A Weekend Cornucopia

A bunch of randomness that may coalesce to form a post:

• I finally took defensive driving, so as to wipe out the ticket that I got on my Corpus trip back on Halloween. It was relatively quick and painless, considering the six-hour length of the class and all. (I took from one of those "comedy" driving schools, and, while it wasn't quite as "wacky" as it was 17 years ago when I took it the first time--evidently, the state has tightened up the curriculum a bit--it was still funny enough to be interesting.)


• Classes like this always offer up an interesting cross-section of humanity. The most fascinating person (at least to me) in our class was a woman who is now a jewelry consultant (she said she "accessorizes people for a living"), but used to race Corvettes competitively a while back. That pretty much covers both ends of the spectrum, as far as I'm concerned.


• There's been an unusual thread running through every bit of the process of this ticket: My friend whom I was following down to Corpus (my Fit Brother, Coop) has the last name of Cooper; the state trooper who issued me the ticket had the last name of Cooper (which would make him Trooper Cooper, and that totally explains why he did not introduce himself in that manner, simply saying "I'm with the Highway Patrol" instead); and the owner of the driving school (who was mentioned by the comedian in a humorous fashion several times over) had the last name of...that's right, Cooper. All I would have needed to complete this charade would have been for me to have been driving a Mini Cooper and getting nabbed near the Cooper St. exit (there really was one, closer to Corpus).


• Incidentally, "Trooper Cooper" gets almost 2000 hits on Google; take away the parentheses and the number rises to 1.6 million.


• After the class was over, I went to see some of my middle school students perform in an all-district concert. One of the pieces that the second band performed was entitled "Don't Feed the Drummers." (The percussion section got to come up front and take a bow afterwards; as the director noted, they often get lost in the shuffle when everyone else in front of them stands up at the end of a piece.)


• It's amusing to watch the audience at a middle school concert, since many of the kids have siblings who are elementary-age or younger. Just like when one of my college combos played on campus last month, a lot of dancing took place during the concert; the kid who was mimicking the conductor while doing so was the funniest.


• Moving on to the world of sports: The Dallas Morning News' Tim Cowlishaw says, in his column from this morning's paper, that the BCS system "worked" this year. I'm betting that fans of Texas and Utah might be inclined to disagree...


• And I suppose you may have heard which industry is now asking for a government bailout--that's right, the porn industry. (I'm pretty sure they're kidding, by the way, but you never know these days.) But if it's true, would anyone really want government part-ownership of porn??

I'll try to catch up on some unfinished posts tomorrow and link them on the frontpage.