Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Funny lines from my final
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2001 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I took my last finals of the semester today. I turned in an extra-crappy paper for my "1939" class, and took my "California Politics" final, and now it's over, the whole semester, the whole year. And I'm listening to Moxy Früvous, and I have all the time in the world to read all this stuff I've been wanting to read, the P.G. Wodehouse and the Martin Gardner and the Gibson/Sterling, and instead I feel kind of alone and possibly just starting down a path of pain and emptiness, so I'll post these funny lines from my final.
Note that I was not setting out to be the class clown of California Politics. I was just emotioned out.
"After apportionment comes redistricting, as after rain the sun."
"Not an election year goes by that the citizenry doesn't vote yea-or-nay on some whack-ass initiative."
On attempts to stem the tide of harebrained initiatives: "But ... there will always be rich people with zany schemes (cf. horsemeat initiative)."
On a proposed scheme to tell voters systematically, via a note in the ballot pamphlet, the probability that a proposition will be found unconstitutional and overturned by the courts: "Voters get more information, writers of inits. get more cautious about writing whack-ass propositions with messy legal implications, and its costs seem negligible. It's a win-win-win situation!"
"... an across-the-board split down the middle ..."
On wedge issues: "Our two-party system requires that each party, like Walt Whitman, be large and contain multitudes -- of opposing views, that is!"
And: "Pete Wilson is the poster child for the use of immigration as a wedge issue."
I'm all right, right now, which is all I can ask for, right? And my friends have been more help than I had realized they would be. Thanks, guys. Being busy tomorrow will help a lot.
Poll: Best Moxy Früvous song on "Bargainville"
- Video Bargainville
- Gulf War Song
- King of Spain
- River Valley
- Stuck in the 90s Again
- Other
Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/5/18/42116/2620
