You Are Dumb - Louisiana

Jingo All The Way

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:50:39 -0500

Racism, 3 July 2008

Memo to Rickie Pitre: YOU ARE DUMB.

And you're a dickhole. A huge dickhole. So huge a dickhole that we could catheterize you with a length of industrial drainage pipe and still have to pack something around the outside to keep it from shifting. There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with you, and I suggest you dig into your psyche and your past and figure out what the fuck it is before you allow yourself to mingle with polite human society again.

Let's place you, a sane, reasonable person, in a... let's say, hypothetical, situation. You are attending a graduation ceremony. The valedictorian, a Vietnamese girl, includes a line of Vietnamese in her speech, and explains it's advice her parents had given her. Her co-valedictorian and cousin also included some Vietnamese in her speech, thanking her parents, who aren't fluent in English.

As a sane, reasonable person, I'm guessing you would think that's nice. As a sane, reasonable person, I'm sure you wouldn't begrudge an honored student speaking to loved ones during that special moment. As a sane, reasonable person, you would have a very difficult time getting onto, and staying onto, the school board in Terrebonne Parrish, Louisiana. Because right after this happened, board member Rickie Pitre and several of his compatriots called for regulating graduation ceremonies so that they will be only in English.

What, exactly, has to go wrong in your brain to make you do that? How much propaganda do you have to be force-fed by racist, anti-immigrant, reactionary nutjobs with microphones and three-hour slots on AM radio? How deeply do you have to internalize the rabid jingoism and the terror that you're being supplanted and replaced by the Other that a few sentences of Vietnamese at a public ceremony force you to take action? And then try, and fail miserably, to justify your fucked-up worldveiw? ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"As board members, we get to observe the different ceremonies and there’s some inconsistencies I think the board or administration more importantly needs to address... I don’t like them addressing in a foreign language. They should be in English." - Richie "Waste Of Fucking Oxygen" Pitre.

First, the obvious. From his sentence structure and word choice, I'd bet that not only was Richie Pitre never the valedictorian of anything, anywhere, ever, but I suspect this whole mess could have been avoided if someone had told him they WERE speaking English, just fancy smart-person English, and mocked him for not understanding it.

But really? "Inconsistencies"? That's just replacing ignorant racism with insane arrogance. You're telling me the school board should step in, on behalf of Richie Pitre and the dozen or so school officials who have to attend multiple graduation ceremonies, so that these officials aren't thrown or confused by minor differences in the speeches and presentations? It's a graduation ceremony. It's not about some redneck school board member's comfort. A point lost on fellow board member Roger DeHart.

"I’m not trying to discriminate against any other language said. We should all know what’s being said." All right. First of all, you actually are trying to discriminate against, literally, ANY other language. That's what requiring English means, you swamp-sucking alligator-humper. And second of all, it's a graduation ceremony. I've been to a few in my time. These people have been to a lot more. Enough to figure out by now that the range of topics covered therein is even narrower than the average mind in Louisiana.

You give me the text of a high school graduation speech from any language in the world, and I bet I could give you a pretty good translation just by looking up the words "future", "friends", "thank you", "important", and "time". They're the E, T, A, O, and N of the valedictorian Wheel of Fortune.

And, you know, this is in fucking Louisiana, where they just now decided that students' academic freedom is so fucking important that they will suffer greatly if they're not told in science class about the evils of cloning and how Jesus rode a dinosaur. Yet strangely, students' freedom gets tossed right under the short bus the instant some asshole hears a word he doesn't understand. Awesome. Way to uphold that reputation.

The Freedom To Be Wrong

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:34:51 -0500

Louisiana, 19 June 2008

Memo to Creationists: STAY DOWN.

I suppose it's too much to ask that a group of people who don't know how old the Earth is might know when to give up, but a man can hope. After two and a half blissful years of peace and quiet while the stupidest people on the planet licked their wounds, they have risen like a retarded Dracula once again, in Louisiana, in the form of Senate Bill 733, which will likely be signed into law in a matter of days.

Senate Bill 733 is full of the latest attempts to get the Six-Thousand-Year-Old Earth into public school curricula. It does so by hiding behind perfectly reasonable language that is difficult to object to at face value, but whose purpose becomes clear once you remember that creationists are crazy fucking idiots who cannot be trusted. ACTUAL BILL TIME!

