Brigham Young University’s annual homecoming festivities were held a few weeks ago, and I am happy to report that I attended one of the numerous dances with a lovely young woman named Michelle, and, furthermore, that we had a swell time, and, furthermore, that I no longer have any money with which to pay for such incidental college-related costs as tuition.

I didn’t have any money to begin with, and I wasn’t planning on going to homecoming at all, let alone with a date, so naturally, I got one and went anyway. This is the same type of self-destructive tendency that made me take 19 credits my first semester and live on-campus.

Michelle and I doubled with my friend Braden and his date Cheryl. Braden and I told our dates that we would pick them up promptly at 6:00, but Braden and I were ready long before that. This makes sense, since girls have to do things with their hair other than washing it, and put on make-up, and do all kinds of mysterious things with “cotton balls” and “curling irons” and other instruments that are completely foreign to guys, whereas guys just have to take a shower, put on their clothes, and dump a bottle of cologne over their heads like it was champagne and they’d just won the World Series.

So Braden and I decided we should saunter over to our dates’ dorm fifteen minutes early, not expecting them to be ready. But guess what. They were ready. Fifteen minutes early. I thought surely this meant that they had forgotten some key element in their preparation, e.g. putting on their dresses, but sure enough, they were completely ready and completely beautiful.

We ate at an Irish-style restaurant called Mullboon’s, in Salt Lake City. There are several Mullboon’ses in Salt Lake City, and if they all charge the same prices for their food, Mr. Mullboon by now must be wealthy enough to buy Ireland. Braden and I had been recommended to the restaurant by someone who told us very nice things about it, but that person had failed to mention certain other not-so-nice things about it, such as that eating there was going to cost the same as a semester’s tuition at Oxford. The “chicken cordon bleu” (French, meaning “chicken with blue corduroys”), for example, cost $18. That’s what we all had, and that was about the cheapest thing on the menu. It came with a salad and a baked potato, but I thought that at that price, it ought to have come with a pair of pants.

The bill for all four of us came to a figure I won’t mention, except to say that between us, Braden and I had a dollar more than it. This meant that we couldn’t leave much of a tip, and we also had to live with the horrible notion that if one of the girls had ordered a drink instead of just water, which of course was free, we would probably still be there, washing dishes.

BYU had its annual homecoming festivities a few weeks ago. As a freshman, I was required to attend at least one of the 432 homecoming dances with a date, whom I think the university should have supplied me with, considering they were the ones forcing me to go.

Well, OK, they don’t actually force all freshman to go to homecoming dances, but they might as well. About the only people who go are freshmen, and I think the reason for this is that homecoming dances are just like high school proms. You have to buy flowers for your date, you have to go somewhere expensive for dinner, and you have to dance like a maniac with a thyroid problem, working up an incredible sweat that soaks clear through your sports coat and pours onto the dance floor, causing accidents among innocent bystanders. In fact, the only differences between BYU homecoming and a high school prom are that at BYU homecoming, the guys don’t rent tuxedos, and no one gets drunk afterwards.

Anyway, because of this a lot of freshmen like to go to homecoming — so many of them, in fact, that if you’re a freshman guy and you announce that you don’t want to go, not because you’re a weirdo or anything, but simply because you don’t have any money and can’t afford to pay for the tickets and dinner and flowers and everything, well then, you might as well announce that you’re a Nazi psycho leper with rabies, because everyone is going to treat you like one.

The only thing worse than not going to homecoming because you can’t afford it is going to homecoming anyway, despite the fact that you can’t afford it. This was my personal situation, but I did have a splendid time and the whole evening was well worth the thousands of dollars it cost me, and I’d do it all again in a minute, provided I had just won the lottery and was crazy.

Because let’s face it, homecoming (and prom and all the other similar events) are just glorified dates. You go to dinner, you go to a dance, maybe you go hang around somewhere afterwards, and you go home. There’s really not much point to all the hoopla and ceremony surrounding it, except that women tend to enjoy hoopla and ceremony, and it’s women who run the show when it comes to dating. Women are the chief perpetuators of hoopla and ceremony. Were it not for them, there would be very little hoopla, not to mention ceremony, surrounding anything, and weddings would be held in the groom’s living room while a football game plays on the TV.

But as things stand now, there is a lot of hoopla and ceremony surrounding homecoming, and I succumbed to it, and while I’d love to tell you all about it, I seem to have run out of space. So you’ll have to wait till next week to read about my homecoming experiences; that is, provided you don’t fall over dead from the anticipation.

If you are considering taking a 14-hour trip on the Greyhound bus any time in the near future, I would strongly recommend that you first take a few moments to strike yourself in the head with a rock.

I present this tip to you because I recently took the bus to Los Angeles from Provo, Utah (where I am currently living and attending college) and back again, all in one weekend, and the only question I have now is who’s been slipping drugs into my food and trying to kill me by making me do stupid things?

The major problem with the trip to L.A. was that the driver was way, way too friendly. His name was Buck, or something equivalent, and he was a middle-aged jolly fellow from the mid-west somewhere, and he chose to delight his passengers with some of his enthralling bus-driving-related stories. I wanted to sleep; what I got was bus lore, at a volume just loud enough to be too loud if you wanted to sleep.

For instance, he mentioned that he had been driving his bus in Utah just a few short weeks earlier when he had hit an elk in the middle of the road. Now I happen to be attending BYU on a scholarship from the Elks Lodge, so I was rather upset to hear that Buck the Happy-Go-Lucky Bus Driver had hit one of their members, but I didn’t say anything.

The elk story naturally led into several titillating tales about hunting, which he continued to tell for several hundred miles because the woman up front kept encouraging him by seeming interested. She probably was interested; she kind of looked like an elk. No one else on the bus was interested, though, so Buck could have just told her the stories in a low, quiet voice so as not to bother the other passengers, but he didn’t. He talked really loud, making sure that we could all hear every fascinating word, and if we hadn’t stopped for lunch and gotten a break from him when we did, the inevitable result would have been open rebellion and mutiny.

We stopped for lunch in Fillmore, Utah (town motto: “We’re Somewhere in Utah — Keep Looking; You’ll Find Us”). I was sitting in a greasy spoon diner, eating my greasy bacon greasy cheese greasy burger, when a greasy young man came in and sat down greasily at a greasy booth. He was apparently a regular, because the greasy waitress, whose name, I’m guessing, was Flo, knew him. She even called him “Sugar,” which for all I know could have been his name. I expected Mel, the gruff-but-lovable cook, to lumber out from behind the counter at any moment and bark an order at Flo, who would of course respond by saying, “Kiss my grits.” But alas, that didn’t happen.

Anyway, we changed bus drivers in Las Vegas, thank goodness, and the rest of the trip was a success. I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Los Angeles, but I think I like Provo even more, because when you get right down to it, going to Provo — with all its problems and shortcomings — is much, much easier than going to Los Angeles.

Although things here at BYU are going very smoothly, I think it would be best if I came back home to Lake Elsinore. I never thought I would even think those words, let alone type them up and publish them, but that’s what I think. Here’s why:

You’ll be pleased to know that I am adjusting to life here at BYU pretty well. So far, I haven’t gotten the urge to buy an Uzi and kill any co-eds, which as you know is a pretty popular activity among college students. As long as I avoid getting too stressed-out, I think I can avoid having this problem, so I have decided not to attend any classes. This should reduce my stress rate enormously; as I recall, it worked fairly well in high school.

Really, I don’t even have time to go to class, because there are so many traditions to be perpetuated. I know this because during the orientation days, there was a thing we were supposed to go to (although I didn’t) called “Traditions Showcase.” Presumably, this was a thing where they were going to tell us what all the BYU traditions were. This seems rather extraneous to me, though. I mean, if something is a tradition, doesn’t that mean it’s something that generally goes on occurring, therefore making it unnecessary to tell us about it, since we’ll surely find out about it before long anyway, it being a tradition and all? I suspect the things they talked about at the Traditions Showcase were things that weren’t really traditions, but that they wanted to be traditions, so they hoped that if they told us they already were traditions, we would start perpetuating them. (“OK, kids, one of the long-standing traditions here at BYU is refraining from having food fights in the cafeteria!”)

One major tradition, apparently, is Growing Poison Ivy. From what I understand, there is a patch of it growing near one of the buildings, but no one has gotten rid of it, because the botany classes like to go study it. I take this to mean that if I do, at some point, decide to get an Uzi and start bumping off co-eds, no one will try to stop me, because the psychology classes may want to come have a look at me.

Another big tradition here is Hanging around the TV Room in the Basements of the Residence Halls 24 Hours a Day. In my residence hall, there’s a guy named Dan who is doing his darnedest to keep this tradition alive. I think he’s the Phantom of the Basement. Every time I go through the TV room, he’s in there, stretched out across the couch, watching whatever is on. Every single time. I don’t think he has any classes; if he does, he doesn’t go to them. Because he’s always watching TV.

Now, if he wants to watch TV all day, that’s his business, but there are two things about him that make him a horrible TV-viewing companion:

1. Whenever someone on TV says something funny, he will repeat the humorous statement aloud, as if to acknowledge that yes, he did in fact realize that it was funny. For instance, if David Letterman says, “Tonight’s show is the greatest show in the history of television,” Dan will say, “…the greatest show in the history of television!” and then kind of chuckle to himself.

2. He picks his nose and eats his boogers.

I know you don’t believe number two, but I swear it’s true. He’ll sit there, just a-pickin’ and a-munchin’, like a three-year-old, having the time of his life.

As I recall, the people of the Paris Opera House tried to get rid of the Phantom of the Opera by tracking him down to his underground lair. That won’t work in this case, because the Phantom of the Basement is always in his underground lair. That’s the problem. Maybe I’ll have to start a new tradition: Killing People Who Bug You. Now where did I put that Uzi catalogue…?

In case you didn’t know, I’m not in Lake Elsinore anymore. I’m at BYU, in Provo, Utah (town motto: “Yeah, We Got Mormons”). Apparently, I’m a freshman here, majoring in journalism. Or at least that’s what I’m told.

Brigham Young University seems to be a pretty good school. Everyone here is very nice, which is probably because everyone here is Mormon, and Mormons are supposed to be nice. It’s one of our major tenets; that, and having enough children to populate an entire softball league.

Anyway, allow me now to share with you the thoughts I had last week after I had completed my first day of classes…

* * *

As a journalism major, I am required to take Communications 101. This is a class with 250 students in it, taught by a person named “Dr. Brad Hainsworth.” I put his name in quotation marks because that cannot possibly be his actual name. That sounds more like the kind of name people give their dogs when they (the dogs) are worth hundreds of dollars and their owners want them to have rich-sounding names.

“Dr. Brad Hainsworth” is actually a pretty amusing teacher, despite his fake name, which is good, since the class is absurd. I’ve been flipping through the textbook, and the major theme of it seems to be that communications are very important, so important, in fact, that we should be glad we have the textbook, and by all means we should read it. There doesn’t appear to be any actual information in the whole book, which is fine with me, and it’s probably OK with “Dr. Brad Hainsworth,” too.

My next class is a religion class. The major objective of this course is make sure everyone is Mormon, as is evidenced by the grading scale:

Mormons: A+
Non-Mormons: F

Next is Honors English — “Intensive Writing.” Apparently, we’re going to be writing intensely in this class. I don’t know if that means writing in an intense manner (that is, sitting at the edge of our seats, with beads of perspiration dripping off our foreheads), or if it means writing about intense things (such as people sponataneously combusting, or one’s family dying in a tragic mudslide). I guess I’ll find out.

Following this is an English elective: “Fiction, Poetry, Drama.” Today the professor, whose name escapes me at the moment, asked us why we read, and, as a parallel, asked us why we watch TV. For an example, he asked if we had ever seen “M*A*S*H,” and of course we all had. So he asked why we watch it. Then this one guy raised his hand and said, “Well, because it’s still applicable now. I mean, we’re not in a war or anything, but the things the show talks about are still relevant today.”

This is a perfect example of a student trying to give the answer that he thinks the teacher wants to hear, when really, that student is a moron. I raised my hand and said, “I watch it because it’s funny,” and I looked at the other guy in such a manner as to indicate that I thought he was a bozo. I think my answer was more what the teacher was looking for, but if that guy’s comment was any indication of what’s to come, I think I’m going to get a kick out of this class. It’s people like that who make writing a humor column easy.

My last class is Spanish. I don’t know anything about this class, because I couldn’t find it. The building it’s in isn’t on the main map that we got, so I had to look it up in the general catalogue. That told me approximately where it was, so I figured I could find it when the time came, but when the time came, I couldn’t find it, and I wound up wandering around for a long time. Eventually, I got desperate and started following people who seemed to know where they were going, in the hopes that where they were going was my Spanish class, but none of them were. Naturally, at this point, it began to rain, so I said, quote, “Screw it,” and went back to my dorm. Maybe I’ll give it another shot tomorrow. After all, in the immortal words of Scarlett O’Hara, “Mañana es un otro día.”

Idon’t know about you, but I have about had it up to here (place hand firmly at neck level) with Humor Deficient people.

There are two kinds of Humor Deficiency. The milder degree is Humor Dementia. This is where the victim recognizes a joke when he hears one, but, when it comes to being funny himself, has a warped view of what is actually funny and what is not. As a Trained Humor Professional, I can spot a person suffering from this illness a mile away. It is the person who says to a friend who has recently gotten a haircut, “Hey, you got your ears lowered!” It is the person who, when filling out a form, in the space that says “SEX,” puts, “yes, please.” It is the person who makes loud cow sounds while trying to move with a slow-moving crowd. It is the person who sees a male with long hair and says, “Is that a boy or a girl?” It is the person who, when asked if he got a hair cut, says, “No, I got them all cut.” It is the person who thinks it is really funny to call Las Vegas “Lost Wages.”

The other, more severe, form of Humor Deficiency is Humor Impairment. This is where the victim cannot produce humor on his own, and, what is worse, cannot even recognize when something is funny. Being a humorist, these people are the very bane of my existence, but perhaps you laypersons have had to deal with them as well.

An example of Humor Impairment is when my family had to deal with the Lake Elsinore Animal Control people because our dog, Black (guess what color he is and how large an imagination my family has), got out of the yard and committed the heinous crime of standing on the sidewalk. As luck would have it, the animal control truck happened to drive past at that very moment, and Black got a ticket for being out of the yard.

While the animal control guy was talking to my mother and me, he asked if we had ever considered having Black “fixed.” Pressed for details, he explained that often, male dogs will jump right over fences when they smell a female dog in heat. In fact, he said (and I am not making this up), dogs have been known to mate through a chain link fence, which, if we could get a photograph of this taking place, would probably prove to be the funniest thing that has ever happened.

Anyway, we told him that no, we did not want to have Black neutered, because he is a beautiful dog (as far as dogs go) and we would like to breed him with another beautiful dog sometime. So the animal control guy pointed out that we could (and I quote) “freeze some of the dog’s spermatazoa and artificially inseminate a female dog later.” Now, the fact that he said this with a straight face should have tipped me off that he was Humor Impaired, but I forged ahead anyway and said, “Well, then, I’ll go clear out the freezer.”

Any normal person at this point would have at best, laughed; at worst, rolled his eyes. But being Humor Impaired, the animal control guy said this:

“No, actually, we have a cryogenics lab where we would store it.”

As if I was serious! As if I was actually about to go into the kitchen and move the ice cube trays to one side so that I could put a Tupperware container full of dog spermatazoa in the freezer! I think it’s about time the government stepped in and gave me large sums of cash so that I could research this some more. Thank you.

Irecently spent four days with my friend Matt and his family in Laughlin, Nevada (town motto: “We’re not Las Vegas but We’d Sure Like to be”), a very well-lit city that is actually located in Arizona, or possibly even New Mexico. The original purpose of the trip, I believe, was to be a family vacation, but Matt’s family apparently realized beforehand that they had no desire to spend four days alone with one another, because Matt and his younger brother, Steve, were told to invite friends along, presumably in the hopes that they would help prevent the actual family members from trying to kill one another.

The problem with this system, as it turned out, was that the friend Steve chose to invite, Will, brought into the vacation twice the contention that his presence was supposed to have eliminated, because he was a bozo. An absolute bozo. He was one of those junior high school boys who think they’re really funny because they know all those junior high school boy jokes, which of course are only funny if you’re a junior high school boy, which none of us were, except for him and Steve. So the two of them would get into insult wars with Matt and me, which really was not fair, since Matt and I are Trained Humor Professionals, and Steve and Will are, as I believe I mentioned, bozo junior high school boys.

Matt’s dad, Jim, owns a boat, which is pretty much a requirement if you live in Canyon Lake. That, and you have to be a Little League coach. Much of our time was spent being driven around in the boat by Jim on Lake Mojave, and this could not have been done were it not for the invaluable cooperation of the good folks at Budweiser. Jim had a cooler full of it on the boat, and we feared that disaster had struck when, all in one day, (1) we lost the key to the boat and had to call out a locksmith and pay $50 to have a new one made and wound up wasting half the day, and (2) Jim ran out of beer. He tried to be noble and offered to continue serving as captain, without beer, but he didn’t have any takers, because no one wanted to be around him when he was without beer. It was sort of like separating a mother bear from her cub, except of course that bears would never be allowed to coach Little League, because they would go too easy on the players.

Anyway, our favorite boat-related activity was taking turns being dragged around the lake on an inner tube-like object that was designed to be attached to the back of a boat so that people could be dragged around the lake on it. In other words, we were not misusing this device. It was built solely for what we used it for, namely: attempting to drown Will.

Matt and Steve and I would all take turns riding on this thing, and Jim would drive the boat at a reasonably swift pace — somewhere around 20 miles per hour (47 knots per hour, 739 kilowatts per hour). Eventually, we would lose our grip on the inner tube thing and fall off and flounder in the water for a while until either Jim turned around and picked us up again, or until another boat came by and chopped us into hamburger with its propeller.

But when it came time for Will to try it, everyone in the boat, in the true spirit of democracy, held a quick vote to determine whether we should pull him at the same speed that we had all been pulled at, or if we should perhaps increase the speed to, say, around 125 m.p.h., and attempt to rip his junior high school boy limbs right out of his junior high school boy torso. After much debate, it was determined that, in the spirit of fairness, we would pull him at a normal speed and instead beat him to death with rocks when we reached shore.

Ha ha ha! I’m only kidding of course! Just the light-hearted, irresponsible journalist in me coming out again! Write lots of angry letters! See how much good they do! Ha ha ha!

