15 Reasons The Citadel can still be proud

1. At the school spelling bee, everyone was able to spell misogyny.
2. New “Brown Shirts” look really spiffy.
3. The cadet who threatened to cut out the heart of one of the female cadts recently received a call of encouragement from OJ Simpson.
4. E Company staff showed “90s man sensitivity” by rejecting gasoline as a hazing fuel in favor of more humane fingernail polish remover.
5. It dispelled wimpy Southern Gentleman stereotype by “kickin’ some female butt.”
6. Administration demonstrated extraordinary insight, when in order not to confuse the female cadets, it changed the term “dress” parade to “fancy uniform” parade.
7. Professor Gingrich will be teaching Advanced Hazing 301 again this fall.
8. Once South Carolina has seceded from the Union, Governor Beasley has promised to let the cadets fire on Fort Sumter again—or at least at New York Times reporters.
9. School has single-handedly allowed Charleston to overtake New York in violent crime statistics.
10. Proved emphatically that ectomorphic white guys can “diss” “hos” as well as those gangsta rappers.
11. Self-nominated for Martin Luther King Peace Award for having gone over three years without having a black student shot on campus.
12. Has saved the state a lot of money by instituting controversial “Designated Hazer” rule.
13. Will be the primary film site of Pat Conroy movie sequel “The Louts of Discipline.”
14. Showed spunkiness with adoption of new school slogan “We Bad.”
15. E Company cadets didn’t let pushy females disrupt “Shower Room Disco Night.”

BONUS: Corps claim that “Our coaches can out-drink anybody’s coaches.”

Originally published August 1997

The Answer’s (Not) Leaf Blowin’ in the Wind

September 1999
The Answer’s (Not) Leaf Blowin’ in the Wind
By Bob Coskrey

If I were to list the 100 most ridiculous invention of the last 25 years—and don’t worry, I’m not going to—but theoretically, if I were, at the very top of the list would be the leaf blower.

Whenever I see someone using one, it never fails to amuse me, very often to point of uncontrolled, sometimes inappropriate laughter.

Why do I feel this way? Because of the machine’s basic, nonsensical function: it moves unwanted material from the user’s property to someone else’s property.

If you cut down a 60-foot oak three and, using a tractor, dragged it from your yard to your neighbor’s, do you think he or she might be at least minimally displeased with your actions?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course, but you would be well-advised to check out whether the neighbor has a gun collection before attempting anything like this.

So then, why do people allow their neighbors to blow all their grass clippings, leaves, and miscellaneous other bits of trash into their yards? Simple. Because all they have to do is blow it into another neighbor’s yard, along with their own unwanted material.

The next logical question wrenched from this totally irrational scenario is, where does all this stuff go? Well, unless a neighbor, without benefit of a leaf blower, breaks the chain, this landlubber’s flotsam and jetsam keeps getting moved about ad infinitum. It could even end up back on the property of origin one day.

A slightly different event happens with commercial property. Dirt, trash, animal droppings, etc., are simply blown into the street, where it is hoped, I guess, to be washed by rainwater into drains, but of course what actually occurs is that most of it gets blown by the wind or passing vehicles onto someone else’s property or, as with the homeowners, back onto the property of origin.

Now, you must admit, this whole thing is quite ludicrous. It’s sort of like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” story. Everyone just pretends that they’re doing a splendid job with their leaf blowers and simply ignores the fact that nothing is actually being cleaned up, it’s merely being redistributed.

And what makes this whole self-sustaining bizarre world even more absurd is that the leaf blower operators themselves carry out their duties with such purposeful solemnity. On the homeowner’s level, these guys stand there blasting everything that’s not fastened down to the earth into the street or the neighbor’s yard, not once looking up from their assignments.

I would expect that if a female walked by and made a laudatory comment, the response would be something similar to “doin’ muh job ma’am,” followed by tipping his cap, if he had one.

