#10 – You have to or you’ll die. Who wants “death by fart” in their obituary ?
#9 – It’s fun.
#8 – Someone has to.
#7 – The right fart can rip a hole in the space-time continuum.
#6 – You can blame it on your dog.
#5 – It’d be weird if you didn’t.
#4 – With enough practice you can fart show tunes.
#3 – You’ll explode if you hold your farts in.
#2 – No one has never not farted.
#1 – Even the Queen ofEngland farts.
#10 – “Politics have no relation to morals.”
#9 – “Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.”
#8 – “One who deceives will always find those who are willing to be deceived.”
#7 – “The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”
#6 – “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”
#5 – “If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”
#4 – “He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.”
#3- “Never was anything great achieved without danger.”
#2 – “The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.”
#1 – “When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence and these opinions generate hatred.”
#1 – “With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”
#2 – “There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.”
#3 – “The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.”
#4 – “I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.”
#5 – “I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement. You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.”
#6 – “This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.”
#7 – “It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it. ”
#8 – “I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”
#9 – “All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”
#10 – “Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.”
Ladies, were you dating hipsters before it was cool?
Have you dated hipsters before but you doubt we would have heard of them?
Consult this handy BQB Top Ten List to find out if you have dated a hipster.
Hey 3.5 cheapskates.
BQB here. You might remember a month or so ago, I put my “Big Book of Badass Writing Prompts” up to $2.99.
The theory was that perhaps a higher price would attract the eye. Weird, but sometimes people see a higher price and think, “Well, that sounds awesome! Give me that!”
At any rate, the experiment failed, so back down to 99 cents I go. It’s available on the cheap now, if you’re interested.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Hey 3.5 readers.
I know. I always say I don’t get political on this fine blog. And for the most part, I don’t. When I do, it’s in the name of humor, and I think if you look at my track record, you’ll find that I harangue both sides equally. If you can’t find humor everywhere, then there’s a glitch in your soul and you need to troubleshoot that immediately. Try clicking your inner “CTRL + ALT + DELETE” and then remove your faulty program from your task manager.
I’m happy to hear a debate about how there are too many guns, that guns should be restricted more, harder to get, etc. etc.
However, and get mad at me if you want, but I think schools need security guards. Schools vary in size, but every small town school should have at least one and bigger schools with bigger problems should have several.
I wish it weren’t the case. Take away the school shooting issue for a moment.
When I was a kid in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was chasing interns around his desk with his pants around his ankles instead of chasing down Osama Bin Laden, I recall many a time when I’d be walking down the hall only to see a fight break out. Teachers would run to break it up. They’d get involved, pull the kids off each other, etc.
Teachers really shouldn’t have to do that. If your goal in life is to master a subject and educate students on that subject, then teaching should be your job and you shouldn’t have to risk bodily injury to yourself by having to break up an altercation.
Talk to teachers from all over and I’ll bet there are many with stories about how they were injured while breaking up a fist fight. I would imagine some teachers even get sued.
Keep in mind too that teachers aren’t security professionals. Security guards who are properly trained learn various tactics to use to grab an out of control person safely without, say, accidentally injuring the person by applying too much pressure to a part of the body and damaging a vital organ or something.
I’m not saying that cops and/or guards are 100 percent safe and that they don’t make mistakes, but me personally, if I had a kid and that kid got into a fight, I think I would honestly rather have a security guard who has at least taken a class on how to break up a fight restrain my kid rather than Mr. Smith, the guy who really liked math and became a math teacher.
Not knocking teachers. Teachers teach. And teachers should be in charge of general discipline. Guards shouldn’t be passing out detentions for not doing homework or arresting kids for talking in class. However, when two students get in a fight, the teacher should have a little button he can beep to call in a trained person with an official looking uniform to break it up.
I’m sorry, but Mrs. Jones, art teacher, shouldn’t have to risk getting cold cocked in the face because you think guards in schools might make kids feel bad.
OK. Bring back the school shooting issue. Would tougher gun laws have stopped this shooting? I don’t know. Honestly, the only law that would maybe put a dent in school shootings would be a repeal of the second amendment and that isn’t happening.
This is how the post-school shooting debate usually goes:
DEMOCRATS: Republicans are monsters who care more about guns than kids!
REPUBLICANS: Everyone needs more guns so when shooters start shooting they can shoot the shooter.
DEMOCRATS: We need more gun control!
REPUBLICANS: Name the law you want to pass.
DEMOCRATS: Umm..ungh…
REPUBLICANS: Just vocalize a proposal. What do you want to happen that you think will make school shootings stop?
DEMOCRATS: Umm…ungh…you’re monsters! Monsters who care more about guns than kids!
REPUBLICANS: Y’all want to repeal the second amendment don’t you?
DEMOCRATS: :::look around to make sure no one’s watching, then they whisper::: Holy shit, no! Are you trying to get me thrown out of office?! Jesus, just let me bang my fist on the podium and call you a monster for the next five days and then I can go back to not proposing anything.
Anyway. Confiscate all guns…and maybe there would be less school shootings. I say less because surely one industrious kid would get his hands on an illegal gun.
