Rhinoceros

I realize that my last few posts have been lacking in any sort of positive sentiment.  I blame AP Bio and having too much information about plants crammed down my throat for the past month.  My mind cannot take any more of this vascular cambium, procambium, cork cambium nonsense.  (Or the Remainder Estimation Theorem and infinite series, but that is another case entirely.)

The Oscars were Sunday night, and Mr. Morris Lessmore got to take home his own little naked gold man.  Very well deserved, in my humble opinion.

My English teacher is a reedy 40-ish-year-old man with an equally reedy voice and thick glasses.  He wears a suit jacket and tie to school everyday.  His protruding ears serve the same purpose as satellite dishes-they provide my constant entertainment in class at his expense.  He also has copious amounts of body art, numerous piercings, and biker boots.  Talk about a walking contradiction.

Today, we were debating the merits of torture in the American world and fell to discussing (which, in his class, takes the form of him asking his bewildered students obtuse rhetorical questions) a potential hostage situation.  He said that if he were ever to take a hostage, his "unreasonable demand" would be "a hundred thousand dollars and a rhinoceros."  His logic ran along the lines of riding the poor animal as a tank by holding onto its horn.  When I so graciously pointed out that doing so would require him to sit on the beast's face, he quickly revised his getaway plan to include reins.  I asked him if he knew how broad a rhinoceros could get.  His Dumbo ears turned a slightly pinker tinge.  After approximately five minutes of pursuing this lively vein of thought (that actually had most of the class participating, or at least awake), he shook his head (which was now a rather alarming shade of hot pink), ran a spread-eagled hand through his already-wild-from-previous-such-occurrences-hair, and sighed, resigned, "Today's discussion about the use of force in hostage situations has devlolved into a discussion on the physics of riding a rhinoceros."

Well, I, at least, learned something from this discussion: R-H-I-N-O-C-E-R-O-S.