Shit I Overheard (or If It Wasn't For My Horse, I Wouldn't Have Spent That Year In College)

A few years ago me and some friends overheard someone saying "Who needs books?" in a mocking/sarcastic tone.

This was in a college.

Maybe they meant paper books, when they could instead get the texts as ebooks? Shush, I'm being hopeful here. Let me pretend that people aren't that stupid.

Maybe they just meant having to pay through the nose for textbooks? My sister sent me an email yesterday thanking me for the Amazon gift card I sent for her birthday, and saying she was probably going to spend it on textbooks. I'm seriously considering sending her another gift card with a note saying "Don't Do That".

It was probably just a joke. College kids like jokes. Or so I've assumed from the popularity of collegehumor.com.

Not to mention that in some college courses (including grad) the books are only there to fulfill some ancient rite of textbookization imposed by the university's leadership upon professors/students. It's easy to see a derision followed by rare grudging purchases coming from that.

I had teachers who told us students (without joke or sarcasm) things like: the book mentioned in the syllabus is optional; the book mentioned in new but please buy the twenty years old one you can find it for $2; the book listed in the syllabus is fake here are handouts of all the things you will need; there is no book in the syllabus because <huff gruff> and damn the school if they think I'm going to change it; there is no book in the syllabus because we use case studies provided by XYZ journal/online resource; etc. By the end of B-school my cohort and I were practically bookless on a per-capita basis (those few with full rides/reimbursements bought books and case studies and shared with all, which is kind of nice to think about coming from MBAs).

The worst, though, is when a professor tells the students essentially "buy this book that I wrote which is the textbook for our class, and don't buy used; I will know".

The best, of course, is when the professor tells the students "Here is the textbook for the class. I wrote it, so if you lose this copy, just come by my office and I'll give you another."

My favorite textbooks are the ones that my professors wrote but are out-of-print, and take half the quarter to arrive.

When I was in grad school we had symposia where instead of textbooks we read stacks of journal articles. This was in the days before everything was available online in .pdf files, so the proff handed us a ONE huge binder of hard copies and the lot of us had to spend six hours at a nearby copy shop making and collating our own copies.

My favorite class in college in terms of materials required a stack of books. All of them were various short story collections in paperback, and they cost about $2 each. The professor explained that it was stupid to require people to buy giant tomes and pay through the nose at the bookstore, because the way he did it you could mark up the margins or highlight or do whatever and not care about resale value.

Also fun: DON'T GET THE OLD EDITION, THAT ONE HAS A DIFFERENT SENTENCE ON PAGE 157. Fucking textbook publishers.

I did not know such a thing existed. It's like when I discovered that my dryer had a second lint trap above it build into the hot air pipe, or like when my college roommate showed me how much better things could be if I dissolved detergent into water first rather than dumping it on the clothes. Do we have a Home Ec tips thread yet?

Liquid detergent?

Was walking to the shops at lunch to buy me some food when I heard this from two guys in the year above me:

Guy 1: That's what I do every night: A nice pizza, stick on some beastuality porn...
Guy 2: *unfazed* Did you pronounce that beastuality? It's beastiality.

Oh man, that reminds me of a dude who used to frequent the electronics shop I worked at. I don't know where this guy got his money, because he was easily the dumbest person I have ever met, and I went to school with Tim Hudak.*

Anyway, at some point this guy got it into his head that the word "digital" was a synonym for "better". So whenever he would be in the store, he'd go around and ask all the salesman about a product, and when they started to answer he'd go "But is it digital? Is it DIGITAL???"

Except he couldn't say the word "digital". I don't think he had a speech impediment or anything, because it was the only thing I ever heard him mispronounce. He would say "digikul" instead of "digital". Pronounced like this: Didge-Ick-Kull. So every now and then I'd know he was in the store because I'd hear him screaming "IS IT DIGIKAL????? IS IT DIGIKAL????"

* Ontario provincial politics slam!

I know you're probably valuing pithiness over accuracy here, but in terms of landlord/tenant stuff, it really depends on the locality. I've directly dealt with several cities/municipalities (on both sides of the l/t coin as well as a litigating cases) where the laws are really quite favorable to tenants. DC is a great example. Now, I have little doubt that the reason they ended up that way is because of scumbag landlords, but there are definitely places now where its relatively easy to be a scumbag tenant without much fear of repercussion, at least for the term of the lease.

Relevant to both the last post and the thread as a whole: yesterday as I worked the reference desk at the public law library where I work, I helped an elderly woman with some landlord-tenant questions. She is a landlord who was having problems with a former tenant who has left stuff in the apartment and owes a rent balance. This woman told me an unnecessarily long story about how she (orally) gave this woman at least two weeks notice that she would have to leave, and then like three days (oral) notice that if she wasn't out by January 1 she would change the locks. And then, when she changed the locks, the woman called the police and made her let this woman back in!

Her explanation for this is that her tenant is one of "these educated black women who know [implication: exploit] all the rules." No, dumbass, your problem is not that you have an uppity Negro as a tenant, it's that you broke the fucking law at least four different ways in the story you just told me.

Although at least she didn't actually SAY "uppity Negro." I've heard worst at this job.

Oh god. Old people stories.

So in the course of my job, I deal with a lot of old WWII/Korea veterans. Like old people do, they love to tell stories and I figure the least I can do is give them some of my time. But this guy today, whoo..

"I'm eighty-seven years old and I was a P.O.W. in Germany. Because my last name is Hermann, they threw me in with the Jewish prisoners. But I wasn't Jewish! Never was! And they made me stay in this room with all of them and then one day the guards came by and told us that the Russians were coming from the east and the Americans were coming from the west and they were abandoning the camp. And they'd been told to kill all the Jewish POWs first. Well, I took offense to that, you see, because like I said, I wasn't Jewish!"

