Let’s define “zero tolerance”

 Posted by at 10:42  Down with, principles, rants
Feb 152014
 

The “let the nanny state take care of me” crowd has a tendency to use zero tolerance as a way to protect themselves when they turn their brains off. That would be 99% of the time. Let’s look at just what zero tolerance is.

Back before zero tolerance became the politically correct method for demonstrating your stupidity, it had a very limited use, and was usually enforced only by the local old maid librarian. Most of them had ears like a directional microphone, and were pissed at the world because they had never been kissed, and used that super hearing mostly to punish highly hormonal teenagers.

I’ll swear, the librarian back home could hear you if you picked your nose, and would throw you out. For the library, the upside was it kept boogers off the bottoms of tables and chairs.

Don’t look at me like that! Where else are you gonna put a booger in the library, inside the back cover of a book?

Anyway, these days any little self appointed dictator uses zero tolerance to 1.) Give them an excuse to exercise what little power they have as often as possible, and 2.) Allow them to save energy by not having to think. For some reason, while it seems to be used by everybody with just an itty bitty bit of power, it rears its ugly head most often in our schools.

• A couple of years ago in Cobb County, Georgia (a part of the metropolitan Atlanta area…naturally) a little girl in, I believe, the seventh grade, who was an A + student, was expelled for the balance of the school year for bringing a weapon to school.

The weapon? A plastic 6 inch long Tweety Bird keychain that had the door key to her home on it. Now, if you have at least three active brain cells working at the moment, you have to be asking yourself, “Self, how in the hell can a plastic keychain be a weapon?” Well, a brain dead (and zero tolerance loving) principle, followed Georgia law to the letter and decided that a keychain with a key on the end of it (where else would you keep the key?) fit the legal description of a “flinging weapon”, and kicked the honor roll student out of school.

The principle was thinking along the lines of numbchucks. Personally, I think numbskull is more appropriate.

• Along about the same time in Gwinnett County, Georgia, (yet another suburban Atlanta county)…

Stop right there. I don’t wanna hear any crap about Georgia. Atlanta might be in Georgia, it might even be the capital of Georgia, but it is not Georgia. Atlanta might be 10% Georgians. Everybody else moved in from Yankee land.

Anyway, in Gwinnett County, Georgia another 10 or 11 year old little girl took a very small 1 ounce bottle that had a purple liquid in it to school and told her classmates that it was communion wine. One of her classmates told the teacher, who took the little girl and the bottle of “communion wine” to the principal’s office . The principle opened the bottle (drinking on the job Mr. Principle?), discovered the “communion wine” was actually grape juice…and expelled the little girl for violating the no alcohol policy. He said that even pretending that it was alcohol put the little girl in violation of the policy.

I suppose that means that if two of the boys in school were standing at the water cooler and started joking about getting a drink of beer “on tap” they would be expelled as well.

• Not to be outdone by it’s confederate neighbors to the south, a high school in Spotsylvania, Virginia has expelled another straight “A” student for shooting spitballs in class. Not suspended… expelled.

As a totally irrelevant aside, who the hell would name a town Spotsylvania? Every time I hear that name I get an image in my head of a cross between a spotted Dalmation dog and a vampire, and I don’t even do drugs like our regular reader Hansi.

OK, back on topic. The school has taken a portion of the Federal Gun Free School Act, which mandates that schools expel students who take “…weapons, including hand guns, explosive devices and projectile weapons, to school. “, and has decided that a spitball is a “projectile weapon”.

Based on the three examples above I think my own personal definition of “zero tolerance” is fairly accurate. My definition? I’ll express it in the form of a math problem:

Zero intelligence + zero judgment = zero tolerance.

Down with Evil…

 Posted by at 10:42  Down with
Feb 152014
 

Where ever you find it.

We all know it’s an evil world. All you have to do is open the newpaper or turn on the TV. This Coot tries to avoid the bad news but each day it gets harder and harder. Some days it seems like the only way to protect yourself from the proliferating evil in the world is to retreat back in the woods, away from people. My partner here at Coots, Bob, prides himself on being ahead of the curve. He moved back in the woods years ago, taking the road less traveled and not coming back. He’s been pretty smug about the joys of living away from people in the idyllic Georgia backwoods but lately the woods haven’t been so idyllic. There is something evil happening there.

 

Scientists have long suspected that trees are not so benign and positive as the folklore suggests and lately they confirmed the truth. Trees are evil.

Instead of finding safety in the woods, Bob now finds that he is on the front line of attack from evil trees which attacked his Yurt last night. Communications have been difficult as Bob tries to save his homestead and ward off the attack. He has requested backup but so far is on his own and outnumbered againt the foe.  And Bob’s backyard  is not the only place where trees are attacking. This story tells how African villagers are terrorized by trees.

Elsewhere Coot’s News Service correspondants have provided news footage showing other places where trees have attacked. This attack happened in the Smoky Mountains, not that far from Bob’s outpost.

 

And finally, Coots has obtained news footage from Bob’s local sherif. It is a full scale war. Let’s just hpe and pray that Bab can hold his own and beat those evil trees back.

There are even attacks indoors. It is looking very ominous now.


Attack of the Trees – Watch more Funny Videos

Keep Bob in your prayers.   How are the trees behaving in your neck of the woods?

