Graffiti

I'm back. (More about the trip will come later, when I'm less tired).

But one thing I wanted to document here, before I forgot:

Traveling on trains, you see a lot of graffiti. Much of it is painted on various boxcars/hoppercars that you pass. A lot of it is that "tagging" name style that I find incomprehensible to read.

But. There was one train car that had a much more, shall we say, amateur graffito on it.

A word of seven letters, one letter painted on each panel of one of those hopper-type cars they use to transport grain or gravel:

A-S-S-H-O-L-L

Reading may be fundamental, kids, but spelling's pretty important too.

at the restaurant

I went out to lunch today. I had some errands to run, so since I was in the next town over (bigger than where I live), I decided to go to one of the tex-mex places there.

This is a chain - I hadn't heard of it before I moved here - it kind of bills itself as a "family cantina." The food at this particular franchise is fairly good, and it's a friendly enough restaurant for the solo diner. (There is a restaurant or two I won't eat at here, after having bad experiences - like sitting for 10-15 minutes before a server came over at a time when the restaurant was NOT at all busy, and having her say, "Oh...I thought you were waiting for someone" after I had specifically told the person seating me I was alone. And there is another one where I get this subtle feeling of the stink-eye, so I just avoid them. Anyway.).

I was sitting in a booth, across from me was a table with a mom, her 3 to 4 year old daughter, the mom's mom, and another woman who was either an aunt of the girl or a friend of the mom.

The mom had given her daughter her cell phone (turned off) to occupy her while they were waiting for their food. The little girl said, "OK, I'm gonna call my boyfriend." She then proceeded to make a "call" and started talking in this crazy loud complainy voice. Just like some teenaged and 20 something girls DO to their boyfriends.

Her mom was going, "Jessica! Inside voice! Inside voice! Don't make me take you out to the car!" I happened to look over as Jessica started doing it (she was kind of loud) and happened to catch her grandma's eye.

And we both just busted out laughing.

Because, in a way, it was kind of terrible - she's SO YOUNG to have picked up that attitude. But on the other hand, it was hilariously funny - this tiny little kid perfectly aping a spoiled 19-year-old girl.

It almost reminded me a bit of those "Pearl" videos that Will Ferrell did. (Except without the swears).

Little kids are really funny sometimes.

holy cats

...or rather, holy prairie dog.

Someone likes their "300" just a wee bit too much.

That is one of the more bizarre things I've seen on YouTube. And for YouTube, that's saying a lot.

(To quote the guy at 2:07 minutes in: WTF?....Seriously.)

(Added: Oh, dear Lord, there's another one. I can tell I'm overtired and overwrought; the "Night at the Roxbury" reference made me laugh so hard that tears started coming out of my eyes)

(And here's one Homer style. Alas, no movie: it's just a still with the song played over it. But it's still funny.)

I think I find these kinds of things funny because they were the kind of things (well, less technologically-enhanced) that my friends and I used to do in high school - we'd get an idea and we'd run with it, we'd come up with all the silly-stupid variants that we could, and it would get to the point where it probably really WASN'T funny any more but we had been laughing over stuff so long that we were just kind of punchy and kept on laughing and laughing. Good times, good times.

crazy, man

So I have this student, right?

And he's signed up for my class three times, the past three semesters. And every time, he attends for a couple weeks and then disappears totally - not even disenrolling, so he winds up with an F.

And I happen to notice on the sign-in sheet one of my colleagues has up for another class (people signing up for times to give a presentation), his name is there, but no time has been taken.

So I ask my colleague: "I see X is in your class. Has he been attending?"

"No," Colleague said, "It's the oddest thing. He showed up the first few weeks and then disappeared."

Now, because I am sometimes a suspicious wench, I thought: a-ha. Financial Aid scam. I've seen this before - people get their check to go to school and go out and buy stereo equipment or a used car and then leave town.

So I called Financial Aid. Read off his name and ID number and explained the situation. And the woman looked him up in the database.

"I'm so sorry, Dr. Ricki..." she said. "He doesn't get any aid from us. There's nothing we can do."

"You mean to say, he or his family pays for him to go to college, he basically drops out every semester, and no one's twigged to that fact?"

"Looks that way."

Dang. Daaaaaaaaang. If I had tried a stunt like that, my butt would be yanked out of school (by my dad) so fast, my head would spin.

Either this is someone who's independently wealthy, keeps thinking he wants a university degree, and then keeps changing his mind, or he has a rich relative he's skimming from. Or something. It's quite baffling.

Like I said to Colleague when I gave him the "rest of the story" - dude must be getting some money. There's not a lot you can do that's more interesting than going to college (At least, IMHO) unless you have a buttload of money...I would think sitting at home watching daytime tv would get seriously old seriously fast.

But what do I know, I'm one of those weird kids who became a prof....