Possums and Papers

Note : This blog has three types of readers:

1- You. Thanks for visiting! You know who you are. If you don't, ask someone who does.

2- Government Spies. Again, thanks for visiting . You guys shouldn't have fired me. I could have saved you a lot of trouble.

3- People from .edu and .k12 IPs doing Google research for their school assignments*- mostly about possums. I am at a loss to explain this sudden, mad flurry of possum curiosity- isn't school out for the summer anyway? If you do poorly in school, are you forced to spend your care-free summer days doing internet possum research?

I wonder if "possum" is slang for something naughty- none of my new, possum-driven traffic leaves comments- but possums posts are presently popular.


Perhaps the waters are rising. When the waters rise, the possums move uphill and gnaw holes in trash cans, garage doors and power lines, drawing unwanted attention to themselves in the process.
If you've ever seen a berserk possum running down the alley with the bumper of your car in it's mouth, you have probably been curious enough to Google "do possums attack cars"-
but you already knew the answer to that question, didn't you?

You should be calling your insurance company and Animal Control, not reading this.


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*KIDS! If you turn in a school paper that uses this site as reference material , you will get a failing grade.

If you don't fail, you will know that your teacher does not read your work and randomly grades papers by throwing them down a flight of stairs- the ones landing closest to the bottom get the highest marks. This is known as the Gravitational Grading System (GGS) and is a lot more common than you think.

My step-mother, a high-school teacher , introduced me to this concept. She also introduced me to the idea of really cheap-ass red wine that was sold in enormous 'family-sized' jugs. This wine is an important part of the GGS process.

She was fair about it. All the papers were slipped into identical transparent binders and turned upside-down before being hurled downstairs.
This allowed aerodynamic impartiality.
No student ever received a failing grade.
There really isn't much incentive for high school teachers to give students failing grades, but there's a great reason not to: If you fail them, you may have to teach them again.

I was a terrible student, so I always got a chuckle out of thinking about my step-mom's students spending long, painful hours on their assignments , only to have her come home, guzzle a quart or so of wine, say " Fuck it!" and start throwing those precious papers around.

No wonder she insisted her students carefully bind their work- otherwise it would scatter everywhere and be difficult to reassemble. Even the spines had to be a certain color- this helped stack them by class and subject after a split-level grading session.

Twenty years later, I heard she got fired for teaching class while she was drunk- at 7:30 a.m.

This didn't surprise me- but it took twenty years to happen?
That was mildly surprising.