Bobby grew up in a place where there wasn’t enough of anything, so they had to make do what what they had.
Instead of sugar, they’d substitute honey.
Instead of milk, they substituted powered milk and water.
And chicken was a substitute for turkey on Thanksgiving.
The school was staffed entirely by substitute teachers. Not a single real teacher in the district.
Bobby raised his hand. “You’re not substitutes if you’re doing all the teaching for the year,” he said. “You’re the actual teacher.”
The teacher gave Bobby detention, and told him to be quiet and eat his turkey sandwich.
Tag: society
Separate Volume
It started when the Oxford English Dictionary created a separate volume for epithets, slurs, and “dirty” words.
Some words were moved from their main volumes to the “ghetto” volume without much fuss, such as “nigger” and “faggot” but others were debated heavily before their demotion.
The collection grew from a pamphlet to a booklet, then a book, and eventually outweighed the main set.
The Polite Laws are next. The segregation of words are to be enforced in public.
Maybe even private, depending on how effective the public ban is.
Me, I think censorship of words censors ideas.
Fuck that noise.
The Turkey
The farmer has fed the turkey every day, and the turkey has every reason to believe this will continue on forever.
So, when the farmer loads the turkey on to the truck and takes him to the butcher, the turkey is thinking “The butcher is going to feed me?”
The butcher approaches with a knife, raises the blade, and then hands it to the turkey.
“Nobody will suspect you,” he whispers to the turkey.
Then he pulls out a photograph of a rival butcher.
“I want no witnesses.”
The turkey nods, and then says “So, when do I get fed?”
Pelicans
One day, all the pelicans vanished.
In their place, neatly-typed sheets of paper explained in perfect French how there was a serious design flaw with pelicans necessitating an immediate recall of all pelicans.
Those that could not be upgraded to meet basic safety standards would be replaced or compensated for at fair market value.
Unsigned. Undated.
The next day, pelicans reappeared.
Nobody could explain exactly what had happened.
Was it an elaborate prank by aliens?
Proof of the existence of God?
Why was the note in French?
But most importantly, why pelicans?
I still can’t tell what’s changed about them.
Cracking
I heard about a scientist who constantly cracked the knuckles on his left hand every day for thirty years to see if there was any more risk of arthritis than on the other hand that he didn’t crack the knuckles on.
Both of his hands felt the same, but his fellow scientists felt like he was going to beat the crap out of them.
“Sure, his research is in arthritis and how cracking his knuckles would affect its progression,” they said. “But does he have to always have a menacing leer on his face as he walks around the lab?”
Building The Next Disaster – Episode 3,000
Storms and floods washed out the cemetery on the hill, decaying bodies, caskets, and headstones scattered throughout the devastated town.
The townspeople did their best to gather up what they could, despite the wretched conditions they were living under, not much food, no electricity, no clean water.
The National Guard pitched in, volunteers from around the state.
It took a week to get basic services back, weeks to get the rebuilding effort going.
The next year, you could hardly tell there’d been a storm or flood. It was back to the way it was.
So when the next storm came…
Punxsutawney
Let’s face it: nobody gives a shit what goes on here in Punxsutawney during the rest of the year. Nobody comes here when it’s not February second. It’s as if this place didn’t exist.
Isn’t that the truth?
Once the cameras are off and the reporters go home, we break down and fold up the houses, rolling them back into the abandoned coal mines.
The streets are disassembled, the signs and lampposts packed away, and the robot citizens marched into the storage facilities by the few actual humans.
Close the freeway off-ramp, and… done.
Race you to the cryogenic chambers!
Crazy Horse
There’s been some speculation regarding Crazy Horse’s name, and I’d like to set the record straight.
He got his name from his father, who had also been named Crazy Horse, but gave his name to his son.
Some legends say Crazy Horse stole his father’s name, but all he ever did was rifle under his cot and look at his porn collection.
Oh, and Crazy Horse’s horse wasn’t crazy. He was a rather well-adjusted horse, a good mount.
His name was “No, I’m Not Crazy, But This Crazy Motherfucker Riding Me Is, So Cut Me Some Slack, Dude.”
Any questions?
Rusty Tools
I was looking around the internet when I came across an online university collection.
There were lectures on history, literature, and all sorts of other academic interests.
I tried to watch the Math and Science lectures, but despite having taken them in college long ago, I couldn’t keep up with the formulas and equations.
None of it made sense.
I took my framed diploma down from the wall and folded up the parchment.
Then I mailed it back to my alma mater with a note.
“If they take driver’s licenses away from elderly people, then this should be returned, too.”
A Scandal In Atlanta
The superintendent of the school district called his principals.
After the cheating scandal, he ordered the teachers not to erase and correct student answers on the scanning forms.
The union rep kept them from getting fired, the lawyers all shook hands, and everybody went back to work.
Time passed, a new round of testing happened.
This time, the teachers got caught marking the answers on forms before they handed them to the students.
“It’s not erasing,” said the union rep.
So, the superintendent filled in a wire transfer form and sent their salaries to an account in Aruba.
And vanished.