 

Down with Routine

 Posted by at 10:42  Down with, principles
Feb 152014
 

rou·tine

 noun rü-ˈtēn

: a regular way of doing things in a particular order

: a boring state or situation in which things are always done the same way

: a series of things (such as movements or jokes) that are repeated as part of a performance

I’m just a ordinary guy

but I find that it’s not easy being ordinary. I like my life to be predictable, manageable and, well, routine. It’s the bane of my existence that life doesn’t work that way. Much as I try to keep my ducks in a row or flying in a tight v formation, they scatter and raise a ruckus. I spend too much time chasing down errant strays and calming the fuss and not enough savoring the pleasures of the moment when I have the time to notice them. I start the day anticipating smooth sailing and fall asleep at night tying to figure how to right my capsized ship. It’s frustrating.

Hamlet with Yorick's skull

Hamlet with Yorick’s skull (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So it’s no wonder that I go back and forth about routines. Early in life I decided that by establishing a ‘good’ routine for my life I would find success. I looked around for role models and tried my best to emulate them. Then I went to college and learned that everything I had adopted was banal and old-fashioned and that I should challenge the system and rebel. I embraced the new as best I could and imagined that I had become a superior human being when all I really did was to blindly follow a different lifestyle model. I was still following the crowd. All I can say is that it felt good at the time.

It was many years later

that I actually pondered the meaning of life and began examining my own accomplishments. I started thinking about what was really important to me; stopped imitating and pondered who I really was- and even more troubling who I wanted to be. It wasn’t pretty. I asked myself why I had neglected to form a life philosophy and persona of my own instead of aping the philosophy of people that I thought were ‘cool’. I’d been drifting along in the cultural currents making no attempt to steer my boat or select a destination. Not only wasn’t I very principled in my lifestyle patterns and behaviors, I discovered that I wasn’t someone whom I could respect. I was superficial and shallow.

Trying to grow up as a mature man with career and a family was a struggle. You don’t break old patterns easily. Inertia is a powerful force but fortunately inertia can work as a positive as well as a negative. It is very difficult to fight old habits and create new ones but when you do create the new ones they serve you by helping to keep you on track. As you build the new habits it forms a structure for your life that can help you stay on track.

Along the way

I discovered that what I learned as a child worked better as a routine than what I learned in college. I found that responsibility and hard work was more satisfying and productive than saying the ‘right’ thing. I found that listening to people made life easier than telling them what to do. I abandoned the conviction that I knew the answer to most questions and asked for advice and support. I stopped bullshitting and fence sitting and started trying to do what was right and began taking chances, being responsible and living with my mistakes. At first, none of this was routine but over time it got easier. It became routine.

So these days, I’m boring and predictable.  After many years roaming the reservation and aping the ‘cool’ guys, I’m going back to the basics and the lessons I learned as a child.

Tying to put together the pieces of my life and fix my mistakes isn’t easy but time is wasting.

 

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Equal Opportunity Cantankerosity-The Feminine Side

 Posted by at 09:41  Softer side
Feb 032014
 

We don’t hold with stereotypes here at COC.  The image you probably form when you hear Cantankerous Old Coots is ugly  old  men but you need to know that cantankerosity is more than skin deep and that coots can be any sex.  In other words you can’t tell a coot by his cover and just to be clear, we use  the standard English meaning for pronouns that the masculine pronoun is also the general pronoun.  So if you are paying any attention, you will understand that  Cantankerous Old Coots can be women.  They can take all forms, from dotty old ladies like Miss Marple to something more seductive. You can be pretty and still be a Cantankerous Old Coot.

At COC we want to do more than entertain.  In fact ,our aim is to help each of our readers exercise the full flow of cantankerous potential they possess.  It is our eleemosynary intent to nurture even the smallest nubbin of honesty and help it grow into real truth-telling cantankerosity because that is what we do here at COC- tell the truth when no one else will.

Some of the fairer sex may feel that they must exclude themselves from the joy of cantankerosity because they think that it is just not feminine.  They may feel that indulging in cantankerosity will make them undesirable or unattractive.  To that, we at COC have only one response.  Au Contraire! Just because you feel pretty, you are not excluded from developing the ‘I don’t give a damn about what anybody thinks attitude’ that is the essence of a coot.  Take the video clip below as an example.

Is it just me???

 Posted by at 09:41  Uncategorized
Feb 032014
 

Well ladies and gentlemen, it appears 2013 is here and ready to slap us in the face and or kick us in the proverbial crotch.   It has been 21 days now and despite slow mail and waning finances, 2013 looks to be just as full of crap as 2012 was.  With the notable exception of higher taxes that got signed into law earlier this month.

By now all of our fake “resolutions” should be down the drain and we are plugging along with the same old same old.  So let me ask all of you, are you still working on your “resolutions”?  Is your life getting better or is it the same old drudge with a new date that you screw up writing once in a while.

For some, January is filled with doctor visits.  We have had several because the flex spending renewed and the new insurance is in force.  I am killing time today just waiting to take my daughter to the doc for her tonsils.  That should be a fun post from the hospital.  Maybe they will give me a picture of her tonsils on the table that I can post along with her kidney pictures.  I used to wonder what it would be like to have my tonsils in a jar on the mantle piece.

So, a question.  Is it just me or is this year truly a new start?

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