At least your friends hate you.

Free Bird! Rock and Roll Over! What delightful dreck! You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet!

“Not at all,” Sean replied, “that has nothing to do with it. It’s just that my writing’s not very good for a sober person, but it’s pretty good coming from a drunk.”

Things are different now, and so I wasn’t surprised to hear news reports about a student in Clovis, New Mexico, who brought a homemade bomb almost a meter long to Marshall Junior High. The authorities reacted accordingly; they sealed off the perimeter of the school and surrounded the institution with snipers on rooftops.

After all the hubbub, the culprit finally came forward to turn in his weapon of mass destruction: an extraordinarily large burrito. After the cops identified the miscreant’s bomb components as steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa, and jalapenos, they let Michael Morrissey go.

The story disturbed me. Why can’t I find a meter-long burrito in San Francisco?

“Next year,” the idiot explained, “I’m going to have to work on my math.”

That remark, like most of his other pronouncements, was a lie. The idiot savant is very good with numbers; just ask any rich Republican.

Take George Brown, for example. As the deputy leader of the Labour party in the 1960s, he left a legacy of drunken exploits that today’s poll-driven automatons can’t touch. I’m thinking of the time Brown showed up at an international reception ridiculously drunk. As the music started, Brown made his move by asking an exotic stranger, “Beautiful lady in scarlet, may I have the next dance?”

“Certainly not!” Brown’s intended prey shot back.

“Why not?” asked Brown.

“In the first place, you are drunk. In the second, this is not actually a waltz but the Hungarian national anthem. And, thirdly, I am not a beautiful lady in scarlet. I am, in fact, the papal nuncio Archbishop Mancini.”

They don’t make drunks like that anymore!

Personally, I applaud the move. I think it’s important for children to learn that people in authority can sometimes be nincompoops, and Benton Harbor Superintendent Paula Dawning is serving as a fine example of someone who can’t be trusted to demonstrate a modicum of common sense.

For starters, it apparently never dawned on Dawning that the song’s lyrics wouldn’t be problematical in that marching bands play only instrumental tunes. And had Dawning done even a little bit of homework, she would have discovered that no one knows the song’s lyrics. In fact, FBI agents spent two years investigating how the song might be corrupting America’s youth. They decisively concluded that the words couldn’t be considered obscene, since they were, “unintelligible at any speed.”

Me gotta go ...