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). These include how to make collect telephone calls and get beer and crepe-paper stains out of your pyjamas.
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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Actual GCSE Answers....Ok, So probably not. Still Funny.
This is a compilation of actual student GCSE answers...
1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.
2. The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinessis, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked, "Am I my brother's son?"
3. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.
4. Solomom had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.
5. The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn't have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
6. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.
7. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
8. In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java.
9. Eventually, the Romans conquered the Greeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long.
10. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out: "Tee hee, Brutus."
11. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his subjects by playing the fiddle to them.
12. Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was cannonized by Bernard Shaw. Finally Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offense.
13. In midevil times most people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the futile ages was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote literature.
14. Another story was William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head.
15. Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted "hurrah."
16. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.
17. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Romeo's last wish was to be laid by Juliet.
18. Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.
19. During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe.
20. Later, the Pilgrims crossed the ocean, and this was called Pilgrim's Progress. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.
21. One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. Finally the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared, "A horse divided against itself cannot stand.". Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.
22. Soon the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.
23. Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposedly insane actor. This ruined Booth's career.
24. Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltaire invented electricity and also wrote a book called Candy.
25. Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn when the apples are falling off the trees.
26. Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German half Italian and half English. He was very large.
27. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.
28. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened and catapulted into Napoleon. Napoleon wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't have any children.
29. The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.
30. Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. She was a moral woman who practiced virtue. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.
31. The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men.
32. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species. Madman Curie discovered radio. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers.
33. The First World War, caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by an anahist, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.
1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.
2. The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinessis, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked, "Am I my brother's son?"
3. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.
4. Solomom had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.
5. The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn't have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
6. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.
7. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
8. In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java.
9. Eventually, the Romans conquered the Greeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long.
10. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out: "Tee hee, Brutus."
11. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his subjects by playing the fiddle to them.
12. Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was cannonized by Bernard Shaw. Finally Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offense.
13. In midevil times most people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the futile ages was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote literature.
14. Another story was William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head.
15. Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted "hurrah."
16. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.
17. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Romeo's last wish was to be laid by Juliet.
18. Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.
19. During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe.
20. Later, the Pilgrims crossed the ocean, and this was called Pilgrim's Progress. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.
21. One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. Finally the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared, "A horse divided against itself cannot stand.". Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.
22. Soon the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.
23. Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposedly insane actor. This ruined Booth's career.
24. Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltaire invented electricity and also wrote a book called Candy.
25. Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn when the apples are falling off the trees.
26. Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German half Italian and half English. He was very large.
27. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.
28. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened and catapulted into Napoleon. Napoleon wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't have any children.
29. The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.
30. Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. She was a moral woman who practiced virtue. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.
31. The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men.
32. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species. Madman Curie discovered radio. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers.
33. The First World War, caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by an anahist, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Regino of Prüm, 'On Ecclesiastical Discipline'
Ok, so I thought I'd share this.
Regino of Prüm worked for the Archbishop of Mainz. In 906, he produced 'On Ecclesiastical Discipline'. This wasn't some long flowing theological text. No, it was basically a HR checklist. When he was wandering about the bishopric investigating the local parishes, he was supposed to ask these questions of the priest:
•Does it have a sound roof?
•Are there birds nesting there and causing a nuisance?
•Is anyone using it as a barn?
•Is the altar properly equipped for services?
•Does it have the right service books? Enough lighting?
•Does it have a good strong door?
Fun, eh? The fact that he needed to ask these questions is indicative of the fact that
1. These must have been at least fairly common occurences
2. The Church wasn't seen as this 'Holy House of God', rather, it was a building that was part of a rural agricultural community. (As well as where the tithes were paid to.)
It gets better though. My favourites are the ones the archbishop was supposed to ask the parishoners:
•Does he live in a place of ill repute?
•What are his relations with the women of his parish? Does he bring women into his house?
•Does he charge illicit fees for religious services?
•Is he drunk? Quarrelsome?
•Does he visit taverns?
•Does he hunt with hawks and hounds?
•Does he carry weapons?
•Has he pawned the church plate?
•Does he wear layman’s clothing?
•Does he neglect to baptise children?
•Does he carry out his religious duties?
•Does he understand Christian teaching, and the mass?
•Can he recite the mass clearly?
•Can he read the Bible out loud and explain its literal meaning?
•Did he obtain his position by bribery?
Again, that he needed to ask these questions is very telling. In a world where pastors bring guns to Church and there is a huge controversy over sexual deviancy in the RCC, can we really say religion has advanced hugely since then?
