Keith's Rants

Whiskey!

Seriously, coffee is great stuff. Now, I’m not one of those people — usually fat ugly girls — who claims to be a coffee addict because they want desperately to have the cool mystique of drug addiction without having the guts to get addicted to something really dangerous. Those people usually have a variety of pins on their messenger bags with slogans like, “Dangerous When Decaffeinated,” “Instant Human: Just Add Coffee,” and “Godsmack.” They should be burned for fuel.

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/search/search.aspx?source=searchBox&q=coffee&cfpt2=&copt=&cfpt=

Coffee is good for a number of things, though. Sometimes, it can help keep you awake, but mostly it is good for having something to drink that is not food and has more flavor than water. You really can’t drink soda pop or juice for a long time before the sweetness starts to get to you, but if you like to have something to sip on while you are working or whatever, coffee is just the thing.

There are a few problems with coffee, however. The first is that you have to make it a pot at a time. The only other options are instant coffee — beyond the pale — and those Folgers coffee bags, which are expensive. If you are like me, you probably make a pot of coffee when you get up in the morning — say 5:30 — and have a cup, then let it sit all day until you come home, by which point it has turned to sludge. That’s no good.

Coffee isn’t the only thing you can drink, however. Alex Rock actually can not stand the stuff, and drinks tea instead. Tea has a number of advantages. First, you can make it one cup at a time, so the tea you are drinking is always fresh. It’s also not as caffeinated as coffee, so you can drink it later at night and still be able to sleep later on. Tea is also extremely cheap — like $3 for a big box, which is less of a waste of money than coffee because you don’t have to pour out all that sludge that you can’t bear to drink.

The problem with tea is that, even more than coffee, it has been faggoted up by the thrift store clothed indie rocker crowd, such that it is almost as bad for a respectable gentleman to be seen in the tea section of the grocery store as to be seen in line for “Brokeback Mountain.”

You can tell this by looking at the varieties of tea on sale. In addition to your basic Lipton tea, you have kinds like “English Blend,” which is all well and good, since the English did steal the recipe for tea at gunpoint, and “Irish Blend,” which sounds like a dandy new cocktail. The problem comes when you get into the herbal teas. I wrote down a few of these at work the other day.

First is “Peach Passion.” Needless to say, I’ve never actually had it, but the box depicts a plain looking farm lass leaning against a giant peach in a barnyard, while from out of the scene, a pair of strong arms holds her about the waist, doubtless about to whisk her off for some peachy passion in the hay loft. Not even Roald Dahl could have come up with so weird of thought.

“Wildberry Zinger” is another one. The box has some giant berries on it, with lightning bolts coming out of them. To make your own “zinger” tea, try adding four Sudafeds to a cup of ordinary tea.

“Pomegranate Pizazz” . . . you get the picture.

There’s also Good Earth Green Tea, with a picture of an elderly chinaman with a fu manchu moustache, for those wishy-washy Unitarians who want to worship Gaia while still tapping into the ancient wisdom of the East, all without leaving the kitchen.

A lot of you are thinking, “What?” but trust me, I know what I’m talking about.

Another product I found in the same section is called “Postum.” It bills itself as “The truly soothing hot beverage,” and is made of wheat bran. That’s it — wheat bran in a jar. They apparently drank it during the Great Depression, when coffee was too expensive for anyone but Al Capone, who was drinking other things. It comes in a jar, and you’re supposed to add it to water, or, to make “cappuccino,” to hot milk.

I made up a mug of Postum. It smells like dirt, but comes out with a nice head of foam, like fancy espresso. It tastes . . . not that bad, actually. Certainly better than instant coffee. There’s a certain grittiness to it, which may be because I didn’t do as good a job mixing it in as I should have. It has a kind of sweet taste, sort of like, well, wheat bran. It’s like drinking a muffin. Is it the answer to our prayers? You decide.

On a final note, if the gays can make a movie about gay cowboys, then I should be allowed, with the support of a major movie studio, to make a movie about lesbian field hockey players. It’s only fair. I guarantee that it will be called, “Simply one of the greatest love stories in film history.”
{democracy:19}

I would like to begin today’s rant with a question: How much money was spent in FY 2004 teaching 100-level Anthropology to intelligent, employable adults at private research universities?

