Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader

I was chatting the other evening with some friends and we spent a few minutes on the topic of the game show, Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader.

I have to admit, I watched this once and enjoyed it. Sure, it’s a humorous show, (it wouldn’t have made it through the first few airings if it weren’t for Foxworthy), but it’s based on a ludicrous concept. 

I remember Foxworthy posed a question about the order of the levels of the Earth’s atmosphere. The adult could not remember which atmospheric layer was called the mesosphere because her brain had kicked that irrelevant fact off the hard-drive about 20 years ago. The 5th grader remembered it because he was faced with the threat of being stuck with the class doofus (who bullied him) if he didn’t do well on that test. Meanwhile the adult with the bachelor’s degree who got the question wrong employs a wealth of wisdom and a tremendous throng of relevant facts to keep herself and her family not just surviving but thriving in a world bent on dumbing her down and removing all of her hard-earned assets and liberties. 

Hey, I’m tri-lingual and have a Master’s degree, and I can not recall the order of the Earth’s atmospheric layers. Am I not smarter than a 5th grader? Please!
 

Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader seems to me to be the trailer park version of Jeopardy. I guess that's why Foxworthy is the host since he's made a hilarious success riding the redneck train. If you win on Jeopardy, you've got something to boast about. If you win on Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader, what are you going to boast about? I have a friend who is missing a leg. While he's tough and active and all, his teenage son can outrun him, but that isn't something that his son can boast about: "Hey I can outrun my handicapped dad!" Yay! Way to go! You see, neither winning a race with a handicapped person nor winning on Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader are accomplishments.

Just going on the show puts you in between a rock and a hard place doesn't it? If you lose, you've gained the reputation of NOT being as smart as a fifth grader, and if you win you have nothing to boast about except the extra cash in your pocket. It is typical of the way Hollywood folk exploit. They invite people to bring shame on themselves in the pursuit of the money they dangle. Even if the show were canceled (Has it been? I don't know and I don't care.) the foolish will find no lack of other avenues to embarrassment and humiliation and the Hollywood types will never lack the means or opportunity to exploit them.

Would YOU become a contestant on that game show? I wouldn't think ill of you if you did, really! Honestly, whether you win or lose, you're smarter than a fifth grader.

JPT

MY HANDICAPPED BUDDY, part II

Sorry it's been so long, but I won't bother offering reasons or excuses. Let's get down to the fun.

My friend Jim, the amputee, worked in an office of Navy instructors for a few years in Virginia. These guys team-taught a technical electronics course for future submariners. I get the idea from Jim that submariners are pretty much the cream of the crop, but even he admits that every once in a while a dud gets through. Such was the case with a co-worker of his at this school that I will call Noodle. (His name has been changed so we don't add to his shame; we're pretty certain he brings enough upon himself without any help from us.)


Now, Jim had suffered the motorcycle accident, gotten a prosthesis, gone through all the physical therapy, and had actually gone back to work as a Navy Instructor. Noodle came up to him one day and asked Jim to take his class for a couple hours so he could take his boy to a doctor visit. Noodle was a jerk, a smart-alec, and quite a bit on the nerdy side to boot, but everyone has their shortcomings. "No problem," Jim says, "write up the request chit."


Noodle fills out the request form and hands it to Jim to sign. Jim notices it says "0900 to 1530" (9 am to 3:30 pm) and asks, "If it's only for a couple hours, why did you specify nearly the whole day?" Well, Noodle says he did that just because it was simply faster to fill out the request form that way, but he would be back in the office before lunch was over. Well, Noodle's a submariner, Jim thought, this won't be a problem.


Okay so Jim teaches Noodle's class for him that morning, dismisses the class for lunch and heads down to the office. After lunch, Jim is wondering where Noodle is, when a co-worker comes in and asks, "Hey Jim, did Noodle say when he was coming back?" Jim tells him, "Yeah he said he'd be back before lunch was over."


"Well I went past his house on the way back from lunch and he's out mowing his lawn!"


Needless to say, Jim was livid. He trusted this guy to his word that he would be back before lunch, but he left him to babysit his class for the rest of the day. Noodle came in the next day and Jim tore him up one side and down the other for stabbing him in the back. He started to explain, "But you signed the chit!" and then everyone in the office was on him like white on rice. All the other instructors in the office were proclaiming Noodle a low-life back-stabber and declared that no one was ever going to agree to do him a favor. There's something about being taken advantage of, about being betrayed, stabbed in the back, that really brings out the acid and steam in a man. Jim's really a forgiving guy who bends over backwards for his buds. If Noodle had asked him right and done right, Jim would have agreed to help him out in just about any way. But he didn't, he betrayed Jim's trust and took advantage him in spite of the word he had given. Jim remained pretty ticked at Noodle for a good while.