"The State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, upon request of a city, parish, or other local public school board, shall allow and assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

Who doesn't love critical thinking? Who could possibly oppose logical analysis? Who in their right mind would stand athwart open and objective discussion? Well, actually, creationists would. In classic Rovian jujitsu, they adopt the mantle of what they hate, disguising themselves as a member of the herd so they can destroy it from within. The kicker is the topics they single out for mention. What do they all have in common? They just HAPPEN to be the bits fundamentalists lose their shit over. And how will this alleged open discussion happen?

"A teacher shall teach the material presented in the standard textbook supplied by the school system and thereafter may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner..."

And there you have it. Teachers teach the correct stuff, and then, to provide a balanced view, can bring in pictures of Jesus ministering to dinosaurs and Noah sailing down the newly formed Grand Canyon. But wait, you say. The Louisiana Legislature is an ostensibly secular body! I'm sure they don't have any particular religious tradition in mind when they open the classroom up to dissenting views." And you would be an adorably naive strawman if you did. But the proof of religious intent is right there in the bill itself. Check this out:

"This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion."

There's your proof right there. There are two possible reasons to include this clause. One, that they mean it, and that this bill, promoted heavily by the hyper-Christian whackjobs at the Louisiana Family Forum and the hyper-Christian whackjobs at the Discovery Institute, doesn't promote any religion at all, especially fundamentalist whackjob Christianity.

The other possibility is that the Louisiana legislature, knowing what's happened to creationism and intelligent design in the courts, is stupid enough to think they can survive judicial review if they just mention, in passing, that by the way, we don't mean anything religious by this bill that allows the teachers of a deeply religious Southern state to bring in additional materials on a series of hot-button science issues important to Christians.

It would be funny if it weren't the people of Louisiana whose tax dollars will be wasted fighting this thing all the way through however many appellate courts it will take them to give up. Actually, it'll STILL be funny. It'd just be funnier if they weren't actively damaging a state that has not had an easy time of it this decade. On the other hand, a majority of these people DID vote for Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor who claims to have performed a cancer-curing exorcism in his youth and who, of the bill he's about to sign, said the following:

"I personally think human life and the world we live in wasn’t created accidentally. I do think that there’s a creator. Now the way that he did it, I’d certainly want my kids to be exposed to the very best science. I don’t want any facts or theories or explanations to be withheld from them because of political correctness."

If you elect a governor who's openly vowing to do what he can to avoid correctness, then you're going to end up fucked over on account of being incorrect. See you all in a courtroom in a year or two.

We Shall Undercome

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 09:27:45 -0500

Racism, 28 August 2006

Memo to Red River Parish: YOU ARE DUMB.

Goddamn Louisiana. Now I understand that after Katrina, the state just wants to get back to the way things were before. I'm fine with that. Or, at least I'm fine with it if by "before" you mean, say, 2004. And not, say, 1954.

But thanks to one school bus driver in Red River Parish, we are once again playing that exciting game, Why The Fuck Are We Still Fighting This Battle? It's Louisiana. A bus was involved. For no money and no surprise whatsoever, guess where the black kids were forced to sit?

You've probably seen the news. First the white kids were given assigned seats and the black kids weren't. Then, after complaints, nine black students were assigned the back two seats on the bus, forcing them to sit in each others laps. The school district is not releasing the name of the driver, presumably out of fears that she could become the "Rosa Parks" of the antithesis of Rosa Parks.

Since we've seen this kind of thing play out dozens of times before, we can find the stupidity in the usual places - the excuse, the official reaction, and the apologists. Very textbook stuff for the most part.

THE EXCUSE:

According to the school board's official statement, the driver claims the ludicrous segregation "were the result of problems with implementation of a seating chart for students on the bus which had been established last year and were not an attempt by her to segregate the students on the basis of race."

That is what we in the industry call "plausibility-challenged". Because I'm pretty sure that even if the seating chart were written in encrypted Sanskrit, in invisible ink, on the stretched scrotum of an elderly donkey*, there's no way it could be accidentally misinterpreted as "pile the black kids in the back". I know literature majors who've read less into text than this driver apparently has.

