‘Well,’ said the man, ‘you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You’ve risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met but, somehow, it’s my fault.’”
ROTFLMAO.
That joke is priceless!
Great story, but couldn't you PLEEEEEEZE change your screen name? The term "Hillary's Lovely Legs" is so dissonant, my head is about to explode!
Bump!
bttt - great article, again.
Thanks for sharing with us again the story of how HLL became your screen-name. It's a good one.
As for the substitute teacher story, this is an oldie but a goodie. It reminds me of a substitute teacher I had once when I was in the eight grade. Our regular teacher was out pregnant, so we got a supposedly long-term replacement from the County office.
He was an Irish fellow and sympathetic to the Republican cause, which was all the rage back in those days. He was also a devout Communist, and spent his entire first day regaling our captive class with the notion that the struggle in Ireland was a class struggle, and that if Communism were imposed on the Emerald Isle, the class divisions that caused people to fight would disappear and they would all live happily ever after singing some non-religious version of "Kum-bye-ya".
He started going on and on about bread coupons, and how if the state imposed a just mechanism for the distribution of bread, everybody would have all he needed. We started giving him a hard time about what would happen if somebody wanted rye bread, or pumpernickel, and how would the bread coupon system accomodate those needs?
Eventually we got him to admit that there would be a secondary trade in bread coupons, and that people would barter them for whatever kind of bread they wanted, with more desirable forms of bread commanding a higher price, and better bakers would wind up collecting more coupons, etc.
Then we got started on other things, like boots and clothes and automobiles. The teacher hypothesized that the state would issue ration cards for these items also, except for automobiles, of course, which would largely cease to exist. Since everybody needed these things, it would be a simple matter to distribute them equitably and everybody would be happy.
Which brought us to the question of hot water heaters. I had just taken a cold shower that morning (in the middle of winter) because my family's hot water heater was broken at the time, so the subject was near and dear to my heart. At that point, his finely constructed world view just broke down. To get a hot water heater, a person would have to trade his bread and ration coupons and buy the unit, and then barter with a plumber for installation, etc. Finally he had to admit that the ration coupons were nothing more than money with a picture of bread on them instead of a picture of the President, and that the whole mess would not work.
So our eighth grade class worked out in a day (the Sub's last day teaching, BTW) what it took the Soviet Union the better part of a century to discover. The teacher complained to the Principals Office about how incorrigible we all were, and the Principal fired him on the spot. I actually got a letter from the County office (which I still have stored away in the attic), apologizing for the behavior of the teacher. We got a place-filler after that who proceeded to teach us absolutely nothing for the rest of the year. But sometimes nothing is better than the wrong thing...