What The Institute stands for

You can’t use everybody decides for himself either. No wait a minute you can, in fact that is what everybody should do. BUT they have to be able to explain why they believe that in clear logical terms, and if somebody comes up with an argument against it (which also has to be clear and logical), they have to be able to refute it in the same manner, and on and on, and eventually a logical inconsistency will be discovered in one of the two sides and then the person upon whose side the logical inconsistency has been revealed, will thunk his forehead with the heel of his palm, and say, “Well I’ll be dogged,” and change his viewpoints gladly, thanking his opponent for helping him to see more logically and clearly.

That’s the way the world works isn’t it?

Anyway that’s what I always thought The Beaglesonian Institute stood for. What do you think it stands for?

How do you know that if you watch a lot of television it looks like the gays and the blacks are taking over the world, when you yourself don’t watch a lot of television? Did the guy at the bait shop tell you that he watches a lot of tv and it appears to him that the gays and the blacks are taking over the world, and so you put that fact into your wallet, as good as gold?

Okay you know the what, and the where, a bunch of black officials assembled in Cleveland Ohio, but you don’t seem to know exactly when, and you don’t know why, and even though you acknowledge that it is not a scientific observation, and you don’t feel any need to do even internet research, you would like to offer this as proof that black people are taking over Cleveland. Is this a reasonable discussion point to put before reasonable people?

I saw a couple Albanian lesbian gun nuts standing on the corner of State and Madison, no wait, three of them, and so I have to assume that mayor Rahm is also an Albanian lesbian gun nut. Makes him look a little better in my eyes, even with that gun thing.

You know I came back to Chicago in 1987, thinking I would just be passing through, but now it is pretty apparent that I am not getting out of here alive. But anyway I had vivid memories of the winters of my youth and the three amigos at the end of the seventies, and I believe there was another big one in 1984, and I was expecting to get clobbered, but you know what, nothing much.

Nothing much since I’ve been here, oh the occasional blizzard, the occasional teens below zero, but you know that was all occasional, duck your head down for a few days and then it was over. I think the first snow hit the ground in mid December, and now on April Fools day you can still see piles of almost black snow against the edges of the parking lots, and it seemed like we were twenty degrees below average more days then we weren’t, and there was no January thaw, or February thaw, and no thaw to speak of in March. It was close to seventy yesterday, but we won’t get much above forty for the next ten days. But there you are a couple hundred miles and a bit east of us, so how can we compete with you?

Funny thing about us northerners, the way we sound like we are complaining, but we are actually bragging about our winters, the way fishermen do about the ones that got away. And it doesn’t impress our friends from the sweet sunny south one little bit, and they look at us over their mint juleps and ask us why we continue to live there, and we change the subject.