One day some weeks later, Jim was down in the office with the other instructors, and everyone was having a rip-roaring time coming up with, believe it or not, one-legged jokes. "What do you call a woman with one leg? Eileen!" That sort of thing. They were coming up with really hilarious ones left and right. Jim is the greatest sport you ever saw, he was encouraging them and busting a gut laughing right along with everyone. Jim genuinely swears that they came up with ones he'd never heard and that most of them were really very funny.


Now all the instructors are continuing the jokefest when Noodle comes in. It takes him a few minutes to figure out what's going on (he's not the swiftest boat in the fleet), and so he stands up waves his hands a little to draw attention to himself, "Okay okay okay, I got one. What do you call a one-legged guy..." Jim doesn't even remember the joke, it wasn't anything special, but Jim saw his opportunity to exact some revenge on Noodle. Noodle tells his joke, and the whole office, as if on cue, falls dead silent and stares at him -- in shock that he would dare tell such a joke! Jim stands up and walks over to Noodle (it was uncanny how well Jim could walk, even run, on his prosthesis, but this time Jim chose to exaggerate a limp) and gets right up in his face.


"Oh that's really funny Noodle! You must think you're flippin' hilarious! Oh sure, you got your two legs so to hell with anyone who's missing one? I can't believe you, how dare you tell jokes like that, jokes about handicapped people, and thinking about nothing except how you're gonna get a laugh at my expense. How dare you!"


Jim turns and limps out of the office and all the instructors give Noodle contemptuous looks as they follow Jim out of the office. It couldn't have gone better even had it been planned that way. Jim comments how weird it was that everyone instinctually knew that Noodle was the one person in the office that should NOT have participated and that Noodle's joke was offensive while everyone else's jokes were not. Uncanny.


It took a few more weeks, but Noodle did finally apologize to Jim for taking advantage of him.


Just so all of you know, I know several handicapped people and I find them extraordinary. They are overcomers and, in general, are stronger in spirit, will, and fortitude than most of us mere "normal" people. Rather than staring at the missing limb or shrinking away at the sight of the strange prosthetic device, approach them and ask them what happened. Tell them you're sorry that they suffered such an event, commend them for overcoming, compliment the cool-looking prosthesis if they wear one, and ask a blessing of courage and strength upon them. Yeah some handicapped people can have hangups; from personal experience, most won't be offended but will enjoy your encouragement. Jim tells kids that he's part Terminator. They usually get a rise out of that.


J.P.T.

MY HANDICAPPED BUDDY, part I

I have a friend who is an amputee, his name’s Jim. He lost his left leg, below the knee, in a motorcycle accident where some dipstick tried to get through an intersection before he got there. Well, even though Jim was just minding his own business and going the speed limit, this moron nailed him. I think about folks like Jim and I kind of wonder if I would be bitter about that, you know, life dealing him a low blow and all. But Jim isn’t bitter about anything. Well he may have gone through a phase for a couple months but he isn’t bitter now. Anyway Jim is one of the nicest guys you’d ever care to meet, a great husband to his wife and a great dad to his kids, and he’s got great taste in friends, (that’d include me).

Well, while Jim may be one of the nicest and coolest come-back cats around, I credit him as one of the cruelest jokers I’ve ever known.

After his amputation, he kind of got this attitude that he wasn’t going to be handicapped. (I know, I know, hey dude, missing leg = handicapped! He snickers about this too, now.) As a result, he refused to get a handicapped parking placard or license plates. But lo, one day he was driving around looking for a parking space at a store. It happened to be raining, and there happened to be an open handicapped parking place right in front. I think he’s normally the type that doesn’t care much about the elements, but decided he’d just go ahead and park in the handicapped spot even though he didn’t have a placard or anything. He says he figured that even if he got a ticket, he take his leg off for the judge who would immediately dismiss the case with a roll of the eyes.

Okay, you have to see Jim. He’s got a weekend’s worth of beard on his face, a Harley painter’s cap, black leather jacket, ratty jeans, Harley shirt, black boots, and a biker’s demeanor that basically says, “Don’t tread on me.” He’s got a big blue ’85 Caprice and Harley stickers in his rear window. He parks in the handicapped spot, gets out of the car and starts walking toward the store. From behind him, he hears one of those screeching fingernails-on-the-blackboard voices, “Hey, if you’re not handicapped, you shouldn’t park in a handicapped spot.” The way Jim describes it, if she had just said it in a normal tone it would have been perfectly acceptable and he would have simply offered an explanation. However, the reality was that she was just so sickeningly jeery and contemptuous, that he was immediately irritated to the point of no return, even before he turned to see who said it.