It is out of pure concern for the well-being of my readers (you) that I offer the following public announcement: Be on the lookout for Robert De Niro, as he is crazy and may kill you.

I discovered this chilling fact recently when my friend Jennifer and I watched the movie “Cape Fear.” In this movie, Robert De Niro is a guy who is a psycho-killer/rapist/bodybuilder who gets out of prison and decides, out of the clear blue sky, to kill his lawyer and his lawyer’s family. But before he does this, he decides to beat up the lawyer’s co-worker, a process which includes — and please note that some sicko screenwriter made this up, and I didn’t — biting a chunk out of the co-worker’s face.

If you’ve ever had a chunk bitten out of your face, you know how damaging it can be to your social life. That is why this movie was so frightening: because the stuff that happened in it wasn’t particularly scary, but it was disturbing, psychologically. After something gruesome like the facial-chunk-biting incident happens, you think, “Gee how awful that must be for her, having a chunk bitten out of her face! I’ll bet now she’ll have a lot of lepers calling her for dates…”

So when the movie was over, Jennifer and I were perfectly fine, because it wasn’t one of those generic horror movies, the kind with highly attractive teenage males and females who go into the woods that everyone knows are infested with serial murderers and have conversations like this:

HIGHLY ATTRACTIVE FEMALE: What was that noise? It sounded like one of the serial murderers that everyone knows these woods are infested with!
HIGHLY ATTRACTIVE MALE: I’m sure that’s not what it was, but I’ll go off into the trees, unarmed, to look anyway.
HIGHLY ATTRACTIVE FEMALE: OK. I’ll stay here and take off all my clothes.

No, this was the kind of horror movie that doesn’t frighten you until later. I was laying in bed, trying desperately just to fall asleep, trying so desperately just to fall asleep that beads of perspiration were forming on my forehead because of the over-exertion of my Fall Asleep muscles, all because I had realized earlier that it was extremely likely that Robert De Niro was going to burst through my window and kill me. Only in the movie, he never burst into anywhere and killed anybody. He always snuck up on them, only they didn’t show him sneaking up on them, so you didn’t know he was there until the victim did, so I assumed that he was already in my room somewhere, sneaking up on me.

Now, a few people have tried to comfort me with the fact that at the end of the movie, Robert De Niro is killed in a very permanent fashion, but I’m no fool. I realize that in the movie, it was only his CHARACTER that was killed. Robert De Niro didn’t actually die, of course — he was only acting! He’s still alive and well, waiting to kill me.

Since he never actually followed through and killed me, I assume he is still somewhere in my room, living off of dead spiders. So be on the lookout for him. If my column isn’t in the paper one week, you may assume that he has finally gotten me, and you should call this newspaper office (699-3004, ask for the editor-in-chief) and express your sorrow in a loud, expletive-ridden manner. That will surely get their attention.

Iam pleased to announce that, despite the efforts of all the people who have tried to kill me over the years, I graduated a couple of weeks ago from Elsinore High School. This was an experience that I shall never forget, largely because of its unparalleled ridiculousness.

A high school graduation, after all, isn’t for the students who are graduating. It is for their parents. Goodness knows, if things were left up to the students, graduation would feature skilled acrobats and heavy metal groups and would be over in about ten minutes. This, of course, would upset the members of the community who have nothing better to do than go to graduation every year and complain if it is not long and boring enough.

You might think I am making these people up, but I am not. (I have come to the conclusion, in fact, that every type of person imaginable actually exists somewhere, so even if I do make a person up, he probably already exists anyway.) There are apparently a number of people who make it their special mission to let the school board know when graduation ceremonies are getting too short and interesting. Last year’s was particularly noteworthy for its low boredom factor, and the fact that it ended long before the buses left for Grad Nite at Disneyland, so the Graduation Police barged into a school board meeting and demanded that this situation be remedied.

But in actuality, graduation this year wasn’t really very boring at all, much to my surprise and the Graduation Police’s chagrin. The really boring part was the day before, when all 430 of us had to PRACTICE graduating. We hadn’t previously thought that graduation would require any rehearsal, considering all we have to do is march onto the football field, sit down, and start throwing beach balls around, but sure enough, it was declared that we needed to practice.

So we all showed up at eight in the morning, lined up in pairs, like Noah’s Graduation or something, and practice walking onto the football field and sitting down. The beach balls, unfortunately, were not available to rehearse with, so we had to “wing it” when it came time for the actual graduation. We also had to practice walking up to the front and having our names mispronounced by school administrators who claim to be our Best Buds and constantly insist that they are Here to Help Us during the school year, but who still think that my last name is pronounced “Schneider.”

We managed to survive this torment, though, and the actual graduation ceremony went rather well, and I’m sure I will always look back on my years at Elsinore High School with a certain fondness, unless I am trying to write a column, in which case I of course will have hated them.

Recently, my friends Mike and Andrae and I went to Joshua Tree National Monument with our drama teacher, Craig “Duke” Duke, to engage in Male Bonding via rock climbing. Rock climbing can be a very enjoyable and invigorating activity, as long as you take special care not to die while doing it.

And we couldn’t have asked for a nicer place to go rock climbing than Joshua Tree. There are a lot of large rocks there, which as any experienced rock climber will tell you, play an important part in rock climbing. There are also a lot of Joshua trees there, which are important insofar as they provide no shade whatsoever, which forces the rock climbers to be extremely manly and brave the heat and eventually die of sunstroke in a very manly fashion.

Anyway, we were there to climb rocks, which of course is a very stupid thing to do. I mean, why would you want to climb up a rock? What would you do when you got to the top? Build a fort and shoot Injuns when they ride past? These questions did not occur to us, though, because we are Men and therefore think nothing of spending two days doing something absolutely useless. The only question that came to our minds was, “Which is more important: getting to the top safely, or looking cool while we do it?” I think you can guess which one we chose.

The way we climbed was this. Duke climbed to the top of the rock via the safe, intelligent route that is conveniently located at the back of every rock in the Monument, and then tossed one end of the rope down to me, Mike, and Andrae, so that we could attach it to ourselves, one at a time, and climb up the rock, using the extremely small fingerholds and ledges on the face of the rock. That way, if we slipped and fell, Duke was at the top, and we just had to hope that he had a firm hold on the other end of the rope and was not busy talking to Andrae.

This was an actual event. Mike was climbing up the rock, and Andrae and I were already up there. Duke was pulling up the slack on the rope as Mike climbed, chatting in a friendly manner with Andrae at the same time. Suddenly, Mike called out the official, internationally-recognized rock climbing signal: “AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!” Literally, this means, “I have lost my grip and am currently plummeting headlong toward the earth.” I immediately sensed that Mike was in some sort of predicament that would require Duke, the Slack Puller, to pull tightly and keep him from falling, but Duke was busy talking to Andrae. So after Mike yelled, this is what Duke said:

“What?”

Fortunately, by the time the neurons in Duke’s head had fired and he was in the process of pulling the rope tightly, Mike had already regained his balance and had continued climbing. We all had a good laugh about it later, I’ll tell you.

But if you think climbing the rock in the first place is silly, wait till you hear how we got down. We rapelled, which simply means that we attached a rope to our harnesses and slid down. At least climbing up is a natural thing to do — people and animals alike have been climbing things for millions of years. But rapelling is not natural — it’s just controlled falling. Why would we purposely walk backwards over the edge of a 100-foot rock and just assume that a thin little rope was going to keep gravity from pulling us to our death?

I’ll tell you why. Because we’re Men.

I walked onto the Elsinore High School campus last Friday not expecting anything out of the ordinary. Like everyone else, my thoughts were on the madness that had possessed Los Angeles over the previous two days, and I knew that there had been some outbreaks of violence in Perris on Thursday.

But it never occurred to me that someone might attack Elsinore High School.

MY school.

But attack it they did. A few people — we’re all guessing it was not just one — tried to burn down the school library, a classroom, and a tree, with Molotov cocktails. Fortunately, whoever these people were probably were not very bright, as they couldn’t seem to burn anything down. You’d think making a Molotov cocktail would be a relatively simple thing to do, that any run-of-the-mill delinquent could do it. These apparently were not your typical delinquents, however. These were delinquent delinquents.

Rumors were flying around the school like the crows in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” Students had heard that the library was burned down, that Perris High School had burned down, that principal Ed Brand had been pulled from his car, streets of L.A.-style, and beaten up, among other things. For the most part, students didn’t take this kind of stuff too seriously.

Many of their parents did, though, and kept their kids home from school on Friday. Several of my classes were noticeably empty. Lisa Bramlett, who has a daughter in the ninth grade, said, “I realize that they feel they have adequate supervision, but they don’t. They’ve had drive-by shootings, they’ve had shootings in the quad. I just didn’t want to risk it.”

ASB President Mike Pust, a senior, tends to disagree. “I think they [the parents who kept their kids home] were over-reacting a little bit,” he said, adding that “they were just adding to the paranoia.”

Mike added that he felt what had happened “was a fluke.”

Students generally seemed to agree with Mike — that what happened was a fluke. A ridiculous fluke, at that.

“I think it’s sheer ignorance,” said Andrae Bibbs, a junior, referring to the attack on EHS. “It just saddens me.”

As an African-American, Andrae was affected a bit personally by the violence in L.A. and the Rodney King case, but he said no one treated him any differently during those few days. His younger brother, a sixth grader at Butterfield Elementary, however, had a few problems. Andrae said the problems existed beforehand, but were intensified by the chaos in Los Angeles — this was people’s excuse to carry out their racist ideas.

Stan Crippen, who teaches psychology and U.S. History and who has a Master’s Degree in Marriage, Family, and Child Therapy, said he discussed everything quite extensively in his classes. Most of his students, he said, felt that what happened at EHS “was kind of stupid.”

“I don’t think they feel threatened,” Crippen said. “The attitude on campus was calm.”

As Mike Pust put it, “I don’t think we have enough [campus] security for a full-scale riot, but I don’t think anybody was planning on having one.”

And that was the prevailing opinion, as far as I could tell, among the citizens of Elsinore High School after their school had been attacked — that it was a fluke, that it probably wouldn’t happen again, and that even if it did, life would go on.

Just like it always does.

It was just the four of us. Four men. Mike “Tough Guy” Pust, Andrae “Refrigerator” Bibbs, Eric D. “The Guy Who Uses His Middle Initial” Snider, and Craig “Duke” Duke. We were all at Joshua Tree National Monument, located somewhere near the middle of nowhere, to engage in forty-eight hours of male bonding. We felt that as men, we would greatly benefit from leaving our respective women and going out to the desert to get in touch (not literally) with our manhood, as well as to live like scum for a couple days.

The main problem here was that Mike, Andrae, and I, collectively, possess about as much camping expertise as your average tree sloth. Andrae, for instance, forgot to bring — and I think we’ve all done something like this before — any clothes. He did, however, bring pajamas. Mike brought clothes, but he took them out of the dryer when they were not, technically, dry. This meant that he had to spread them out all over Duke’s pickup truck when we got there, hoping they would dry overnight, presumably under the heat of the hot, blazing moon. For the next 12 hours, we were subjected to constant Underwear Updates, wherein Mike would report to us on the current status of his drawers. (“Still damp and slightly wrinkled, with a chance of being dry and straightened by noon.”)

I brought dry clothes, but I neglected to package the food in my ice chest very well, so when the ice began to melt, it got the food wet. Mike and Andrae did not even bring ice chests, but instead crammed all their food into mine, which I am sure they were sorry for when they went to get out their lunch meat, only to find that it was even wetter than Mike’s underwear.

When we returned from rock climbing the first day, we found that Mike had left the ice chest open, thus providing a squirrel with a feast of wet hot dog buns. Thereafter, Mike was referred to as “Butthead.” That nickname, if I have anything to do with it, will go on his tombstone.

Duke, on the other hand, appears to be an expert camper. He never had any trouble with anything. We would wake up in the morning to find him puttering around the campsite, cleaning up after himself and preparing for the day’s activities. As far as we know, he never even went to sleep, at least not that we ever saw. When he saw we had woken up, he would offer a cheerful morning greeting and comment on what a beautiful day it was going to be. We would respond by grunting and attempting to determine what uncomfortable object it was that we had chosen to lay our sleeping bags on the night before that was now making us feel incredibly sore (the answers — me: my wallet; Mike: his shoes; Andrae: Mike).

By the end of the excursion, everyone except Duke looked and felt like garbage. We hadn’t shaved, showered, or washed our hair in three days, and we all smelled like… oh, I don’t know… something that smells real bad. Make up your own simile. I need to go see if my lunch is dry yet.

If you ever decide to produce a play with a cast of 50 high school students, I would strongly suggest that you take a few minutes before starting to beat yourself in the head with a blunt object.

This tip comes to us from Craig “Duke” Duke, who was the director of Elsinore High School’s recent production of “Bye Bye Birdie.” If you saw any of the performances of this show, you are probably still doubled over with laughter, which must make it extremely difficult to drive.

As you may have surmised, I was in this show. I played “Mr. MacAfee,” the grumpy-but-irritating middle-aged father. I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the show, except for the time during a rehearsal that I was almost killed by the Piano of Death.

We were rehearsing the scene wherein I sing “Kids,” a song that revolves around the general theme of kids being very bad. At the end of the scene, the lights went off (or “down,” as we say in the business), and I was supposed to run off stage — in the darkness, mind you — in a humorous, middle-aged manner.

As I did this, however, I found directly in my path: a piano. Goodness knows why there was a piano there. I later learned that it had been placed there by a member of the technical crew (a group whose combined literacy rivals that of a postage stamp), apparently in the hopes that I would scurry off stage, sit down at the piano, and play a little ditty, perhaps “The Entertainer,” or something.

I did not do this, however, because I did not discover the piano in the normal fashion, i.e. with my eyes. I discovered the piano via running into it with my head. I promptly responded to this minor setback just the way a professional actor would have: I exclaimed, “Uuuuunnnhhh,” or some equally professional phrase, and fell professionally to the floor, banging my head again, only more professionally this time, as it knocked me out.

The last thing I heard before I slipped into unconsciousness was very comforting, because it reminded me that, no matter what our differences or problems, we Drama People are really all one big, happy family, full of people who are deeply concerned for one another’s well-being. I heard some guy — I’m guessing a member of the technical crew — say, “Eric, get up off the floor.” Feeling thus reassured of my importance, I promptly passed out.

Except for this minor incident of near-death, the show went very well, although it did make everyone a little nutty. For instance, during the cast party after closing night, the aforementioned director, Craig Duke (who can legally vote in this country), decided, on a whim, to let Nick Sandoval shave off his beard for him. Personally, I can think of several comical things that Duke could have done with his hair after it was shaved off (i.e., putting it all in the microwave and exclaiming, “Honey! The cat!!”), but that is not the point. The point is that acting is an all-around very enjoyable experience. Far more enjoyable, for instance, than writing a column, where you always have to worry about running out of space and being cut off right in the midd–

If you’re looking for a place to go that is clean, fun, and capable of draining your entire life savings in a matter of hours, I have one word for you: Disneyland.

I recently went to Disneyland with my girlfriend, Charlotte, and with another couple, Jacob and Jennifer (who are now an ex-couple, by the way).

Unfortunately, there were about 70 billion junior high school drill team girls in attendance that day, as they were having some kind of competition there at Disneyland, I would guess to determine which school had the loudest, sqealiest girls in the state, or perhaps the universe. We saw them all over the place, and I strongly suspect that they followed us around from ride to ride, getting louder and louder and squealier and squealier and irritatinger and irritatinger. For a while there, we thought that we had taken a wrong exit and had somehow driven to hell instead of Disneyland.

Anyway, aside from those girls, the most obvious feature of Disneyland was that it was very, very clean, and we soon saw why: The second someone drops a piece of litter on the ground, eight guys swoop in out of nowhere and sweep it up. We think those guys are actually highly evolved buzzards, which must be handy, because buzzards probably do not demand a very high salary.

One major thing that is currently going on at the Magic Kingdom is that they have done away with Tom Sawyer’s Island, because they are putting up some kind of Fantasia-related attraction in its place. This new thing should be finished sometime this spring, and I am sure they will celebrate its completion in the typical Disneyland fashion, which is to have a big media promotion for it and then promptly close it for renovation.

At one point in the day, for reasons that are still not clear to us, we went on It’s A Small World. It is not very impressive, as it is just a bunch of dolls screaming at you in different languages. When we got off, though, I must admit that we all had a really good feeling inside, like all the world’s problems were solvable, and children from every nation could stand together on a hill and sing “We Shall Overcome.” And then we heard those junior high school girls, which pretty much ruined things.

(We briefly considered luring the girls onto the cable cars that go over Fantasyland and then, just as we got off, cutting the cable and letting them plunge to their fiery deaths, but we knew that as soon as they hit the ground, those buzzard guys would swoop in and sweep them up, probably even before the Eyewitness News Van® could get there.)

At about 12:00, it suddenly occurred to me and Jacob that we had been there for three hours, and yet we still had money left. Seeking to alleviate this obvious oversight on our part, we decided to eat lunch. Since Jennifer was Jacob’s date, he insisted that he should pay for her food, but since she is a Modern, Independent Woman, she insisted that she should pay for her own food. They got into an argument over this, and he stormed away, nearly knocking Goofy over in his haste. Being a good friend, I hurried over to him (Jacob, that is) to comfort him and assure him that if it really meant that much to him, he could pay for MY lunch. He declined, however.

As anyone who has lived in Lake Elsinore for more than about a week can tell you, we are frequently visited by The Carnival. This thing, which is the closest thing to culture that there is around here, comes barging into town approximately every time you turn around, and each time, I feel compelled to go spend large sums of money at it. It’s kind of like how, at Christmastime, I watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” each of the 900 times it’s on, which is probably the only way you could ever associate the carnival with “It’s a Wonderful Life,” except to say that, just like Jimmy Stewart’s character, I have often wished I hadn’t been born after riding The Zipper three or four times.

At any rate, my friend Aaron (you remember Aaron) and I went to the carnival last Memorial Day, and I haven’t gone since then. We paid $7 each and promptly had our hands stamped with what apparently must have been a tattoo gun, because there are still traces of the ink on my knuckles. This stamp granted us the privilege of going on all the rides we wanted, going home to throw up and perhaps take a bath in some kind of disinfectant, and then coming back for more.

