A Contestant for Jaywalkers

Any of you watch Jay Leno? If so, you're probably familiar then with the bit they do on the show -"Jaywalkers" in which he interviews people on the street, asks them some questions - usually fairly easy ones about history or geography or trivia type stuff. Needless to say, some of the answers people give to these questions are really wild and wacky to say nothing of being downright dumb too at times.

Well, after a conversation at the table tonight, I think the 16-year-old here would make a great individual for him to interview. Sometimes, I just shake my head in wonder at what thoughts go through this kid's mind, ya know.

Mandy and I were just making general conversation and I don't know how the topic of Easter came up but Kate made a comment about Easter having already passed. Oh really? When did this happen? Mandy informed her Easter is March 23rd and Kate said "Oh, I thought it was about two or three weeks ago." Mandy then told her that Easter often falls in April but sometimes it occurs in March too. I gave her a very rudimentary explanation that it occurs six weeks after Ash Wednesday and it is in conjunction with the moon's cycles and the Jewish Passover so it doesn't happen on the same date every year.

A few more comments went back and forth and Kate then said something about St. Patrick's Day and when is it? Well, Mandy and I both answered together - "March 17th." The look on Kate's face was priceless as she asked "Does it happen every year on the same date?"

Yes, Kate - hence the name "St. Patrick's Day!" One thing for sure, this kid will never make it on Jeopardy or "Do You Want to be a Millionaire?"

I saw in Sunday's Centre Daily Times too that because many Penn State students felt they were being cheated this year since St. Patrick's Day falls during the Spring Break week, they were going to miss the golden opportunity to gorge themselves on Green Beer and make total asses of themselves in the process so, to take up the slack there, they set this past Saturday aside as kind of a Penn Stater's holiday -called it "State Patrick's Day" -so they could drink green beer and become jackasses without being around for the "real deal" on March 17th.

And apparently many of them really succeeded in meeting that goal too. According to the paper, the normal amount of police reports on a weekend is around 80 but this past Saturday thru to 8 a.m. Sunday, the police had logged 120 reports of which the overwhelming majority related to an alcohol issue. One guy even apparently wandered into the high school football field and couldn't find his way back out. Others were arrested for urinating in public, public drunkenness, fighting and the likes of that kind of stuff. Kind of scary you know to realize these people are the future leaders of the country.

Maybe with age, reading about things like this seems worse than it really is - I dunno. I do know alcohol does make a person do some pretty damned stupid things at times though and yes, I am saying that from personal experience too. Kind of makes me feel a bit of a hypocrite to read these police reports and shake my head -asking "What the hell are we coming to anyway?" thing ya know. Is it that police are more in tune to these things now than they were when I was a whole lot younger and a lot dumber too? But over the past decade or so, it does seem virtually any event over around the campus leads to way more violence and destruction than seemed to happen further back in time. Maybe we were just a bit more civilized in our drunken revelry, if that's possible. But there have been many occasions when they had out-and-out riots there with business fronts being damaged, people's yards being ripped up and the responsibility level of many of the students after the fact was a "So what? What's the big deal? It's our right of passage."

Perhaps to some small extent, having fun, a few drinks, etc., is a "rite of passage" but when did destruction of public or private property become something of a fun thing that leaves other people in the lurch, having to clean up the mess, pay for the repairs, and such?

Is there such a thing as "responsible drinking?' Sometimes I do wonder about that.

Somehow, it seems to me there is a connection too between the things the 16-year-old here has absorbed in her mind or rather ignored learning even simplistic things to the actions of a good many college students in their quest to have a fun time.

And then, maybe I'm all wet on all of that stuff too.