You know, Jim is a nice guy and all but he doesn’t look nice. I would have said that to some punk skateboarder kid, but not to a biker in tattered jeans and leather jacket on a rainy day. Most of us average mortals have better sense than to swagger our pith and pluck in front of someone who obviously poses a threat to our ability to breathe. He turns around and there’s this obese gal who apparently had a serious case of handicap-placard envy. I understand that obese people can get handicapped placards nowadays just because it takes so much extra energy to get around with all that extra fat hanging on them. This might not have been the case at this period of history.

At the time, Jim didn’t have one of those high-tech springy propeller-type artificial limbs. No, he had just a socket for his stump, attached to a blue aluminum pole which connected to a wooden foot with a bolt that ran right up through the heel into the pole. The funny thing is this – that bolt that held the foot onto the pole would work loose as Jim walked around. He had to tighten it up every week or so, or else his foot would start to pivot around. Once he turned his foot around and walked around with his foot facing backwards. It really got a lot of snickers around the office where he worked.

All right so Jim’s caught parking in a spot without the appropriate placard or plate, she is technically right, and you have to hand it to her – she had to have some brass clackers to talk to a biker like that in her limited physical capacity. Now I’ve known some bikers that would have just tossed a tire iron at her and been done with the situation, but that wasn’t Jim’s style (though Squatty-Body didn’t know that). So Jim got a little perturbed and he faces this lady, he picks his leg up, grabs his foot and turns in backwards right in front of her and says, “Is THAT handicapped enough for YOU?!?!” The lady’s eyes got big as saucers and she put her hands up to her mouth as she gasped. Then he straightened his foot, turned, and walked toward the store entrance. He still describes this as one of those rare pristine moments where he actually had the perfect comeback AT the moment he needed it.

He mentioned, too, that he ran into this lady a couple times here and there in the store and she made no secret of avoiding him. He admits that he later had a little remorse; he feared that he may have scarred her for life or something. But I and others are in agreement that it probably taught her a good lesson to watch her tone – that same attitude spat at the wrong person could wind her up in the ICU or worse – so we all applauded the event as a good deed done. By the way, Jim did eventually get a handicap placard. Yay Jim!

Okay, I have another hilarious one about Jim for next time. You’ll definitely want to stay tuned for this one.

J.P.T.

THE SO-CLAMORED-FOR TALE - THE TROUBLE WITH DOGS IN CARS

Oh, the humanity! We bolted to the car. I don’t really know why we felt we had to run, it was just a reflex really. Well we got there and the windows, that we should have been able to see through, were all steamed up. It was not a good sign.

Jaco was inside and we could hear the poor boy whimpering like he thought he was going to get in big trouble. Oh it still gives me those little internal retches to think about it, and this happened like over two decades ago!

I’ll just come out and say it frankly: the dog had spewed diarrhea all over the Shelby’s interior. He had apparently jumped into the back seat as well as the front seat attempting to find another way out of his little prison, so there was no place inside the car that escaped trauma.

I swear, Jaco, I really meant to be gone for only 30 seconds!

The odor was just gag-awful and someone came back out of the bar with a great big package of bar napkins for us and a wastebasket. Well there was a lot of laughter in the Speakeasy’s parking lot that night, let me tell ya! Oh yeah they could chuckle, but they weren’t coming within 20 feet of us. Eddie and I must have been there for hours wiping up soggy doggy-doo with bar napkins just so we could tolerate it enough to operate the vehicle. Yeah, now it was nothing more than a vehicle. That was such a hideous mess! I kept asking Eddie what he fed Jaco. Well, the Shelby Charger was no longer my sports car; this event, while very small on the global perspective, it just shattered me and my entire life’s paradigm shifted.

And you know what, I didn’t get even a single one of my friends’ phone numbers that night to show for my foolish efforts to get back in touch. It cost me $340.00 to have the interior detailed to the point where it could be driven again. Right before I transferred to a new duty station, I traded it in on another car. No. No, as a matter of fact, I did NOT tell the dealership what that funny “new car smell” was about.

J.P.T.

THE SO-CLAMORED-FOR TALE - TRUCK IN THE PARKING LOT

Okay, so Jaco has been injected with the spew-factor-3 medicine and we are on our way back to Eddie’s house. Everything was smooth sailing and Eddie was back to his normal self. Actually Eddie’s mood took a noticeably good turn after the vet explained that money, even of the paper persuasion, holds up very well in most pets.

