What the heck. It's spring!

[Edward Mullaly]

Yeh.  I know everyone's up to their eyeballs in term papers, exam setting,
puzzling over where the time has gone, etc, etc.  If you find this just
clogs up your day, don't bother reading any further.  But if winter's
starting to get to you......

In case you've ever wondered about it.........


  DAVE BARRY ON COLLEGE
  ********************************************************

  College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two
  thousand hours and try to memorize things.  The two thousand hours
  are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time
  sleeping and trying to get dates.

  Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:

  1.  Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
  2.  Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).
  These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in
  - -ology, -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on.  The idea is, you
  memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books,
  then forget them.  If you fail to forget them, you become a
  professor
  and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.

  It's very difficult to forget everything.  For example, when I was
  in college, I had to memorize -- don't ask me why -- the names of
  three metaphysical poets other than John Donne.  I have managed
  to forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two
  were named Vaughan and Crashaw.  Sometimes, when I'm trying to
  remember something important like whether my wife told me to get
  tuna packed in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw
  just pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket.  It's a
  terrible waste of brain cells.

  After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to
  choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and
  forget the most things about.  Here is a very important piece of advice:
  be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right
  Answers.  This means you must not major in mathematics, physics,
  biology, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts.
  If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander
  into class one day and the professor will say: "Define the cosine
  integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result
  to five significant vertices." If you don't come up with exactly the
  answer the professor has in mind, you fail. The same is true of
  chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen
  combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you.  He wants you
  to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have
  agreed on.

  Scientists are extremely snotty about this.

  So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy,
  psychology, and sociology -- subjects in which nobody really
  understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve
  virtually no actual facts.  I attended classes in all these
  subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:

  ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have
  read little snippets of just before class.  Here is a tip on how
  to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about
  a book that anybody with any common sense would say.  For example,
  suppose you are studying Moby-Dick.  Anybody with any common sense
  would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters
  in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven
  thousand times.  So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the
  Republic of Ireland.

  Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never
  liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative.
  If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple
  stories, you should major in English.

  PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding
  there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch.  You
  should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.

  PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams.
  Psychologists are obsessed with rats and dreams.  I once spent an
  entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain
  sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing.  The rat
  learned much faster.  My roommate is now a doctor.  If you like
  rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats, you should
  major in psychology.

  SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and
  away the number one subject.  I sat through hundreds of hours of
  sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never
  once heard or read a coherent statement.  This is because
  sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most
  of their time translating simple, obvious observations into
  scientific-sounding code.  If you plan to major in sociology,
  you'll have to learn to do the same thing.  For example, suppose
  you have observed that children cry when they fall down.  You
  should write: "Methodological observation of the sociometrical
  behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a
  casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and
  lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behavior forms." If you can keep this up
  for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Edward Mullaly                  I'm not bewildered, I assure you I'm not
Department of English           Bewildered.  As a matter of fact a plan
University of New Brunswick,    Is almost certainly forming itself in my head
Fredericton, NB  E3B 5A3        At this very moment.  It may even be adequate.
CANADA  (506) 453-4676                                    -- Fry
   fax: (506) 453-5069