Smartass
Pen from ANA Hotel, San Francisco, November, 1996. Sentimental
value.
Kudos! My hero today is a wiseass named Mike
Cameron. He committed the heinous crime of being an irreverent troublemaker
and nonconformist, and got one day of suspension from his high school.
Once upon a time, at Greenbriar High School in Evans,
Georgia, some representatives from Coca-Cola were visiting in honor of
Coke Day. The school came up with Coke in Education Day in response
to a local contest for $500 and a national one for $10,000. Something
to do with promotional discount cards.
Sooooo, for Coke day all the kids were supposed
to be photographed spelling out the word Coke. Mike suddenly whipped
off his white and blue striped shirt, revealing a Pepsi shirt underneath.
Well!
"I know it sounds bad - 'Child suspended for wearing
Pepsi shirt on Coke Day.' It really would have been acceptable if
it had just been in-house, but we had the regional president here and people
flew in from Atlanta to do us the honor of being resource speakers.
These students knew we had guests. It's not a Coke-Pepsi war issue.
It has nothing to do with that. It was a student deliberately being
disruptive and rude." That was Gloria Hamilton, principal.
Heh, if they don't win the contest, I don't think
it would be because of the shirt, I think it would be because of the principal's
attitude. I sure as hell wouldn't award that kinda money to a school
with no sense of humor and a storm trooper mentality. Coke spokesperson
Diana Garza claimed that the Coke reps weren't offended, saying, "The kid
did what a kid does." I'm glad they took it in stride, otherwise
it would reflect poorly on them, as it does on Ms. Hamilton and the school.
Course, Pepsi had to turn this to their advantage,
how could they not? "Without knowing all the details, it sounds like
Mike's obviously a trendsetter with impeccable taste in clothes.
We're going to make sure he's got plenty of Pepsi shirts to wear in the
future once we track him down." This from Brad Shaw, Pepsi spokesperson.
Garza responded that Pepsi was just taking advantage of the opportunity
to unload a lotta Pepsi paraphernalia that nobody else wanted.
Yeah, pfft. One thing Ms. Hamilton said does
strike me as true, it wasn't a Pepsi thing, it was being a smartass, something
I know a lot about and can't help but applaud. I'm with Granny Hazel
Lanier: "We do teach independence in this country don't we? The last
thing we need is to teach conformity."
I failed to take notes today, so I am sitting here,
pulling on my hair, trying to remember all the cool stuff I wanted to say
tonight. Lately I've been keeping quiet in here about the scavenging,
cuz that's a subject directly related to my eminent move, and while I wasn't
sure whether the HuzBend had started reading my journal or not, it seemed
a bad idea to say anything in here that might upset him. He has again
made it clear that he has no desire whatsoever to read my journal, so if
he's reading it and not telling me, that's his trip. He gets
to have the ulcer over it.
So, anyway today was another unintentional scavenging
day, especially since I have recently been passing up delectable treats,
sometimes because I either had the Huz with me or was on my way to get
him, and therefore couldn't unload without disclosing the existence of
my storage unit, and sometimes because the item failed the (sometimes close)
measurement of its value versus the considerable effort it would take to
fit it into my bulging and poorly arranged locker. Whoa! What
a long sentence! Anyway, today I found a delightful office chair,
a cushy comfy one with nary hole nor dent nor smudge nor scrape on it.
Its two flaws were its less-than-flattering color (clay dirt orange) and
its state of disassembly, which was rectified in a matter of five minutes.
Otherwise the thing was new, and therefore worth having to remove an item
in order to keep it. And that hurt. Not the parting, I simply
picked the most useless thing I could easily reach and tossed it.
The lifting and shifting left quite an ache in the back. Yes I did
use my legs. The tops of my thighs hurt too.
Found an obscenely heavy old microwave. Does
it work? I don't care. All I wanna do is rip the keypad off
and hand it over to the Gus. Naaaahhh, ok I will test the thing for
functionality first, ok? When it doesn't work, then I'll rip
the keypad off.
I found two plants, too, some suffering marble queen
ivies. Gave em to the Huz's friend, the one with the Kaypro I wanna
buy. She might not sell it, by the way. Screw it, I don't have
my heart set on it. I am still burping fish that tastes like charcoal
lighter fluid. Never, never, never use that self-starting charcoal
if fish is on the menu, k? I only ate it to be polite. The
shrimp, however were great. They were done in her microwave.
The Huz is sick and tired of The Speaker.
That in and of itelf is ample reason to love The Speaker, but I like it
also because the voice behind it is Kelsey Grammer, and too because he's
a smartass. I refer to The Green Speaker featured in MCI ads these
days. I hate MCI itself, as much as I hate AT&T, but the commercials
are cool by me.
Jay Leno is talking about how embarrassed we ought
to be to have such an aging hunk o' junk as Mir swinging around our planet,
comparing it to having a vehicle up on blocks in the front yard.
What would visiting aliens think??? Know what? I am so proud.
Not necessarily of Mir (though something that lasts that long is indeed
a joy to me), but of Leno's we/us/our attitude. No mention of what
nation put that thing up there or anything. Citizen of the
World, ya know. I like that.
link o' the day:
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