THE APOLOGIST: There's always at least one. And they usually have blogs. Like some dickhead who may or may not be named "Ace" at a blog called "Ace Of Spades HQ". Which is something you name your tree fort when you're twelve, but that's beside the point. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"Okay, I'll give them this one. There may be actual racism going on here. Although, of course, once again there is the overreaction. Not only should this bus driver be fired, critics say -- which is fine and dandy -- but that the entire school disctrict must be examined for racism.

It's a Louisiana school district. Of course it should be examined for racism. It should probably be examined just to make sure 90% of staff can spell "racism". It should be examined to make sure the janitorial staff aren't balls-deep in pot-bellied pigs on their lunch hour. Although I will admit, at least one system-wide solution is ludicrous, as evidenced by...

THE OFFICIAL REACTION: The driver's been suspended. That's good. There's an investigation. That's good. Oh, and all the bus drivers in the district will get training.

TRAINING? What the fuck? Here's the deal. You either know it's wrong to pile the melanin-rich kids in the back, or you don't. And if you do, great. You've passed one of the minimum requirements for human existence in the new millennium.

But if you DON'T know that's wrong, no amount of a guy standing in front of a Powerpoint presentation is going to help. I don't care if the slide showing a happy, integrated bus transitions with a horizontal wipe to a slide with a sad, segregated bus. The back of the bus is American myth, for fuck's sake. Like Washington and the cherry tree, only it actually happened. It's the kind of thing even a functional illiterate with lead paint windowsills can take out of social studies class. We used to make black people sit in the back of the bus, and THAT WAS A BAD THING.

Anyone who hasn't figured that out by now... probably feels pretty comfortable in Louisiana, actually.

*This is the most problem-riddled seating chart I could think of on short notice.

You Arrogant Fucking Pricks

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 11:00:45 -0500

The News, 1 September 2005

Memo to a certain subset of Americans: STOP BEING SUCH ARROGANT FUCKING PRICKS.

There's a reason the phrase "The Ugly American" exists, you know. It's because the worst of us are also frequently the loudest, traveling overseas and shouting at people in English, bombing people, or calling for the assasssination of South American presidents.

You can't have a sense of entitlement unless you've spent your life entitled, and from a global standpoint, we've been pretty fucking entitled throughout our history. And even at a time where we should be a bit humbled and aware of our hubris, with a city of hundreds of thousands under water because we built walls, cut funding, and crossed our fucking fingers, the Ugly Americans are out in force.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by what I saw on CNN. I tuned in out of the vague idealistic belief that video footage collected by real people could provide me with information I couldn't get through wire reports and online text. Instead, I found myself in the Situation Room, watching in horror as Jack Cafferty, someone I'd been entirely unfamiliar with up to that point, introduced his latest informal online survey.

The question? "Should the international community help out the battered Gulf Coast?" Cafferty then followed up with the question with words to the effect that if your answer is "no", don't even bother answering, because OF COURSE they should. Because we always help everyone else out.

The tone of the responses played on air was similar. Insulting France. Insulting other countries. Talking about how we're owed. Cafferty even used the phrase "cashing in a chit or two". YOU ARROGANT FUCKING PRICKS.

Let's leave aside ENTIRELY the fact that on the global scale of haves and have-nots, America is King Have of Havalon. Pretend economic disparity doesn't exist. I think it'd be great if other countries sent manpower and supplies, especially since our manpower in the region is hampered by all those National Guardsmen digging up all those Iraqi chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

But we're not fucking OWED. It's not some obligation we bought with our help during the tsunami and before. We did not help out in the tsunami as some kind of tit-for-tat insurance policy for the future. Or if we did, we're arrogant fucking pricks. We did it, I'd like to believe, because THEY NEEDED AND WE HAD. Period.

And I'd like to point out that as of this writing, we're only about 24 hours in to realizing just how bad things are. No country (including the French, you xenophobic fucks) has even raised the idea of NOT HELPING. Nobody has denied us help. Hell, Venezuela offered its support yesterday, even though the hurricane struck dead center on the 700 Club's demographic.

And if you really want to take your comparative-tragedy, quid-pro-quo, our-turn-now analogy to the extreme, how long did it take Bush to respond to the tsunami? And how long before his token offer turned into something meaningful? But the Ugly Americans are already up in arms, wondering why Paris isn't done rebuilding New Orleans yet.