We decided we should go on The Zipper first, and just as we were getting in line, we saw someone we know walk past and, without even slowing down, toss his proverbial cookies on the ground. That’s how you can tell the quality of an amusement park. If people are walking around, puking openly, as though it were no bigger deal than yawning, not even slowing their pace, sometimes even continuing to carry on a conversation as they do so, well, then that’s a high-quality amusement park.

(That’s one interesting difference between men and women, by the way. A couple years ago, I convinced a girl to go on The Zipper with me, and after two revolutions, we had to yell to the operator to get his finger out of his nose and let us off. After he did so, she walked briskly to a Port-A-Potty, where she spent the next 10 minutes doing goodness knows what. A guy would have gotten off and said, as he walked merrily away, “Man! That was [BLAAAARRRRRCCH] fun!”)

After The Zipper, we headed for The Ferris Wheel from Hell. Actually, it’s called The Skydiver, but it should be called The Bruisemobile, because its primary function seems to be taking two ordinarily able-bodied, robust young people, and flinging them around an unpadded metal cage at high speeds. For the first eight or nine hundred revolutions, we turned at such an angle that I wound up on top of Aaron, but then the operator graciously popped it in reverse, leaving me to be crushed. The last time I had gone on this thing had been with the aforementioned Puke Girl, so the crushing didn’t really bother me much, since she weighs a lot less than Aaron and is somewhat less masculine.

After that, we both felt sick and went home, having spent $7 on three rides. Oh, and please accept my apologies if the constant references to vomit in this column offended you. The last thing I want to do is BBLLLLAAAARRRCCHCHHH

Excuse me.

Ibelieve it was Benjamin Franklin who said, “There are only two things certain in this life: Death and taxes. And rock music. Three things, I meant.”

I am pleased to announce that I recently managed to experience the death and rock music parts simultaneously, when several dozen of my friends and I sojourned to the big Rush concert at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood (town motto: “Welcome to Inglewood! Bang!”).

The first incident of near-death came about while the opening act was performing. Aaron (you remember Aaron) and I had to find one of our friends who was there, only we didn’t know where his seat was, so we began wandering about aimlessly, hoping that we would just run into him. Unfortunately, everyone else was also wandering about, just like we were, only they probably were not all looking for the same guy we were, because he did not, so far as I know, have any drugs on him. So as Aaron and I were in the process of meandering around like retarded sheep, along with fifty billion similarly impaired livestock, we encountered some major gridlock. For some reason — we couldn’t tell why — things got more cramped than they already were, and everyone tried to keep moving but couldn’t.

To further my perturbation (if there is such a word), many of these long-haired weirdos began going, “Moo!,” which of course is what you are supposed to do if you are in a large crowd and lack the imagination to come up with anything funnier. These are the same people, I imagine, who, when they fill out a form, where it says, “SEX,” instead of putting “male” or “female,” they put, “yes, please,” apparently thinking that they are the first person ever to think of that. These are the same people with bumper stickers that say “Same [expletive], different day,” or possibly, “My other car is a Cadillac.” These are the same people who, when they go to someone’s house where there is a piano, they immediately proclaim, “Oh, I play the piano,” and then, uninvited, they sit down and proceed to play “Chopsticks,” which of course is all they know. There is a serious lack of originality in Americans today, particularly those Americans who go to Rush concerts and have a few beers in them already.

The other incident of near-death was after the concert, when we were trying to get out of Inglewood (as are, I suspect, a majority of the residents). Just outside of the Forum parking lot, there were a whole bunch of large males engaging in some major capitalism, insofar as they were selling bootlegged Rush T-shirts. We had seen them on the way to the concert, lined up from the freeway to the Forum like some kind of delinquent Hands Across America, peddling their wares to anyone who was sufficiently intimidated by them. This category included everyone in my car, several of whom were intimidated enough to buy two or three shirts.

Anyway, after the concert, we were in line behind a zillion other cars, trying to get out of the parking lot, when we realized that we were right in the middle of a large T-shirt dispute — literally. On one side of the street was a whole group of delinquents who were debating with a group of delinquents on the other side of the street as to which group of delinquents owned a pile of T-shirts that had fallen in the middle of the street. This would have been fine, except that this debate was being held over my car, which was stopped in traffic. They were LEANING ON MY HOOD, arguing with one another. I guess our lives were never actually in danger, but it was still kind of scary. I wound up having to buy a few more T-shirts just to make them go away.

Ithink I’m going to write a trashy, soap opera-type novel, because there aren’t enough of them in the world already. It’s going to be called “The Stepford City Council,” based on the book “The Stepford Wives,” where all the wives in the town got replaced by perfect, Donna Reed-esque robots. Here’s a preview from the first chapter:

* * *

It was a typical day at Disneyland, except that there was a psychotic guy working there. He was Newton Fig, a 34-year-old man with an English accent so thick you could cut it with a knife, and he had been called into the office of Mickey Mass, Chairman in Charge of Audio-animatronics and Big Cheese at Disneyland…

“You wanted to see me, sir?” said the quiet, bespectacled man as he removed his hat and wiped his nose on it.

“Yes, Newton Fig. Have a seat,” said Mr. Mass benevolently, as though without that minor act of kindness, Newton Fig would have had to stand up for the rest of his life. “Newton Fig, you are a robot constructor for The Park, are you not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you are quite adept at creating life-like androids of people, correct?”

“Well, yes,” he said, blushing, “I suppose so.”

In that soft yet ominous voice that we writers love so much because it doesn’t exist in real life, Mr. Mass said, “I’ll get right to the point. Newton Fig, we’ve been receiving complaints to the effect that robots are going around and picking people’s pockets. And yesterday, Beast, from ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ mauled a little boy to death.” He leaned forward. “Do you know anything about that?” He glared at Newton Fig.

“Yes, sir. It was rather amusing. The boy thought Beast was just hugging him, and next thing you know, SQUISH!” He chuckled softly to himself.

“Stop chuckling softly to yourself!” demanded Mr. Mass. “I mean, do you know why the robots are doing these things?” Mr. Mass was growing impatient. He was also, to the surprise of modern science, growing a third arm, but that would seem to be irrelevant here.

Newton Fig was not one to beat around the bush. Or the reagan, for that matter. “Yes, sir, I’ve been programming those robots,” he said.

Mr. Mass stood up and started to say something pertaining to the word “blithering,” which was ironic, considering Newton Fig had given up blithering months earlier, but Newton Fig stopped him. “Wait a minute, sir! How come I’m never referred to by just my first name?”

“I don’t know, Newton Fig,” Mr. Mass replied. “I imagine the writer is trying to beat some lame joke into the readers’ heads.”

“Oh. Anyway, I HAD to do it, sir! I needed the money, and this job only pays minimum wage, so I HAD to do it!!!”

“Don’t tell me — you have a wife and three kids at home…?”

“No, actually, I have this heroin addiction, and, what with inflation and all, I –”

He didn’t fully understand what was happening until his rear end impacted with the cement outside.

“Well then,” he said darkly. “I’ll show them. They’ll be sorry!!” He laughed evilly, then rubbed his hands maliciously, then belched sinisterly, as dark, evil, malicious, sinister clouds in the shape of armadillos, or perhaps elephants, gathered in the sky over his head…

* * *

Isn’t that great? I know I’D buy it.

Idon’t wish to imply that the good folks at Chapman College deserve any less federal funding than they are getting, but I definitely think that a little too much of the money going to their drama department is being used to purchase illegal chemical substances.

I suppose you and Chapman College’s lawyers will want to know why I think that. Well, the reason is that a few months ago, I saw their production of “The Bacchae,” which is an ancient Greek tragedy, written by Aeschylus, who is an ancient Greek. If you had seen this production, you would have reached the same conclusion that I did, which was that this drama department was having some seriously disturbing cast parties.

The first sign that something strange was going on was that the program said the play would be performed WITHOUT AN INTERMISSION. This seemed odd, because EVERY play has an intermission. The reason is simple. You don’t want your audience sitting on their rear ends for two hours non-stop, or else they will start getting testy, and they’ll stop laughing when funny things happen, and they might start throwing chairs. Wise directors, therefore, always follow the two Primary Rules of the Theatre, which are as follows:

1. Always have an intermission to give your audience a chance to stretch their legs.

2. Only perform in theaters where the chairs are bolted down.

I was further alerted to the drug problem when the play began. It began with about 20 people dressed in bizarre outfits, looking like rejects from “Cats,” coming downstage and assembling themselves into four rows. Then, they all took turns chanting one phrase at a time from a speech that made no sense whatsoever, largely because it consisted of many Greek words, such as bacchus, pantheos, kilometer, and delirium.

The play was more boring than it was weird, until suddenly, from out of nowhere — and you’ll have to pay close attention here — one of the male cast members began HOWLING. Like a wolf. FOR NO REASON. Then, the four rows of weirdos ran offstage and a guy dressed only in a very very small diaper-looking thing come on. This man — presumably a college student, and not, if I may say so, a very attractive one, either — didn’t have a stitch of clothing on except for what looked like a dishtowel that he had tied on so that it covered his personal regions. He came downstage, right up to the front row of the audience, and as he spoke, he almost put a girl’s eye out.

Now, I think the reason for Wolf Boy’s sudden outburst was to cue Naked Man. They had probably rehearsed it a few times without the howling, only to find that Naked Man, all the way backstage, couldn’t hear the group’s last line, so he didn’t know when to come out. Either that, or, like the audience, he was asleep.

As for not having an intermission, my only guess is that the director was afraid if he let the audience out, they might not come back in. All I know is that the play left a profound mark on the group I was with, because on the way home, the bus reverberated with the sound of 45 high school students howling. At least WE all kept our clothes on.

As a drama student, I have been exposed to quite a bit of drama, which I guess I might have expected. From my experience, I have determined that all drama falls under one of four categories:

1. Plays That No One Understands Because They Are Really Weird: These are plays where, when you see them, you just KNOW that the playwright was goofed on skunkweed when he wrote it.
2. Plays That No One Understands Because They Are Written by Shakespeare: These are plays where, when you see them, you just KNOW that Shakespeare had to be kind of flitty to write plays that feature numerous large-calved males leaping about in tights and saying words like “doth.”
3. Plays That High School Drama Students Like to Do Scenes from Because They Have Lots of Dirty Words in Them: Neil Simon is the major author in this category, although much of Shakespeare can be made to sound dirty, too, because no one will know if you’re doing it right or not.
4. Plays That Are Boring: We are mainly talking here about plays that were written by Arthur Miller (“The Crucible,” “Death of an Amway Salesman”) and Greek tragedians (Euripedes, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Spectacles, etc.). You can always understand what’s going on in these plays; the problem is that you don’t CARE.

From what I can determine, any fool can write a play to fit into category #1. As a matter of fact, I think being a fool would probably help. All you have to do is obtain some illegal substances, which is fairly easy to do around here (not that I would know).

Category #2 is a bit harder to write, because you have to be Shakespeare, and not many people are, or even want to be.

Category #3 is fairly easy to write because it is very easy to sprinkle a few dirty words here and there to liven things up. The play itself can be really stupid — it could even be a member of another category. All you have to do is add a few expletives. Shakespeare should have tried this:

Shakespeare’s version: “Romeo, O Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”
New, filthy version: “Romeo, O Romeo! Where-the-****-fore art thou, Romeo, you *******?!?”

Category #4 is even easier to write because you don’t have to worry about making the characters or the plot interesting. Also, you can make the play as long as you want. That will just add to the overall boredom. For example, my friend Aaron (you remember Aaron) and I went to see “The Crucible” at the Palomar University and Enormous Parking Facility. My extremely bearded drama teacher, Craig “Duke” Duke, insisted that this was a good play, but Aaron and I now know that Duke is a big stinking liar. Not only was the play long — I’m guessing, in retrospect, about fourteen days — but it was not very exciting. I mean, most of it was a bunch of people standing around and talking about witches and stuff. You’d think that a play about the Salem witch trials would be good — lots of demons and devils and torture devices and what-not — but it was just BORING. And don’t even get me started about Greek playwrights, because I’m out of space.

It is at this time of the year (that is, the beginning), that we columnists traditionally write a column in which we list our New Year’s Resolutions. (I say “we,” as if there is some kind of Columnists’ Federation, when in actuality, any moron can be a columnist, Andy Rooney being a prime example.)

Not wanting to deviate from the norm (Norm would be very upset if I deviated from him), here are my resolutions:

I, Eric D. Snider, being a minor and therefore not being legally bound by anything I am about to say, do hereby resolve the following:

Today is Christmas, which hopefully means that the Christmas season will be ending soon. The Christmas season, of course, officially began sometime back in July, I believe, and ever since then, we have all been caught in the tentacles of TRADITION, a beast that occasionally rears its head during graduation ceremonies and that sort of thing, but which really has a blast during Christmas because that’s when people will do almost anything.

My own personal family, being chock-full of red-blooded Americans, has many traditions, but we realized recently that they are all really weird. This was driven home to us when my mother announced that her women’s group at church was compiling a book of all the women’s families’ traditions, Christmas or otherwise, and she needed our help to think of some. The problem was coming up with something that we didn’t care if all the other women at church knew about. The conversation sounded more or less like this:

“How about the way we — oh, no. Never mind.”

“Well, what about — no, I guess they can’t print that.”

“There’s that one time we — ha ha ha! Never mind! I wouldn’t want the police to hear about that one!”

And so on. We eventually came to the conclusion that we only have one tradition that we care to make public, and, fortunately for this column, it has to do with Christmas. It is called the Videotaping of the Same Christmas Specials Every Single Year.

The way this works is that every year, my mother, as Matriarch, has the duty of reading the TV Guide during the Christmas season and announcing to the rest of the household when and on what channel every Christmas animated special is going to be on. “Oh!” she’ll say, in a very sentimental voice, as though she has discovered a long-lost classic from her childhood that we’ve never seen before. “‘Frosty the Snowman’ is on next Thursday!”

The responsibility then moves to whichever Snider child is 8 years old that year. That child will say, “Can we tape it?” My mother, picking up her cue, will lose control of her rationality and say, “Yes.” Then, someone with an ounce of sense in his head will say, “Don’t we already have that on tape?” Which of course we do. That is the cue for the entire family to search through our vast videotape collection in search of whichever Christmas special is in question, and invariably — this is the really weird part — THEY CAN NEVER FIND IT. So the decision is made that we should Tape It Again.

The way this tradition gets perpetuated is, once we’ve taped all these shows, we never watch them because they’re not very entertaining to begin with, and it’s hard to get in the Christmas spirit in the middle of March anyway, so the next year, when they come on TV again, we haven’t seen them for twelve months, so we assume we should tape them. I think that after the last of the Sniders is dead, and the relatives are viewing our videotape library in search of family memorabilia, they will come across eighteen different recordings of “Hey, Charlie Brown! It’s Christmas!”, and they’ll be able to tell what year each of them is from by watching the four seconds of commercials that remained intact on each one because whichever child was eight years old that year was a bit slow on the “pause” button.

I was recently looking in my kitchen cupboard for something to eat when I came across a box of graham crackers that said “2 POUND FAMILY SIZE” on it. I wondered why my mother even bought it, since our family weighs considerably more than two pounds. (rim shot)

But seriously, folks. I didn’t come here to tell amusing anecdotes, thus making other people’s lives happier and more pleasant. No, I came here to promote myself and hopefully pick up a few extra bucks. You see, my friend Aaron (you remember Aaron) and I recently took it into our heads to market a calendar — you know, one of those day-to-day calendars that usually come with Far Side cartoons on every day? We’re doing one, only instead of cartoons, each day has a deep and/or meaningful quote. These are actual quotes from actual people, mind you, and that’s what makes many of them seem funny. Like the man who said, as he was being strapped into the electric chair, “This will certainly teach me a lesson.”

Or Pamela Bass, who lived down the hall from alleged mutilation murderer Jeffrey Dahmer: “I would hear a buzz saw running in the early evening. I thought he was building something.”

Some of them are from easily obtainable sources (such as Psalms 137:9 — “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”); others are a bit more obscure. You’ll just have to take our word for it that they were all actually said by the people we have credited them to. We’ve been combing Newsweek magazine, as well as just listening closely to everything we hear.

The calendar is called “Eric and Aaron’s Daily Bit o’ Wisdom,” and, as I said, we just came up with the idea recently. Just how recently will become apparent when you buy it, for $4. It can be purchased at Bits, Bytes, and Books (located next to Thrifty in Lake Elsinore), or at John’s Service Center (located at 161 N. Main Street), or from Aaron and me directly, if you happen to know where to find one of us. All proceeds will go to the “Pay for Eric’s College Tuition/Aaron’s Automobile” Fund. It should be available no later than Saturday — just in time for Christmas.

Oh, one more thing. Due to circumstances beyond our control, pertaining mainly to our laziness and procrastination, only the first three months are ready at the moment. But not to worry. What you do is, you buy those three months from the aforementioned Bit o’ Wisdom affiliates, and after the March 31 page there’s a form where you fill in your name and address. You just send that to us, and we’ll send you the next three months in about three weeks, at no additional charge, and another three months about three weeks after that, and so on, kind of like getting Time/Life books, only we promise — and this is our creed — that we will never, ever, under any circumstances, produce a television commercial that is more than three minutes long, unless we really think it will boost sales.

So rush right out and buy the calendar in a couple days, when it gets to the stores. We promise you’ll enjoy it throughout 1992, and if you are not fully satisfied, you have our personal guarantee that we do not give a flying goat’s head.

* * *

Oh, yeah. One of the benefits of having a birthday on a Wednesday is that it means you get it mentioned in this column. So happy birthday to Jennifer Jackson, who is 16 today. Her parents already bought her a brand new car, which makes me sick, considering I got a 13-year-old Ford Granada when I turned 16. I hope she doesn’t expect a gift from ME.

As you are no doubt aware, this Sunday, Dec. 15 marks the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill o’ Rights. As a public service, we have commissioned humor columnist/Constitution expert Eric D. Snider to summarize, with the help of his panel of analysts, the Bill o’ Rights so that you, as a citizen of the good ol’ U. S. of A., will not be an ignorant buffoon.

1st AMENDMENT: The first amendment is often called the “First Amendment,” because of all the amendments, it was the first. This amendment guarantees many things, but do not become arrogant and think this means you can do whatever you want, because you can’t. As the great statesman or judge or somebody whose last name was Holmes and whose first name escapes us at the moment once said, “Freedom of speech does not grant us the right to yell ‘Maggot!’ in a crowded morgue,” and he’ll get no argument from us, largely because he is dead.