The commercial operators are even more ridiculous, since they often wear uniforms and with these menacing machines strapped on their backs like flame-throwers, or sometimes resembling the team from “Ghostbusters,” these armies of the absurd attack parking lots and sidewalks with a futile vengeance.

I know that if these things had been prevalent 25 years ago, Mel Brooks or Monty Python would have made movies around them. In fact, occasionally upon seeing these regiments of ludicrous landscapers, I imagine them as jousting knights or castle storming medieval soldiers wielding their wicked wind machines.

And I haven’t even mentioned another inanity: that these people are actually paid for this, sort of like hiring someone to featherdust the Sphinx.

What do we do about this, my fellow Americans? And I limit my audience to Americans because we seem to be the only ones who purchase these kinds of goof ball items, just as we gobbled up moon rocks, hermit crabs, mood rings, lava lamps, and those grotesque little trolls. And I rank the leaf blower with these other awful artifacts, not just on their mutual goofiness, but because they also share another characteristic: total uselessness.

Do we continue this neurotic charade till one day we discover we have such a leaf, grass, and trash buildup that we can’t go outdoors?

I’m sure you’re growing impatient awaiting my remedy for correcting this situation, so I’ll get right to it.

I have two recommendations. We can all decide on which one might be more effective.

My first one is to make the leaf flower into a leaf vacuum with a large bag attachment, of course.

This way you’re not simply blowing away the same leaves, grass, etc., until they day you pass on, or as we centipede centurions say, become one with the mole crickets. Instead, you can create a mulch pile or put it in lawn bags. Like normal people.

The only possible drawback I see would be if some of these young horny leaf blower—I mean leaf sucker—operators might want to, er, “experiment,” as they say, as young hormonally saturated guys are inclined to do. Then we might have an epidemic of severe “groin pulls” or even worse, although many of the latter could find work in the exciting field of harem guarding.

Of course, we could only pray that our supercharged president might get hold of one, which he more than likely would nickname “the Monica.” From the beneficial perspective, it might just straighten out his Peyronies disease problem and Hillary could concentrate on her Senate race. But I digress.

My second recommendation is that we all keep our leaf blowers just as they are, but that we get seriously organized. Rather than continuing this endless cycle of reblowing your own trash, we make sure that the unwanted material moves towards one egress point out of your subdivision, neighborhood, or business district, then out of your city and county, state, and finally out of the country. You would have winding phalanxes of leaf blower operators stretched out along highways and roads moving everything along in one direction. We would not want to pollute the oceans with it, so we’d have to decide on either Canada or Mexico as its final destination. Frankly, I think Mexico is the more viable option, since we might have a little more leverage, considering the NAFTA agreement. Basically we tell them:

“If you want our factories then you’ve got take our leaves, grass, and assorted trash.” If they refuse, we simply build a huge mulch and trash wall all along the Mexican border to keep out all the illegal aliens.

My God. I’m starting to sound like Pat Buchanan, so let me close with a benign third suggestion for the use of a leaf blower.

The amazing hurricane dissipater. The next time a hurricane is heading for us, everybody heads to the coast packing his leaf blower. When its winds are a few hundred yards away, everyone, on cue, flips on his machine and the storm is blasted back into the sea. In fact, if each state cooperated, we could blow the whole thing up to Canada, just so Mexico wouldn’t think we were singling them out.

Well, I guess it’s true what they say about good old American ingenuity, even if I do say so myself.

Please let me know which remedy you favor. And although I don’t even own a leaf blower, as a concerned citizen I want to do my civic duty.

Unfortunately, I will be unable to get this program cranked up right away. I’ve got urological surgery coming up next month. I had this really freak accident with an Electrolux.

