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August 10, 2004
More Reasons Why Teachers Die Early
Ripped from a forward my mom received, here's some bad news for any upcoming history teachers (and hilarious news for the rest of us!):
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Answers to history tests and in Sunday school quizzes given by children between 5th and 6th grade in Ohio. They were collected over a period of three years by two teachers:
Ancient Egypt was old. It was inhabited by gypsies and mummies who all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that all the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.
Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandos. He died before he ever reached Canada but his commandos made it.
Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines. He was an actual hysterical figure as well as being in the bible. It sounds like he was sort of busy too.
The Greeks were a highly sculptured people and without them we wouldn't have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a young female moth.
Socrates was a famous old Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. He later died from an overdose of wedlock which is apparently poisonous. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
In the first Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits and threw the java. The games were messier then than they show on TV now.
Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king.
Dying, he gasped out 'Same to you, Brutus.'
Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was canonized by Bernard Shaw for reasons I don't really understand. The English and French still have problems.
Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen". As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted "hurrah!" And that was the end of the fighting for a long while.
It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood.
Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking.
Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper which was very dangerous to all his men.
The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter.
Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Since then no one ever found it.
Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backward and also declared, "A horse divided against itself cannot stand." He was a naturalist for sure. Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.
Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. Lincoln's Mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation.
On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. They believe the assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposing insane actor. This ruined Booth's career.
Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large.
Bethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf that he wrote loud music and became the father of rock and roll. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.
The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up.
Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men.
Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbits but I don't know why.
Charles Darwin was a naturalist. He wrote the Organ of the Species. It was very long and people got upset about it and had trials to see if it was really true. He sort of said God's days were not just 24 hours but without watches who knew anyhow? I don't get it.
Madman Curie discovered radio. She was the first woman to do what she did. Other women have become scientists since her but they didn't get to find radios because they were already taken.
Karl Marx was one of the Marx Brothers. The other three were in the movies. Karl made speeches and started revolutions. Someone in the family had to have a job, I guess.
Posted by MaTT at 03:24 PM | Comments (4)
August 04, 2004
Classic New York City
Tonite i went to my first Yankees game, with my NY friend Kyle. He's a big Yankees fan, and even after going to a game last night, he endeavored to get me to one tonite :) We took the '4' train all the way up to 161st St., signaling my first trip into the Bronx. As we got off the train and Yankee Stadium came into view, you could hear people getting all excited and pumped up for the game. (And note, this is a Wednesday!) The Yanks were playing the Oakland A's this week, and after losing terribly the night prior, we hoped they'd redeem themselves this evening.
We didn't have tickets yet, hoping to get them at the ticket office. After getting worried from seeing so many closed ticket windows, one area was still open, and packed with people. We get in line, and no more than 2 minutes later, a guy approaches us and asks if we want to buy 2 tickets! They're relatively good seats for $30 each, and so we take them happily (after paying, of course...). We're almost at Gate 2 to enter, tickets in hand, and then we realize i needed to check my backpack first (none allowed in the stadium). So $5 later and another trip half way around the stadium, we get back to Gate 2 and get in, as the game is starting. We sit down, watch the first inning, get some obscenely expensive food and continue the game.
The Yanks were down by 1 or 2 runs almost the whole time, but I was amused by such things as the classic beach ball getting tossed around until a cop snatched it away, beer that tasted like nasty soda and cost $8, the YMCA-dancing infield smoothing guys, some fans throwing an A's homerun ball continuously back into the outfield, wondering how many times the beer guy says "draft or light" each night, and generally seeing a crowd of 47,885 people just enjoying themselves and watching a baseball game.
Finally, in the bottom of the ninth, after much suspense, Gary Sheffield slams a two-run homer into left field to tie it up, 6-6. The crowd goes wild, and knows the Yankees are still in the running. Mariano Rivera came out to pitch for overtime, to his own unique accompaniment of Metallica's "Enter Sandman". After 3 more halves of inactivity, and the game approaching four hours in length, A-Rod finally let everyone go home by crushing a 2-run homer into left field - almost directly in front of us! As Frank Sinatra's classic "New York, New York" sang thru the loudspeakers, alot of happy Yankees fans left the stadium, crowding onto the subway trains for home.
Indeed, it was quite a great night -- as i was walking out to retrieve my backpack, listening to the music, i realized i'm really going to miss this place (i leave this coming Sunday). That song has some deeper, closer meaning to me now, and these past 3 months have given me a glimpse of the good and the bad, the ups and the downs, and the overall greatness that NY'ers experience everyday, and the dual hometown/celebrity feeling that attracts so many people to the Big Apple. Here's to you, New York City!
Posted by MaTT at 11:54 PM | Comments (7)