I apologize for implying your friend was stupid. Quite the contrary, I just meant that he was human. Okay, I admit the idea of kicking academicians in the pants was irresistible. All I'll say is that anybody who knows me knows why
Everybody thinks that stupid things happen all at once, and my own experience indicates that most of the time, the really monumental acts that Mark Twain called inspired idiocy happen in stages. (Hmm, I think I'll paint the roof of 'the love bus,' my unsuspecting 1965 VW troop-carrier, like a chunk of Swiss cheese! That should snag groovy chicks like crazy, daddy-o!)
Being married to a Scot, I began a study of stupidity I call the un-unified theory of irrelativity - since I had access to a full-time volunteer chronicler of my steady stream of blunders, errors and miscalculations - and I've come to the conclusion that certain factors of idiocy can be codified.
Forest's Law of Colossal *Four-ups states that PEOPLE WHO ARE GOOD AT TAKING THINGS APART ARE RARELY GOOD AT PUTTING THEM BACK TOGETHER.
That's an example of what I call an element of stupidity, distilling the science to its smallest essential components.
A very popular book way back when was Your Erroneous Zones by Wayne Dyer. I'm not recommending it (I wouldn't slog through it again at gunpoint) but I distilled one element from the book: being crazy has nothing to do with intelligence. There are plenty of doctors and lawyers who are completely nuts.
I was sixteen when I read that, and within a couple of months my neighbor - whom I respected - attempted to paint his house a weird 70s Laugh In green with his spanky-new Kirby vacuum attachment. (What is it about house paint?) I immediately applied a variant to the rule: being stupid has nothing to do with intelligence. The guy next door is trying to paint his house with a vacuum cleaner.
He was proud of it, too. Told anybody who would listen, and a lot who wouldn't. He'd take all morning to set up, then you'd hear that damn Kirby fire up and he'd make a few feet before the thing clogged up. You could tell how far he got, too, because when it clogged it did this Jackson Pollock-style squirting paint thing, like a signature. He kept saying he'd fix it later; once I get this damn thing dialed in, but for years anybody who turned onto my street was confronted by the ghastly sight of a beige stucco house covered in lime-green wisps, clots and free-form ejaculations, like a giant Martian had sneezed on it.
I'm hoping for a Nobel nod for Forest's Law of States of Matter: 'AT STANDARD AIR PRESSURE AND TEMPERATURE, THE FASTEST WAY TO TURN A SOLID TO A GAS IS TO FEED IT TO A DOG.
Jeez, I've completely wandered from the topic. That was stupid. (See what I mean?)
* the original word wasn't a number.
