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

[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?"