Also, even though you have a right to practice religion however you choose, this does not mean that you have a right to practice religion however you choose. You couldn’t, for example, participate in a religion that involved the sacrificial slaughtering of senators, mainly because there are only a hundred of them, and you’d run out too soon. (Believe me, once you get on a roll knocking off senators, you just can’t stop.) Representatives would be OK, because there are hundreds of them, and no one would notice if they were gone anyway.

2nd AMENDMENT: This is the one that says you have the right to bear arms. It has been highly disputed, however, because it is rather clear that what the Framers meant was that, since in 1791 the militia was made up entirely of citizens, they had to ensure that those citizens would always be allowed to have guns, because let’s face it, an army without guns couldn’t beat anyone, except maybe France.

Nowadays, of course, we are far more socially advanced, although we do still use words like “nowadays.” Now, we have professional militias, militias made up of people who went to college just so they could be militias. So this amendment is kind of irrelevant now. What we need to do, we think, is stop trying to place restrictions on guns, because all that does is irritate NRA members, every single one of whom — you’ll pardon us for generalizing here — is bonkers. What we need to do is outlaw the manufacturing of bullets.

3rd AMENDMENT: This says that if soldiers just show up at your house one night uninvited, you don’t have to let them sleep there. It would be perfectly constitutional for you to call the police and have them arrested for trespassing, in fact.

4th AMENDMENT: This states that you and your house and your property cannot be searched or seized unless the police have a darned good reason for it, such as that you are a minority or Rodney King. If the police do not have a real good excuse right then, they must obtain a search warrant from a judge, which is not hard to do, because most county judges toss out search warrants about as often as they exhale. They get bored, sitting there all day dealing with traffic violators and that kind of thing, so when a cop comes in and says he wants to go ransack a guy’s house, those judges get so happy they could jump for joy, if they weren’t afraid their robes would fly up, exposing their underclothing.

5th AMENDMENT: This is a very famous amendment, because it is what Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North took back during the now-infamous arms-for-hostages “Watergate” scandal of Dec. 7, 1941, during which President Lincoln was shot at Hiroshima. Or something like that.

What it says is that you cannot be forced by the government to say something that might incriminate yourself. (An example of an incriminating statement might be, “Yes, Your Honor, I did,” or, “Yes, that’s true,” or even, “Why, certainly, yes, that’s what I did, all right.”) What the Framers didn’t realize was that when you say, “I’d rather not answer that question,” what you’re basically saying is, “YES! YES! I DID IT!!” This would probably affect the jury’s opinions in regards to whether you did it or not, but the Framers did not foresee this problem, largely because, back in the early days of United States history, when the Framers lived, everyone was stupid.

Another thing that the fifth amendment guarantees us is that you cannot be tried twice for the same offense. For instance, if a man murdered his wife and dumped her on the highway, but then was found innocent by the jury, but then announced that he did, in fact, do it, they could not try him again for murder. They could probably just fine him for littering.

6th AMENDMENT: What this says is that in a trial, the accused “shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial,” but we fail to see how anyone could possibly enjoy his own trial, unless it was catered or something. It also says that accused persons have the right to be tried by an “impartial” jury, made up of their peers, but again, we find this difficult to believe. First of all, if we were unlucky enough to get stuck doing jury duty, we would probably have a very poor attitude, since we are immature and childish, and we would just automatically say that whoever was on trial was guilty.

Second, we think it would be very hard to find a group of 12 people who could be considered peers of a demented ax-murderer, with the exception of one or two Middle-eastern dictators, but they probably would not even show up. And third, any group of people who were too dumb to find a way out of doing jury duty are not MY peers, I can assure you.

7th AMENDMENT: This is a very little-known amendment. It says that (1) you have the right to trial by jury in any case that concerns more than $20, and 2) you have the right to shake your fist and go, “Woof! Woof! Woof!” when Arsenio Hall comes onstage. The second part of this amendment will hopefully be repealed before we get really irritated.

8th AMENDMENT: This protects us from cruel and unusual punishment. Many people argue that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment, however, because the convicted person knows exactly when he’s going to die and he has time to worry about it and think about it and then finally the day comes and they ask him what he wants for his last meal and he gets his favorite food but he can’t eat it because all he can do is think about how he’s about to die and then they walk him down the cold, grey corridor to the gas chamber and they have the Religious Person reading him things in Latin, as though your average convicted murderer is multi-lingual, and then they lead him into the room and tell him to breathe deeply and they leave and lock him in and they go to the window so they can watch and see if something cool happens, such as his eyes falling out of their sockets, or his face melting, and they drop the cyanide tablets into the water and it fizzes like Alka-Seltzer, only it tastes better, and the man holds his breath for as long as he can until finally he can’t help it and he takes a deep breath and after a few seconds the cyanide fumes have burned out his lungs and he falls to the hard ground, clutching at his chest, gasping for air.

The solution, obviously, is to arrange it so the convicted person doesn’t know when he’s going to die. That way, it wouldn’t be cruel and unusual. We would suggest that they replace the bailiffs at murder trials with Samurai warriors, equipped with enormous swords, ready to leap from behind and lop the defendant’s head off as soon as the verdict is read. He’d never know what hit him. The only foreseeable problem would be this:

JURY FOREPERSON: We find the defendant guilty…
SAMURAI: (lops the guy’s head off)
JURY FOREPERSON: …of jaywalking, but not of murder.

But that’s the kind of snafu that is necessary for a democracy to run properly.

9th AMENDMENT: This says that of course the Constitution couldn’t possibly mention every single right that we, the People, have, and that there are plenty of others. New rights are being discovered every day, in fact, such as the right to distribute birth control devices to high school students.

10th AMENDMENT: This was thrown in at the last minute to make the Bill o’ Rights come out to an even ten amendments. All it says is that old ladies have the right to carry on detailed conversations with inanimate objects, such as their plants or their cats.

And there you have it. We hope that we have educated you somewhat in the workings of the Bill o’ Rights, and that we have instilled in you an appreciation and understanding of that all-important document, and that we have successfully written enough material to fill 45 column inches.

For those of you who really enjoy watching fat women parade around in skimpy swimwear, you’ll be pleased to know that there is now a Big and Beautiful beauty pageant. This bit of information comes to us from my grandmother, who saw it on Sally Jessy Raphael.

According to my grandmother, who is a very reliable source, the only rule for entering the contest was that you had to weigh at least 250 pounds, a requirement shared by many traveling carnivals. The pageant itself was much like the Miss America Pageant, only far more disgusting. The women had to peform a talent (eating did not qualify), be interviewed (“What are your career goals?” “I don’t know. Pass the potatoes.”), and — please sit down, if you have not already done so — model swimsuits.

* * *

Those asterisks indicated a brief period of silence, to give you time to realize the implications of my last statement. My only regret is that my grandmother — a dear, sweet, old woman who has never done anything to deserve such a fate — had to witness this. She must surely be scarred for life after seeing a dozen women, many of whom require license plates, wander around what must have been a steel-reinforced stage wearing swimsuits. I pity her.

But as long as we’re making fun — uh, discussing — fat people, let me tell you about a guy I saw at the courthouse the other day.

See, I had to go to court because I got a ticket for going 80 miles an hour on the freeway. As my mother and I — hey, there’s something I don’t understand. If you’re a minor, which I am, and you go to traffic court, your parent or guardian has to go with you. But it seems to me my mother’s not going to do me a lot of good once I get to court — where was she when I was doing 80 down the freeway? THAT’S when I needed parental guidance — not in court, where I’m already duly intimidated. “Slow down!” my mother would have shrieked in a parental manner. All she can do in court is give me dirty looks when the judge tells me how much I’m going to have to pay.

Anyway, we were outside the courthouse when this man came be. Now, I am not one to make fun of people’s problems, but this guy was FAT. He must have weighed 1,400 pounds, at least. He was not Big and Beautiful. He was Big and Fat. But as he came lumbering past us, we noticed that this incredibly fat man — a man who single-mouthedly could deplete the entire food supply of a third world nation in one sitting — had, by some freak of nature, some bizarre twist of circumstance, somehow managed to acquire a pair of blue jeans that were TOO BIG for him. Bear in mind that while a normal man has maybe a size 36 waist, this man’s waist must have been a size 300, and he had somehow managed to find a pair of pants with a 310 waist.

The result was that he had to hold them up to keep them from falling down. Now, I think it is safe to assume that Levi’s does not ordinarily manufacture pants of that magnitude. My guess is that a piece of factory machinery went haywire and started making circus tents instead of trousers.

But there are still many unanswered questions.

1) Why didn’t he try the pants on before he bought them? It seems to me that if you’re going to go to the trouble of hunting down a clothing store that has a Fat Slobwear department, you may as well go to the trouble of making sure the darn things fit you before you pay for them.

2) Is it possible that the pants used to fit, but that he — stay with me here — LOST WEIGHT? I would be inclined to say no, because I think once you break the 800 pound mark, the goal of losing weight is replaced by the goal of getting out of bed in the morning unassisted.

3) What was this guy doing in court? He can’t possibly have been occupying a vehicle that was going too fast, unless it was going downhill. My guess is that he got a ticket for double parking his butt.

Some adults tend to believe that teenagers think they cannot have fun without getting drunk, but this is not even remotely true. We can have just as much fun getting stoned.

Ha ha ha! Kids, please do not try that joke in front of your parents! I am a Trained Humor Professional!

Actually, though I hate to admit it, many of my fellow teenagers do seem to enjoy getting drunk, although I can’t imagine why, since drunk people tend to act even stupider than they normally are (and people who like to get drunk must be pretty stupid normally, or else they’d find some better, less liver-rotting way of having fun, such as dodging traffic).

As an example, let me relate to you a little anecdote. When the school newspaper, “The Tiger Times” (motto: “Death before Verification”) went on a week-long trip to Washington, D.C. and New York City last April, our editor (who has asked that I not mention his name, which is Gabe) decided that he should take full advantage of the trip and, while we were in New York — the city with the most culture and entertainment and fascinating things to do and see in the nation — he got so drunk both nights that we almost had to donate his body to science. He couldn’t do that back in Canyon Lake, you realize, because parties are only held WEEKLY there, as opposed to nightly.

Another example: Several of my friends recently embarked on an overnight trip to Tijuana (motto: “Death before Sanitation”). Their original intent was to attend the Ojai Lai games, which are supposedly very fun, although they are probably not spelled the way I just spelled them. They are apparently some kind of Mexican racquetball, and people go there and bet on which guy they think will win. My friends, though, got sidetracked and wound up going to a bar and getting lit. They were, as someone I know once said, “three sheets to the wind.” I don’t know what that means, but I think it somehow applies here.

Anyway, between the six of them, three of them were really drunk, and a fourth one was just drunk enough to be louder than he normally was, but no funnier. After a while, one of the really drunk ones began to throw up on the table and on himself and on his friends, and I think that’s when one learns who one’s friends really are: when one begins throwing up on them. In this guy’s case, his friends elected to leave him alone with his mucous and go watch him from the bar and laugh at him.

We clearly have a problem here. Something must be dreadfully wrong if what seems to be a large number of teenagers thinks that getting drunk and possibly endangering their lives is fun. And I don’t mean something is wrong with their morals. What I mean is that something must be wrong with their taste buds, because I had a sip of beer once, and quite frankly, it tasted like dragon vomit. It was the worst garbage I had ever had the misfortune of tasting, and I just wonder how these kids who like to get wasted can possibly stand it. Is the ecstasy of being drunk really so wonderful that it makes you forget about the sewage you had to drink to achieve that state?

I think the problem is that these kids are unimaginative. I mean, if you want to taste something vile, there are certainly more creative ways of doing it. Why not go down to the pet store and ask the owner if he’ll let you eat the droppings from the rat cages? Or go to your own refrigerator and scrape off the scum from the bottom of the cheese compartment? At least you might get some nutritional value from those options.

Anyway, that’s my opinion. Now if only I had something to do this weekend….

Isee by the old calendar on the wall that Thanksgiving is tomorrow. That was not my first observation, of course. My first observation was that it’s November already.

This alarmed me, because I usually notice it when we begin a new month, but this one slipped right past me, probably because I was among the living dead when it rolled around. That’s what happens when you’re in a highly-successful school play like I just was — it gets to where you have to make a decision between sleeping and doing schoolwork. Being the responsible citizen, I chose to stay up late writing columns instead of doing either.

Anyway, Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and if your family is anything like mine … you are probably in serious need of counseling. (A family-related anecdote that you will perhaps find amusing: when we got our swimming pool a few years ago, it came with these stickers that we were supposed to put on it with pictures of stick persons being crossed out as they dive into stick swimming pools, and the words say, “No jumping or diving.” My brother put those stickers on our toilets. To my knowledge, no one has disobeyed yet.)

Anyway, Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and if your family is anything like mine, this is not the only time they all get together. My family, for example, assembles into one big mass at least once a month to celebrate whoever’s birthday it is that month. This is fairly convenient, because my grandfather was born in Lake Elsinore and, to my knowledge, has never been out of the city limits except for occasional weekend vacations to Wildomar, and all of his children and grandchildren live within an hour of Lake Elsinore. Most of them live IN Lake Elsinore. It’s all really very sad. I could see a family being born in a city like Seattle or Denver and never leaving because it’s such a great city with so much to do and just overall a pleasant place to live, but this is LAKE ELSINORE, for crying out loud! The town whose motto is “You’re not livin’ till you’re leavin’!” The town with, by some estimates, as many as FOUR THOUSAND Circle K’s, and not a single movie theater! The town that had a cultural conniption fit when K-mart came to town, meaning that only a Pic ‘N Save was needed to make it possible for mothers to dress their children in tacky-looking clothing without ever actually leaving the city. The town… well, nevermind.

Anyway, Thanksgiving is tomorrow, which means that by noon, your house will be crawling with relatives, half of whom will want to watch football, and the other half of whom will want to watch the “Twilight Zone” Marathon on channel 5. As host or hostess, whichever you happen to be, your responsibility to your guests is to moderate these types of arguments fairly and rationally. For instance, you might say that they can watch the football game up until the time when that one episode with the doll who talks and kills people comes on, and then they have to change the channel. Or you could — oh, forget it. This column is going nowhere. I give up. Pass the turkey.

You’ll be pleased to know that I am in a production of Neil Simon’s hilarious farce “Rumors,” which opens tonight at Elsinore High School and runs through Saturday. It is a very funny play, as you can tell by its subject matter, which is a man shooting himself in the head.

Normally, of course, a man shooting himself in the head is not very funny, especially if it is you. But when Neil Simon writes about it, he manages to make it seem quite funny indeed. He also manages to insert dirty words in about every other line, which, if you were to see the play in its unexpurgated form, would make you think it takes place at a meeting of People with Garbage Mouths. At Elsinore High School, however, no one says those words, particularly not the P.E. coaches, and particularly not when their students don’t run fast enough, so of course we can’t say them in the play.

You may recall that the last play I was in was “Shakespeare Shorts,” back in February, which was a pretty good show, except that it was boring and had the word “Shakespeare” in its title, which is pretty much a death sentence for any show. The next EHS production, however, was the world-renowned, incredibly-large-audience-attracting “Wizard of Oz,” which I did not appear in for some reason. Every time I mention this oversight to Craig Duke, the director, he points out that I did not audition, but I fail to see how that is relevant, considering the fact that I played the title role in “15-Minute Hamlet” and therefore should not HAVE to audition anymore after that.

I did audition for “Rumors,” though, and I got a part. I play Ken. Ken is a very nervous fellow, which is understandable, considering that his best friend has just shot himself in the head. Twenty minutes into the play, Ken goes deaf, and things get even funnier after that!

In order to Bond as a Cast and Grow as Actors, presumably so that it will appear more believable when I go deaf on stage, we even went to the trouble of going out to Joshua Tree National Monument and Yucca Tree Reserve to have a campout and rehearse our play. This little excursion was very effective, and I can honestly say that we did, in fact, Bond as a Cast on that trip. That statement is very funny to the people in the play. The rest of you probably don’t care.

Another thing we did was have an all-night rehearsal. Mr. Duke is apparently laboring under the illusion that if he makes us rehearse under bizarre circumstances — in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, etc. — we will perform better on stage. This, of course, is silly, and Mr. Duke is a silly man, but we did it nonetheless, and let me just say that you really learn who your friends are when everyone has been up all night, running lines and working on the set:

ME: (performing one of my lines) “I’m not calling the police until we have to.”
OTHER PERSON: (ad libbing something) “Shut up. I hate you.”

Come see the play or you’ll never hear the end of it.

Just so you know, this may be my last column. I am a fugitive.

First of all, I wrote a column a few weeks ago that irritated the Elsinore High School football team because it implied — and I hope the team will pardon my presumptuousness here — that they weren’t doing so well, football-wise. I also discussed at length the subject of bottom-patting in high school sports. Both subjects were apparently unamusing to the football team.

Let me just say here and now that the last thing I wanted to do with that column was offend a group of people who, collectively, are larger and more powerful than a neutron bomb. I may be stupid, but I’m certainly not stupid. All I was doing, in regards to the comments about their record, was making a joke. That’s what I do for a living. I see that something isn’t going as well as it might be — the government, the City, the football team — and I make humorous, light-hearted little comments about it. I kick them when they’re down, as it were. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that the football players were worthless, either as human beings, which I am sure most of them are, or as football players. This is last year’s UNDEFEATED C.I.F. CHAMPS, for goodness’ sakes! Of course they’re a good team! That’s why I made those jokes — it’s so ironic that a team that good would have such a poor record, I HAD to say something!

Also, some of the players apparently thought that I was implying they were gay when I talked about the bottom-patting. Let me assure you — actually, more importantly, let me assure THEM — that that is not at all what I meant. I am sure that none of them are homosexuals, and I certainly wouldn’t be the one they’d tell if they were. All I was doing was saying that patting one another’s behinds is a little silly, coming from a group of rugged, manly, macho individuals such as themselves. But they’re free to continue doing it! (I may be kissing butt, but at least I’m not patting it.) (Ha ha! Another little joke there! Ha ha ha!)

So I want the football team to know that I am sorry if I offended them, and that that was not my intent, and that I personally enjoy football, particularly Tiger football, and that I admire their dedication to their sport, and that I wish them the best of luck in the game this Friday, and that I really hope they don’t beat me up and throw me under a bridge. Thank you.

