LA en vie

The fast lunch

"Can you explain about lunchtime?" I asked the dean at the first parents' meeting.

"Well, there's no actual lunch hour, but they can usually grab a bite between classes. And of course everyone has at least one free period a day."

"How long do they have between classes?"

"Ten minutes."

Don't know much about geography

"Wait a minute. Are you saying New Mexico is in America?" said the pretty teenager behind me, of friend of A's who goes to one of the top schools in Los Angeles.

"Well, yes, it is," I said over my shoulder, trying to make her feel better. "A lot of people make that mistake, though. A magazine there even has a feature column where New Mexicans write in their stories about how everyone thinks they're foreigners."

"Wow. Since when is New Mexico part of the U.S.?" the girl said.

I tried successfully not to snap. "For about a hundred years."

"Americans are terrible at geography," said A. "Mom, remember that guy who didn't know London was a city?"

"London is a city?" said the girl. "I thought it was, like, a country."

Not my dolphins

Being of a trusting, if not to say gullible, nature, I finished uploading my Louisiana swamp photo onto this blog (I just came back from Louisiana) and then let A check email on my laptop. "You don't need to close anything! I'll just open a new tab."

I went downstairs to watch an episode of 30 Rock (it's so funny!) with the college kids and came back upstairs to see A sidling out of the room, looking shifty.

"You didn't!" I said.

But the deed was done.

Dolphins: A threat to society?

Dolphins, often inhabiting seemingly quiet, peaceful places such as the one pictured above, are considered by most to be the scourge of our generation. In many countries they have already been made illegal, and any dolphin spotted in these territories must immediately be shot and skinned. Consequently, dolphin skin, which had previously been thought of as a rare and elegant delicacy to be served as a topping on the tea and coffee of the world's creme de la creme, is now bought easily and frequently for as little as $1.50 an ounce. Many people think that dolphins are the reincarnation or perhaps simply our century's version of the basilisk, the shrewd and thoughtless snake that slithered its murderous way through the eighties before finally becoming extinct in 1994 (coincidentally, on the very day popular rock star Kurt Cobain died-- a coincidence many have thought suspicious. Did Cobain kill the last basilisk, or, in a perverse way, was Cobain all the last basilisk, who was at the time nearly four hundred years old, had left in terms of hope in humanity after Cobain's demise? This shall forever be one of life's greater mysteries, along with The Princes in the Tower and who really invented the cat.)
In Australia, school children are told that their grades will go up as much as a full letter grade if they can undeniably prove that they have singlehandedly killed a dolphin, and in some cases, have been known to receive medals of valour for humanitaus towards their grand island, which has been particularly infested with the vile creatures.
Sally Barker, 11, from New Hampshire, England, has a different opinion on dolphins than most.
"I really like dolphins," said the little girl, in between bites of her fish and chips. "I have five stickers of them!"
Sally's opinion, however, is wholly unpopular. Sam Rowler, 27, from California, U.S.S.R. tell us of his harrowing dolphin experience in his own words.
"I was sitting on the beach eating an ice cream that I had bought just then with my coupon and then suddenly this great big dolphin came up to me and took it from me, severely damaging my hands in the process," he tells us, showing us his scarred  thumb. Sam, however, is one of the brutes' luckier victims. Molly Gilbert, 34, from Paris, France, tells us of her experience.
"My boyfriend and I were walking along the Seine when suddenly this huge dolphin attacked us. He spiked my boyfriend through the heart with his horn and then he ripped him apart with his venomous fangs. It was horrible. Then the disgusting thing rounded on me, and I though I was a goner for sure, but he simply spat in my face disdainfully and turned away."
Having seen both points of view, what is one to argue? Are dolphins the innocent creatures of yesteryear which we remember so well from our childhood Disney movies, when Ariel and the dolphins frolicked merrily together in the sunny ocean? Or are they the treacherous beasts we now know them to be? How is one to tell.
I, for one, shall not feel safe until Pete Wentz dies, thus safely eradicating the dolphin species from Earth, rather as Kurt Cobain did with the basilisks. But that, of course, is only my own wise opinion.