Friday rules; it’s just about everyone’s favorite day of the week, and you’ll all be completely enthused to know that it just got demonstrably better! How, you may ask? Well, inspired by a number of other blogs and/or breakfast cereals (okay, mostly just Count Chocula and his whiny emo kid musings), I’ve decided that from here on out Friday is gonna be Q & A day. So, all y’all have to do is send me questions about anything, politics, science, life in general, Dick Cheney, religion, beef, monkeys, Nintendo games, history, hating Ashton Kutcher, whatever. Leave comments, email me ( ben@teacupmammoths.com ) , tie your question to a carrier pigeon and throw it into a black hole in another dimension and hope that the laws of quantum electrodynamics are kind to you, anything works, as long as it gets to me by Friday. So yeah, start doing that.
Now, I was gonna make this very Friday, today, the first Q & A Friday here at teacupmammoths.com, but since you only learned that I was looking for questions like, five seconds ago, and none of y’all seem to be the right combination of telepathic, time traveling, and motivated, clearly something must be done if this blog is not to wind up way too short. So, after considering and rejecting using a giant font and padding the margins to make it seem longer, I’ve decided to just go to my trusty copy of “The Global Experience: Readings in World History Since 1550,” (written by four random professors at JMU who created it by combining their power rings) and pull out a few of the discussion questions. It is also imperative, therefore, that you send me real questions, because it’s really not that long of a book and I’ll have to start doing reruns in a month or so. This all being said, let’s begin!
Q: What were some of the reasons for the self-imposed isolation of
A: Well Boris, there were a lot of reasons for it. For one thing, Tokugawa was a totally hard name to spell, and after about two weeks of all the other Asian emperors calling him stuff like, Togawumba, Tinyjawa, and Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang, Tokugawa just got sick of it all and decided to self-impose himself some isolation. This had the advantage for
Q: What sort of dissent was Lord Baltimore willing to tolerate? What limits did he put in religious dissent? ~ Cobra Commander, Age 7
A: Well Cobra Commander, Lord Baltimore was a pretty chill guy, as such he had no problems whatsoever with nuns going about with Mohawks or politicians pretending to Ganesh, god of four-armed elephants. He was even pretty cool with Martin Luther and John Calvin starting up a totally bitchin’ garage band (Death Monkey Reformation), as long as they didn’t start cranking it all up at like, four in the morning on Saturdays. And he thought that baboons wearing miters were pretty goshdarn cute. However, anything involving goats was pretty much right out, as were all religions that involved talking backwards and defenestrating ferrets (the Defenestrating Ferrets, by the way, would make a most excellent name for a band). Also, if you had a mullet and Lord Baltimore saw you, he’d just up and beat you like a red-headed stepchild.
Q: Is Adam Smith’s approach to international trade workable in an international economy in which not all the trading countries practice laissez-faire economic policies? ~ John Bigbooty, President of
A: Well El Presidente Bigbooty, I wouldn’t go around trying to steal Adams Smith’s flava like that. I mean seriously, didn’t you ever play Civilization, when you built his thing, your economy totally took off and you could start cranking out space ships and Hoover Dams like some kind of thing that cranks out some other kind of thing really, really fast? And what are you throwing all them fancy-shmancy French words in there any way? C’mon now President Bigbooty, you’re just trying to look cool, but it’s not working. I’ll bet you’re just all angry because Adam Smith wouldn’t put you on his friends list on myspace. Well guess what? Now I won’t either. So there.
Q: Edmund Burke once described Rousseu as “an insane Socrates.” Why would Burke say this about Rousseu? ~ The Right Reverend Methuselah Cheeseworthy Hammer
A: Well Padre Hammer, first let me point out that Edmund Burke never got along with Rousseu anyways, because freshman year, when they were roommates, Rousseu was always brewing merlot in the bathtub and changing Edmund Burke’s screensaver to something involving trout whenever he was off at class. Secondly, he was right; Rousseu was exactly like an insane Socrates. Like, he always used to sit around in a toga philosophizing, but instead saying deep stuff, he’d just compose intricate baroque armpit symphonies about ham. And once, Bill and Ted came back in time to snag him for a history report, but he smeared himself all over with Crisco and they couldn’t catch him. And like all philosophers and other rock stars, he only had one name, like Bono, or Madonna, or Confucius (whose album that he did last year with Hillary Duff totally sucked, by the way). Finally, he was forced to drink hemlock by the Athenian government in 399 B.C, only Rousseu was wearing a clown suit all the while.
So there you go, the historic first Q & A Friday ever here at teacupmammoths.com. Be sure to make the next one easier for me by sending in real questions so I won’t have to mooch more of them from the Industrial Revolution.