The other reason I am a fugitive is that I killed a baby. It wasn’t an actual, human baby. It was actually a sack of flower with a head attached, but you’d have thought it was a real baby when I dropped it on the floor and the flour spilled out and the “mother” — who was actually a girl taking a Child Development course at school who had to take care of this thing for a month as an assignment — screamed in horror and called me a filthy name. Everyone else in the room grew very quiet, as though they were awaiting the jury’s verdict as to whether or not they were guilty of mass homicide, and then the “mother,” upon examining the child, announced that I had, in fact, broken it, and boy, was she going to be in trouble.

I apologized profusely, explaining that I hadn’t realized it was a sack of flour when I dropped it. I had thought it was just a Cabbage Patch Doll. That’s why I dropped it, for crying out loud, because I think Cabbage Patch Things need to be dropped as much as possible. But she was inconsolable. She was also unamused when I suggested she tell her teacher that it wasn’t flour leaking out, but that she had applied baby powder because the child had a diaper rash. She also didn’t like my crack about donating the baby to Home Economics. I just hope she is as good a mother when she has real children.

The next day, I was informed that she had been convicted of child neglect by her teacher (who is apparently a judge, which I didn’t know before), and that her grade had been dropped, just like her baby. I again apologized, but the fact remains that I did kill a baby, and I really need to get out of town. See ya.

Remember what it was like when you could get off the freeway at Main Street and drive straight down to Lakeshore Drive, passing the little shops and the city hall and the drug dealers along the way, without being hindered by the fact that one of the blocks on Main Street was being made to look like a demilitarized zone? Neither do I.

I have a theory about Lake Elsinore. See, the City keeps tearing up blocks of Main Street and then putting them back together again, and they SAY this is in order to increase downtown business and make things look pretty and provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare and what-not, but I think all it does is 1) give the hookers and drug dealers more pleasant places to sit, and 2) make businesses go bankrupt because no one can get there to shop at them for three months, and by the time the construction is done and people can get to them without a helicopter, everyone has forgotten about the businesses entirely.

So here is my theory:

The City is using this “revitalization” thing as a means of getting rid of the businesses it doesn’t want.

These include anything that is not an antique store. The City’s dream is to have a whole street of only antique stores, and eventually, the entire city will by like that. Circle K will be allowed to stay because many of their packages of Hostess items qualify for the category “antique,” and some of the boxes of cereal at the Alamo have been there quite a while, too.

This would explain making the street LOOK nice without getting rid of the people who make it look bad. That way, any businesses that aren’t killed by the construction itself can be killed by that fact that, no matter how Oz-like the street looks, no one wants to shop there because they’re afraid they’ll encounter a Main Street Person talking to God or Allah or whomever it is those Main Street Persons talk to.

The City refutes this, of course. They say that the businesses don’t suffer because people can still get to them to shop without too much inconvenience. This is true, of course, unless you’re one of those people who was trouble walking over broken up concrete and having to get past guys named “Larry” who operate tractors and wear flannel shirts with their names embroidered on them, lest they forget who they are.

On a more serious note, it is also hard to get to the businesses if you are a person who is slightly handicapped in the walking department. My grandmother, who, with my grandfather, has run a business on Main Street since the dawning of time, has difficulty walking due to a stroke she had a few years ago, and now she has to call someone at the business and tell them she’s coming so they can be waiting outside to help her walk over the sand and broken concrete. The City apparently doesn’t give a flying goat’s head about the people of downtown — either the businesspeople or the low-life — because if it did, it would realize that this little project of theirs will help none of them. All it will do is give the street a superficial façade of pleasantness and joy, thereby making other cities look at us and think everything is well and good in Lake Elsinore because by golly, things LOOK good, don’t they?!? The City is a sad clown who is trying to hide his problems and struggles by putting on an act and trying to make others think he is happy. Those of us who know the clown know otherwise.

Attention, teenage guys! I have found, purely by dumb luck, the perfect date: dinner at Taco Bell, then church youth group. It’s cheap and religious — the two things that impress a girl most.

Here’s what happened. This girl named Jill turned 16, like most girls do at some point, and her best friend Laura arranged, as a gift, for Jill to have a date every night for a week. (I guess you can see where this is headed.) I heard about this little arrangement right around the time that one of the dates canceled and Laura asked me to take his place. I was honored to know that Laura considered li’l ol’ me to be the last available Christian guy on the face of the earth who was not legally ugly who would of course be happy to drop all his plans for a Wednesday evening and take out a girl whom he had never actually spoken to before, except for the time that he yelled at her to get out of his way because he was about to run her over with his car.

Naturally, my answer was a resounding, “What, are you nuts?”

I pointed out to Laura that I could not take Jill out because:

Idon’t know, or even care, about you, but personally, I am getting pretty darned sick of the gang problem in Lake Elsinore, and I don’t care much for the Elsinore Tigers’ performance lately, either. Believe me, these two topics are related, or at least they will be when I get through with them.

I first noticed both problems a few weeks ago, when I started covering Tiger football for this here newspaper. Now, I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but when it comes to football, I am as knowledgeable as your average door hinge, and I am blatantly misleading you when, in my stories, I attempt to sound like I know what I’m talking about, because in actuality, I don’t know a clipping penalty from a hole in the ground.

But I’ve been covering football every week nonetheless, along with my pal Nick, who takes dark, blurry pictures of things for the school newspaper, The Tiger Times (motto: “We Don’t Just Report the News, We Create It”). Nick and I stand right down there on the field, posing as journalists, and we’ve learned quite a bit. First of all, we’ve learned that if you want to fit in with the football players, you have to pat them appreciatively on the bottom when they do something spectacular. Otherwise, they don’t feel needed and they become depressed. They’re all very good at bottom-patting, those football players, which is good, because everyone should have a talent, and goodness knows our football team, bless their little hearts, don’t have any other ones. They can pat one another while running, while jumping, while being tackled — it’s truly an art form. I understand they spend at least an hour of each practice going over their patting maneuvers.

It’s well known, in fact, that when someone on our team scores a touchdown, his rear end often winds up so sore from being patted by over-zealous teammates that he has to sit — well, stand — the rest of the game out. (Unless I’m mistaken, that’s why they’ve decided not to score any more than one touchdown per game for the rest of the season.)

Anyway, it was a few weeks ago, after a game, that I noticed this gang problem. Nick and I, along with our friends Eric (another one) and Aaron (you remember Aaron), went to In & Out, which apparently is the big post-game hang-out because of the wide selection of food (everything from hamburgers to cheeseburgers!) and the fact that it is the only place in Lake Elsinore open past 11 p.m. Even if the only item on their menu were dog meat with phlegm sauce, everyone would still go there. Hardly anyone actually EATS.

What most of the 475,000 people who were present were doing was standing out in the parking lot, in the street, and in the parking lot across the street. After we’d been there a few minutes, we realized: there were GANG MEMBERS there. Our first clue was when they started fighting one another, sending the surrounding crowd fleeing for its collective life. The fight quickly broke up, though, because it was announced that the police had been called. (That’s how tough and brave these gang members were — they stopped fighting at the mere THREAT of having the police show up. I bet they wet their pants when the police actually arrived.)

Anyway, my point, I think, is that the whole evening was spoiled, not just because the Tigers lost — I’ve grown accustomed to that — but because a perfectly good social experience was tainted by the violent actions of a few idiots who couldn’t take out their ill feelings toward one another at a more appropriate location. Like a football field.

Back in 1990, I received my B.H. — Bachelor of Humor — at the University of Humor. Along with this degree came the license to practice humor and, most importantly, get paid for it. Many untrained people practice humor as a hobby, of course, but they are not legally permitted to get paid for it unless they have received the proper training, as I have.

But now I’ve gone back to school and am now working on my A.A.D. — Doctorate in Amusing Anecdotes. I’m specializing. That’s where all the big money is.

As a class assignment, I am required to write at least one column consisting entirely of amusing anecdotes. The professor will grade the column, and hopefully I’ll have my doctorate before the year is out.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Eric is obviously suffering from some kind of delusion. There is no such place as the University of Humor, and if there were, HE certainly wouldn’t be allowed there. Pay no attention to him.)

Ha ha! There was a fine example of humor right there! I wrote that, pretending to be my editor, so that you would think I was nuts. Isn’t that funny?! Ha ha ha!

Anyway, here’s that amusing anecdote column.

There’s a book available now called “14,000 Things to be Happy about.” Now, normally of course I am a very happy, optimistic person, but this book makes me physically ill. FOURTEEN THOUSAND things to be happy about?!? As far as I’m concerned, anyone that happy needs to be shot.

Anyway, in response, here’s my list of Things to Be Irritated about.

It is Dec. 12, 1989. My mother is waking me up, I assume for school. But instead of telling me to get up, or even turning on the light, she tells me that my grandmother, my dad’s mother, died during the night.

She had been sick for a while, with cancer and leukemia, among other things, and we all knew she was going to die soon. But I can’t say I was prepared for it. I wasn’t. But everyone else seemed to be OK about it, and far be it for me to show more emotion than everyone else.

My mother tells me I don’t have to go to school if I don’t want to, but I see no reason not to. I don’t realize it, but I have somehow conditioned myself not to feel sad about my grandmother’s death.

I don’t tell anyone at school, simply because I can’t think of anyone I should tell. It’s not like I don’t have any friends; on the contrary, I have more friends than I know what to do with. But all of them, it seems, are my friends simply because I make them laugh, and I hang around with them because they’re a good audience. I do hope to become a professional humor writer some day, but I seem to be regarded as one already.

After two days, I still haven’t told anyone. Finally, the day before the funeral, I decide that maybe I’ve been wrong about them, and that maybe they will understand, and that maybe they are good friends.

I tell one person I won’t be at school the next day because I’m going to a funeral. He asks who died and I tell him. He seems to think for a moment, and then he says, “I had a turtle that died once.”

Later, I tell the boy who is supposedly my best friend (and I guess if you consider the bunch of them “friends,” he would be the best). He says, “Your grandmother? How’d she kick it?” Instead of committing an act of violence toward him like I should, I am quiet for a minute. I finally decide that no, everyone expects me to be happy and funny all the time, and if I’m not, they won’t like me at all, so why disappoint them.

I make a joke. I say, “I think my grandfather killed her.”

Then I feel bad. I feel like I have betrayed my grandmother. But I still don’t cry.

During my English class, I receive a note from the yearbook staff telling me they need to take my picture the next day. I go to tell them I can’t do it then; I’ll be at a funeral. A girl I don’t even know says, “Oh? Who died?” I say, “My grandmother.” She says, “I’m sorry.”

The thing is, she sounds like she means it. And she doesn’t even know me.The next day is the funeral. I remember it as being dark and overcast, but I’m not sure it actually was. I go to my first class because I have to take care of some assignments, and everyone is very happy.

It’s Christmastime.

I don’t feel happy, but I don’t feel sad, either.

As I talk to people and go about my business I keep thinking that I should be sad, and I wonder why I’m not. Also, I keep thinking of funny things to say, but I don’t want to say them because I think it would be disrespectful to my grandmother.

Some of them are so good I have to say them, though.

And then I feel bad.

At the funeral, I see my grandfather wearing a button-up shirt. He is from Arkansas, and before now, I have always seen him in a white T-shirt, sitting on the front porch, chewing tobacco, and being friendly to everyone.

I have never seen him when he was not smiling, or at least on the verge of smiling. I have never heard him raise his voice. Even when he cracks a joke, which is often, he does it quietly and subtly. To me he has always been the epitome of a grandfather.

He still seems that way, but somehow just a little different.

As the priest talks about how wonderful my grandmother was — and he is right — I happen to glance at my grandfather.

He doesn’t look grandfatherly anymore.

He doesn’t look friendly anymore.

He is crying.

I realize that this woman was not just my grandmother. She was my grandfather’s wife. He’ll miss her more than I will.

Then I realize that if there’s one thing I learned from my grandmother, it’s not to worry all the time about how you’re expected to act. Sometimes you just have to do what seems right to you. That’s what my grandfather is doing when he cries.

Soon, that’s what I’m doing, too. I’m crying. None of my friends are here to see me, but they are positively the furthest thing from my mind at this point. I don’t care if I ever see them again.

I would like to see my grandmother again, though.

Just to thank her.

When my friends have problems — when they get depressed about something, or when something bad happens to them — I try to let them know that I understand and that it’s OK for them to feel that way.

I don’t want them to think that they are expected to act a certain way all the time.

I think that’s what true friendship is. Knowing that it’s OK to be yourself.

It’s time once again for that zany game that we call “Let’s Rag on the High School Administration!”

But before we start, let me explain that I do not look for little things to be picky about, as do certain members of the police force who read this column. But sometimes it gets hard to have School Spirit when we have to endure such things as — and this is the topic of this week’s whining — The Dress Code.

According to the student handbook…

You’ll be interested to know that I have stopped driving. The reason for this is that I have just completed traffic school, and I am afraid that if I drive, I will get another ticket, and I will have to go back to traffic school. I have told myself that if I am ever assigned to traffic school again, I will invest in some major plastic surgery and flee to Mexico.

Undoubtedly many of you have had to endure this form of legalized torture and therefore will agree with me when I say that it is an example of how the environmentalists have gotten way out of hand. You see, in the old days, traffic school was informative and interesting and not at all the hellish ordeal that it is now. But then the environmentalists flocked to Washington and, still smelling like saved whales, begged Congress to pass an official act that would make traffic school boring, thus encouraging people, like me, not to drive at all, thus reducing the number of cars on the highways, thus reducing the amount of smog. It’s all a big conspiracy, I tell you.

And if you try to say that’s not true, because Congress would never listen to a bunch of loonies like the environmentalists, think again. Congresspersons will listen to anyone with money, except each other.

Anyway, traffic school had two major flaws:

1. The instructor was a Southern guy named Larry, and while he certainly knew his traffic laws (which must make him extremely popular at parties), he seemed to be laboring under the illusion that he was funny, which he was not.

2. There was this woman there — the most irritating woman on earth, it turns out — who decided it was her duty to argue about every single stinking law presented and determine exactly WHY it was the law, and HOW they could possibly get away with enforcing it. For instance, Larry told us that it is illegal to drive while wearing headphones. (Gosh, Larry, you mean we have to be able to hear when we drive?!?) But, he said, it is okay to wear one headphone, and have the other one pushed away from your ear. So this woman — I don’t recall her name; we’ll call her Irritina — said that all we have to do, if we get pulled over, is just quickly push one headphone away, so it will look like we’ve been driving with only one. When Larry told her that a judge will always believe a cop over a lowly citizen such as herself, she started ranting about how they’d have to “prove it.”

This topic kept them busy for a while, and while they were arguing, I drew pictures in my notebook. One of them was of Larry and Irritina standing in the middle of a crosswalk and me in my car, speeding up so I could hit them harder. Basically, all I learned in the class was how to draw cars so they look like they’re going real fast. So I guess it wasn’t a waste of time after all.

Some people think that I am a poor driver, but this is not even remotely true. Yes, I’ve been known to exceed the speed limit somewhat, and I have, on occasion, driven on what would technically be considered the sidewalk, and it is true that I did, in fact, strike a chain-link fence that probably was not moving very fast with the front end of my car. But this does not make me a poor driver. This makes me a fun driver.

I am such a fun driver, in fact, that my friends are always asking to go places with me. I would estimate that I have driven my friend Aaron a total of — and this a rough estimate — four hundred thousand miles in the year that I have known him, but I don’t mind, because I know he has so much fun driving with me.

“Eric!” he’ll shriek, clutching my arm. “Wasn’t that a stop sign?!?”

“I don’t know!” I’ll respond. “Ha ha ha!” What a jolly time we have!

Anyway, knowing what you now know about my driving habits, what would you guess my first traffic ticket would be for? Speeding? Reckless driving? Killing an elderly gentleman in a crosswalk? Not even close. I received my first ticket for an illegal left turn. Care to hear the story? Too bad.

Back in April, my friends Aaron, Nick, and Colby and I decided we should go to the movies in Temecula. Naturally, they asked me to drive because they knew what fun would be in store for them. Also, none of them have cars.

So I was in Temecula, driving south on Ynez Road, and I turned left into the enormous shopping center in which the Edwards Cinema Zillionplex is located. I have turned left there at least, I’d say, one million times. Unfortunately, a sign had just been posted a few weeks before insisting that no, I can’t turn left there, but I did not see this sign and I turned left. Fortunately, a fine, upstanding member of the police force, someone whose duty is to protect us, was sitting there, literally miles from a donut shop, alertly on the lookout for potential dangers to the general populace, and she saw me make that extremely hazardous left turn, and I do not blame her one bit for pulling me over and giving me a ticket and making us miss the movie, because she was just trying to protect me. In this case she was trying to protect me from doing something convenient and natural, something I had done a million times before, but I do not blame her and I am not bitter, nor do I resent being ticketed by a woman.

Nor do I resent having to go to Traffic School. I mean, you can see why Traffic School would be particularly effective for me. It had been nearly 14 months since I took driver’s education in school, and goodness knows I must have forgotten everything I learned if I could do something as flagrantly and rebelliously illegal as failing to see a brand-new “No Left Turn” sign in the dark. What a renegade scofflaw rebel I must be, not thinking to look for a sign where there had never been one before!

Next week, I’ll tell you all about Traffic School. If you’re lucky.

Idon’t wish to alarm you, but it has recently come to my attention that Casey has gotten her first flea.

For those of you who are not familiar with Casey, she is a five-year-old dog belonging to the Horton family. Many of you, I’m sure, have heard of her, as she is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under the heading “Living Organism with Fewest Functioning Brain Cells.”

The only Horton who actively disputes this is the wife, whose name is “Belva,” which sounds like an exotic fruit, like “Kiwi” or “Mauga,” or something. Belva insists that Casey is highly intelligent — so intelligent, in fact, that each and every Wednesday, when The Lake Elsinore News is flung on the front lawn, she (Casey) knows instinctively that she should immediately chew it up beyond recognition. I’ll bet the rest of you have to ask the domestic help to do that for you.

Belva is very fond of Casey, to the point where she asked me not to print her or Casey’s actual names for fear that someone will find out where the Hortons live and come and steal their dog because they think she is amazingly intelligent. I assured her I would make certain that no one thinks Casey is smart after reading my column.

