Oh joy, oh rapture: an email from my young friend at you-know-where.
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Dear Mr. Menick,
We had a very busy day yesterday, and I thought you’d enjoy hearing about it. We really miss you here at DVM; we think you would fit in like a trombone at a Sousafest.
Anyhow, here was our day:
6:00 a.m. DVMers had their choice of 16 different calisthenics programs, ranging from Lockean leg presses (we kick up a storm the old-fashioned way) to Theoretical Tai Chi (campers imagine themselves writhing in unison in a public park to Wu-Tang Clan sing-along hits) to Lyotard in Leotards (which is pretty much what you think it is, but we advise you not to think about it). Calisthenics lasts from five minutes to two hours, depending on the physical shape of the debaters and/or their calisthenics leaders (which is something else we advise you not to think about).
8:30 a.m. Breakfast. A choice of pancakes, flapjacks or griddle cakes was offered at our fine Habermas Havasnak Cafeteria. We recommend that each camper consume at least four buckets of coffee a day, and that they take their first bucket now.
9:00 a.m. Drills. DVM firmly believes that the best LD is a combination of fitness, fatuousness and ferocity, and at our drills we work on all three. We begin in our first sessions with exercises where debaters speak with pencils in their mouths; by yesterday, our debaters had advanced to speaking with other debaters in their mouths. This is known as a Round Robin, and is only recommended for rising seniors.
10:00 a.m. Yeast injections. This is how we make sure all our debaters are rising.
10:10 a.m. Lectures with Lechers. This is a chance for our older instructors to share their wealth of information with the assembled multitudes. Each day one of our senior instructors concentrates on his or her major subject area, sharing the wit and wisdom of three millennia as we study everyone from Plato to Coulter. Yesterday the main lecture, conducted by Opie Taylor, was on the famous Frenchman Zinedine Zidane’s theory, “Apres le tete, le deluge.”
12:00 a.m. (Or is that 12:00 p.m.? They don’t teach us that here at DVM. Anyhow...) Lunch. A choice of heros, grinders, wedges or submarine sandwiches was offered at our fine Nietzsche’s Noshes Cafeteria. Yesterday’s filling of choice was either chicken of the sea or tuna, accompanied by a Name-The-Simpson Trivia Quiz (we provide a famous quote and you have to decide if it's from Homer, Jessica, Wallis or OJ).
1:00 p.m. Labs. Labs are very popular here at DVM. So are terriers and poodles, but that’s another thing entirely. Yesterday’s labs were on how to rewrite cases that were given to you by your coach. As you know, often these cases are completely unintelligible, which, while making them hard to run, nonetheless pretty much guarantees you’ll pick up the ballots of most college students and half the parents (we call this the Emperor’s New Case Syndrome). Our goal is to maintain the unintelligibility (since that’s the element that wins the round) and to work on finding any words that are in Webster’s 11th Edition and selecting substitutes that are either in French, in Latin, or in Wu-Tang Clan. I realize that makes two references to Wu-Tang Clan in one message, but I know that you are a ODB if there ever was one, or at least that’s the word around DVM.
4:00 p.m. Field trip to Urbane Outfitters with Bubba Chutney, O’C and Uncle Wiggly. Yesterday I purchased three pairs of camo pants, two home-boy style denim short pants ensembles, and a pair of $400 Nike Airheads.
6:00 p.m. Dinner. A choice of pasta, macaroni or noodles was offered at our fine Chomsky Chompers Cafeteria.
8:00 p.m. Last night, for any DVMers still in possession of energy, we had a Star Trek film festival featuring a complete screening of the Academy Award winning performances of William Shatner. This meant an early night, with plenty of rest to get us ready for the morrow.
As you can see, we lead a busy and productive life here at DVM. Our website (EnoughAlready.com) will fill you in on anything I may have missed here.
Your chum,
Herman Melville
Camp Counselor
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