What does this say?

I only know of one person from Wisconsin. I didn't know there were others.

It says we really need to work on our elementary and primary school systems.

I was once witness to an undergraduate course in which the professor asked if the students could think of major wars in which America and England were close alllies; one student responded, "The Revolutionary War."

Oh yes NickFun!

There are several people in Wisconsin!

I knew someone there who didn't know the layout of the U.S. very well.

It started when he told me he had been to Fla once, but couldn't tell me which coast. As we talked somehow Hawaii came up and he wanted to know how to get there.

I told him if he drove West a couple of thousand miles, he would get to the Pacific Ocean..then, if he took a boat and went 3 thousand more miles, he'd get to Hawaii.

He asked me in all seriousness..."If I got there, do you think they'd let me get off the boat and look around?"


OK OK, this has nothing to do with people from Wisconsin...he just happened to live there.


In Okeechobee Fla. I worked at a nursing home...the girl that would take residents out shopping on the bus was supposed to take them over to Fort Worth, directly East maybe an hour... Somehow she ended up halfway to Tallahassee.

She got so shaken up and afraid. Turns out she'd never left Okeechobee in her life, except a few times over to the coast.

Now the guy, he was admittedly a little slow, but I'll tell you what, he could build you a great house for damn sure.

The woman in the bus? She was really quiet intelligent, was up on current events, she just had everything she needed there and wasn't much interested in where other things were physically.

Everybody's different. Wouldn't it be horrible if we were all the same?

Actually, I think it is partially a matter of this student being an idiot. Remember, these kids were in a remedial get-ready-for-college program.

Also, a detail that I did not relate in the story was that the parents of most of these kids elected to send them to the small Catholic liberal arts school -- which was 20 minutes by bus from Madison -- rather than to the State University, which is among the top schools in the country. That 20 minutes made all the difference!

And now, for a geography story from Europe. When my daughter was an au pair in France, and would ride the commuter rail and the subway, she and her friends would attract male attention. In Europe, the first question is where are you from. She would answer Denmark. Many but not all the men would say, "Oh! the capital of Holland!" Ba-da-da-ching!

I used to work with a fellow who had been in the Army in Viet Nam during the "conflict" there. He assured me that Viet Nam is an island south of Australia...

Wy -- That sounds like post-traumatic stress syndrome or sheer idiocy.