Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Circa 1958.

Tiger Rag starts around the 3-minute mark.

For Labor Day weekend, Rachel and I flew to BFE Missouri (pronounced mizz-err-uh) to spend time with her family. Let me emphasize that I don’t intend BFE in a derogatory way: I rather enjoyed the country. Hopefully stories, words, and/or pictures about that trip will be posted here eventually.

This weekend, we took to the road to see the Clemson-Citadel game. The game went well. We avoided the heavy Hannah-related rains by effectively driving around it. A trip to MH Frank was made and I invested in my first Southern Tide polo. All that was swell. But it really felt great to enjoy a cheap pitcher of cold beer at Tiger Town Tavern.

After a 1000+ miles of driving, I found myself amused and frustrated. As usual.

- At one point on the way to Clemson, we passed a little, beat-up red car that said “SWEETRIDE” and myspace.com/sweetride. It is amusing by itself. It is worthy of mention because as soon as I saw it realized that we passed the exact same car in February when we drove from C-ville to Athens, GA.

- Just north of Charlottesville, I was stuck behind a vehicle with the license plate H20 PIPE. Maybe the guy/girl/thing was a major hippie pot head douchebag, or he/she/it is actually somehow involved in irrigation or some such thing and is completely oblivious to the drug references on the license plate. Speaking of oblivious, here’s a hint for the driver when actually driving. In simple terms: get the fuck out of the way. More importantly: GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY! More specifically, planning to turn left in 10 miles is not a justification to cruise along in the left lane at the exact same speed as traffic in the right lane. If you are in the left lane and there is no one ahead of you and you aren’t actually passing the cars on your right, you are doing something wrong and need to get over (and failing to realize so might mean that you are too dumb to live).

- Speaking of people who won’t get out of the way, I am thoroughly frustrated by slowpokes in sports cars. Today I realized that I am even more frustrated by slowpokes in sports cars that have racing stripes.

- Just before I got home, I heard Katie Couric on some radio show (Kolb?). She was, with all seriousness, defending the umm seriousness of the Today Show. There’s a very good reason why the writers of South Park decided that mass of human feces should be measured in a unit called the Couric (pronounced kyoor-ick).

- On a nice note, many thanks to Evan and Bear of OrangeCoat for their hospitality on Saturday. The tailgating was excellent.

- Somewhere north of Greenville, SC, I nearly shat my pants. I am pretty good about checking my mirrors and knowing when cars are approaching from behind me. Friday night, I was doing about 70 in the right-hand lane. By the time I sensed headlights beside me, the black police car in the left lane was already past me. He had to have been doing 100 miles per hour without his blue lights on.

At Clemson, I took 3 Spanish classes. Spanish 104 was a condensed version of 101 and 102 for those who had taken Spanish in high school. 201 and 202 were slightly higher level. I learned, after the fact, that my high school Spanish teachers had done a really excellent job, and that I should have simply asked to test out of all those classes. However, because I knew the material, I was able to recognize good teaching.

I had the same professor for 104 and 201. He was really good because he really tried to make us learn Spanish. He made us actively try to speak Spanish and learn the language.

Then there was my 202 professor, Gloria Bautista. I can honestly say that one semester of her class provided me with zero benefit. I could have skipped class every day without detriment, aside from the “you must attend class every day or lose points” detriment to my grade. In a 202 level class, the primary activity should be speaking the language. We had covered most of the verb forms and a lot of vocabulary through 201. The best way to improve your knowledge of the language is use it. So what did Sra. Bautista include in her lesson plans? Sometimes she told us to do work in a workbook which she would sometimes check for completion. Mostly she showed us tapes of an “educational” soap opera called “Destinos.” On occasion, she also filled our class time with political propaganda.

Well now Sra. Bautista is suing Clemson. This professor, whose regular student reviews must have been some of the worst on campus, is suing because she lost “her tenured full professorship in November 2006.” She got shitcanned and rightfully so. Now she claims she was discriminated against because of her “race and national origin.”

I hope Clemson calls me in for the trial. I’ll be more than happy to set the record straight. She was a bitch of the first order. She didn’t care about teaching, at least not at the 202 level, a level far below her stature. It was clear that she was pissed off that she was stuck in Podunk, South Carolina. She wanted to wear her designer clothes and drive her Mercedes around in New York City. Now that she’s canned she is living in New York. Moreover, for someone being paid so poorly, she certainly had a lot of nice things. The common belief is that she married very well then divorced, sued, and got a sweet-ass settlement.

And as for how much discrimination there is going on, consider that the professor I had for 104 and 201 was the department chair. And gay. Really, really gay.

I saw a new favorite in Charlottesville on a van yesterday. The plate? KEGMBIL.

And the van had a big ol’ Tiger Paw magnet on the back.

Apparently there was another “offense college party” (aren’t they all?) at some tiny college I’ve never heard of. As usual, the blackface and Klansman gear weren’t appreciated.

The article had a paragraph about other colleges with similarly publicized offensive parties, but Clemson was left off the list.

We are moving up in the world.