Thursday, August 16, 2007

Overheard at TPJ

For those of you at TP Judicial who requested them. Thanks for the laughs and the great memories!

Mr G: "I decided I'd come down and make sure ya'll weren't dancing around fires or anything."

Kyra: "If I was watching me, I would creep myself out."

Mr. G [a lawyer]: "I hate lawyers. None of my friends are lawyers. Lawyers are the most obnoxious segment of the population."

"Maybe if we make coffee like Mr. Echols, we'll act like Mr. Echols."

"I've never made coffee before, but I don't think that's the way you make it."

"But these (party hats) make us look awkward."
"We looked awkward already."

"I didn't realize that I was supposed to be offended by that, but thanks for letting me know."

"What's a motorboat? Is that like a regular boat with a motor?"

Kyra: "Save a monkey. Shoot a person."
Landon: "That monkey will then turn into a person."
Kyra: "Who will then shoot himself to save another monkey."

Kyra: "I see baby seals and then I'm like 'I need a stuffed animal!'"

"You're generic. We can buy you at Sam's Club."
"In bulk. At discount price."

To a chess player: "You're...chessy."

"In Arizona, we're 50th at everything, and proud of it."

"In Ohio we lose at everything, but we're very protective of it."

Emily Smith: "If the whole lawyer thing doesn't work, you can go be a manager at QT."

Kyra: "...but that would encourage grown men to wear sandals in public, and we don't want that."

Erinn to me: "You would look good with angel wings."

Mr. Norris:

"Take the flavor of what I'm saying and not the snippets, because when you take the snippets, it's bad for me."

Unfortunately for Mr. Norris, I took the snippets. Here are the results:

"Are you the kind of person who likes to write outlines with Roman numerals? Well, I'm not going to give that to you. I go all over the place."

"Did you just write that down, and you don't know what it means? Good! You're on your way to becoming a lawyer."

On ethics: "They're ok with stealing the ball, but they're mad because their ball was stolen."

On making assumptions: "Don't you just see how you can jump from lilypad to lilypad, and then all of a sudden it's not a lilypad, but it's a magic carpet and you fly away...?"

On justice: "...Or you could just go and try the vigilante style, where all the good people kill all the bad people, and it's great. Except then you forget which group you're in."

"...the Constitution, which was sort of ratified by sort of most of us."

"If you can dance on the head of a pin, and you do, that's fine, but when your feet start hurting, don't cry out to God, because He's the one holding the pin."

On democracy: "I'm not always crazy about the majority. Sometimes the majority is stupid."

"He's brilliant [referring to his son]. He said, 'it wants to kill me, therefore I must kill it.'"

"If I knew that I danced that bad, I would be against dancing."

Monday, August 6, 2007

Conversation on Wheels

Ever been in a conversation that moved fast enough to get lost in? A conversation that went from philosophy to shampoo at the snap of a finger?

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a large van full of gregarious TeenPacters. For two entire hours. It was great. We went from discussing politics to commenting on garlic in about 0.2 seconds.... and that was just the tip of the iceberg.

I journaled our topics of conversation for about twenty minutes. Here's what we covered during that time span, in the order we discussed it. As you'll notice, we jumped from one subject to the next at a breathtaking speed. Sometimes you can see where one topic led to the next, but at other times even relevance is irrelevant.


Characteristics of the South

Women in the South

Feminism

Political correctness

Garlic in Italy

Seatbelt legislation

The purpose of government

Traffic fatalities

Motorboat accidents

Synonyms for 'morbid'

Mispronouncing vocabulary words

Mispronouncing 'Penelope'

Adventures in Odyssey vs. Homer's Odyssey

The ridiculous conversation we were engaged in

Solutions for disposing of the world's waste (all of them unpractical)

Smog in New York City

How to propel trash into space

Global warming

Global cooling

Al Gore's electric bill

An Inconvenient Truth

The Kyoto Protocol

Polar bears and seals

Stuffed animals

Overpopulation

The Life of Pi

Party hats

Barf bags

Food poisoning

China's equivalent of the FDA and what they're up to

Panda bears

Bamboo

Veggie Tales

Mars Hill

Small towns

The nature of reality

Rene Descartes

Plato

The 'if it feels good, do it' philosophy

"I think, therefore I am" vs. 'I am, therefore, I think'

The upcoming moot court tournament

....and there it ended, because we remembered that some of us would be competing in the tournament. ;)