Biblioflatus Antiquus

Recently, my wife’s nephew, who works in a store that sells used books, told us another interesting story about one of the many characters who frequent his place. Incidentally, the term “used” when paired with “book” doesn’t seem to be a good fit. I mean, if someone lends you a book and you simply read it and treat it with a reasonable amount of care, you don’t really use it as you would a pencil or a lawn mower, and it gets returned in the same condition that it was received. In fact, if someone wants to read a book that belongs to another, they don’t ever say, “May I use your book?” It’s “May I borrow your book?” Although you could make a strong case for a guy, if he’s forthright, asking to “use” another guy’s Playboy or Penthouse. And perhaps, this is the origin of the term, “second-hand.” Being aware of this important nuance, back in my hormones-run-amok days, I never let any of my friends “borrow” from my vast, “first hand” Playboy collection.

But back to my wife’s nephew, Tom’s story: It’s not surprising at all for a used book store to have oddball customers, but the particular behavior, in this case, was, to me, anyway, somewhat astonishing. In brief, he has a problem with the geriatric set using the store as an unofficial flatulence zone. And it’s not just an occasional occurrence. There appears to be a sizable sample of seniors with this condition, which I have labeled “Biblioflatus Antiquus” or BFA, to save space. To dispel any hint of ageism, I asked Tom if this condition had expressed itself in any members of a younger group, and he answered and unswerving, “No, they’re all in your age group or above;” a reply eliciting a reflexive “Well, you can be assured I would never do anything such as that, not even in the magazine section of Kmart.” After allowing me sufficient time to contemplate the guilt-tinged inappropriateness of my outburst, Tom calmly continued with his tale.

Interestingly, he said these people never evince any recognition of their gaseous gaffes, but simply continue to look through the books or even participate in the sales transactions, showing no reaction whatsoever. Of course, my inevitable reaction to this phenomenon was to ask, “Why is this happening.”

Initially I asked Tom was the evidence both olfactory and auditory, thinking that if it were olfactory only that perhaps it may be a combination of old book mustiness and old people mustiness, having experienced both. The former I actually enjoy, since it reminds me of my early youth when I would spend hours in my grandmother’s attic perusing ancient journals so laden with dust that I was occasionally distracted by a coughing silverfish. The old people odor, which happily my grandmother did not emanate due to the strategic use of “Lilly of the Valley” bath powder, is an essence that wafts pungently from many of our senior citizens and always triggers in my mind the funereal phrase, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and, possibly, is the first indication that that process is already beginning. Tom states that most of the time he is fortunate enough to receive an aural warning before the methane miasma pervades his territory, so we know we’re dealing with the real thing here.

Pointing out to Tom that no one should have to endure this vile sort of treatment, I suggested a couple of ways of dealing with it: 1) Just accept it, but also purchase some remedial devices, e.g., a gas mask (just say you’re conducting a terrorist chemical attack drill) or place a large industrial fan behind you; 2) attack the problem head-on/know your enemy. Have some fliers places on the sales counter that read as follows: “Biblioflatus Antiquus, a devastating medical condition that causes involuntary flatulence in used book store environments strikes 3 in 10 senior citizens. Don’t be afraid. You are not alone. The BFA support group meets every Monday at 8:00 in this bookstore. Please not that even though we will meet initially in the store, the meeting itself will be conducted outside for obvious reasons.”

At least, this way you’ll be able to identity all these individuals, I pointed out to Tom, that he, naturally, would be the group leader. He could then begin the group therapy that might eventually uncover the reasons for this devastating affliction. And even if this is not possible, perhaps reasonable modes of control might evolve such as self-administered or group wedgies or the ingesting of perfume-laced flatus-inducing foods such as Mexican cuisine, beans, or cabbage. Last but not least, should all this fail, you’ll now know who these perps are, which will enable you to utilize the Bush town meeting strategy and ban them from the store.

Feeling all my methods could be a bit too draconian, I finally suggested that Tom try to obtain a book I had just recently come across and display it conspicuously. It’s called—and this I’m not making up—“Cutting the Cheese or A Cultural History of Farting.”

Fortunately, Tom never takes anything I say or write seriously—and neither should you.