Dumb and Smarter
Hello. Welcome to the globally renowned Weekend Gene Pool, which was originally envisioned by Benjamin Franklin but took 250 years to fully perfect and publish. As always, we ask you for your thoughts and observations about a subject we bring up, and in return we entertain you.
First, a Gene Pool Gene Poll:
A complicated question today: What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever seen a smart individual do? Or the smartest thing you’ve ever seen a dumb individual do?
Smart individual doing a dumb thing: Barack Obama on TV talking animatedly about how hot Kamala Harris was.
Dumb individual doing a smart thing: That pasty-faced horse’s ass Ted Cruz deciding to grow a beard and it actually makes him look distinguished.
But even better than public cases like these are private things that you personally witnessed. I had a professor at NYU who was an renowned psychologist but who almost perpetually had his fly open in class.
And for the purposes of these questions, and your answers, we can extend the meaning of an “individual.” Here is a story about my dumb dog, Harry:
Harry was in the backyard, playing with one of those five-gallon clear plastic water containers from a water cooler. He was trying to get it to roll down a hill, but it wouldn’t go, because its vertical axis was congruent with the slope of the hill. I watched him nudge thing around for a while until — Eureka! Helen Keller at the water pump! — he had maneuvered it so the vertical axis was perpendicular to the slope of the hill, and the thing rolled. Harry had figured out a fundamental Newtonian law of physics! Then he spent the next few hours moronically rolling it down the hill after nudging it in place, cementing the fact that he was still dumb, but somehow once in his life did a smart thing.
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Okay, please send your nominations to the ordinary orange button for such things.
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See you all on Tuesday.
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Ted Cruz before the beard looked like a flaming asshole.
Ted Cruz after the beard looked like the flames had scorched the hair around the asshole.
“…its vertical axis was congruent with the slope of the hill…”
I get what you were trying to say though I would have phrased it a little differently. Perhaps “its long axis or “its axis from its solid base to its opening.” I also get the sense of “congruent” meaning “the same when superimposed” although “parallel” describes it in a way that correlates to “perpendicular” later in the paragraph.