Outside the Box: Take 2!
Murdoc blue-screened yesterday after I'd spent a half-hour typing this up. He better behave better today, because I don't want to retype this twice, especially since I don't even remember all my initially concieved witticisms as I retype it this time.
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As I was walking across campus, I saw a poster for some sort of mid-spring-semester Rush for Alpha Kappa Psi, a local fraternity. Now, I get a kick out of replacing english letters with their Greek equivalents as much as the next guy (Delta Sigma Iotas! Whaddup!), but even I was a little thrown by the bright imperative emblazoned across the top:
"R-U-Shaky? If so, you're most likely drunk enough already to fit in at our 'professional co-ed business fraternity'."
Seriously, where have you lately seen anything be successfully both 1) professional and 2) co-ed & business? Sexual harassment suits aside, you've still got interoffice romance, the company Christmas/Halloween/Fourth-of-July party, and cc:-crazy company-wide emails with subject lines like "[Funny Kid-Pics]: Oops Mommy! I had an accident!" and "51 More Hilarious Blond Jokes. ENJOY!" And then you add 'fraternity' to the mix, and you're asking for lawsuits.
A few minutes later, I walked into my next class and noticed an odd feature of the classroom's coat/hatrack:
"All right, guys, go ahead and hang up your coats and hats, and while you're there, sharpen a pencil, why don't you?"
Who puts a pencil sharpener on a coatrack? A sharpener's by-products are shavings, splinters and graphite dust, none of which is something you'd want littering your jacket. Also, the thing is sitting five feet up the wall, and most of the females in my class would have to look up to see the circumference gauge.
Come to think of it, how many people actually use regular (i.e. not mechanical) pencils on campus any more? I mean, outside of the Art Building, I'd assume most people have a similar stance as mine: 1) It's so much easier to have either a pen that's not going to smear or else a pencil that can easily be stored in my pocket, not kept pristine in some pencilbox and 2) When I'm in the middle of a class, I don't want to have to stand up, 'excuse-me' my way down the ass-crotch-thin aisle, walk in front of the still lecturing professor, move aside somebody's woolen parka and then GrInDmYwAyThRoUgHtHeNeXtThIrTySeCoNdS. Actually, from the look of the thing, the body was probably installed some time in the mid-Eighties, back before people understood the complex physics of clickably advancing graphite through a tube.
And to close out this illustrated livejournal, this piece from today's Daily Tar Heel:
I have spent the last 45 minutes in my dorm room, listening to my roommate (pictured above) and his best friend complaining, "Every time we do something wrong, you put us on the front page, but when we do something right, you don't say nuthin' 'bout it." He set up an appointment for an interview with a DTH reporter to give his side of the story, and I'm not sure how much more of this 'our people' stuff I can take when the two of them are talking about a freakin' JAYWALKING WARNING, not, as reported, a citation, but a SLIP OF CONSEQUENCELESS PAPER saying, "Don't jaywalk again, you moron, especially not in front of THE FREAKIN' DPS OFFICIAL IN THE NEON YELLOW VEST."
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As I was walking across campus, I saw a poster for some sort of mid-spring-semester Rush for Alpha Kappa Psi, a local fraternity. Now, I get a kick out of replacing english letters with their Greek equivalents as much as the next guy (Delta Sigma Iotas! Whaddup!), but even I was a little thrown by the bright imperative emblazoned across the top:
"R-U-Shaky? If so, you're most likely drunk enough already to fit in at our 'professional co-ed business fraternity'."
Seriously, where have you lately seen anything be successfully both 1) professional and 2) co-ed & business? Sexual harassment suits aside, you've still got interoffice romance, the company Christmas/Halloween/Fourth-of-July party, and cc:-crazy company-wide emails with subject lines like "[Funny Kid-Pics]: Oops Mommy! I had an accident!" and "51 More Hilarious Blond Jokes. ENJOY!" And then you add 'fraternity' to the mix, and you're asking for lawsuits.
A few minutes later, I walked into my next class and noticed an odd feature of the classroom's coat/hatrack:
"All right, guys, go ahead and hang up your coats and hats, and while you're there, sharpen a pencil, why don't you?"
Who puts a pencil sharpener on a coatrack? A sharpener's by-products are shavings, splinters and graphite dust, none of which is something you'd want littering your jacket. Also, the thing is sitting five feet up the wall, and most of the females in my class would have to look up to see the circumference gauge.
Come to think of it, how many people actually use regular (i.e. not mechanical) pencils on campus any more? I mean, outside of the Art Building, I'd assume most people have a similar stance as mine: 1) It's so much easier to have either a pen that's not going to smear or else a pencil that can easily be stored in my pocket, not kept pristine in some pencilbox and 2) When I'm in the middle of a class, I don't want to have to stand up, 'excuse-me' my way down the ass-crotch-thin aisle, walk in front of the still lecturing professor, move aside somebody's woolen parka and then GrInDmYwAyThRoUgHtHeNeXtThIrTySeCoNdS. Actually, from the look of the thing, the body was probably installed some time in the mid-Eighties, back before people understood the complex physics of clickably advancing graphite through a tube.
And to close out this illustrated livejournal, this piece from today's Daily Tar Heel:
I have spent the last 45 minutes in my dorm room, listening to my roommate (pictured above) and his best friend complaining, "Every time we do something wrong, you put us on the front page, but when we do something right, you don't say nuthin' 'bout it." He set up an appointment for an interview with a DTH reporter to give his side of the story, and I'm not sure how much more of this 'our people' stuff I can take when the two of them are talking about a freakin' JAYWALKING WARNING, not, as reported, a citation, but a SLIP OF CONSEQUENCELESS PAPER saying, "Don't jaywalk again, you moron, especially not in front of THE FREAKIN' DPS OFFICIAL IN THE NEON YELLOW VEST."