petitioning authority

Petition to Stop Exercises does not have a ring to it, like Declaration of Independence, and I’ll wager Reggie Revolution did not put a lot of Whereas’s in it. Kind of a hard word to spell. I can just see Reggie Revolution raising his hand and asking Tilda Tyranny, “Hey Teach, how do you spell ‘Whereas?’ and her asking him why he wanted to know, and him replying, “Oh no reason.”

I’m surprised that the faculty didn’t use it as a teachable moment, and examine the petition in the Chicago manner where this name would be ruled off because it crossed the line, and this other because it was in pencil, and this other because it really looked more like printing, so that in the end there would be no signatures left and hence no problem.

It was always a dicey situation for me, the sub, to have complete domination (the ability to win any argument by saying ‘because I said so,”) over the kids, solely because somebody in the office had called me and I had showed up. I learned on my second gig, that I couldn’t touch them. I knew I couldn’t hit them because nobody could hit me when I was a kid (I also knew they could and did whale on kids in the Catholic schools, but I didn’t learn till later that in suburban and downstate schools they could also hit them, shocking), so the only avenue of enforcement I had was buzzing the office. And sometimes you would buzz the office and nobody would come and that was like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when it’s revealed that the wizard is just some little guy.

But I digress. You know we were both rebellious types, but in different ways, I guess the reason I am a democrat in the middle of the city and you are a libertarian/republican in the middle of the frozen wastes. Maybe here’s a difference: I objected to any teacher having authority over me, whereas you were okay with that, but they had to use their authority in the correct way.

Wiki sez foolscap is foolscap because of its length. Strikes me that its size makes it more like legal paper. Oh I love legal pads, that extra length, that cool canary color, writing on that makes you twenty percent smarter than foolscap. Wiki also has high praise for onion skin, though to be honest it has always looked a little chintzy to me, like a single sheet of paper somehow sliced into two.

But I digress. This muzzle loader is a new thing to me. I suppose I could see it for those guys who like to dress up and pretend they are in old timey armies, but I don’t see why anybody else would be interested. You know we try to get you guys to cut down to fifteen shot magazines and you are all like Give me liberty or give me death, and then along comes a gun that you have to load every single time it shoots and you are all like, oh how cool, I can’t wait to get one. Gun nuts.

So I guess the reason that they give these one-shot guys and bowmen longer to hunt deer because it takes them longer to kill as many. But there is also the idea that hunting is kind of a contest between man and deer. I don’t know if you think of it that way but some people do, and the harder it is to kill the deer the more fair it is. But I guess what would really make it fair was if you armed the deer. They are all law-abiding as far as I can tell and think of how much safer we would be.

So you have ten more days to shoot a deer, but you have to use that one shot thingy, which maybe isn’t such a big deal because how often do you get off two shots anyway. So let me know how it goes.

I didn’t keep up with all the details on Ferguson because it seemed like both sides were selectively leaking them. At first I was generally on the side of the kid because of those reports of him being shot in the back, but now that it is revealed that there were no shots in the back, I am rather on the cop’s side. The details are still somewhat murky, but in a potentially dangerous situation I am inclined to give the cop more leeway than most of my liberal ilk. Once the suspect is in custody you can’t go beating up on him, but during the capture I’m inclined to allow an extra swat or two.

But anyway it wasn’t about whether Wilson was justified or not, it was about whether you think blacks are treated fairly, or not fairly. The one side believing they aren’t and the other side believing they are, and that’s where people got their ideas about whether Wilson was justified or not.