A Column that Veers Between the Ridiculous and the Deadly Serious (posted 8/14/23)

Today I’ll start with some of the usual political foolishness, but I’m going to end with a personally scary story about something that happened to my daughter at Oxford after we left there.

First, after lavishing the Scots with praise during my columns on our recent trip to England and Scotland, I now have to criticize them, at least to the extent of acknowledging that their woke academics are as pathetic as our own. 

This past spring semester, the University of the Highlands and Islands gave a ridiculous trigger warning to their history and literature students who were assigned to read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.  The notice cautioned students that the book contains “graphic fishing scenes.” 

It’s been a long time since I read that – it wasn’t my favorite from Hemingway – but my first instinct was to wonder whether I could possibly have forgotten some gross scene that featured a human vs. fish sexual encounter! 

Because it’s 2023, and everything has gone insane. 

But nope.  The “graphic fishing scenes” are just scenes about… deep sea fishing. 

Just promise me that Disney doesn’t get hold of the copyright, because you know that if they remake a movie about that book, there’ll be some graphic fishing scenes, all right.  But they’ll be graphic because they tell the heartwarming tale of a trans-marlin who suddenly identifies as a turtle, and begins a torrid affair with a gay Cuban fisherman.  (Working title:  Broke Back Tortoise.)

Or better yet, the marlin doesn’t just realize that he’s a turtle, but that he’s a FEMALE turtle.  (Working tagline for the publicity campaign: “He puts the “gal” in Galapagos!”)

Seriously though, the proud Scots fought the ferocious Roman legions to a draw, and now they’re going to get their kilts over their heads over some fishing scenes?  They obviously haven’t been eating enough haggis!

In a surprisingly happy outcome to a California story, it turns out that the two Sikh store employees at a 7-11 who did God’s work by playing a little stick music on a career criminal who brazenly tried to steal a giant barrel full of cigarettes are NOT going to be charged with any crime.

While all normal people praised their performance (My review on Yelp, if I knew how to use Yelp: “Best percussion performance since I saw the Blue Man Group!  Two thumbs up!  Encore, please!”) we all feared that some Soros-ion DA would threaten the Sikhs with the death penalty or life in prison.

But the wave of public outcry over that possibility appears to have helped, and now the only one facing charges is the would-be thief, 42-year-old Tyrone Frazier.  

While reading a story about the case in the Business & Politics Review, I learned a few things I hadn’t known about Frazier.  His mug shot showed that his face is covered with bad prison ink.  (I’m shocked, I tells ya!)  At the time of his “let’s take my fists to a stick fight” encounter, he had multiple active warrants out for his arrest.  (Shocked!)  

And best of all, the cops came across him in the first place because HE had called THEM “complaining of pain from being struck by a stick.”   You’d have to have a heart of stone to not laugh at that.  Or at the wiseguy cops, who in their report noted drily that, “Frazier refused to provide further information on how he obtained his injuries.” 

I bet he did.  Because it wouldn’t help his street cred amongst the Biden-voting criminal community – “Now accepting MS13 gang bangers and criminals from all over the world!” – to admit that he ran head-on into a heat-Sikh-ing stick!  (Yes, that’s a bad dad joke, but a damn fine one.)

I paraphrase Uncle Jesus: “Sikh and you shall find… an arse whipping in a 7-11 if you try to rob it!”   (So let it be written.  So let it be done.) 

Turning to my scary personal story…

On Friday I posted the third and last part of my account of our trip to England and Scotland.   (And thank you for all of your kind responses.)  As you’ll recall, we spent the first two days of that trip at Oxford with my youngest daughter Emily, who was taking a summer study-abroad class there. 

We got back from our trip on July 27^th.  (The columns were so delayed because I was too busy soaking up the UK goodness during the trip to write more than anything but notes.)  Because Emily’s course lasted until this past week, she was still in Oxford when we got a call last Tuesday evening from two of her friends.