I think I have spent the last five minutes just making the face of disbelief and going "...what?"

I don't know why, but reading that I just picture Dante (Clerks) in a prison jumpsuit, saying "I'm not even supposed to be here today!" as they pull machine guns on him.
Poor WW2 POW Dante.

But Nute, don't you get it? He wasn't even Jewish!!!

You do realise that the US was pretty close to jumping into the war on the German side, right? The US was pretty anti-semitic back around that time, for similar reasons as the German people were.

Pearl Harbour is the major thing that put paid to that.

Unfortunately, the only funny things I've heard recently are only funny when said in the dialect that spawned them (Doric), but I'll keep this thread in mind for the future

CITATION NEEDED.

I don't know about jumping in on the German side--we were trying to stay out of the war in general. A couple of things like England maybe falling and Pearl Harbor kind of nixed that.

One massive step in your corporate lobbying power, I'm afraid. Look up the WWII and Pre-WWII actions of Ford, Rockfeller and others. The German American Bund was really only the radical fringe that got noticed at home - some of your all american trading heroes were greasing the Nazi war machine and lobbying that it should be more overt. Out of anti-semitism.

So... you don't have any actual sources. PLONK.

Internet is being slow and I assumed you'd be.. you know, able to use google. Certainly, that's how it gets taught in Europe, broadly, and we're certainly a lot less revisionist about history than America tends to be, and have a more complete historical education from what I've gathered talking to friends who were in High School in the US at the same time I was.

Really, us Europeans have Roosevelt and the Japanese to thank. Pearl Harbour was the light to Roosevelt's Blue Touch Paper, as he'd been trying to maneuvre you guys into supporting the British (Despite an overwhelming 79% of Americans not wanting to get involved) - Then combine that with the actions of Ford etc, which are easily googleable, and you find a nation that wanted neutrality, had to be dragged kicking and screaming into actually fighting the war (on the right side) and was up until they actually entered the war via Lend-Lease, financially and mechanically supporting the Germans. Plus the turning away of Jewish immigrants at first, etc.

their anti-Semetism and even perhaps their German sypmpathizing is not a new concept to me, but the idea that FDR was about to take us in on Hitler's side when Dec. 7 happened is... Any explanation for Lend-Lease (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease)?

Googling "united states proposed alliance with Hitler" gets nothing. What are you googling?

Not exactly "overheard", but....

At work today, we were hosting a meeting for an action group. At some point during the week, somebody in the group emailed a couple of documents as attachments, and asked if anybody in the group could print them out because he didn't have access to a printer. So somebody else agreed, and brought the pages to the meeting.

Well, sort of. He had printed the screen showing the email, and highlighted the filenames of the attachments with a yellow highlighter.

Roosevelt wasn't. That man is pretty much a hero over here, he literally dragged the US into fighting for Europe.

The backing was mostly financial/material via certain iconic American entrepeneurs. If it had been any other president than Roosevelt, it's suggested things might not have gone the way they did. (Almost certainly wouldn't have)

Hmm, Hitler Roosevelt bff doesn't turn up much in Google.

...that's almost Dilbert levels of dumb. >.<

Either that or the height of passive-aggressiveness.

If what you mean is "Some rich assholes in America were anti-Semitic, enthusiastically invested in and profited from the military-industrial complex in Nazi Germany, and would probably have liked it if we allied with them," then we're in agreement.

Today, I overheard this:

No you didn't and you posted that in the wrong thread.

I don't understand your joke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_Bund

I think he's overstating how likely we were to join the Germans - isolationism was still very strong, we didn't want to get involved on any side. Anti-Semitism was very strong as well though, I just started reading In the Garden of Beasts which highlights just how crazy anti-Semitic people in the US Gov were

http://brokenforum.com/index.php?th...hings-you-see-people-post-thread.2198/page-21

I still don't understand your joke.

And German was almost the official language of the United States.

I'm going to up the threshold for Nute's request for a citation and require a peer-reviewed academic treatise as a fair burden of proof to support your claim about "pretty close."

Sure, many if not most of the US was anti-semitic. It was also heavily anti-catholic and overwhelmingly anti-furriner. And sure, a handful of powerful men were early supporters of Hitler's regime and/or the changes taking place in German in the 30s but how many of them felt that way after 1938 or Kristallnacht?


Some support for the Germans is a far cry from a population tolerating a draft to fight foreign wars in September 1940.

And who would this imagined Pro-Nazy American military effort be fighting? The UK and Canada?

If your contention was true, then the United Kingdom was pretty close to jumping in on the German side thanks to the British Union of Fascists, Sir Mosley, Unity Mitford, and the Duke (abdicated King Edward VIII) and Duchess of Windsor.


If you had contended that an isolationist USA would have been in effect pro-German (by failing to help the UK, freeing German Wolfpacks to do other things, etc., - though timing plays an issue there with Japan, Germany, and Italy forming the Tripartite pack in September 1940 - if Germany was confident the US wouldn't enter the war against them, would they have allied with Japan? If the Nomohon Incident/Battle of Khalkhin Gol were more well known outside the USSR and Japan, would Germany and the Soviets made a non-aggression pact in 1939? Would WWII have been German, USA, and the USSR vs. the UK and Japan? Only Hearts of Iron knows. I'm pretty sure I've played that permutation in Axis & Allies and it was hopelessly unbalanced.), that's a different and less ridiculous point.

Summoning our resident Hearts of Iron expert Lum for more hypothetical WWII alliance breakdown.