March 1999

So, having exhausted all the possible material for this month's column, I have decided that I will now exhaust all the possible material for last month's column. After all, February was such a potent month, ripe with potentialities of all sorts. Wiarton Willie went to the "great groundhog hole in the sky" last month. Or so they claimed. He actually died sometime during the winter, as his handlers discovered when they went to find Willie and instead found Mickey the Maggot and about 15 million of his closest friends. As fun as it would be to go to the rodeo on that thread, it's not very tasteful, so I think I'll leave it unexhausted.

I could also tell you about all the excitement an average man can have marking 200 calculus assignments a week, but, to be brutally honest, the excitement in that consists primarily in finding who made the most interesting mistakes. It's about 100% certain that 90% of the markers feel 80% of their time that after seeing about 70% of the students get 60% or less on the assignments, one becomes about 50% sure that one is 40% mad to take on such a job, and wonders if perhaps the 30% of their time in which they waste parts of the 20% of their brain that they actually use is worth the 10% of the amount that they figure they should be getting for the 0% satisfaction.

Not that I'm bitter.

Far from it, if it weren't for my job marking, I couldn't afford my rent or my internet access, without either of which I would be incapable of tormenting you as I so love to do. (I'm currently watching French television, which explains a lot of my current mental bend, not that that has any relevance to what I am currently saying, but who ever said parenthetical remarks had to be relevant? Dash it all, if I'm not allowed to be irrelevant in my parentheses, where am I allowed to be irrelevant? I demand that I may [or may not] be granted the freedom to be [or not to be] irrelevant in my parentheses [maybe].) Actually, that parenthesis may have erred on the side of becoming relevant even as it protested its irrelevance, but I'll let you, gentle reader, work that one out for yourself. Really! Enjoy!

What else is new and exciting... other than that my one sister is getting married in the not-too-distant future, and my home is a madhouse with all the preparations starting to grind into gear, not much. Oh, and I got a filling. And it wasn't a cake filling. But, other than that, at the risk of belying myself by means of another one of those nasty parentheses, or, even worse, next month's article, is it for exciting and new things in my world.

Maybe.

"Et maintenant, on retourne à la Soirée d'Hockey."