They were with her in the Radcliffe Hospital there. 

Her whole class had gone punting on the Thames that day, and there had been an accident.  A “punt” is a flat-bottomed boat propelled by a person in the back who uses a long metal pole to push off of the river bottom.  (We saw some Oxford students getting the punts out one morning; going punting is a popular activity for students to do themselves, and to do with tourists to earn extra money.)

Somehow the punter lost control of the pole, and it smacked Emily very hard in the forehead.  She was dazed, and the university chaperone got her to the hospital quickly.  By the time her friends called us, a doctor had been in to assess Emily, and scheduled a CT scan, which she was now waiting for. 

The girls told us that Em wasn’t bleeding and that she hadn’t lost consciousness or vomited.  But they told us that for a short time after getting hit, she wasn’t able to speak, and when the doctor asked what her birthday is, she couldn’t remember it.  She definitely had a concussion, and Karen and I naturally started freaking out.

And then Emily spoke.  “I- I- I’m o- o- I’m o- o- okay.”

And Karen burst into tears, and my heart leapt into my throat.  This kid is a very verbal, fast-talking and whip-smart astro-physics student, and she sounded like John freaking Fetterman! 

She tried to stutter out another sentence to calm us down, and I told her to stop trying to reassure us!

The phone connection was bad, and Karen asked her friends to call us again when the doctor came back.  As soon as she hung up, she got on the computer to check on flights from Orlando to London.  We’d only been home for 4 days, and were kicking ourselves that we hadn’t stayed longer. 

I don’t think the distance across the ocean has ever felt longer to anyone since Columbus set sail with three rickety ships. 

Three hours later we got another call from the girls.  The docs had come in and taken Emily for a CT scan, then came back and announced that the results were “good,” and had released her to go back to her dorm.  But they had been in and out so quickly that the girls hadn’t been able to call us in time for us to speak to them.    

While the CT results were good news, the best news was that Emily talked to us from the hospital room before being released, and she sounded a lot better than before.  She was putting complete sentences together, and even though she didn’t sound like her normal self – “I can’t think of words right.” – she was much improved.

Over the next two days, she made good progress, and we decided not to fly over.  We talked to our daughter the nurse and to the doctors we know, one of whom consulted with a doc who runs a cutting-edge concussion clinic (the advantage of living in a university town with a top-level SEC football program!), and Emily’s recovery was following what they’d laid out as a best-case scenario.

A day after saying “I can’t think of words right,” she told Karen, “I couldn’t process language correctly.”  She had three or four days of wicked headaches and recurring nausea, but her “fuzzy brain” feeling receded more and more. 

The day after the concussion, she skipped her first class but attended her second, even though we and her chaperone had told her to take at least 2 days off, and maybe more.  She swears she has no memory of that, and considering the other holes in her memory, that might be true.  But she’s also a driven and ambitious kid, and I can see her trying to get back to it too quickly.

Oddly enough, when her professor told the chaperone he was surprised to see her in class after he’d been informed about her concussion, he also said that she had made some of the most intelligent comments in class that day.  When we asked Emily about that – after yelling at her for going to class –she said that she’d said something in class, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

The moral of that story: even with a serious head injury, the average Simpson is still smarter than a Democrat Senator from Pennsylvania!

But right after going to that class, she had a headache, and sat on the floor beside her toilet for half an hour, feeling like she had to vomit.  After that, she took direction better.  She slept 15 hours the next day, and then slowly got back into the swing of things.  She still needs to write her two final papers, which her profs agreed to take late, even though the class ended on Friday.

Tonight we picked her up at the airport, and we’ve got her back under our roof, and we couldn’t be happier.  Our daughter is still herself, but with some occasional headaches that we are going to over-react to, even though the docs say they are normal.

For the first time in 10 days, Karen and I are going to sleep well tonight.  I haven’t been this relieved – and politics haven’t seemed less important – in a long, long time.

Still…

Biden delenda est!