The whisper of the axe

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Inspired by someone on my flist exercising caution based on experience and thus not dying in a horrible car wreck]

The closest I've ever come to just being flat-out no take-backs killed involved the route I took home from grade one. We lived in the tutor's residences on Columbia Street. My school was five or six blocks away up Columbia [1] and there were train tracks about a third of the way from home to school. One day I was walking home, tripped just short of the tracks and as I stood back up, a train came through. I could have covered the distance between me and the tracks in the time it took me to get up.



1: Or much longer via a "short cut" I discovered, which looped all around UW campus and took me by the Tuck Shop in V1 (which was only useful if I'd remembered to hide my money: the teacher used to confiscate any loose change the kids had for some charity or other].

Comments

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm, interesting train of thought! (Why, yes, I do crack me up.)

I fell out of attic once -- fell right between a heavy oak chair and a bicycle. Had I hit either of those things, I think I would have gotten broken.

Of course, most of us probably have narrow escapes all the day that we'll never know about. The alternate route, the long stop light, the unplanned stop at the store -- who knows what they save us from?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

One of my brother's ex-bosses once jogged through a stand-off between armed robbers in a building on one side and armed cops behind cars on the other. I guess it didn't occur to the cops to block off both ends of the street where the siege was happening.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

My dad once got off the streetcar and stepped right into a standoff between the police and a rooftop sniper.

The police had blocked off car traffic but let the transit vehicles go through.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

One of my old customers walked into a bank that was being held up, used the bank machine and then walked out, where he was grabbed and hauled off to safety by the cops. The guys with guns in the bank apparently just stood there waiting for him to notice the masks and guns, which he didn't.

[kuangning]

Did your parents know about the teacher taking your money? Because giving voluntarily is a far cry from a flat out demand of "I'm going to take your loose change now."

[abidemi.livejournal.com]

Not that I don't care for James's health, but this was the part of the post that got most of my attention.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Obviously I am basing this on a small sample but it seems to me that the fraction of teachers who were, well, loons or otherwise total crap at their job was higher in the 1960s than the 1970s.

I remember Mr. Ferguson, my music teacher in high school, talking about his days as a supervisor out east back in the olden days when anyone could get a job teaching up to one grade below the highest one had graduated from. He said once walked in on a teacher writing something like this on the black board:

2/7 + 1/3 = 3/10

[kuangning]

... I do not even know what thought process makes that possible. 1/3 is, all by itself, just a little more than 3/10, so why would adding 2/7 to that ever add up to 3/10?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's obvious: 2 + 1 = 3 and 7 + 3 = 10. The teacher also didn't have any kind of feel for what fractions represent.

If the kids were lucky, it was not the kind of teacher who sees a correction as an attack. I well remember the heated disagreement I had with my grade four teacher over whether millipedes literally have one thousand legs or not, which is what led to me dumping a bag of them on her desk so we could count legs together.

It's probably a good idea to precede dumping a bag of millipedes on someone's desk with a phrase like " I am about to dump a bag of millipedes on your desk."

[kuangning]

*laughs.* Yes, I would imagine so.

[mr-mediocre.livejournal.com]

One grade five teacher insisted that the street I lived on was not Poplar but Popular. I don't recall any particular consequences of our disagreement other than annoyance, doubtless mutual. A couple of years later I had to haul in an encyclopedia to get my science teacher to grudgingly admit that he'd been wrong about the definition of some term - "blue baby" IIRC.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

No, it didn't occur to me that teachers weren't allowed to do that.

[kuangning]

I admit, I'm probably picking up on this more because I'm still fuming over a post someone made yesterday laughing about the the fact that a child had been locked in a room at school for two days with no supervision. He fell asleep on the floor the second day. The assistant principal walked by, did not see him, did not check on him, and he woke up on his own after the buses had all gone. To the teacher posting, this was apparently hilarious.

Me, I can only imagine him having a seizure or an allergic reaction in that room by himself with no-one to care. So I'm a bit rampage-y about teachers being mean to children because they know kids can't do anything about it. I really hope someone found out and that teacher got what was coming to him/her.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I don't think the teacher was being mean so much as guiding kids firmly in a direction they'd have chosen of their own free will if only they were not self-centered snot-nosed kids. Spending money on self = spoiled but giving money to charity = virtue.

[kuangning]

*grumbles.* Involuntary charity isn't. If I clean out my fiance's bank account and give it all to third-world children, I'm still a thief. The rules don't change just because the victims are too young to know they can complain/say no.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It was the 1960s. The rules were different back then.

[kuangning]

This is true.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Or they were communists enforcing collectivism.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Ontario in the 1960s does not strike me as a likely place for a communist to get a job teaching.

I don't recall any from the 1970s although maybe that was just my schools being fairly conservative. I remember in the early 1970s when my father offered to have one of his Indian grads come in [1] to talk to the World Religions Class about what being Hindu is like, that was firmly rejected as going Too Far. Theory was fine but actual contact was out of the question.

That was in my brother's time. In mine, I think it would have been OK or at least the staff had been trained to curl up in a ball and cup their testicles during certain kinds of debates involving a Nicoll.