It’s not a rhetorical question; I genuinely don’t know. I doubt that anyone knows, since that’s not the sort of thing that people keep track of. I do know this much: the number is at least $120,000. How do I know this? Because in 2004, I took an Anthropology class — Anthropology 102 (Intro to Anthropology). On days when there were tests, approximately 40 people showed up, so I would assume that that was the total enrollment. Given that tuition runs about $1,000 per credit hour, the approximate cost of giving those 40 people an introduction to the subject of anthropology was 40 people x 3 credit hours for the class x $1,000 per credit hour = $120,000.

Let me tell you, it was money down the drain.

As I said before, on the four days when the professor gave a test, all 40 paying students, myself included, showed up for the class. On the other class days, though, it was a different story. I myself went only about once in three weeks, to make sure that the class was in the same room and the professor hadn’t died or something. On those days when I did show up, there were, on average, nine people in the room. Of those nine, on average, one was reading a lecture verbatim from his notes and copying down diagrams from National Geographic on a white board with a permanent marker, four were sleeping, three were reading newspapers, and one Asian freshman was diligently scribbling down notes.

The subject matter wasn’t exactly thrilling, either. Despite having taken the class and gotten an A, today the only thing I know about Anthropology I learned from humorist P.J. O’Rourke, who said, “Folks do lots of things. We don’t know why. Test on Friday.”

So, the upshot is that the class was bullshit. Why did I take it? I’m not an Anthropology major — I’m an Economics major. I don’t particularly care about all of the ingenious marriage arrangements of Tibetan nomads, either, so it’s not as if I took the class for personal enjoyment. No, I took the class because I had to to get a college degree, which piece of paper, in turn, opens the door to a host of other educational and professional opportunities for some reason.

The official reason for general education requirements is to give students broader perspectives — ie, to ensure that some Economics major doesn’t just take 30 Economics and Math classes before he graduates, thereby making the “Bachelor of Arts in Economics” title on his degree signify some kind of limited expertise, but rather that he takes classes in a wide variety of stupid fields, including English, Anthropology, Communications, and Psychology.

I don’t buy that argument for a minute, however. If I wanted to be broadly educated, I would be. As it is, I have a stack of unread books by my bed, the reading of which would have taught me far more than writing the stupid paper about deaf people or Beowulf that I was writing instead of reading them. I have written more and better for Alexrock.com, I honestly feel, than for any English class I have ever taken, but the university doesn’t trust me, so they make me learn this crap, at great expense.

It isn’t just general education requirements that are bogus, however. The girlfriend of one of my roommates last year is a history major who intends to go to law school. She’s fairly bright, so she probably will, and like many pre-law types was just treading water with an easy undergraduate major so as to keep her GPA up. All well and good.

However, one of the classes she was taking struck me as being inexcusably dumb. The 300-level History class was called “The History of Sex and Dating in America.”

Now, using the $3,000 per person figure that we arrived at earlier, I can think of a few alternative options to this class.

a. Feeding ten starving Africans for a year.

b. Paying to put this girl in a first-year law school class, expediting her move towards the legal profession.

c. Paying to put this girl in another History class, for instance, “The History of the Roman Republic,” where she might learn something useful.

d. Giving her $3,000 in cold hard cash with instructions to spend several hours a week learning all she can about sex and dating in America.

Which of these would be a better use of time and money? The answer is “e. Any of the above.”

What am I getting at here? My point is that, while the United States is widely purported to have one of the best higher education systems in the world, there is a huge amount of waste brought about by the inflexibility of a system that compels undergraduate students to take four years of broadly based classes, whether or not they need or want to, before they are considered well enough educated to go on to genuinely valuable graduate learning or paid work in their specialty.

Imagine if we took all the federal financial aid money that goes to enroll undergraduate students in Anthropology classes, and made that money into scholarships for mechanical engineers. Maybe then American cars would work.
{democracy:18}