(It would be a mistake to suggest that medieval Europeans weren't deeply religious; they certainly were. I don't really have the time to go into how Religion was percieved in the Middle Ages, so I'll save that for another post.)
In the period 800-1200, the Roman Catholic Church quietly but steadily gained responsibility for the major events in a person's life: Baptism, Confirmation, Penance ,Marriage (from 12th century), Anointing the dying. The legacy of this is still with us today - especially the idea that marriage is a religious ceremony, - but also as it is a part of a wider struggle in contemporary times to separate temporal and spiritual power, secular and religious power; a separation of Church and State.
I'll close with the different ways different groups responded to this moral crisis in the Church.
Romuald of Ravenna (d. 1027) wanted “to turn the whole world into a hermitage”, to make society ultra-religious and pious. This evolved into what we can see today in the US; Megachurches, creationists and the use of Bible passages by Texan juries when handing out death sentences.
The other responce came from people like the ‘Heretics’ of Arras (1024/5): they rejected the sacraments, refused to accept saints as intercessors and “denied the authority of the church”. (For which of course they burned.) But I would argue that this is important because even then people realised that Organised Religion was primarily a social, political and economic structure and a way of keeping people in line. We can trace the evolution of this realisation that actually the Church isn't all knowing and all powerful to the Protestsant Reformation, the Englightenment and the Age of Reason, and to the First Amendment.
Regino of Prüm worked for the Archbishop of Mainz. In 906, he produced 'On Ecclesiastical Discipline'. This wasn't some long flowing theological text. No, it was basically a HR checklist. When he was wandering about the bishopric investigating the local parishes, he was supposed to ask these questions of the priest:
•Does it have a sound roof?
•Are there birds nesting there and causing a nuisance?
•Is anyone using it as a barn?
•Is the altar properly equipped for services?
•Does it have the right service books? Enough lighting?
•Does it have a good strong door?
Fun, eh? The fact that he needed to ask these questions is indicative of the fact that
1. These must have been at least fairly common occurences
2. The Church wasn't seen as this 'Holy House of God', rather, it was a building that was part of a rural agricultural community. (As well as where the tithes were paid to.)
It gets better though. My favourites are the ones the archbishop was supposed to ask the parishoners:
•Does he live in a place of ill repute?
•What are his relations with the women of his parish? Does he bring women into his house?
•Does he charge illicit fees for religious services?
•Is he drunk? Quarrelsome?
•Does he visit taverns?
•Does he hunt with hawks and hounds?
•Does he carry weapons?
•Has he pawned the church plate?
•Does he wear layman’s clothing?
•Does he neglect to baptise children?
•Does he carry out his religious duties?
•Does he understand Christian teaching, and the mass?
•Can he recite the mass clearly?
•Can he read the Bible out loud and explain its literal meaning?
•Did he obtain his position by bribery?
Again, that he needed to ask these questions is very telling. In a world where pastors bring guns to Church and there is a huge controversy over sexual deviancy in the RCC, can we really say religion has advanced hugely since then?
(It would be a mistake to suggest that medieval Europeans weren't deeply religious; they certainly were. I don't really have the time to go into how Religion was percieved in the Middle Ages, so I'll save that for another post.)
In the period 800-1200, the Roman Catholic Church quietly but steadily gained responsibility for the major events in a person's life: Baptism, Confirmation, Penance ,Marriage (from 12th century), Anointing the dying. The legacy of this is still with us today - especially the idea that marriage is a religious ceremony, - but also as it is a part of a wider struggle in contemporary times to separate temporal and spiritual power, secular and religious power; a separation of Church and State.
I'll close with the different ways different groups responded to this moral crisis in the Church.
Romuald of Ravenna (d. 1027) wanted “to turn the whole world into a hermitage”, to make society ultra-religious and pious. This evolved into what we can see today in the US; Megachurches, creationists and the use of Bible passages by Texan juries when handing out death sentences.
The other responce came from people like the ‘Heretics’ of Arras (1024/5): they rejected the sacraments, refused to accept saints as intercessors and “denied the authority of the church”. (For which of course they burned.) But I would argue that this is important because even then people realised that Organised Religion was primarily a social, political and economic structure and a way of keeping people in line. We can trace the evolution of this realisation that actually the Church isn't all knowing and all powerful to the Protestsant Reformation, the Englightenment and the Age of Reason, and to the First Amendment.
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