"Zippy" #4

After my first quarter at UC Berkeley was over I wanted to blow off a little steam, as that place is whack and I was fed up already.

Me and my homey Zippy got in the car with a bottle of Olallieberry wine, a six pack of beer, and some bottle rockets. We drove to Oakland and went to Flint's BBQ, sated our dinner pangs, and planned our next move.

We decided to cruise past Uptown Liquors, which usually had an assortment of fellows hanging out front. We slowed down to a crawl, put a bottle rocket in a paper towel tube (our aiming mechanism), lit the fuse and fired towards the front door. People scattered pretty well as they saw the flaming projectile come towards them.

We circled the block and tried it again. We had more bottle rockets but decided we shouldn't hang about. We drove to Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley looking for a good target. There was a Miller's Outpost with the usual gaggle of street people sitting about on the sidewalk, so we fired off a bottle rocket or two but I'm not sure they noticed.

Deciding it was time to leave the area, we went home. The next day I realized that fun or not, it was pretty dumb. The folks at the liquor store and on Telegraph Ave. had done nothing to me.

Too bad I didn't know where my math professors lived....

Bus Stop Man

I was waiting at a bus stop in San Francisco near Moscone Center, when a semi-normal looking guy walks up and starts writing furiously on an outside partition of the bus stop structure. I was standing on the inside looking at the bus route map, and he was on the outside, writing away, talking to himself in a funny lisp.

Not wanting to appear too nosy I waited until the bus pulled up before I took a peek at his handiwork. There wasn't much to see since he was using a pencil and the surface he was writing on was gray metal. I hoped he hadn't written down something important like a solution Fermat's Last Theorem or something, because you couldn't read it.

I got on the bus (paying my $1.50) and sat down about half-way back. He then gets on, telling the driver "I need a ride" and does not pay. The driver said nothing, and as the guy walked by me towards the back of the bus he mumbles "market the knowledge-base".

As we pulled away he went to the back, sat up on the back of seat, and at the next stop the driver got out of his chair and told him to sit down properly. I pondered this sequence of events while watching an elderly gentlemen "comb" his sideburns with a toothbrush.

Happy New Year

This being a time for resolutions, one of mine is to (beginning with next Christmas) use the word "Christmas" rather than "xmas".

Why? Well, I started using "xmas" for December 25 because that date was not the date of Christ's birth. It was in September (the 11th to be more precise). December 25 was basically the result of the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church bringing the pagans of their realm into the fold. So, they took the feast of Saturnalia and labeled it "Christmas".

This was similarly done with Easter, which is nothing more than the word "Ashtoreth", who was the pagan goddess of fertility. Did you ever wonder what bunnies and eggs had to do with anything?

At any rate, a US Navy Chaplain is being fired because he insisted on praying "in Jesus' name". Really, is should be "in the name of Jesus Christ", but I will not digress. The government has been pushing hard to have things changed from "Christmas" to "Happy Holidays" in order to get rid of the word "Christ". However, when Homeland Security Commissar Michael Chertoff lighted a Chanukah Menorah, nobody suggested that it be called a "Holiday Candle."

So, even though December is not the right date, I will start using "Christmas" again instead of "xmas" or "Happy Holiday", because if I don't fight back one thought at a time I will end up using words like "Homeland" and "Commissar", instead of "United States" and "country", and will start believing that what the politicians say rather than the US Constitution says to be the law of the land.