I had another great friend when I was in high-school. His name was Greg, and actually we’d been friends since junior high, a.k.a. middle school. But hey, who’s going to count the years when you’re best friends, right? Wow the stories I could tell! A Greg had a pickup truck. Oh no, not just any pickup. He got a job just so he could customize the thing, and customize he did. First of all it had a lift-kit, flashy rims, and gargantuan tires, a superbly detailed paint job. You had to have some powerful thighs to jettison yourself up into the cab. Oh yeah, he technically had a pickup truck, but you were NOT going to call Greg to help you move!

Funny that he was a Christian when we were growing up and I was not. Then we went our separate ways: he went to college and I went into the military. Greg succumbed to the liberal rantings of leftist whacko profs, the allure of feminists who were ready to discard everything about themselves that made them precious, and the stupid dimwit cries of his partying humanist “friends” there at those places of supposed higher learning and he abandoned the truth. I, on the other hand, came to recognize that Jesus was the truth, the way, and the life, while I was in the service. Now Greg did eventually return to his senses, but like many humans, he had to hit bottom before he looked back upward.

Well, there we were tooling on down the road with Jaco in the hatchback of my pretty sports car, when lo and behold what did I spy in the parking lot of the Speakeasy Bar-n-Grill? Of course, it was none other than Greg’s unmistakable pickup truck sitting head and shoulders above all the other vehicles there under the floodlight’s beacon. There was no doubt. Now, Greg and I had lost touch with each other, he moved several times, I was transferred several times and his parents moved as well so this was likely the only opportunity I was going to have (unless he showed up at some future high school reunion) to get back in touch.

Eddie saw the truck same as I did and was excited but was pretty apprehensive too, saying that we didn’t want to be late getting Jaco into a tub before he started letting loose with the $50 bill and whatever might be accompanying it.

“No worries.” I said, “I’m just gonna get his phone number and we’re gone.”

Yes, that was the plan. I zipped into the parking lot and Eddie and I ran inside. Greg was there, bigger than life and apparently with a whole entourage of other friends of ours from high school, including Nate. Oh man, it was great! We were laughing and hugging and everyone was slapping everyone else on the back – I was just overcome with seeing so many friendly and familiar faces. I remember telling Greg how shocked I was that he still had the custom truck what with college expenses and all. He explained how he managed everything (he mooched off his folks as much as he could – ah the character-developing secrets to life you learn at our fine universities nowadays!) and then he asked what I was driving.

That was the moment that time sort of stood still. All the sound around me in that bar just sort of deepened and slurred. Eddie and I looked wide-eyed at each other and screamed running out the door.

J.P.T.

THE SO-CLAMORED-FOR TALE - TO THE VET AND HOME, QUICK!

All right, I successfully stayed the execution of poor Jaco, Eddie’s elderly malnourished but friendly mutt. Now Jaco is enjoying a relaxing ride to the vet. I knew a place that wasn’t too far away, the vet I knew right around the corner from my grandparent’s house. It was only a 20 minute trip, during which I made small talk with Eddie while secretly wondering about the effect of digestive juices’ on American currency.

Fortunately the vet was there, it was a fluke that he had just finished an emergency surgery on a Dachsund. I’m sure the vet meant Dachsund, although with his oriental accent, he pronounced it Datsun. Anyway, our visit was wonderfully short and sweet although we didn’t get the news we were hoping for. By the way “short” is not a dig at the vet, who was possibly the shortest man I’ve ever met. He was even shorter than my grandmother! There were little step-stools all over the premises, it was cute, but we did not laugh at him. (Well, not until later in the car, at least.)

I assumed the vet would just give him some syrup of ipecac or a similar medication to make the dog upchuck the contents of his stomach, a.k.a., the $50 bill. The doctor explained that a dog of Jaco’s age, as well as his being undernourished (he said “malnourished” wasn’t an accurate description of ol’ Jaco) made induced vomiting dangerous for him. He recommended an injection which would cause Jaco to “pass” everything through. It would take around a half-hour for the medicine to start working and would then cause his digestive system to evacuate everything out Jaco’s rear end for about an hour. This brought humorous images to mind, but the vet continued to explain to us in great scientific detail why this course would be gentler on Jaco’s sensitive system than inducing vomiting. It nearly all went over our heads, but we nodded confidently and enthusiastically in hopes that the doctor would stop showing off.

