It’s been a wild week in Louisiana, but what else is new? Here’s a summary of just some of the stories that unfolded last week:

• Perhaps the most surprising development was that the New Orleans Saints jumped off to a 2-0 record to start the 2009 NFL season. There was little fanfare after the opening win against the Detroit Lions, who hadn’t won a game since the last Model T rolled off Ford Morors’ assembly lines. However, they really turned some heads by going into Philadelphia and upsetting the Eagles, who were heavily favored despite having to resort to starting Kevin Kolb at quarterback, him being the only Eagles’ passer who was not injured on on parole. Drew Brees emerged as the hero in the early going, already having accumulated enough passing yards to span Lake Ponchatrain. The season is still young, however, so hold off a bit before making those ski reservations in hell.

 

• Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise continues his attempt to RSVP a White House invitation to talk heath care with the President over a few beers on the lawn. Scalese continues to express confidence that they can come to a bipartisan agreement over whther the beer should be draft or bottled. 

 

• The state got yet another failing grade by a national nonprofit group, this time on the quality of education and healthcare. Rapides parish officials respond by urging citizens stop watching television, believing that excessive viewing is a major cause for poor school performance and unhealthy lifestyles. This is expected to do little good, as people have mostly shut of thier sets, tired of seeing President Obama on every channel including QVC.

 

• Following an initial euphoria over the end of the long summer drought, state residents became disillusioned as mosquitoes once again rose from the bayous in vast numbers. Farmers who before could not feed thier cattle on the dry grasslands now face a new problem as they see thier herds being carried off by the swarms. And speaking of pests…

 

• Intelligence agents from the LSU Ag Center report that a new species of what they call “crazy ants” are massing at the Texas border in apparent preparations for a full scale invasion of the state. These ants, they say, form massive colonies with multiple queens and suffer from severe inbreeding, thus making them so crazy. Still, Ag Center officials warn that they are a force to be reckoned with, as they form massive swarms that move haphazardly, much like revelers descending on the French Quarter on Fat Tuesday. Law enforcement agencies in western parishes vowed to set up highway checkpoints this weekend to nab the intruders.

There’s been a lot of controversy here in Louisiana about the new “Career Diploma” track that was passed into law in an attempt to reduce the dropout rate. Many people believe that the track is just a dumbiing down of the curriculum to improve the numbers.

Many school districts throughout the state have asked for waivers because they are not sure how to implement the new curriculum. Here at Road Kill Gumbo we’ve come up with some exam questions for the Career Diploma to try to help these districts out a little.

Here are some questions for various subject areas:

English:

What form of sentence is “Do you want fries with that?”

A. Declarative
B. Interrogative
C. Exclamatory
D. The kind you need to memorize for your job.

History:

Where was the Battle of New Orleans fought?

A. At the New Orleans Arena between Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage in Wrestlemania VII.
B. In Central City between the Voodoo Lords and the River Pagans.
C. At the Superdome between Grambling and Southern University.
D. Uh, somewhere in Iraq?

Chemistry:

You are the pool boy at the local YMCA. You test the water and it contains 3 parts per million of chlorine and has a pH of 6.5. What should you do?

A. It’s all good. Sneak back into the chemical storage shed and finish reading your stack of dirty magazines.
B. Pour a whole gallon of test solution into the pool and watch it turn bright orange.
C. Toss a rubber snake into the pool to scare all of the children out; then call in the hazmat team. Somebody’s obviously been peeing in it.
D. Add ten bars of homemade lye soap you got from your grandmother to raise the alkalinity and clean the pool at the same time.

Mathematics:

You are a carnival worker selling ride tickets. They cost $1 apiece or six for $5. Someone comes up to you and orders eight tickets. How much should you charge him?

A. $7
B. $8
C. $50, including the price for the contraband he really came to buy.
D. Hey man, can’t you just make it easy on me and buy $5 worth?

Geography:

What direction would you go to get from New Orleans to Houston?

A. Interstate 10
B. Uphill (everything is uphill from New Orleans)
C. Sideways
D. Follow the giant sucking sound that started after Hurricane Katrina.

Foreign Language:

What is the meaning of the phrase, “Laissez les bon temps rouler”?

