casus belli – n - An event or political occurrence that brings about a declaration of war.
Prominent examples include the firing on Fort sumter (1861, American Civil War), the assassination of Archdule Framz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie (1914, World War I). and the German invasion of Poland (1939, World War II). Don't even get me started on the Hundred Years War. Edward III is probably still wearing a hairshirt in purgatory. (Speaking of purgatory, I'm almost certain that the soft drink machines are stocked only with Fresca, the cigarette machines contain only Carltons, and the dinner menu will be either liver and Brussel sprouts or squid with a side order of spaghetti and clam sauce. I'm not too worried though; by the time the rewrite is implemented, my stay there should be down to 6.000 years [give or take a century].)
And now, take the IQ challenge by answeing a test question from the movie IDIOCRACY:You have a bucket that holds two gallons. You have another bucket that holds five gallons. How many buckets do you have?
Keep that in mind as you read the following transcription of a conversation between a North Orange County high school match teacher and one of his students. I wish I were making it up, but I'm not.
Student: My mother is 28 [years old].
Teacher: How old are you?
Student: 15.
Teacher: So your mother had you when she was 13?
Student: Wow! How did you figure that out in your head so fast?
Teacher (embarassed): Uh, well, after all, I am a math teacher.
(California schools spend over 10,000 dollars per annum per student.)
I wonder how that kid would make out on the IDIOCRACY IQ test. (What am I saying? My betters have assured me that there's no such thing as IQ, and that people like Charles Murray and Richard Lynn are just racist, Nazi, sexist swine - so there! I'll ask again - how does anybody ever get bored in such a fascinating world so filled with big boffs and hearty-har-hars?)
2 comments:
I'm (almost) more appalled at the age of the mother than the response of the student. After all, if the mother couldn't figure out the odds of pregnancy at that age, why should the student be able to do simple subtraction? (rhetorical)
It may be rhetorical to us, but a good many people might benefit by giving it some serious thought. And, yes, the 13-year-old mother is appalling. On the same subject, did you catch the recent Christian Science Monitor Story on work force literacy? It seems that the generation now entering the work force is markedly less literate than the generation (mine) that is just starting to retire. Gee, how'd that happen? (rhetorical!)
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