But, and what people don’t want to talk about, is that the issue runs deeper than guns. High school is a hard time for the young. Kids fight. They argue. They feel wronged by other kids and they feel this wrong is the only thing that matters in the entire world. Some kids let these slights roll off their backs. Some turn to negative activities like drugs or alcohol.
And then, sadly, there’s that one kid who says, “I’m going to get even!”
Take away guns and that kid will probably build a bomb, or use a knife, or a car or something. You’ll probably say the kid who does that might at least kill less if he doesn’t have a gun to use as a primary weapon. You probably have a point there.
The second amendment is a bigger issue than I don’t have time to talk about in detail today. Rightly or wrongly, it isn’t going anywhere. Politicians can throw barbs at each other all day, but a gunless Utopia where everyone solves problems with hugs isn’t coming tomorrow.
Increased security at schools can start tomorrow.
Take away the school shooting issue again. Let’s return once more to the 1990s, when Hillary was really the de facto president and Bill was leaving stains on Monica Lewinsky’s dress.
I was a big kid. But I was a nerd. I was an easy target. Kids who felt they had something to prove would hassle me, hit me, punch me and then they’d brag that they’d got one over on a big kid. They wouldn’t go after, say, a big kid who would actually fight back.
I never fought back. I’d just accept all manner of abuse because I figured if I socked a kid who was harassing me, I’d end up in trouble myself. I figured that black mark on my school record would keep me from my big plans of becoming rich and famous.
Hell, had I known that the best I’d ever do is blog proprietor for a website for 3.5 readers, I might have socked a kid back.
Teachers I turned to for help were utterly useless. Sometimes they’d give me a speech like, “Well, that kid’s home life really sucks and your life is better so could you maybe try to understand that kid has problems.”
I’d usually just nod politely but in my mind I’d just say, “Oh OK. I deserve to be a human punching bag because my parents are gainfully employed and free of substance abuse addictions. Got it. I’ll go tell my Dad to pick up a bottle and then maybe you’ll help me.”
One time a teacher told me to just sock them back. I admire that teacher’s gusto, but again, I’d nod politely and then in my mind, think, “Um, sir, I’m here to be educated. I shouldn’t have to train myself in the ways of kung fu and fight my way out of here every day like it’s ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’ just so I can learn algebra.”
As an adult, do I realize that kids can be little assholes? Yes. Should troubled kids who slap other kids around be carted off to Rikers Island and have their lives ruined? Sigh. Maybe not if the kid can be sat down by the principal and reasoned with. Maybe yes if the kid is making an environment where all the other kids feel like they need to train in the ways of kung fu and fight their way out of school like ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’ just to learn algebra. Even then, probably not to Rikers Island but maybe to some school for difficult children where teachers have training in dealing with problem kids.
The point is, at some point in a young person’s life, they have to learn that there comes a time when rough housing and horseplay and fights aren’t fun anymore and if you lay your hands on someone else, there are consequences. That should start in high school.
When I was a kid, I thought those teachers who wouldn’t help me were lazy assholes. As an adult, I feel like those teachers were probably just people who signed up to teach a subject and didn’t get paid enough to, you know…be security guards.
That’s why schools need security guards. I know that as a 1990s kid, I would have enjoyed school more if there’d been a person in a uniform and a badge nearby to pull douchebag kids off me.
So, to wrap this up. Big picture, security guards might help stop school shootings if they are being utilized to set up check points, make sure every kid has an ID and everyone entering has a legit reason for being there, to search bags and run metal detectors.
Smaller picture, they should also be there to break up fights and to intimidate bullies into leaving nerds alone. Nerds should neither have to suck it up and accept being pummeled is just a part of growing up, nor should they have to train in the ways of kung fu for self defense purposes just to learn Algebra.
Thank you. Commence haranguing me in the comments.
Also please support:
#11 – Big Screen TVs for the Blind
#12 – Blank Screen TVs for the Sighted
#13 – Paper Bags for Ugly Heads
#14 – The Fund to Purchase Prostitutes for Homely Men
#15 – The Cure for Writers Who Suffer from Existential Ennui
#16 – Clubs for Seals Who Want to Club Back
#17 – Butt Corks for the Flatulent
#18 – Pudding for Everyone
#19 – Medallions for Poor Yet Swarthy Motherfuckers
#20 – Butlers for Butlers (Because Butlers Should Have Butlers to Serve Them When They Come Home After a Long Day of Butlering)
Hey 3.5 readers. As you all know, I am a great philanthropist.
Here are some of the charitable causes I hope you will join me in supporting:
#1 – The Center for Molested Chickens
#2 – Fat, Poor Hamsters Who Can’t Afford Running Wheels
#3 – Parrots with Tourette’s Syndrome (“BRACK! COCKSUCKER! BRACK!”)
#4 – Ferrets Who Need Vaping Materials
#5 – Free Chili for Anyone Named Carl
#6 – The BQB Center for Saving Impoverished Single Mothers who Dance One Dollar at a Time (BQB hands out all donations directly.)
#7 – Free Golf Pants for Kangaroos
#8 – Lockable Drink Lids for Women Who Hang Out with Bill Cosby
#9 – The Association for Bloggers Who Tell Dated Jokes, Including Bill Cosby Jokes That Are Too Easy
#10 – Pancakes for Ducks
Bookshelf Battle 