When Belva begins arguing on behalf of Casey (POINT #1: If Casey’s so smart, why can’t she argue for herself?), I usually point out the several million times that I have knocked on the door and immediately heard Casey barking furiously, as though she knew, by some kind of mutant dog instinct, that the person on the other side of that door simply had to be either Charles Manson or a Jehovah’s Witness, and as soon as someone opened the door (POINT #2: If Casey’s so smart, why can’t she open the door herself?), Casey would lunge at me, go past me, and relieve herself on my car. Belva says Casey does this to warn me. Casey, she says, is a very passive dog.

As you can no doubt tell, I am a great fan of Casey’s. You can imagine, then, how distressed I was a few weeks ago when (and this really happened) I received an urgent phone call from Belva informing me that Casey had somehow gotten a flea. Fortunately, I was relieved to hear, Belva’s husband Gerry killed it. The flea, not the dog. Belva then asked me when I was going to write a column about Casey.

(I love how people assume I am eventually going to write about every topic imaginable, and it’s just a matter of when.)

But as long as we’re talking about dogs, I should mention the dog I saw in Arkansas that had two tails. Now, when you hear me say “dog with two tails,” I’m sure you immediately assume that, this being Arkansas, either there had been a little in-breeding going on the dog kingdom, or this dog lives downstream from a nuclear power plant. This was what I assumed, but I later learned that the second tail was, in fact, just a large clump of matted hair. The dog’s owners have tried constantly since they got him to get close enough to cut the hair off, but the dog has gotten very attached to it, so to speak, and refuses to let them remove it. It’s as if he had a mind of his own, or something.

If any of you have a great desire to inflict serious ankle injuries upon yourselves, I would strongly recommend you take up ice skating. As you might have guessed, I recently went ice skating with some of my friends. Here’s how it came about.

Shelly called Aaron’s house one morning while I was there, saying she wanted to go ice skating that night, but Aaron couldn’t because he was already going out with Vicki, so we called Rachel, who, having just recovered from heart surgery performed by Bob, who is actually her father, agreed to go, even though Kayla and Louis were still in Barbados looking for Martin and Cricket’s baby, which was lost in the airport where Steven’s luggage was stolen by the religious cult headed by Justin, who of course is Anthony’s ex-lover (but don’t tell Catherine). Eventually, Aaron and Vicki changed their plans and, being careful to avoid Nicholas and Michael, who are still involved with the Mafia and want the entire Heyden family rubbed out because of what Jason and Jennifer did to Jack and Julie last June in Jacksonville, went ice skating with Shelly, Rachel, and me.

We went to Ontario Ice Skating, which, surprisingly enough, is located in Ontario. Of the five of us, only Shelly ice skated well (her specialty was the famous “figure one”). Aaron was a rather violent skater, but he had skated once before, which he was quick to point out.

ME: I saw you fall on your back and accidentally kick that kid in the neck with the sharp part of your skate over there.
AARON: Hey! I’ve only been skating once.

The rest of us had never skated before, but once we were on the ice, we soon realized, much to our surprise, that it was almost exactly like roller skating, except that:

Why do people do the strange things they do? Why do men want to defy death? What is it that makes a man decide to plunge head-first from a cage located 130 feet in the air with only a mutant rubber band to keep him from hitting the ground?

These questions, along with “What, am I nuts?” were running through my mind as I drove the dusty, winding road off of Camino Del Norte to the canyon that Bungee Fever, Inc. now calls home. I had somehow been roped into taking the plunge so I could write a first-person story about it for Community News Network. I guess maybe I have stepped on too many toes with my column — now they want me to bungee jump!

But really, there’s no reason at all to fear bungee jumping. Since the company set up shop in Lake Elsinore on July 13, they have done more than 1,600 jumps, according to Rich Schurfeld, a large, strapping man with enormous calves and a million bungee-related one-liners. Furthermore, he said, not one of those jumps has resulted in injury or death — “not even a hangnail,” he said. I pointed out that the odds of the jumpers’ survival were getting worse and worse then, because the law of averages dictates that eventually, something would have to go wrong.

There were five other jumpers there: a young, spritely woman, a middle-aged man, and three very young men, not much older than I. One of the young fellows had gotten for his birthday a gift certificate for one bungee jump. If it’s the thought that counts, his family must not like him much.

We were all led into the office, where we had to sign a million releases and waivers. I didn’t have time to take complete notes as to what the release form said, but I can paraphrase it: “I (Eric D. Snider) am fully aware that bungee jumping is a very dangerous and, well, stupid thing to do, and I realize that it may well result in injury or, yes, even death, and I must be a complete moron to even try it, and if I should get hurt or, yes, even killed, it’s my own fault for volunteering to do it in the first place, and I certainly won’t sue Bungee Fever, Inc., nor will I hire large, burly men to go beat up its owners.”

After filling out the forms, Rich the Humorous Bungee Person weighed me. I happened to weigh 134 (which is just perfect for a teenage male of about 5’10” and has the strength of ten men), but I asked Rich what the maximum weight is. He said the limit is 270 pounds, which is about the weight of a fully mature moose.

The other people jumped before I did. As I waited my turn, one of my friends asked if I was nervous. I said I wasn’t yet, but that I’d let him know as soon as I was.

A bungee-related employee came up to me and started attaching what he said were “aircraft buckles” to my ankles. He explained what I would have to do: face forward, toes straight out, and when Derek the Jumpmaster says, “Three, two, one, bungee!” jump out. “Do not hesitate,” he said. I didn’t ask, but I assumed that if I hesitated, Derek the Jumpmaster would push me.

By the time I had the aircraft shackles affixed to my ankles, it was my turn. They attached the bungee cord to the shackles, and attached the other end to the cage. I waved goodbye to my mother and hopped in the cage with Derek. He motioned to the crane operator, who promptly began lifting the cage up to its 130-foot resting place.

On the way up, Derek explained again what I would have to do, including the “do not hesitate” part. But I wasn’t listening very closely, having already heard Rich say it didn’t require any effort anyway. Besides which, I was busy thinking about other things. Like the fact that I had driven my family there in my car, and I had the only key, and if I wound up in the 16-foot man-made lake at the bottom, how were they going to get home?

We had reached the top of our climb. Derek opened the cage door and repeated the instructions (especially “do not hesitate”). I yelled to my friends that I was, at this point, nervous. Derek said, in a very authoritative manner, “Three, two, one, BUNGEE!” Not wishing to disobey, I did not hesitate. I just leaned out. Immediately thereafter, that darned gravity took effect.

I had attached my tape recorder to my chest via duct tape so I could record my thoughts as I fell. My thoughts were, and I quote, “AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!” Not very profound, I’ll admit, but it came straight from the heart.

I bounced perhaps 400 million times, and then they lowered the cage back down to the ground. Except for all eight pints of my blood having been relocated to my head, I felt fine. There had been no jerking, no abrupt movement, no motion sickness. Just falling.

I would highly recommend bungee jumping to anyone who has $79 lying around or who is assigned to do so by his newspaper. It is truly an incredibly experience, one that can be compared to no other. And no one ever gets killed!

I think I learned the answers to my questions. In my case, people try to defy death and do ludicrous things simply because they have to. At least I had to. I was assigned by my editor to do it.

As for those other five people, well, they just must be nuts.

Here’s what Eric D. Snider has had to say…

Ithink it’s only fair to warn you that many of this city’s youth are being trained in the ways of Eastern violence: Tae Kwon Do. Be careful.

My friend Ryan (you know — Aaron’s brother) is involved in Tae Kwon Do, which, he explains to me, can be broken down as follows: “Tae” means “kicking, jumping, and spinning foot;” “Kwon” means “hitting and blocking with fists;” and “Do,” of course, means “a deer, a female deer.”

I went with Ryan one night to the U.S. Institute of Martial Arts, which is right next to Stater Bros., which I think is a good place for a martial arts school. Ryan’s class is technically a mixture of kids and adults, but it was mostly kids the night I was there. There was one woman, but she was short, so she fit in. She was kind of amusing, that woman. Here she was, doing manly, testosterone-related things like kicking and hitting various solid objects that no sane person would ever kick or hit, but she managed to retain her femininity by squealing in a high-pitched manner when she did it, instead of yelling “Eeeee-YAAAA!” like the Incredible Hulk undergoing painful dental work, which is what all the males sounded like.

The first order of business was to read aloud the Student Creed, which mentioned such things as strengthening confidence, keeping friendships, and building a happy community. Later, I asked Ryan how Tae Kwon Do could help build a happy community, and he said (I swear): “If a mugger came up to me and I kicked his butt, I’d be happy.” So we can see that Ryan is taking his Tae Kwon Do every bit as seriously as he should be.

After the Creed reading came what Jane Fonda’s low-impact workout would be if Jane Fonda were an unintelligible Korean man. The master would tell the class what they were supposed to do, but they made no motion toward actually doing it until he demonstrated it for them. Then they would all nod repeatedly as if they had just suddenly had a major realization and say, “Yes, sir.” After they finished each little exercise, they would say, “Thank you, sir.” But do you think he ever said, “You’re welcome”? Of course not.

During the exercises, I started to get bored, and the master, at least to me, began to resemble Richard Simmons, which is funny, because Richard Simmons would not last two minutes in that class as a student, because he would always be telling everyone to move their buns. So to offset my boredom, I began to look at the various items posted on the walls. One of them was one of the master’s resumes, which gleefully informed the reader that on November 1, 1966, that particular master “performed Tae Kwon Do in front of the U.S. President LYDON B. JOHONSON.” I was mightily impressed, and I started paying attention again. But by that time, the class was over.

Oh, yeah. There was a 5-year-old kid in the class named Chris Deiter who was really cute and funny. He’ll be lethal by the time he’s 10. His mom told me to mention him.

Idon’t wish to cause alarm or panic or rioting in the streets, but it would appear that Mary Hart, hostess of “Entertainment Tonight,” can cause seizures just by speaking aloud.

This alarming piece of news came to us a few weeks ago in an Associated Press story printed in the Press-Enterprise (motto: “We Have Dan Bernstein, and You Don’t, So Nyah Nyah Nyah”). Apparently, a neurologist named “Dr. Venkat Ramani” (whose name can be rearranged to spell “Martian Knave”) concluded that some unidentified woman’s seizures were triggered by the voice of Mary Hart. Every time she watched “Entertainment Tonight,” she would have a seizure, so after a while, she finally determined that maybe she should stop watching it. She has not had any seizures since.

I think we can all agree that Mary Hart’s next step, now that the woman has stopped watching “Entertainment Tonight,” should be to start doing commercials. That way, when the woman least expects it — perhaps when she’s sitting on the sofa, engaged in a private moment with her husband, watching a romantic movie on television — all of a sudden a hemorrhoid commercial comes on with Mary Hart doing the voice-over, and boom! The woman starts up. Then, when she stops watching television altogether, Mary Hart can show up at her house with a bullhorn and send her into oblivion. All of this would be very mean, of course, but it would also be very funny, which would cancel out the meanness.

Another alarming story I saw was accompanied by the alarming headline “Loud Music May Bring Loss of Hearing.” Naturally, I kept reading, wanting to know just how this alarming suggestion — that loud noises might cause hearing loss — could possibly be true.

Apparently, the National Institute on Deafness (motto: “What?!”) delivered a big spiel to the House Committee on Children, Youth and Families. The House Committee, I would imagine, probably had a difficult time stifling its laughter and sarcastic cries of, “You’re kidding!” when the Institute said things like, “Of special concern is the use of personal stereos, which are capable of reaching high decibel levels.”

But the really alarming part of the story was where some military guy said that U.S. military services have had to lower their standards for hearing because so many people applying for induction have suffered hearing damage. I can just hear the conversations coming from fox-holes a few years down the road:

SERGEANT: Alright, men. Jones, you and Finkle go down to the south end of the river and cut across. Schwartz, take your platoon straight toward the enemy lines, but duck the whole way. Washington and Lincoln, go to the Denny’s back in town. Meet us back here at 0200 hours.

SOLDIERS: (Simultaneously have seizures, because the sergeant sounds like Mary Hart.)

There’s a game show on Lifetime called “Shop ’til You Drop,” and I think that if you have not had the golden opportunity to see the taping of this show, as I have, you should definitely rush right out and count your blessings, because it sucks.

But you should at least watch it on TV sometime, preferably before reading this column, so you’ll understand how idiotic it is (the show, not the column). Lifetime is channel 22 on King Video Cable.

(King Video Cable, of course, was the only cable company allowed in Lake Elsinore for a long time, due to their highly efficient Vito and Eddie Department. The way this department worked is that two big guys named Vito and Eddie would frequently visit the city council members and politely “suggest” to them that they not allow any other cable companies into Lake Elsinore. Somehow, Jones Intercable was finally told they could come in, but they mysteriously changed their minds a few weeks ago, presumably because the Vito and Eddie Department went to welcome them to the community via baseball bat.)

Anyway, Lifetime is channel 22, so go watch the show now. I’ll wait.

Pretty stupid, right? For those who don’t have cable, let me explain what this show is about. The set looks like a shopping mall, only without the screaming kids relieving themselves on Santa Claus’ lap. Two husband-and-wife teams perform various “challenging” (that is, “stupid”) stunts involving retail prices and shopping knowledge, and the audience is required to yell and clap and behave as though they actually care if anyone wins. If you’re in the audience and you don’t clap, the zany and kooky fabulous merchandise announcer, Mark, will personally kick your heinie out of the studio.

Anyway, one couple is finally declared the winner, and they get to go home with whatever dignity they still have. The other couple has to stay there and play the bonus round. That’s where the show gets ridiculous. The premise of the bonus round is that the couple is given six gift boxes, each containing a gift. They are given 90 seconds to decide whether they think the gifts are valuable enough to total $1000, and if they’re not, they can exchange any or all of them at the various fake stores in the studio.

The reason it’s ridiculous is that it’s supposed to be just like shopping, but the couples don’t act like any married couple I’ve ever seen. The ones I’ve seen consist of a wife wanting to go inside every stinking store in the universe and a husband just wanting to quit spending money and go home. But on this show, the men LISTEN to their wives when they say they want to exchange something, and then they RUN to a store and exchange it, and then they COME BACK to their wives to await further instruction! I’ve never seen such a bunch of hen-pecked husbands! They all reminded me of Elmer Fudd, only slightly less masculine.

As you are no doubt aware, July 11 was the day when, after months and months of preparation, the world’s scientists were finally able to perform a good eclipse. The public response was so overwhelming, in fact, that another one is being planned for next month.

I am taking a class in summer school, so I witnessed firsthand the school’s reaction to the eclipse, that reaction being, “AAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!” The school is apparently afraid of being sued, because on the day of the eclipse, teachers were instructed by principal Dr. Ed Brand M.D., to keep students inside from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. because (and I am quoting the bulletin given to the teachers) “a 10-second exposer can damage the retina.” As an alternative, teachers had the option of taking their classes over to the gym to watch the eclipse on TV.This raises some questions, namely:

— What does “exposer” mean? Did he mean “exposure,” or was he referring to people who expose themselves (as in, “That man’s an exposer! Don’t look at him for more than 10 seconds!”)?

— Do they really think that, just because someone is taking summer school, he must be stupid enough to stare directly at the sun? (And for 10 seconds?!? Show me someone who can look at the sun for 10 seconds without blinking and I’ll show you someone who does not have eyelids.)

Or maybe it’s that they think eclipses emit some kind of Deadly Eclipse Ray that will blind anyone who comes near it. If that’s that case, though, then why were they inviting kids to watch it on TV? Couldn’t they be blinded while walking from their classroom to the gym? Or was the Administration issuing students special Eclipse-Proof Suits so that they would not be injured and the school district would therefore not be sued?

I don’t mean to attack the Administration (well, okay, I do mean to attack the Administration), but the whole thing was kind of silly. First of all, the bulletin was written in an extremely illiterate manner. Not just the “exposer” thing, but also the fact that it contained no less than eleven words that were capitalized unnecessarily (words such as “students” and “television”). [Speaking of correct usage, “less” should be “fewer.” — 2017]

Furthermore, keeping kids inside from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. would only be doing half the job. The eclipse reached its peak at 11:30; it started to reverse after that. So kids were just as likely to look at it after 11:30 as they were before, because it looked just the same — the moon was just moving in the opposite direction.

Finally, the warnings didn’t do any good. Several people in my class, accompanied by my friend Aaron the Eclipse Expert, went outside and, dodging the Eclipse Police who had been ordered by Dr. Brand to shoot on sight anyone caught looking up, observed the eclipse and said, quote, “Oooh. Neat.” If they thought they could keep a once-in-a-lifetime thing like that from us, they’re as goofy as their bulletins.

[ This is one of my favorite columns because it’s the best I ever did at mocking the high school administration. I tried several times, but this one is the most concise, funny, and leak-proof. I mean, what’s the other side of the story? What key point could the administration make in its defense that would make the illiteracy of the bulletin and the stupidity of the decision seem OK? None that I can think of.

I also like the fact that the bulletin in question was intended for teachers’ eyes only. I was taking a drama class, and the teacher made sure I saw it so that I could make fun of it. Bless him for that. ]

I have been driving for ten months now, and quite frankly, I think it’s about time I pull over and take a nap. (rim shot)

But seriously, folks. In the ten months I’ve been driving, I’ve learned to detest cars for two reasons.

REASON #1: Unless it’s your car, you have to listen to other people’s music. On a recent car trip to Mexico (“Land of the 40-Foot Bathroom Bacteria”), I experienced my friend Anthony’s “Tape-of-the-Month” system, which he uses in his car. This system is basically one whereby he puts a tape in his tape deck and listens to it over and over for the space of about a month, at which point he puts a new one in, takes the old one out and, now completely sick of it, hurls it into the oncoming traffic. The tape for this month was Rush’s “Moving Pictures.”Now, I have nothing against Rush, except of course that the lead singer looks like Tom Petty’s plastic surgery nightmare and sounds like Mickey Mouse on helium and the drummer very obviously takes adrenaline-increasing drugs before playing and probably has three arms anyway and most of their songs last longer than some marriages. But by the time we had reached San Diego, we’d heard this album three times, and anything was preferable to hearing it again, including popping my own ear drums with a pencil. So I very loudly suggested to Anthony that he replace Rush with something else.

Anthony complied, but what he replaced the Rush tape with was a tape of songs #300-260 in a radio station’s “Top 300 Songs of All Time” countdown. Apparently, his father recorded the tape off of K-EARTH 101 (there’s an earth I bet no one cares about saving!) in 1978. Eleven years ago. Rush was almost preferable.

