Kindles, Pointed Disobedience & Creative Minds

My bride Management said something last night about giving me a Kendall for Christmas. I have to say I was pretty upset. Kendall happened to be one of the names we tossed around when we were in our reproductive years.

As much as I enjoyed the brats I think I am beyond taking on another small mind to warp on a full-time basis. The Grand-brats are just what we want now and I don’t want to give them full-time competition. Happily, Management wasn’t saying Kendall, she was saying Kindle. A Kindle is a little computer thingy that is about the size of a book and that will hold every book in my library and have room for more. I can see lots of advantages to them but I still don’t want one.

Reading a book is more than just ingesting the words on the page. It includes the touch, feel, appearance and design and the smell (especially the old leather bound ones). To say that a computer or a Kindle is the same as a book is as silly as saying, “All women (or men if you prefer) are the same.” They vary in size, texture, color and many other ways. I don’t know what you are thinking but I am still taking about books here. Each book is an individual. I seem to remember hearing guys saying the same thing about women but it has been so long ago I don’t remember.

Speaking of the Grand-brat, his mother who is our brat, called last night to thank me for not killing her when she was younger. It seems our sweet and wonderful Grand-brat was told not to put his fingers on something. He did as told and promptly touched it with his toe. We had numerous similar experiences with his mother as did her Grandparents with at least one of their children and possibly previous generations of my ancestors had similar issues. Creative disobedience is not a capital offence, although I often say abortion should be legal from age six to 25 years old or until they move out of the house whichever comes last.

There was once a charming young man who attended a very conservative religious college. That college had an extensive and poorly written rulebook known as “The Book.” The young man shall remain un-named but he may be responsible for some of the genes that created my Grand-brat’s latest problem. He took that rulebook as a challenge. There was a point system with punishments mandated for various levels of accumulation.

For example: There was a curfew in effect at the dorm. A student would receive one point for every minute after curfew he returned to the dorm with a “maximum of 20 points per offence.” This young man soon realized that once he was 20 minutes late the clock stopped. Twenty minutes or twenty hours equaled 20 points. Unfortunately for him, the rulebook could be revised on the whim of the administration, which was done. He received 368 late points, which remains the school record to this day.

That rulebook also listed the use of various items as an offence requiring expulsion. It also listed various items it was forbidden to “possess.” Now according to the warped finely tuned mental processes of our charming young man, there would not have been two lists with different punishments unless the writers of the book intended it. This meant some things could be used but not possessed and others could be possessed but not used, which created some interesting challenges to be resolved. I am certain the entire process was educational and promoted creative thinking, which is at least one of the purposes of a college education anyway.

In any case, when the daughter called to thank me, I didn’t see that my Grand-brat had done anything wrong. I am pleased with his predisposition to challenge things. For the record, my daughter was never in danger of being terminated at that age for any similar actions. On the other hand, we did consider it when she was in her late teens. As Mark Twain said, “Put them in a barrel at age six and feed them through the bung hole. At age 12 plug up the bung hole.”