1: I will assume the grad in question actually wanted to come in to talk about what being a Hindu was like and also that Bill would have checked to make sure they were in fact a Hindu.

[kiya]

or at least the staff had been trained to curl up in a ball and cup their testicles during certain kinds of debates involving a Nicoll.

I am reminded, perhaps a wee bit tangentially, of something my father was asked by one of his TAs in college.

"Mr. Nicoll -- how can you be so convincing and so wrong?"

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I am sure if I mentioned it to my father, he'd have had a chat with the teacher. He had a keen grasp of the difference between people who are Nicolls and people who are not Nicolls and there was a real limit to the crap people in the second category were allowed to pull on people in the first.

I remember in high school we had for some reason to bring in letters from our parents acknowledging this or that, which Bill felt was a waste of his time. He had everyone in the family write identical letters asking the principal if he could tell which one letter was the real one, because if they couldn't he was just going have us handle the letters from now on.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, and don't get me started on how people in positions of authority reacted to us calling our parents by their names(That was my older brother's fault. He asked Bill why it was necessary to call him "dad" or Lorna "mom" and since Bill couldn't think of a logical reason, none of us ever had to use anything but their names after that). We knew who they were to us and who cares if outsiders were confused?

[kuangning]

That's *awesome.* I wish my parents had been that logical; we, as children of traditional West Indian parents, got raised on the "because I said so" and "if you don't stop crying I'll give you something to cry for" model of child-rearing.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Bill also did that all the time. It depended on how much reaction time you gave him when confronting him with a new idea.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

For all the Nicol-esque accidents I've had in life, alas (?) my closest encounter with the Reaper's scythe came from a boring-old case of food poisoning courtesy of tainted custard in a Napoleon/mille-feuille pastry.

-- Steve's taken food safety very seriously ever since.

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

When I was in university, I learned from painful experience that, while cutting off the moldy section of cheese and eating the rest is perfectly OK, doing the same for bacon is NOT.

Luckily, I was OK after 24 hours. My boss referred to me as Lucrezia for the next week (I had to explain why I took an unexpected day off sick).

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Did you get the bacon mould(!!) tested to find out what was causing it?

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

I'm actually just deeply curious about how the hell anything can grow on bacon in the first place - seriously, I wouldn't mind so much but I now must replicate this bacon mould somehow.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

And just in case you didn't know, you can't take mold off bread and eat the rest, either.

[outerego.livejournal.com]

I had a similar experience with a train in Germany.

I was wandering around town, a little lost. I stopped to get my bearings and looked back the way I came from, then turned around to forge on when out of nowhere a train shot by, missing me by an arms length. A very big, fast train.

I still can't figure out how I had wandered onto a track--I'm sure I was in the middle of the town at time and can't remember seeing a level crossing or the like.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. I was honked at a lot in my first day in Frankfurt because I entirely failed to see several streetlights, on account of them being painted the usual dark green rather than the homey, bright Ontario yellow.

Also, Frankfurt city planners seem to like islands and separate street lights for crossing to the island and crossing from the island.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I think our streetlights are metal-colored; I'll have to look on Monday.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I was once hiking on a trail around Mt. Hood; late in the summer but high enough that there were occasional snow banks blocking the trail. I came across a significant one of these and was carefully traversing across it. Then there's a blank spot in my memory, and then I was a few feet below the level of the trail, spreadeagled and clinging to the snow bank with both hands and feet. Below me was a long, steep slope down the mountainside.

I can't say for sure that the drop would have been fatal -- it would have depended on how long it took me to skid to a stop and what I hit along the way -- but it would have been very much no fun at all; and while people knew where I was nobody was expecting me to make contact for a few days. It could have been pretty bad.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I think the sub thing is the only exterior dangerous thing (other than my father). Everything else is medical.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Even leaving aside my experiences with Aurora drivers, I almost got run over today. I was crossing - with the light, I must point out - when two cars making left turns decided that they weren't going to wait for me to finish crossing. The ground was covered in slushy snow which was in turn covering patches of ice here and there, and I was very carefully carrying an extra-large coffee from Tim Horton's, so I know I wasn't walking at my usual quick pace, but that in no way absolves the driver who came directly at me at about 40kph and then veered suddenly to go around me when I had the right of way.

OTOH, I'm in Montreal for the weekend, so I suppose I should expect the drivers here to be maniacs...

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there were more exciting ones, but My Beloved Spouse and I used to have a strong disagreement about the amount of re-labelling that was required when repurposing food containers.

Then I staggered into the bathroom one night at 3 am, picked up what I firmly believed, for some good reasons, to be the bottle of water I had left there, and caught the reek just in time to VERY narrowly avoid taking a large gulp of bleach.

He woke up to me screaming (I kind of wish I hadn't, but I wake up badly; and I hadn't actually WOKEN UP when I did it, I had just gotten up to pee), and ever since then he is a firm proponent of the notion that THREE Skulls-and-Crossbones on a small container of non-food is just barely adequate.