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savoirefaire's BLOG
{Wednesday, April 28, 2004 . }

From a forwarded email from a friend in England:
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College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two thousand
hours and try to memorize things. The two thousand hours are spread out over
four years; you spend the rest of the time drinking,sleeping and trying to
get dates.

Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:

1.Things you will need to know in later life (two hours). These include how
to make collect telephone calls and get beer and crepe-paper stains out of
your pajamas.

2.Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours). These are
the things you learn in classes whose names end in -ology, -osophy, -istry,
-ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things, then write them
down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you
become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.

After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to choose a
major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most
things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a
major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers.

This means you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology, or
chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts. If, for example, you
major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class one day and the
professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid
binary axis, and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices." If
you don't come up with exactly the answer the professor has in mind, you
fail. The same is true of chemistry: if you write in your exam book that
carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you. He
wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have
agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.

So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology, and
sociology -- subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else
is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts.

a quick overview of each:

1.ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read
little snippets of just before class. Here is a tip on how to get good
grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that anybody
with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying
Moby-Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say that Moby Dick is a big
white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white
whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is
actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of
reading papers and never liked Moby Dick anyway, will think you are
enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic
interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.

2.PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there
is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in
philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.

3.PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams. Psychologists are
obsessed with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire semester training a
rat to punch little buttons in a certain sequence, then training my roommate
to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My roommate is now a
doctor. If you like rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats,
you should major in psychology.

4.SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away
the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology
courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read
a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered
scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious
observations into scientific - sounding code. If you plan to major in
sociology, you'll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose
you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write:
"Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of
prematurated isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists between
groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behavior forms." If you
can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get large government
grants.
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I know for a fact it's written by some guy in the US (and not my friend) and me thinks...it's possibly completely true!


savoirefaire blogged at 2:20 PM



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