If I join the VCA, can I opt out of freshman English?

April is the cruelest month, breeding LDers out of the dead land, mixing golf and debate…

What?

(I was going over this week’s episode of Nostrum last night and realized that, if you’re not with us on our literary references, a lot of this won’t make much sense. If I say to you Miss Prism, and you look at me as if I have a hole in my head, then we’re not playing on the same field. I realize that you’re possibly still in high school, but you’re supposed to be on the cutting edge of possibly still in high school. I read all this stuff when I was your age. Honestly, I haven’t read a decent book since about 1971, what with various DJs forcing me to read what they want rather than what I want. You don’t think I’m sitting there all day reading Moby-Dick, do you? The thing is, I remember Moby fondly, and recall all sorts of things about it, and dredge them up as called for. It’s about this whale [which is a reference to something else altogether, but I don’t expect you to be all that up on your Comden and Green—I’m not that far out of it].)

Anyhow, April is the cruelest month, as the poet wrote (look it up) because in the debate universe, we’ve got one foot in the camp of still at it and the other in the camp of, it must be over by now. It’s hard to keep track of it because you feel like you ought to be able to finally put an end to it. But no, tonight I’ll meet with whichever hardy Sailors show up to discuss the CatNats “soil” topic, and maybe a little hit of Pffft for this weekend, yet meanwhile, last Saturday I played my first (miserable) golf game of the season. I guess folks who religiously (no pun intended) attend CatNats and NatNats and then run institutes don’t get into this idea that there may be a season and we’re done with it, but most of us sort of run out of gas by around now. By August I’ll be rarin’ to go again, but I’ll admit, for now, enough. Add to this the annoyance of sorting out NatNats for the Panivore (since I’m not going, various souls must be traded to the devil), and you can understand the damp, drizzly November in my—All right. None of that!

For the record, on the first page of a Google search for a certain book, you get Moby Dick’s House of Kabob…

Moby Dick’s House of Kabob?

I think I’ll switch gears completely over the next few days and go into WDW mode…