Maybe, JUST MAYBE, if you think we need help on this so bad, you could cut back on the epithets, snark, and sarcasm? We've got a city under water, and you're still waving your dicks around with tiny flags on the end, making stupid assumptions and stamping your feet.

It took less than a DAY for the first sarcastic letter to show up in the Star-Tribune. ACTUAL ARROGANT PRICK TIME!

"I'm just wondering what kind of aid the United States will be getting from sympathetic countries as it tries to recover from the devastation done by Hurricane Katrina." - The unfortunately named Pat Googe of Stacy, Minn, who sounds like a spoiled prep school girl "wondering" if the pony she's going to get THIS year will be prettier than the one she got last year.

This is how we ask for help. Ready to erupt into a self-righteous, xenophobic rage the instant we think we might get even a fraction less than we think we deserve. I sincerely hope the governments and people of the world will do what they can to help the people of New Orleans, but if they don't, I sure as hell wouldn't blame them for returning spite with spite, and telling the Ugly Americans, the arrogant pricks, to buy some boats, shove oars up their asses, and paddle their own damn people out of harm's way.

Category Five Idiocy

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 11:01:25 -0500

Mississippi, 31 August 2005

It's time, once again, for You Are Dumb Dot Net's semi-periodic roundup of stupid shit said, and the stupid shits that said them: IDIOTS SAY THE DAMNDEST THINGS.

"God's got our back."

No, this is not the slogan of The G-Team, the crack paramilitary squad consisting of Pat Robertson, Michael Savage, Alan Keyes, and Fred Phelps, who take out gay leftist commie Latin American Islamic extremists with nothing but a pickup truck and a welding torch. But it's a nice thought.

Those are the words of 73-year-old New Orleans resident Josephine Elow, as Hurricane Katrina weakened and turned on Monday, managing to only -partially- bury New Orleans in millions of gallons of rain, river, and seawater.

God does not have your back. Or, if he does, he's telling you to GET THE FUCK OUT. This is, I believe, the fourth major bullet the Big Easy has dodged in the past decade, despite the fact that experts have been saying the entire time that if the worst does happen, the Mississippi Delta will turn into a toxic lagoon that'll make the entire area the setting for post-apocalyptic roleplaying games for the next century. And this near-miss still managed to flood most of the city with up to 20 feet of water, kill hundreds, and lead to the complete evacuation of the city. Well, the hurricane and the levee that broke 'cause they didn't fix it 'cause the money got yanked to pay for more people to make sure you take your shoes off at the airport. But mostly the hurricane, and one minor quibbling fact of geography.

You people live BELOW SEA LEVEL. That means that, were nature left to its own devices, all your beads and titties and cajun zydeco jamborees would be BREATHING SALT WATER. Which is fine if your house is some kind of pressurized dome, but a lot less bright when it's just some quaint porches and wrought-iron balconies. If God really had your back, he'd give you gills and mildew-resistent carpeting.

"There is no proof that we are aware of regarding the truthfulness of her claim. We require proof of claims such as this. Until that is provided, our station will not carry this ad."

Your big hint on this quote is the pronoun, "she". Since missing Aruban blondes can't buy ad time, the "she" in question is therefore Cindy Sheehan. Her claim, so painstakingly researched and refuted in the above quote? That George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The dipshit speaking is Paul Anovick, who rejected the family fortune from the rectal fresheners that bear his name to toil ceaselessly as the vice president of sales at Fisher Broadcasting, parent of the Idaho CBS station that rejected Sheehan's ad.

I'm not sure how much proof he needs. They said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Fuck knows, they tried to trumpet and spin and build up every single alleged find and false-positive and twenty-year-old shell in a closet they dug up, but they got nothing and everyone knows it.

Yes, the word "lie" carries with it a certain connotation of intent, but barring the kind of paper trail everyone's learned not to leave since Nixon fucked up, that intent isn't provable. So what we're left with is that if they DIDN'T lie, they were wrong to an astonishing degree that coincidentally was incredibly helpful to them achieving their goals. And if you believe THAT, well, you probably run a TV station in deep red-state potatoeland.

