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From the Right Hon. Euclidian G. Ahmatree

Dear Biggles,

Enjoyed the bio, but had an observation.

If you “turned your life around 360 degrees”, you’d still be going in the same direction you started.

Perhaps that was meant as a joke?

Yours,

“Uke”

Humidity, FL, April 15, 200-

Big Southern University’s goal of entering the Top Ten list of public universities suffered a setback this week, as Officials In Charge Of Such Things canceled a scheduled tour of the university at the last minute.

“Well, of course we wanted to see the facilities,” said committee chair Justin Omdeplume as he boarded the outbound flight from Humidity Regional Airport. “It’s just that when we got there, there was no place to park.”

So I just got back from my first college football game since the new rules were implemented.

“New rules?” you ask. Yes, new rules that are designed to “speed up” the game. New rules that keep the clock running after a change of possession. New rules that start the clock on kickoff, not when the other team touches the ball.

Rules, in short, that are designed to ensure less actual football but leave plenty of time for ads.

Hey, I’m aware of the realities. Ads = revenue. You don’t get to the top of this heap with bargain-basement personnel. Great leaders, great staffers are few and far between, and they don’t come cheap.

But this is wrong in so many ways. If there’s really a need to speed things up, put a tranquilizer dart in the red-hat guy’s neck. Because while he’s on the field, there’s one tenth of a million people in the stands twiddling their thumbs, and the rest of the country’s checking for leftover pizza in the fridge.

But it gets even worse: this game was on freakin’ pay-per-view. How the hell did we get suckered into paying to see ads?

Take a step back and think about this question:

How many commercials would it take to motivate nearly 100,000 screaming, rabid fans to lay down a handful or two of Alexander Hamiltons in order to spend days driving, fighting gridlock traffic, searching for a place to park, trudging up several flights of stairs in oppressive humidity, and cheering themselves hoarse for a couple of hours, fighting back tears of joy the whole time?

How many insurance ads would get that kind of turnout?

How about ads for cars or banks or drinks or bug sprays or groceries or–well, anything else?

You get the picture.

Football– the game– is the filet mignon in this T-bone. Ads are the gristle. We put up with ’em because we have to, but they’re not the reason we’re here.

Television had better wake up to this reality before advertisers suck *all* the life out of the game.

Because when the T-bone has too much gristle and not enough meat, there’s always leftover pizza in the fridge.

Startling jury finding: the Houston woman who drowned her five children because Satan was in her body and she thought the act would prevent her from going to Hell, is insane.

Of course it took the legal system three years and untold thousands (millions?) of dollars to come to this conclusion.

Insanity, it seems, is going around.

Those who tend to the extreme right or left often become frustrated about lingering issues (such as, say, gun control) because they don’t see the issues as being complex.

They can’t understand why people don’t automatically agree to implement their (obvious!) solution and sometimes work very hard to try to persuade them to do so– in some cases even ignoring or supressing data that don’t happen to support their point of view, which is a no-no when trying to find a fix that actually works.

The fundamental truth that these people are missing is that if there were an obvious solution to their issue, it wouldn’t be an issue anymore. It would’ve been fixed long ago and no one would be arguing about it.

So polarists, let’s have a little healthy respect for the lingering issues. If it’s still hanging around, theres something your (obvious!) solution isn’t addressing.

On I-75 just south of Ocala lives one of the greatest signs ever:

Now while I’m no snake guru, I have enough common sense to know that snakes say “Moooo” only under the rarest of circumstances– for example, while trying to swallow a live cow.

There are versions of this sign for each state university, each with some variation of a letter and a quadranaught. It’s obviously only the unfortunate juxtaposition of the Rattler logo, the choice of the initial letter M, and the transferability of the capital O and zed that causes any confusion.

But me being me, I’d prefer to treat the sign as part of a conspiracy, rather than a prank or delicious oversight.

Steve Martin used to have a great bit, to the effect of

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a kid… and you taught him to talk wrong? He’d be there on his first day of school, and he’d raise his hand and say, “May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?”

Who know that so much groundwork had already gone into making this idea a reality? I can only imagine how the guy who thunk up this sign might implement a See-N-Say.

Lately in the paper there’s been a series on what a tacky, ugly place to live Gainesville is, and how much better they do things in Savannah, Georgia.

I did some cursory research and found that Gainesville has ample bus, airplane, even moving van services, that all head up Savannah way.

My suggestion is that anyone who likes Savannah that much better than Gainesville should feel free to move there at once– don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, and see if you can convince a meddling, ingrateful newspaper editor or two to join you.