Yes, so the numbers ran like this: $25.00 for the vet visit, a $40.00 after-hours emergency fee, and $23.75 for the injection. So I was out $88.75, not including the $50.00 that had taken up temporary residence inside Jaco. This was a rather expensive visit to ol’ Eddie. I look back on this now as one of the most tremendous (non-military) bonding experiences I’ve ever had, so the money wasn’t really important.

So the little veterinarian man got Jaco and the injection ready, Eddie and I were ready: I paid at the front desk and had then parked the car right outside the back door of the clinic). Jaco was such a cool dog, he didn’t flinch or even whimper! I know, I’m still impressed by that, too. The doctor administered the shot, then Eddie and I whisked him out the back door into the hatchback and we shot off like a bat outta hell.

We were hitting all green lights so we were sure to get home quite a bit faster than it took to arrive at the vet’s. Things were going even better than expected. Eddie and I were joking and laughing like old times. Like that one time that I was in a food fight with a friend of ours named Kurt. It started with him flicking little pieces of potato salad at me with a plastic spoon in the cafeteria. Well I was trying to woo a really nice and foxy girl at the time. I didn’t know how to handle the bits of food that kept coming my way and so I wound up losing the girl. Needless to say, I was pretty ticked off at Kurt. So I filled my mouth with fruit cocktail and walked by Kurt. I acted as if I was going to say something, but then instead I lurched and “puked” the fruit cocktail on his jeans. Kurt was mortified and the whole cafeteria was in an uproar. It was a most satisfying moment. Kurt and I continued getting more and more ingenious with our digestible matter battles, and we eventually called a truce and became friends again, but that moment lives on in infamy.

Yes, everything was going according to plan, once again, until I saw “the truck.”

J.P.T.

THE SO-CLAMORED-FOR TALE - ENTER JACO

Yes, I had the $50 bill in my hand, pinched between my thumb and index finger and I handed it to Eddie across the table. You know how, every once in a while, you hand something to someone and you swear they’ve got it, but then you let go and discover that they didn’t? Well, yeah, it happened. I handed the bill over and I swore Eddie had it but I let go and instead of floating farther over toward Eddie’s side of the table, it plopped right into the gravy bowl.

Now I was really embarrassed! The dog, Jaco, is getting friendly on my leg, I am eating food that really should be eaten by my starving but gracious host, I am giving money to help a man who had to discard his pride and dignity to ask for pity, and now that little bit of charity has been fumbled right smack dab into his meager rations. Well Eddie didn’t let a little gravy get him down. He simply took the 50-dollar bill out of the gravy and gave it a little shake near the floor.

Let’s not forget about the Jaco, now. As soon as Eddie turned with the bill, the dog vacated my leg and went over to Eddie’s side of the card table. I didn’t see Jaco with my eyes, but I heard the squishy slurp, and I was wondering if Jaco did what I thought he did.

Eddie bolted out of his chair and grabbed Jaco in what I can only describe as being some of the most masterful rodeo calf-tying I’ve ever seen – except Eddie didn’t tie Jaco, he just “secured” him with his leg while he pried Jaco’s mouth open and proceeded to do a little spelunking to fish that bill out.

I’ll hand it to Eddie and to Jaco: I’ve never seen a man with enough guts to thrust his hand down a hungry dog’s throat, and I’ve never seen a hungry dog permit a man reach into his gullet. Well, accolades aside, Eddie did not retrieve the bill.

At this point, I saw a side of Eddie which I’d never seen or heard: pure fury. Eddie straddled Jaco on the floor with his legs contorted a little to maximize his control over the poor beast. He kept one hand planted firmly at the base of Jaco’s skull while he rooted through the little array of cardboard boxes that sufficed for kitchen cabinets and drawers. He finally found what he was looking for – a steak knife.

Zut-alors – he intended to cut the dog open to get that $50 bill! I proclaimed every kind of “whoah” word that I could think of and rapidly suggested that we just take Jaco to a vet so he could just puke it up. There was a tense moment while Eddie mulled this over but after a few moments he agreed that was the best thing to do. Praise the Lord! I could only imagine what would have ensued if he had rejected the vet idea.

Now I still thought that my idea to take Jaco to the vet was a good one, but I kicked myself anyway. Why? Why?!?!?! Well because I had a nice shiny sportscar, THAT’s why! All right, it was a choice: risk getting the sportscar dirty or cut the dog open. Okay, I put Jaco in the back. He laid down like a very good doggy.

Right now I was thinking something along the lines of the evil emperor in Star Wars, “Everything’s going according to plaaaan.”

Things we’re going well at the moment, but that was going to be short-lived moment.

J.P.T.