Weeellll, Aaallrighty then...

Every so often, I have a day where I'm about half convinced that I've boarded the express and headed straight toward Crazytown. People say things to me, both in person and in print, that make me wonder just exactly what they've been smoking, or whether they realize just how absurd they've made themselves to look. I mean, I look at their argument (if they're making an argument), or whatever else it is they've said, and I want to say something like, "You do realize that no one has actually made the argument to which you're apparently responding, don't you?" Or, "Ummmmm--have you noticed that your answer actually has nothing to do with the question I asked?"

I'm not talking about one of the local lib blogs (not you, Dave...), where that sort of thing is a daily occurrence. I'm talking about people that I know to be ordinarily sane and reasonably intelligent, for whom that sort of thing is something of a departure from their normal behavior. It's weird, like perfectly normal people have, en masse, all woken up jist completely ate up with the dumb-butt, knowwhatuhmean?

Why do so many of them have to do it on the same day? That's what I keep wondering.

Oh, and if anyone's interested, if I ask you what style you're studying, and you say, "Karate," most of the time, what that actually tells me is that you don't know what style you're studying, which is weird, 'cause in my experience, it is usually quite difficult to make it through your first whole lesson without being told what style or system of karate it is, at least in this country, I mean, there are about a bajillion of 'em, an' each an' every one of them is pretty much convinced that theirs is the best--which really makes me wonder about other things...

I mean, it doesn't bother me, so much as it makes me think that maybe you've wandered into one of those (spicy sentence enhancer of your choice) McDojos where you're not actually going to learn "karate" so much as you are going to be taught how to win trophies with foam pads and chrome-plated "weapons" whilst calling it "karate." And then you're going to say the wrong thing to the wrong person and get your bohiney kicked, and you're going to tell me that "karate" is not really good for self-defense.

Just sayin', y'know?