I can't help but wonder, though. Did Anovick use the same kind of strict definition and intellectual rigor when it came time to evaluate the Swift Boat ads last year? On the one hand, I hate to make that kind of speculative partisan argument about what someone may or may not have done. On the other hand, I bet he ran the anti-Kerry ads without even the slightest twinge of skepticism. That's how this always goes down.

"This is our tsunami."

Mayor A.J. Holloway of Biloxi, Mississippi, where upwards of eighty whole people may have died from a hurricane.

Now, I want to be fair to Holloway. So I will not make a joke about how Mississippi's educational system is woefully deficient in the math department. That would be MEAN. I'm sure that Holloway, as a longtime resident of Mississippi, really and truly believes that the loss of 80 Southern, American lives is just as bad as a couple hundred thousand dead brown and yellow people halfway around the world.

So, you know. It'd be wrong to make fun of him for being unable to count.

An Exploration Of Porcine Exploration

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 10:54:19 -0500

Main Column, 3 September 2004

Memo to Austin Gullette: YOU ARE FAMOUS.

Over time, this site has had many potential mascots. Shrimpy McShrimp. The Big-Eyed Taco Ninja. Halle Berry. But today, we open a very special place in our hearts and minds for Austin Gullette, age 45, resident of West Monroe, Louisiana, and an authentic, genuine, documentable, Southern pigfucker.

And not in a metaphorical manner, either. This isn't like when I call Dennis Hastert a complete asshole for trying to insinuate that George Soros gets his MoveOn money from drug cartels. On national TV. The Speaker of the House just casually throwing out libel. Hastert is a COMPLETE ASSHOLE, but I don't mean he is actually, literally, a rectal sphincter without any pieces missing.

Austin Gullette, on the other hand, was arrested for fucking a pig. Legally, they refer to it as a "crime against nature", but the crime was fucking, and the representative of Nature that received unto the fucking was a 125 pound, Vietnamese, pot-bellied pig. And I thought I felt bad when all the gamers went nuts over Jenna Jameson. Imagine living in Louisiana and knowing that one of your own not only fucked a pig, but got caught at it. Probably didn't even get to finish before he had to run off into the bayou, pants around his ankles, desperately trying to call upon his limited mental capacity for some kind of excuse that would get him out of this pigfucking rap, and failing.

I almost feel bad for the South, that's how embarassing this is. I mean, yeah, when I talk about the South, and the inbred pigfuckers that reside there, part of me did believe in a strictly abstract sense that yes, some of them had, when it comes to pork, probably verbed the noun, as it were. But that was abstract. It's different actually reading about it in print. Actually attaching a name to the dick attached to the pig. It starts to seem almost gloating. Almost morbid. Almost... wrong.

And it would stay that way, except that, like a perverted Paul Harvey, you don't know the rest... of the story. See, it wasn't his pig. Apparently, Austin Gullette felt that having intimate relations with a pink, snouted animal was not quite Southern enough. No, he had to have sex with... HIS SISTER'S PIG. Just that faintest implication of incest, like when you make a martini by rinsing the glass out with vermouth. Was it a crime of opportunity? Was his sister's pig the only one he had regular access to? Or was it some kind of sublimated stand-in for his own immediate relative? The world may never know.

It was the sister that caught him, by the way. That's gotta ruin your week. You hear some squealing, you head out into the yard to see what's wrong, and hello, Porky. And the worst part is, the penalty for pigfucking in Louisiana is either $2,000, or up to five years in prison. So either he's gonna be hitting her up for the money to pay the fine he incurred by molesting her pig, or in a few years, he'll be out, and there'll be some REALLY awkward family dinners from that point on. "Well, I'll carve the roast now, assuming Austin didn't have his WAY WITH IT while I was finishing up the coleslaw. Well, Austin? Did you drop your PANTS and have FILTHY SEX with our DINNER?" At least, that's how I'd imagine it would go. And Austin couldn't even get indignant. When you've humped livestock, you really can't ask that people just "let it go".

But lest you think I'm just rambling on, trying to say "sex with a pig" as many different ways as I can, there is one final detail to the story that I've been saving until the end. And that is the pig's name.

The pig's name.... was "P-Pie". P-PIE. It's like the pig was pre-destined to be a euphemism for its own fate! "Austin was gettin' himself a little bit of p-pie in the back yard, if you know what I mean." I hope someone's already snapped up the film rights to "American P-Pie.".