REASON #2: If you drive a ’78 Ford Granada, all you have are problems. A few weeks ago, my friend Aaron and I were returning from a jaunt to Temecula when my car broke down. Aaron and I, being, legally, guys, immediately felt compelled to open the hood and look around inside. Neither of us have anymore automotive knowledge than, say, your average garden slug, but we nonetheless felt this primal urge to look at whatever is kept under the hood, perhaps thinking in the back of our minds that whichever part was not working correctly would light up and spit out a list of repair instructions.

As it turns out, we didn’t even need that, because we were able to determine the problem ourselves. When we opened the hood — and this was our first clue — a cloud of smoke that would have rivaled the one coming from the Hindenberg in its final moments billowed out. When the smoke cleared we saw that there was smoke coming out of the engine. This was not, mind you, steam from the radiator. This was smoke from the engine. We thought perhaps we had hit a squirrel and it had caught fire. After careful consideration, we determined that this smoke was probably what had made the car stop moving. Call it guy instinct.

I’m afraid it looks like America is headed for troubled waters, international trade-wise, because a U.S. company is producing a music show for Japanese TV that features mostly rap music. As though Hiroshima wasn’t enough.The good news is, I have performed my first public rap.

The show, which is called “Rap Tap,” claims to be a showcase for all kinds of American popular music, so the Japanese can get a good idea of what Americans listen to, but if the first show is any indication, the Japanese are going to think that Americans really, really, really like rap music, which of course they don’t. Not the smart ones, anyway.

The reason I know about this show is that I am an observant columnist with a nose for news who always has his eyes open for an interesting development in American culture who happened to go to the taping of the first show with his summer school drama class. (I would like to point out, by the way, that I am taking summer school drama because I want to, not because I failed it. Failing drama would be like failing health, which my friend Ryan did TWICE, by the way.)

Anyway, our bus was met by a KTLA page named, quote, “Raoul,” which interested me because I had previously thought that the only people named Raoul were the fictitious characters in my Spanish book. He led us inside, where we were met by the zany and kooky warm-up guy, Mark, who told us that during the breaks in the show, when they weren’t taping, we could win “Rap Tap” T-shirts (!) by performing some kind of talent.

The first display of talent came from Garaghty (pronounced “Garaghty”) Kramer, who played Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” in May. After much coercing from Mark, she was finally convinced to belch really loud to the tune of “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” Then Nick Sandoval (a friend of mine; you don’t know him) won a T-shirt for making fun of the rapper who had just performed. Seeing that two of my friends had just won T-shirts, I felt I should. So I rapped.

Some of you are thinking, “Hey! He couldn’t have done a serious rap song! He’s a Trained Humor Professional! Furthermore, he’s a white Trained Humor Professional!” Those of you who are thinking that are, quite frankly, morons. I would have to have a lot of gall to get up in front of professional rappers and make fun of rap music. My rap was entirely serious. Here’s a passage:

“All the ladies dig my Mercedes
Women are cool ’cause they have babies
Chicks are rad, but some are illin’
I hate Pat Sajak; I’d like to kill him”

As you can see, this is at least as good as anything Vanilla Ice could write. He would never think of “illin'” and “kill him.” (Come to think of it, neither would I. I stole it from “Weird Al” Yankovic.)

As you attentive readers already know, I went to The Prom on June 1. Last week, of course, I complained about the high cost of Prom, but I should probably point out, for the sake of accuracy (there’s a phrase I don’t use too often) that I actually only had to pay a little over $100: $27.50 for my ticket, $50.00 for the tuxedo, and various costs throughout the evening, such as post-Prom dinner at Denny’s and a pack of gum for My Date, who determined, with no one’s help, that her breath stunk.

This is considerably better than what a lot of people had to pay. For instance, my friend, whose name is Nick but whom we will refer to in this column as Rico in order to save him embarrassment, had a total Prom cost of — and I am not making this cost up — $1375. One must take into account, however, the fact that Rico also had a car accident on the way home.

Anyway, many people, and I suppose this is natural, go absolutely nutso the week before Prom. I know girls do, because they have to start getting dressed a week before Prom. I have heard many stories about parents having to slip food under the bathroom door on a tray to their daughters, who have been secreted in there for four or five days, spraying each individual strand of hair with enough hair spray to destroy every ozone layer from here to Neptune.

Guys don’t do that, of course. Guys take a shower (chemical make-up: four parts water, one part cologne), shave (whether it’s necessary or not), apply deoderant and some more cologne, comb their hair, put on their tuxes, dab on a little cologne, borrow some spending money from their parents, make sure they put on some cologne, and, finally, put on some cologne.

The only major sign of Male Nervousness is what is commonly referred to by Promologists as Wanna-See-My-Tux? Syndrome. This is where, during the week before Prom, every guy asks all of his visiting guy friends if they would like to See His Tux, apparently in the hopes that, by some freak of tailoring, his tux doesn’t look exactly like every other tux that has ever been made since the dawning of time. I must have looked at — and I am probably guilty of understatement when I say this — 14 million tuxedoes the week before Prom.

I did not suffer from Wanna-See-My-Tux? Syndrome. The only nervous-type thing I did was to go out and purchase, at the bargain price of $3.50, a hairstyle. I have badly been in need of one for about 16 years now, and I decided that, what the heck, it is The Prom and all, so I may as well do something about my hair. The picture at the top of this column is an old one, so you can see what it used to look like. Now, I look exactly like Pat Riley, only not as rich.

Iwent to Prom on June 1, but before I go into the evening itself, let me whine about something else: Proms cost just too darn much.

I have done some careful research (that is, I asked the reporter sitting next to me as I typed this), and by the time you males have paid for Prom tickets, tuxedos, flowers, limousine rentals, breath mints, dinner, pictures, contraceptive devices, hotel rentals, gynecologist examinations, hospital visits, baby clothing, and food and housing for the next 18 years, the costs can reach nearly 12 million dollars, even more if you live in Orange County, where even dirt costs more than it does here. This is a major part of the reason why, up until two weeks before Prom, I didn’t want to go at all (that, and the fact that I am incapable of dancing without injuring innocent bystanders).

But I was convinced by my supportive friends to go. “Go to the Prom, you moron!” they said supportively. I asked a girl who has since filed a court order prohibiting me from stating her name in this column, and she graciously, perhaps foolishly, said yes. I don’t think either of us knew what we were getting into.

First of all, I was informed just moments after asking her that we would be doubling with Mike Pust and Garaghty (pronounced “Garaghty”) Kramer, who played Scarecrow and Dorothy in Elsinore High’s production of “The Wizard of Oz” last month. Since Mike was just elected ASB president a few weeks ago, it seemed fitting that he should make an authoritative decision about Prom that would affect the four of us. That decision was that we would all go dressed like goobers.

This administrative decision was carried out with Mike and Garaghty going in 1930s-style formal wear. Naturally, My Date and I would have to look a decade stupider, so we went in 1920s styles. The result was that My Date and I looked like a flapper’s wedding, and Mike and Garaghty looked like Clark Kent’s parents going to a funeral. I’m reasonably sure that we were the only people there who had to rent their clothes from a costume shop.

Besides that, though, I wound up spending considerably less than you might spend on, say, an electron microscope. My Date informed me well in advance that she absolutely, positively did NOT WANT A CORSAGE, no way, no how. Obviously, this meant that I should get her one anyway. But then she told me that if I showed up at her house on Prom Night with a corsage for her, she would tear it up into little tiny pieces and stuff it down my throat with a serving spoon. So essentially, she was telling me not to spend an extra 20 bucks on Prom. I didn’t argue.

Furthermore, I didn’t even have to pay for dinner, because My Date and Garaghty said they wanted to cook dinner for us and have us all eat it at the beach. This sounded very romantic and, more importantly, cheap, so we went along with it. We were on a budget, after all.

Next week: Pre-Prom jitters, and Wanna-See-My-Tux? Syndrome.

By the time you read this, Elsinore High School’s Prom will have already taken place, but as I write this, I am still thinking about it and wondering to myself: What, am I nuts?

I hadn’t intended on going. I told myself several months ago that I couldn’t afford it, that I didn’t want to have to face rejection and ask a girl to go with me, that I couldn’t dance anyway, and that well, darn it, why put up with all the hassle? I decided not to think about it anymore.

This plan was fine, until I realized that I was nearly the only person at school to whom Prom was not the most important thing on the face of the earth, perhaps even more important than life itself, and definitely more important than such trivial things as grades and meaningful conversation. I found that no matter who I talked to, the exchange would wind up going something like this:

ME: Hey! Your shoes are on fire!
OTHER PERSON: Oh. So who are you going to Prom with?

So you can see that not thinking about Prom was not an easy thing.But it didn’t phase me. I just kept reassuring myself that I couldn’t afford, I didn’t want to have to ask someone, I couldn’t dance anyway, and it was just too much hassle.

And none of that has changed. But I am going. With a girl named Michelle. For the longest time there, Michelle didn’t have a date, and, this being her senior year, she really wanted to go so that she would have Memories to Last a Lifetime and Something to Tell Her Grandchildren, who of course won’t care. People kept telling me I should ask her, since they were fairly certain she would say yes, even to a belch-emitting, joke-cracking, beat-up-piece-of-junk-car-driving person like me. (High school students seem to have great difficulty comprehending the idea of not wanting to go to Prom. To them, it’s like not wanting to graduate, or breathe, or curse.)

Again, I held out for a while, saying I’d love to go with Michelle to the Prom, but I really didn’t care to go at all. This lasted until a few weeks ago, when I heard that someone else was going to ask her. Naturally, this meant I had to. In what was probably the most romantic moment of my young life, I approached Michelle and said, in a voice choked with emotion, “Hey Michelle. Do you still not have a date?” She said no, so I asked her.

At this point in the story, it would be very funny and ironic indeed to say that she began shrieking with laughter, but she didn’t. She said yes.

So I’m going. I still can’t dance, but that’s okay. It’s being held in the ball room at the Sequoia Athletic Club, so we can go bowling instead. And I still don’t like all the hassle, but that’s okay. I guess this type of thing only happens twice in a lifetime (which is more times than a person has his tonsils removed, but even that seems to be less trouble). And I still can’t afford it, but that’s okay. I just won’t go to college.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Since there seems to be some confusion lately over what is funny and what is not, I will perform a public service with this column and point out everything that is funny by writing “ha ha” in parentheses after it.

With every new decade, people start getting nostalgic for whatever happened two decades before. In the ’70s people reminisced about the ’50s and in the ’80s they reminisced about the ’60s. So I guess it was only a matter of time before people started getting weepy over the ’70s.

This has been the subject of some of my more disturbing nightmares lately, although I think the one involving Roseanne Barr, my editor, an Uzi, and a bullmoose is slightly more disturbing (ha ha). So I guess I should have been prepared when I saw a commercial sponsored by the Seventies Preservation Society.

I wish I were making this up, but I’m not. The commercial was for a three-record set of rock and roll from the 1970s. The collection includes such classics as “The Night Chicago Died,” “You’re Having My Baby,” “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” and “Macho Man.” Can anyone forget these milestones in American music? Not without the aid of extensive psychiatric counseling, I’ll bet (ha ha).

But the commercial got me to thinking, which is really saying something (ha ha). It got me to thinking about the ’70s things that are still around. Things like…

If you want my opinion (and I can’t imagine why you would), I think high school science should be an elective so we don’t have to take it. I guess the reason they make us take so many different classes is so we can be exposed to a lot of things so we can make Wise Career Choices, but anyone who actually wants to go into science professionally already knows it by the time he reaches high school, and anyone who doesn’t can’t be changed because that kind of dorkiness cannot be taught in four years. It requires a lifetime of practice.

For instance, I have a friend we’ll call Bob who wants to go into physics, or some other kind of white lab coat-related profession. One time — and this is true — I heard Bob engage in a heated debate over why, when you put your finger over a straw and then pull the straw out of the glass, the liquid stays up in the straw. What’s frightening is that someone was actually discussing it with him.

“Come on, Bob,” I said. “What difference does it make?”

“My name isn’t Bob,” he said. “It’s Colby.”

Regardless of what his name actually is (I’m still not sure), you can clearly see that one does not get like that from a mere four years of high school. It requires gobs of practice and lots of mind-altering substances.

Another thing I don’t like about science is my chemistry teacher, who is under the impression that chemistry is the most important subject on the face of the earth and that he is therefore duty-bound to make us hate it by assigning ten times as much work as we get in other, more relevant, classes.

His rationale for being the Science Teacher from Hell (which is kind of a contradiction in terms since science teacher are atheists and don’t believe in hell) is that chemistry is all around us, every second of the day. He fails to realize, however, that so is dirt, but you don’t see me taking Dirtology just so I can earn enough credits to get out of Elsinore High School and move on to a place of greater intellectual depth, such as Mayberry.

Yet another thing I don’t like is how everything they teach us, science-wise, is not only irrelevant to our everyday lives, but is also usually untrue. Take, for instance, Dalton’s Atomic Theory. Dalton’s Atomic Theory states — get this — that atoms are always moving. Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve heard since Miss Iowa announced that she wanted to be a podiatrist “because I love children”?

I think the way this came about is that one night Dalton and a bunch of his science-geek friends were sitting around the lab, getting plastered and throwing up in the hydrochloric acid just to see if it would boil or something, when Dalton said, “Hey! Look at that table! All the atoms are moving!” Then they all had a good laugh and threw up some more, except for one particularly nerdy scientist (you’ll pardon the redundancy), who took Dalton seriously and published his “theory.”

The last thing I don’t like about science is having to do a science project. I have a very amusing anecdote about that, but I’ll have to tell it after I’ve passed the class and my teacher can no longer take revenge, as it makes him look kind of stupid, which believe me is not hard.

I did have more recommendations, but I seem to have forgotten them now. Maybe I’ll think of them if I get bored again.

Some people think that you cannot have fun at a party without drugs and alcohol, but this is not even remotely the case. You need loud music too.

Ha ha ha! Just a little joke there, designed to make the veins in my editor’s forehead pop out. Actually, we Elsinore High students recently had an assembly that proved that idea to be false.

One of the major disadvantages of being a reporter on a school newspaper is that, unless you happen to be the editor and can get away with doing nothing, you have to cover high school assemblies.

High school assemblies generally fall into two categories:

1. Pep rallies. These are usually held on the day of some major sporting event. Sports, of course, are the most important reason to attend high school and therefore warrant the shortening of all classes to a length that renders them worthless, thus providing enough time at the end of the school day to have a pep rally. The major activities at EHS pep rallies typically involve either a “Let’s See Who Can Belch the Loudest” Contest, or a “Let’s Tie Balloons to Everyone’s Ankles and Have Everybody Try to Pop Everybody Else’s Before Theirs Get Popped” Contest. Pep rallies, fortunately, are not mandatory.

2. Assemblies designed to Motivate and/or Inspire us and/or Beat an Idea into Our Heads.

The drug/alcohol one fell under category 2. It was sponsored by the local chapter of the nationwide “Friday Night Live” club, whose primary purposes are:

1. to show the nation’s youth how to have fun without drugs or alcohol, and

2. to put on an assembly everytime you turn around.

One of the many interesting facts presented at this assembly was that out of 100 students, either one or 99 of them (I forget which, exactly) will be involved in an alcohol-related accident sometime before next Thursday. This particular interesting fact really hit home with me because I was recently involved in an alcohol-related accident.

I was out driving one afternoon, and I came to a rather enormous curve in the road. In the interest of preserving my brake pads, I decided not to slow down as I rounded the curve, which would have been fine, except that all of a sudden, a drunken chain-link fence leaped out from the embankment and struck my car, adding to my already extensive collection of car problems the new difficulty of not being able to turn left.

I managed to drive the car home safely (although it took much longer, since I could only turn right), but just think of what could have happened. We could have been killed! This is why I am so grateful to Friday Night Live for presenting this informative assembly. I only wish there had been more chain-link fences present to hear the message, since there seems to be an alcohol problem prevalent in the fence community.

Fifteen of my schoolmates and I recently embarked on a week-long trip to Washington, D.C. and New York City. The primary purpose of this trip for the five of us who are on the school newspaper staff was to get away from the goofy reporters who have been following us around lately, trying to engage us in annoying conversations.

GOOFY REPORTER: What would you do if, because of the April Fool’s issue of the Tiger Times, the school district were to suspend its publication?
ME: I would buy an Uzi and wipe out the better part of a Vons check-out line.

We all met at 4:00 one Saturday morning, took a bus to Ontario airport, and hopped on a plane, where they promptly tried to eliminate the over-booking problem by feeding us healthy-sized globs of what they probably expected us to think were eggs but that actually more closely resembled, in both taste and texture, soggy tree bark. Since we were all extremely hungry, however, we had no choice but to push the tray aside and nibble on our seat cushions (which, they graciously informed us, could be used as floatation devices if we should happen to make an emergency ocean landing while flying over, say, Kansas).

We flew on TWA (slogan: “We Make You Feel Glad to be on Solid Ground Again”) to Baltimore International, where we were met by our tour-guide/bus driver, whose name was — I swear — Elvis. For those who have been wondering what happened to The King, he is now an illiterate man driving a bus in Maryland (which is pretty much what I’ve thought all along).

Anyway, Elvis herded us onto his bus, where we soon realized that we were trapped and would have no choice but to listen to his Washington, D.C. spiel, which was at best incoherent and at worst made one think that one had bees caught in one’s inner ears.

After taking us to dinner, Elvis took us to the Washington Monument. This particular monument was fairly awe-inspiring, but you could tell the government was in charge of building it. At the bottom, there are all these drawings of the various ideas for the monument that weren’t used. All of them are very ornate and beautiful and spectacular, except for the one they actually chose to use, which resembles a 555-foot white pencil. Leave it to the U.S. Government to insult its forefather by stacking a bunch of white bricks as a memorial to him. I’m glad I’m not a forefather.

We eventually arrived at our hotel, which was in Williamsburg, Virginia. For those of you who have never visited the metropolitan wonderland of Williamsburg, Virginia, let me give you a word of advice: Don’t. It was such a hole in the wall that we all found ourselves wishing we were back in Lake Elsinore, where at least there are some decent frozen yogurt places (847 of them, in fact). It is doubtful at this point that the residents of Williamsburg could even spell “yogurt,” let alone freeze it.

The only thing we could find to do at our hotel was order Domino’s Pizza and hang around the lobby, eating it, and belching. I think the hotel was glad to see us leave the next day.

Next week: Jamestown, Williamsburg, and authentic colonial women’s-libbers.

