather man.
· Pope Stephen VI was a stickler for law and order. In 897, he had his predecessor, Pope Formosus, exhumed to stand trial. After a spirited yet unsuccessful defense, he was found guilty and had the three fingers of his right hand—the ones used in blessings—broken off. He was then clothed in the rags of a commoner and reburied. Later, Pope Stephen changed his mind and had Formosus exhumed a second time and tossed into a river.
· For reasons I will never investigate, wombat feces are cube shaped.
· I always wanted the history department to teach a course on current events, tying in the events of today with the past. History is what is happening now! We breathe in the present and exhale the past.
· Frank Capra once wrote that there were no rules in filmmaking, only sins. He went on to say that the cardinal sin was dullness. The same applies to church services, political rallies, faculty meetings and any other place where the particularly evil congregate.
· Ah, tequila. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t drink.
· Only during a hurricane can you go to a hardware store and purchase a shovel, rope, duct tape, and a large tarp without someone questioning your motives.
· Perhaps the most obscure government job in history was created by Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1698. The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles was responsible for opening message-bearing bottles that washed up on the shore of England. For a commoner to open such a bottle was punishable by death.
· Sarcasm is a poor but necessary alternative since beating the living crap out of people inexplicably remains illegal.
· Jim Heselden, 62, the owner of the Segway Company died shortly after purchasing the company, when he drove his two-wheeled device off a cliff into a river thirty feet below. In a separate, but karmically similar accident, Douglas Tomkins, 72, the co-founder of North Face (the outdoor clothing company), died of hypothermia after he flipped his kayak in Patagonia. The chief business rival of North Face is a clothing company named Patagonia.
· When Raymond Burr was recovering from surgery and unable to act as Perry Mason on his weekly television series, Bette Davis stepped in and took over his role on a lark.
· Someone should do a research project based on the childhoods of university administrators. I will bet serious money they were the overly sincere twerps who thought student spirit was real, not just an artificial construct cheaper than putting barbed wire around the building.
· Studying abstract expressionism is like trying to collect clouds. There is something there, and you can see it, but it is impossible to get a handle on anything.
· Blog Idea. The English professor who earned tenure after publishing her novel—a retelling of To Kill a Mockingbird from Boo Radley’s point of view.
· That Congressman—I won’t name him, but he’s a bald-headed coot from North Texas—is such an imbecile that the only possible explanation is that his parents mistakenly raised the afterbirth.
· Once a week as I race to meet my self-imposed ‘deadline’ of Friday’s midnight, I remember that the term comes from Civil War prisons. A line was drawn on the ground that prisoners crossed at peril of being shot by their guards.
Unfortunately, that is where this post must stop as that deadline is approaching all too soon. For the better part of this evening, instead of spending the time writing, I was sitting in the dark watching the local electrical company replace a transformer atop a telephone pole. For the next crop of topics that never made the crop, you’ll have to wait a year.
I already have a new notebook.
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