The South has risen again, and its name is Austin Gullette. American. Southern. Fucker of pigs. Welcome to the annals of history, Austin. You've earned it the old-fashioned way. With your sweat, your toil, and your insatiable desire to stick your dick in a pig. In the immortal words of Hee-Haw, SA-LUTE!

Insert Beatles Song Joke Here

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 11:42:11 -0500

Main Column, 14 June 2004

Memo to religious obsessives: YOU ARE DUMB.

I know, I know. How many times can I nail a dead horse to a cross? I do try to wait at least three days between instances, to allow the horse to resurrect itself, but still. On the other hand, punks keep getting up to get knocked down, as they say. Specifically, Southern religious punks. From the lovely small town of Alexandria, VA. Where God works in mysterious ways.

They say that when God closes a door, he opens a window. An enlightening analogy, yes, but somewhat inappropriate-sounding when you're talking about someone's bathroom. You see, in Alexandria, LA, there is a family. A family named Cross. And the Cross family has a bathroom, and the bathroom has a window, and outside that bathroom there is a store, and outside that store there is a light. And when the light shines through the window, which is yellow and frosted, some people say they can see... wait for it... a CROSS.

This has kicked off a bit of a fervor in Alexandria, LA, where schools apparently lump "refraction" in with "evolution" and "human sacrifice" as inappropriate subject matter, and where there is apparently nothing better to do than get yourself worked up into a Baptist frenzy over your neighbor's shitter.

Not everyone sees a cross, of course. Wouldn't want the bathroom miracle to remain consistent. Some people see many crosses. Some people see an angel, and some people see a crown of thorns. That last one kills me, because other than artistic representations, there aren't a lot of crowns made of thorns lying around for comparison. They're not next to the wicker baskets at Wal-Mart.

So you can imagine why I'd be a bit skeptical when, say, Zelma Seals McCoy is quoted as exclaiming "I see the thorns. I see the thorns. God is real."

I know that this column tends to be written from what might be considered a somewhat... secular perspective, but let's assume, for the moment, that the Judeo-Christian god is the one true god, as real as a Hostess fruit pie and twice as nice. What kind of fucking backhanded, half-ass respect do these people think they're giving Him? God is great! God is all-powerful! God has chosen to reveal His Divine Self through a stain on a rock, an oddly-shaped potato, and if that weren't low-rent enough, a LOUISIANA BATHROOM WINDOW. Behold the majesty of The Lord Our God, and don't forget to flush!

Now, if the waters of the toilet bowl were to part, and a bunch of silverfish, led by one silverfish holding a staff, were to then cross the bowl, we might be talking here. But it strikes me as incredibly disrespectful to attribute a vague light effect to your omnipotent uberbeing with such fervor and stupidity. Stupidity as evidenced in the Book of Lambert, verse 24, paragraph 2: "And lo, there shall come a time upon the Earth when the dull-witted shall speak, and their spakings shalt be recorded by a small-town journalism intern, and the recordings shall be posted upon the World Wide Web, and then reposted at a time known as the EPOCH OF THE DIVINE SPAKINGS." Which modern theologians prefer to translate as ACTUAL QUOTE TIME.

"It's shocking to see so many people, people my age, people I went to school with." - Roncey Miles, daughter of the Cross matriarch, and the first to see the cross. Yes, in a small town in Louisiana, many of the people who came to look at a cross in a bathroom window are peole Miles knew and went to school with. It is as if they never left the small Southern town of their birth. IT IS LIKE UNTO A MIRACLE.

"It was so amazing, so breathtaking." - Andrewnette Sampson, leaving me the perfect opportunity to make another "stinky bathroom" joke. But instead, I will take the high road and just make fun of all the names listed in the article, like "Andrewnette Sampson", "Roncey Miles", "Ricky Beauregard", and poor, poor little 7-year-old "Keraneicia Aaron", who is destined to spend her entire adult life sighing with exasperation before spelling out her name a fourth time to outsourced call center employees in third world countries.

If God wanted to work a miracle, he should have shown up in a delivery room seven years ago and saved the poor Aaron girl from her fate. Unfortunately, He was much too busy at the time painstakingly forming the image of the Virgin Mary into a single Cool Ranch Dorito bound for Oklahoma. Hey, he can't be everywhere at once.