The days are just packed

I don’t even know where to start. I had to go to my company’s award dinner last night and it’s about a 3 hour drive from where I live. On the way down yesterday morning, my wife and I were listening to “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” which is a current events game show on National Public Radio. There are three panelists, a host and an announcer. The show consists of alternatively asking questions of the panelists and listeners who call in. In one segment, called “Fill in the Blank”, the announcer recites limericks and leaves the last word out for the the contestant to “Fill in the Blank”. As we all know, a limerick has the rhyming pattern where the first two lines rhyme, the next two rhyme with each other and the last line rhymes with the first two. I can’t remember exactly how the limerick went but it was about Kenneth Lay from ENRON using the idiot defense (he was too stupid to realize that the people he hired were crooks and raided the company). Come and drum were the last words of the first two lines and dumb was the answer they were looking for. The contestant answered “Alieto”. The host decided to give her another chance, all the while explaining in some detail the rhyming pattern of limericks. Her remark was that what made it more interesting was that she was an English teacher in the San Francisco school system. The second time she answered with something that rhymed with the second group of lines. They gave her yet another chance, and were unmerciful in their ribbing of her. On her third try she answered “Enron”. Although the I couldn’t see the panelists faces, I’m sure they were absolutely incredulous. She ended up getting one answer out of three correct and didn’t win the prize. I was absolutely gobsmacked at how idiotic this woman was and that she admitted to being an English teacher. I hope she is not representative of the other teachers in that area.




During one of the later segments of the show, a call-in contestant had to guess which incredibly unbelievable news items is actually true. The third news article dealt with a Christian High School coach who told his team that their game had been cancelled and then replaced them with college aged kids. The punch line was that they lost the game. The minute I heard Christian High School, I thought this might really be true. In my experience, “Christian High School” means that they will bend (or break) any rule in order to win. One of the schools in my area gives scholarships like colleges do to excellent football players and will even go so far as to make sure the kid is 19 rather than 18 when they graduate. What made think that it might not be true is that surely no one could be so stupid as to think they could get away with it. Well, it turns out that it was the true news story and the way the coach got caught is that some of the parents saw the score for the game in the newspaper the next day and started asking questions. Oh, by the way, the coach is also the principal of the school and was suspended for 5 games. I think they ought to throw him out of High School sports, fire him as principal and make sure he doesn’t go to some other state to teach or coach.




Later yesterday, I was watching television waiting for the Washington- Seattle playoff game to start and a commercial came on from Chevrolet. It shows these three bare-chested guys cheering at some winter sporting even. Each one of them has one letter of USA painted on their chest. In the excitement, the guy with the “S” on his chest jumps a bit too hard. The ice underneath him cracks and he falls in. The next thing you see is a Chevy SUV pulling him out of the lake. He’s frozen solid and is blue as well. His buddies decide to take him with them to the Olympics because they need the “S” and they show several little vignets with the all the clichés that go along with having a dead guy in situations he doesn’t belong. At the end of the commercial, the dead guy gets bumped by an overzealous fan and falls into the luge course. You can guess the rest. I don’t think this was the least bit funny and I’ve got a pretty dark sense of humor. I guess they were going for a “Weekend at Bernie’s” kind of feel but it just came off as callous and insensitive, at least for me.