Ithink we can all agree that the world would be a much happier place if:

1) Everyone behaved a little bit more responsibly, and
2) Temecula were to be wiped off the face of the earth by means of nuclear explosive devices.

I have had a lot of experience with Temecula and irresponsibility lately. The first time was back in February, on Dead Presidents’ Day. I was sitting at the newspaper office, attempting to write a column, when I was asked if I would like to deliver a camera to the Temecula office. Needless to state, I nearly wet my pants at the chance to drive to TEMECULA (!), which was recently named “Most Hell-like City in Riverside County,” narrowly beating out Hemet.

So I went, but first I called up my friend Aaron, whom I was sure had nothing better to do than go to Temecula with me. He said he would like nothing better than to go, but first he had to ask HIS PARENTS, who eventually said yes.

(Here, I would like to parenthetically point out the first instance of my irresponsibility, as explained by HIS PARENTS to him and eventually to me. One day after school I took Aaron home and was invited in so that I could waste time and be sufficiently late for work. While I was hanging around his house, I happened to notice that his parents had a collection of I would say 118,000 Cabbage Patch Persons, all of them strewn about the house in various poses and settings. They obviously cared for them more deeply than they did their real children, but I did not recognize that at the time. Instead, I decided to be funny — I am a Trained Humor Professional, after all — and turn three of four of them upside down and return them to their original locations, thinking that no one would ever notice.

I thought nothing of it until a few days later, when Aaron informed me that his parents had noticed (they apparently come home each night and say “hello” to each individual Cabbage Patch Person) and that they were — I want you to pay close attention here — ANGRY about it. The fact that I had turned a few of their Persons upside down had actually upset them. I’d be willing to bet that if I were to turn Aaron upside down, his parents wouldn’t give it a second thought, but when it comes to a $45 bunch of rags tied to an ugly plastic head, well, THAT’S where they draw the line.

I was informed that Aaron’s parents now thought I was irresponsible.)

But back to the story, the point of which I have now forgotten. Oh, yeah. Temecula. Aaron and I went to Temecula and, after delivering the camera, we went to the record store and then to Burger King, where we experienced the second example of my irresponsibility. Aaron ordered and paid for his — for want of a better word — “food,” and I had just ordered mine, when I realized that I had spend every last cent I owned at the record store. Fortunately, there was a check cashing place nearby, and I just happened to have a check that someone had written to me for my book.

So I went to the check cashing place, which had a sign outside proclaiming the fact that no I.D. was required. This led me to believe that no I.D. was required and that the whole process would be relatively simple. This, however, is not the case. The woman — I swear this is true — asked me what the check was for. I didn’t think she’d believe me if I told her I’d written a book, much less sold a copy, so instead I told her the check was for heroin. She laughed and gave me the money and called the police.

There are, of course, other examples of my irresponsibility, such as the time I ran into a chain-link fence with my car, sustaining $318 worth of damage, but that’s another story, and quite frankly, I’m tired of telling stories.

Iwas recently driving to Temecula for reasons I won’t go into because I have forgotten them when I noticed a sign saying, “Clinton Keith Road, Next Right.” I hadn’t been down that direction in a while, so I decided I would get off there and see what this “Clinton Keith Road” was, exactly.

The only thing I found was a hospital. That’s all. So I began thinking, “Why did they name the street ‘Clinton Keith’ instead of ‘Hospital Street?’ Or ‘Doctors Avenue?’ Or ‘Ambulance Chasing Lawyers Circle?’ Or ‘We Won’t Even Look at You Unless You Have Adequate Insurance Coverage Lane?’ Who is this Clinton Keith person and why is he so all-fired important? Did I just run that stop sign?” I should really stop thinking when I’m trying to drive.

Anyway, when I returned home, I called up my friend Ed Farrell to see what he knew about it. I chose Ed because 1) he used to live here, and 2) he has the ability to make embarrassing noises with both armpits AT THE SAME TIME, so his name just naturally springs to mind when I think of Lake Elsinore.

Ed told me he didn’t know, but that he thought we should investigate and write a column about it. “You want to do research?!?” I said, laughing. “What, are you nuts?” But research we (kind of) did.

Our first step was to see what the populace of Lake Elsinore thought, and the obvious way to do that, of course, was to go to Kmart. The most popular response we received there, before we were thrown out by the management, was, “Clinton Keith. Isn’t that a road, or something?” When we informed them that we weren’t looking for some obscure freeway overpass, but, rather, an actual physical presence, the main reaction was, “I don’t know.” One particularly inspiring “I don’t know” came from a young man who asked that we not use his name, which is Brian McKay. His “I don’t know” wasn’t just your garden-variety moron’s “I don’t know,” but the “I don’t know” of a man who is sincerely lost . The kind of “I don’t know” that takes teams of scientists years and years of careful research to formulate. We could tell that Brian was just as obsessed with finding the answer as we were pretending to be.

Our next approach was to attempt communication with the residents of a place called “Elsinore High School,” or, sometimes, “Heck, with a Gym.” It was at this bizarre place that we encountered two persons named Jay and Clint, or maybe Bob and Marvin. We can’t seem to recall exactly. At any rate, this is the conversation as we recorded it.

ERIC: Pardon me. Do you know who Clinton Keith was?

JAY, or maybe BOB: Clinton Keith. Sounds familiar. He’s some kind of historical dude or something.

CLINT, or maybe MARVIN (We would prefer CLINT, if we were him): He’s dead, isn’t he?

JAY/BOB: Yeah, I think so.

CLINT/MARVIN: So who cares? He’s just dead, that’s all.

ED: (Whispering to ERIC) Imbeciles, both of them.

Our last remotely intelligent theory came from someone who claimed that Clinton Keith was a two-headed man with one head named Clinton, the other, Keith. This supports the legend that the ancient Incas had, but goes against the beliefs of the fanatical religious cult called TFEE (True Followers of Ed and Eric, you may have seen them at the airport), who believe that Clinton Keith is the blind idiot god of chaos residing atop a throne of human skulls somewhere in the underworld. Or perhaps that was Saddam Hussein. At any rate, we can’t believe we have any strength left after this much mental aberration. We also can’t believe we just used a word like “aberration” and thought we could get away with it.

Our research ended on an auspicious note. Several sightings, it seems, have been made behind Circle K’s across America. Footprints of what appears to be our man have been plaster casted. We will continue the search as long as we live! We will never give up! It is our sole obsession.

Until next week.

Some of you sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that I’ve been on hiatus for the past three weeks. In my place has been a ranting, raving, irresponsible lunatic, which is why only you sharp-eyed readers noticed I was gone.

Many of those who did notice my absence asked me questions to the effect of, “What are you doing with your time, now that you’re not writing a column?” I appreciate those people’s concern, and I hope they are not offended when I say that that is a really stupid question. I mean, how long do you think it takes me to write one of these things? It’s not like I do research, or anything.

Anyway, several fairly interesting things did happen to me while I wasn’t writing columns, the most interesting of which was:

I MANAGED TO OFFEND THREE PERSONS WHO ARE LARGER AND FAR MORE CAPABLE OF INFLICTING BODILY HARM THAN I AM. Technically, this happened before I stopped writing, and it is more or less the reason I stopped writing. I don’t want to go into any details, as it is only through the aid of extensive psychiatric help that I have just recently managed to forget about it, but suffice it to say that these three persons didn’t like the subject matter of my last column (possibly because the subject matter was THEM) and they became extremely angry with me.

Normally, of course, I don’t care if I offend anyone because normally I do it at least half-way on purpose. But this one caught me off guard, and I was actually sorry that I had bothered them. The fact that any of them could squish me like a bug if he wanted to probably contributed to those feelings.

A few days later,

I WENT TO A BIRTHDAY PARTY. The party was for some girl, I forget who. It started at 6:00, so I picked up my friend Aaron at around 6:45, and we went to our friend Nick’s house, where he and another friend, Colby, were waiting. (Note that the writer is blatantly kissing-up to his friends by putting their names in the paper.) When we finally arrived at the party at around 8:00, I happened to notice — and this is where it comes in handy to be an investigative journalist — that everyone else was leaving. It takes the careful eye of a trained professional to notice such minor details.

Upon questioning the remaining guests, we learned that the hostess had broken her wrist the night before and was in no mood to have a party. At least, that’s what someone told us. We never actually got it from the horse’s mouth (so to speak), but the hostess did get her point across when, shortly after we arrived, she said, “How long were you guys planning on staying?” Needless to state, we stayed for quite a while.

After a while, some more people showed up, and the party was in full swing again. Unfortunately for my nerves, among the people who showed up were two of the three persons mentioned in item #1 (specifically, the tall one and the short-ish one). This led to the next major event, which was:

I WAS INVOLVED IN A KNIFE FIGHT.

Ha ha! Just kidding! Actually,

THE PROBLEM WITH THOSE THREE PERSONS WAS RESOLVED. This came about after two of them arrived at the party. Realizing that there were no illegal substances to aid in the festivities, and that the hostess really didn’t want any of us there (evidenced by the fact that she kept looking at her watch and sighing impatiently), I decided to honor my responsibility as a Trained Humor Professional and attempt to liven things up by tossing foreign objects (i.e. the hostess) into the pool. This, I’m pleased to say, convinced those two persons that I had enough psychological problems without their interference.

So one of them (the tall one) officially summed up the opinion of all three of them by saying, and I quote, “Hey, that’s cool, man.” I couldn’t have asked for a more eloquent resolution of our differences than that, at least not without being smashed in the mouth by the short-ish one.

And that’s the last three weeks of my life in, as we writers say, “a nutshell,” which is a good indication that we writers are severely overpaid.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: The following column contains such controversial terms as “jew” (in the context of “Wandering jew,” a spiny-leafed green plant), and “bisexual” (in the context of Elton John). If you are a Sensitive Reader, we suggest you proceed with caution, because you never know when one of those words might (BISEXUAL!) come up. Thank (JEW!) you.

You will be pleased to know that I am now in a band, called “Eccentric Eric and the Wandering Jews,” after the spiny-leafed green plant of the same name (not the religion. Please. Don’t write in). If you would like to know why that title was chosen, too bad, because I’m not going to tell you.

Ha ha! Just a little humor there. Actually, I am going to tell you, because that is my job, and I won’t get paid unless I do. The title already existed, even before we became a band, only it did not include the “Eccentric Eric” part. It just referred to four of my acquaintances (named, from tallest to shortest, Mike, Tim, Aaron, and Ryan) who one day decided that if they were going to be an official, respectable group of friends, they would naturally have to name themselves after a plant. “Tradescantia fluminensis” (the botanical name) didn’t have quite the right ring to it, so they went with “Wandering jews” instead.

The Wandering jews soon became a mutually exclusive bunch of merry men, limiting their numbers to only four. That is why the name of our band is “Eccentric Eric and the Wandering Jews” and not just “The Wandering Jews”: I am not an official “jew” and therefore cannot call myself one in any sense of the word for reasons centering around the facts that 1) I am a Christian, and 2) I am not a plant.

At any rate, the five of us are now a band, and we will undoubtedly become the Menudo of the ’90s, if only we can overcome our minor problems, such as:

1) Aaron, the bass player, cannot, in a physical sense, actually play the bass.

2) Mike and Ryan can both play the drums, but no band needs two drummers, so we suspect that Mike and Ryan may wind up attempting to kill one another, which, if we get it on film, will make for some amusing footage when it comes time to make a video.

3) Tim plays the guitar quite adequately, but his hair, which he let grow for the sole purpose of being in a band, sometimes gets caught in the strings and the fire department has to come in with the Jaws of Life to get him loose, but only if we can get the 911 pesons to believe us. (“You say your friend’s hair is stuck in a guitar?”)

But other than these minor difficulties, we’re a perfectly normal band, except that we’ve never actually played a song together. We do have one planned, though. I wrote it, and I think we’ve all been practicing our parts individually. I know I have. My part involves playing the piano and singing, and, thanks, to the wonders of modern technology, I won’t have to do them at the same time, or even correctly. I could (and frequently do) sing like a dying chihuahua in heat and play like a blind man with no fingers, but if I turn a few knobs on the recorder, I’ll sound like Elton John, only not nearly as bisexual.

We do have every intention of playing the song together sometime, but as of so far, we don’t have anyplace to practice. My house is out of the question because it would mean the other guys would have to actually meet my family, an experience from whence no one has ever returned without a severe facial tic and major hair loss.

(A recent family incident: We were eating a nice Sunday dinner and enjoying a peaceful silence when my 8-year-old sister — the one who is so cute and small and delicate and precious that we have nicknamed her “Bunny” — emitted a belch that would make a drunkard stand up and applaud. The next night, we all went out to Sizzler, which, as fate would have it, is where Aaron the Bass Player works, only he was off that night, which made me a much more religious person, if you get my drift. I just thought I’d share that with you.)

Anyway, if you would like to donate the use of your home, we would greatly appreciate it, and we might even give it back when we’re through.

[ Hoo-boy, was this ever a column! As you can see, it’s pretty average in its humorous appeal, but that’s beside the point. It’s the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes it interesting.

First of all, in publication, the copy editor got nervous and pulled the entire first paragraph. That’s better than the rest of the editorial staff, though, who wanted the entire column removed. This was just a few weeks after the school paper, which I worked for, had been involved in a major racial controversy/misunderstanding, so people were kind of nervous about anything that mentioned any specific groups, such as Jews. (The title I use here, “New Rock Band: Jew-2,” is new. The headline used in publication was something about “Will Eric’s Band be Banned?,” which seems remarkably prescient now that I think about it.)

Also, I made the mistake of not mentioning to the Wandering Jews, whom I really didn’t know very well (except for Aaron), that I was going to talk about them in the column. They were upset about it, mostly because it caught them by surprise, and because they were afraid people were going to take the whole “jew” thing the wrong way. It really IS the name of a plant, and that really IS where they got it from, but I know there are many people in the world who think that merely to MENTION something is the same thing as mocking it.

So the Wandering Jews, except for Aaron, got mad at me, and that bothered me. Coupled with that was the fact that I’d been struggling in my writing lately anyway. My columns had been somewhat more juvenile, violent and gross lately, and people had noticed. So I decided to take a few weeks off, to get my creative energies back again, and to go off to Walden Pond and find myself.

It’s unfortunate that this column should be the one, but this was the first time I mentioned Aaron. He was my best friend for my last couple years in high school, and I mentioned him numerous times in later columns. Nearly everything I did during that era, I did it with him.

Aaron was a fun friend. He was forgetful and rather flaky, but he was charming, and kind of sweet in his good-natured worthlessness. He was also quite the ladies’ man (which also was in stark contrast to myself), though he denied any such prowess. We met when we were cast in the same student-directed one act plays at the end of my sophomore year. He was supposed to have been in “Shakespeare Shorts,” as Macbeth, but he failed to learn his lines and was kicked out and replaced. Aaron and I started hanging out around that time, and we were more or less inseparable (except when he had a girlfriend) for the next couple years. We drifted apart when I went to college, and I don’t know where he is now. Last I heard, he was living in Washington and had killed a guy, although that story may be apocryphal. ]

Iwas in this school play a couple of weeks ago, but it wasn’t your garden-variety, obscenely boring school play. This was Shakespeare.

I believe you know the Shakespeare to whom I am referring. The one who wrote long, boring plays in about the four hundredth century B.C. in which every single major character, by the end of the play, had either gone nuts, died, or gone nuts and then died. The one who wrote plays containing dirty Elizabethan jokes that make your English teacher gush about what a Comic Genius he was, but that if you were to tell them, in modern English, would get you suspended. The one who didn’t think twice about having any character, major or not, stand onstage and babble on and on about the Meaning of Life, or Anything at All, really, to the point where the other characters, if they were at all normal, would either fall asleep or shoot whoever was talking, but instead they just sit there and let the moron ramble on until the scene abruptly ends and some designated stagehand begins making loud noises in order to wake the audience from its deep slumber. Sometimes, in fact, the stagehand himself would fall asleep during the speech and the audience would wind up staying the night. Sometimes even the actors would fall asleep, including the one who was talking:

“To be, or not to be — that is the quesZZX-XXXZ-ZZZ-ZZXZzz.”

They never tell you that in English class, though.

Anyway, that’s the Shakespeare the Elsinore High School Drama Department decided to perform. Now keep in mind, they didn’t want to do an entire Shakespeare play. That would be cruel. Instead, they decided to do bits and pieces of a few plays — just enough to bore the audience without actually putting them to sleep or angering them into open rebellion.

Another thing they did was to change each of the plays they had selected in order to annoy any English teachers who may have been present. “Macbeth,” for instance, was set in the Civil War era; “Taming of the Shrew” in the old west; and “Romeo and Juliet” in approximately the 1990s. The only one set in the proper time frame was “Hamlet,” which was not Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” but, rather, a fifteen-minute parody written by Tom Stoppard in the 1960s. And surprisingly, none of the plays were boring, which ticked the English teachers no end.

The reason I mention all this is that I was in the plays. To begin with, I played a smart-aleck high school student (if you can believe that!) in the classroom scene that connected all of the plays. From there, I went down into The Pit, from which I operated the smoke machine that was used to prevent the audience from breathing or thinking clearly for the next 45 minutes. After that, I played barroom piano for “Taming of the Shrew.” One of the songs even had three, count ’em three, chords (C major sixth, G diminished seventh, and D minor stupid), a feat that any mentally deficient concert pianist would be proud of.

After intermission, I had the genuine pleasure of portraying Benvolio in “Romeo and Juliet.” Benvolio is a rather ill-defined character whose main duty seems to be sitting on a platform and listening to Mercutio make off-color remarks to Romeo. Rather than just sit and listen, though, I decided to just sit and listen and be drunk, all at the same time, which might have had a profound effect on the audience, had any of them still been conscious after the smoke from “Macbeth.” Mr. Duke was really proud of the smoke, but he was up in the sound booth, out of harm’s way.

After “Romeo and Juliet” came “Fifteen-Minute Hamlet,” with yours truly playing the title role. This is a really great play, mainly because it takes “Hamlet,” which is four hours long, and condenses it to fifteen minutes. That is how Shakespeare was meant to be seen — in fifteen minutes. Whoever it was that just released a movie version of “Hamlet” with Mel Gibson in the lead had the right idea — it was shortened to two hours — but they didn’t go far enough. Our version, on the other hand, probably went too far.

After having the experience of doing Shakespeare, I think I have learned one important thing: that Shakespeare was just a few couplets short of a sonnet, if you sense my meaning.

The rest is silence.