A. It’s the Louisiana state slogan.
B. “Let’s get ready to rumble!”
C. “It’s better to let a ten foot sleeping alligator lie.”
D. “It’s Friday! Let’s go out on the french Quarter and drink hurricanes until we’re so drunk that we can’t remember our names.”

Ecology:

You are cutting the lawn for the Department of Transportation alongside of a busy highway, and you see an endangered species of turtle venturing out onto the roadway directly into the path of an oncoming 18-wheeler. What should you do?

A. Start a grass-roots campaign to have several million dollars of federal stimulus money allocated to build a bridge over the highway so that the turtles can cross safely.
B. Attempt to save the turtle at the risk of taking one for the planet. At least they might name the species after you if it survives extinction.
C. Run over it with the lawnmower. It’s a goner anyway, and this way you’ll destroy any evidence and avoid the possibility of angry protests, saving the state embarassment.
D. Put on a pot of rice and wait for the carnage. It’s road kill gumbo tonight, baby!

Well, school is back in session here in Louisiana. And we all know what that means. Alright, yes, there is high school football. Who doesn’t relish the return of delightful Friday nights where we yell at the coaches for not giving our own fledgling star the ball, thus forever ruining his chances at an LSU scholarship?

No, I am talking about the return of driving through the school zones. These are the zones that lie somewhere outside the space-time continuum- where multi-tasking soccer moms put on makeup, scold Jimmmy for calling his sister a name, and remind hubby on the cell phone to pick up the dry cleaning after work, all while maneuvering through a maze of traffic cones, buses, and crossing guards. I bet any one of them could give Tony Stewart a run for his money on the NASCAR circuit.

The thing I wonder is why public officials decide to build schools where they do. They seem to be strategically located so as to give commuters the maximum amount of anguish. Do they actually plan it that way, or did those places just happen to be where the politically-connected owned land to sell to the school board?

They always put signs in the school zones telling you to slow down to something like 20 miles per hour, although you’re lucky if you could get up to about 5 when you’re going through. The parish can save the money they spend to put up these signs. Instead, they can put to better use by, say, building a new golf course where we commuters can let out or frustrations by smacking a little white ball into a pond.

In my district they even had a dry run last week, as if we had forgotten the hell we’d gone through just a few months prior. The soccer moms were nowhere to be seen for this drill. They know better; they only venture through these black holes when it’s absolutely necessary.

Times sure have changed. When I was a kid, I used to walk to school. No, it wasn’t uphill through the snow both ways like my father used to do, but still I walked. No wonder there’s such a problem with obesity among the youth with today’s 21st Century American School-day Ritual. This consists of prying the video game controller out of the kids’ hands, shoving them into the Ford Expedition, and chauffering them to the front door of the school via the McDonalds’ drive-thru.

Okay, now that I’ve vented, I’ll see you on the golf course, or, more likely, in the woods beside it.

Every year, Princeton University releases a list of the top 20 “Party Schools”. The 2009 version came out last week and, for the second consecutive year, LSU didn’t make the cut. It would appear that things around the Baton Rouge campus have become a bit more ho-hum since 2000, when they topped the infamous list.

Many people, most notably school officials, do not relish the idea of their institution making it onto this particular top twenty. But that is not true for everyone who is associated with the university. Take fraternities, for instance. They’ve got to be really struggling. In fact, the dance floor was practically empty at last year’s toga party at the Tappa Kegga Lagga house. The fraternity seems to have made an unfortunate mistake in scheduling the gala. It ended up being in direct conflict with a lecture by Dr. Hans Kyrghan on the subject “The Genesis and Collapse of Third Millenium North Mesopotamian Civilization,” which attracted a standing-room-only crowd.

This fall, the fraternities may have to pare down Greek Week to Greek Hour-and-a-Half due to lack of participants in key events, such as the “Bobbing for Beers” and “The Hurricane Hurl”. They are also contemplating dropping Beer Pong in favor of the latest campus fad, “Lemonade Pong.”

No, it seems that LSU students are shunning the madcap Greek life for other extracurricular activities such as the glee club, the debate team, and the bridge club. It’s also become much more fashionable to be a nerd, as calculus books, pocket protectors, and scientific calculators have been flying off the shelves at the campus bookstore.

But not to worry, it seems that they’re nowhere close to replacing the homecoming football game with a chess tournament.