Monthly Archives: April 2011

A Royal Fantasy

Through Indie Ink‘s @II_Challenge, Debra Elliot gave me this writing prompt for today:  “”You have been invited to the Royal Wedding.  Do you attend or decline? Why or why not?”

 

A Royal Fantasy

 

What is, in essence, true royalty?  

We know what it is historically, but have you ever thought about it in terms of what it actually accomplishes?

Many would say its primary function is for a small group of people to be in charge, to rule a land or an area, to be the government in its entirety.    In most cases, they’d be right — to an extent.   Royalty existed to provide that ever-so-difficult-to-come-by means by which a country could figure out who in the hell was calling the shots.   Whether by look, hook, or crook, it worked as a political system (and still does in many ways) in many countries and areas.

Others would also cite the idea of elevating one group above another; the royals and the serfs, the bourgeois and the proletarians, separated not only by mere financial status but by an entire class, thus giving a social order that could be understood and followed by the populace.   A separate, special class of humans.

But I wonder how much having a royalty fulfilled the innate need of humans to feel special — privileged — admired.

Think about it:   A group that has figured out that if they only repress those around them and elevate themselves, they suddenly feel better about it.   They not only get better things but better treatment.   People call them fancy titles.   They give them gifts and praises.   Special clothes adorn you and fill your closets.   You live in great palaces and castles and command many soldiers, servants, and admirers.   Scores of people travel to visit your domains simply because you’re royalty and they are not.

And it perpetuates — once royalty has it figured out, they know the score — and they have time to plan it further, so that they dynasty goes on.   Properties and lands are captured and then rented for income.    Riches and assets are gathered together to fund not only pursuits but to keep up the image — to fuel the party and keep it happening.   And because of time and money, the royals are not mere idiots — no, they are educated and thoughtful and politicians and leaders and an inspiration — to everyone.

And they get married to scenes of pomp and circumstance and many, many more reminders that they are royal and you — you are not.

It is a game in many ways; a complex series of moves that, once you get into a particular places, unless something drastic happens to change the rules, you can stay on the merry-go-round almost infinitely.

Any invitation to a wedding is considered an honour — a request from someone to share in their most special day.    From the royalty, it is a call to populate the church and the event with the very folks that keep them in the royal light — their subjects.    And yet, despite all this, we rather like it.

So if invited I would attend and see the spectacle that is before me; not because I do not see it for what it is, but because it is the fulfillment of the ultimate fantasy that any person can has — to be special.

But I shall never forget my place.

 

 

Waltisms

Waltisms
The Wit & Wisdom of Professor Walt Will of Luther College

Professor Walt Will is one of the many excellent professors in the Computer Science department at Luther College in Decorah, IA, USA. During my tenure at Luther, I got the pleasure of having him for a few classes, the most noted being Databases. These quotes are collected from that class session. At the time, I printed these out and handed them to the entire class prior to the final exam, including a copy for Walt, whom I recall laughing a lot once he found it on the podium. I present them here so other students of Walt’s — and the general public — can appreciate his unique teaching style.

Walt is retiring this year and will be greatly missed; I am honoured to have been one of his many students.

“Have you hugged your computer account lately?”

“…and I’ll try to make those times as gentle as possible as we slam you to the mat.”
– Walt on relational databases and the math involved in them.

“One of the prerequisites for the course is to read — or read if you are pressed. I’m pressing.”
– Walt on his theory of motivation

“Oh…Oh…damn it anyway.”
– Walt trying to work out a math problem on the board and coming up horribly wrong.

“…couldn’t we bring this tuple into the join and give it some friends to play with?”
– Walt on sympathy towards tuples lost in natural joins.

“When you want it, you really want it. But you can go days — weeks, even, without wanting it.”

“That should have given you who are going to copy this time to get it copied, and the rest of you time to fall asleep. Good job on that so far.”

“You walk into your typical bar in Decorah and I’ll bet you won’t.”
– Walt on the lack of people who can write SQL in Decorah.

“It amazes me how you can walk down the street and meet people every day that couldn’t write a line of C++ if their lives depended on it.”

“Have you seen this textbook in the room at all??”
– indicating the course’s one-and-only textbook.

“…where you were thinking about something else and he was up here babbling on about whatever he talks about. I’ve been there.”
– Walt on the attention span of his 2:30pm class.

“You get a good score, I get the illusion that I’m teaching well, everyone’s happy.”
– Walt on his teaching strategy.

“I apologize for being too lenient and I promise to make it up in the future.”
– Walt on the easy grading on a certain test.

“I’m skipping over the part I really wanted to skip over for the time being.”

“The great thing about standards is how many we have.”

“So as you sit here ignoring me, in a skyscraper in Manhattan and a barn in Wisconsin, people are writing SQL queries….”
– Walt on the importance of SQL in daily living.

“…just imagining a person on a mountain bike with pink sprockets just puts a little joy into my life.”

“Well, you look around for awhile, and unless some of you have names I don’t know about…there are no Ferraris in the room.”
– Walt somewhere on the intricasies of functional dependencies.

“And it caught the attention of those people sleeping, just for an instant; I don’t have high expectations here.”

“I’m suggesting that most of you are well enough traveled that you know that there is a First Avenue in more than one city. Also, that Decorah isn’t the only city with a main street.”
– Walt on travel habits of college students.

“You can come in here and hold hands and sing, ‘We are the World’ or something, but if you can find something else to do at 2:30 on the Friday before Spring Break, go for it.”

“…And if this trips your trigger, you can read all weekend if you want.”
– Walt on the erotic pleasures of multivalued dependencies.

“I had this debate with myself, which I lost.”

“We’ve all become so perverted that we think that a tree’s roots are at the top and leaves at the bottom.”
– Walt on CS vs. Biology

“I can only lose so many battles with myself.”
– Walt showing the strain of a long spring semester.

“Oh, just kidding. Just trying to wake a few people up, just for a moment. Kind of ease ‘em back into reality.”

“Get a life.”

“You have big buffers. Nothing personal, but you do.”
– Referring to the size of some people’s memories.

“They tend to love their computers in a way that’s, well, kinda scary sometimes.”
– Walt on Macintosh owners.

“Back in the 60′s and 70′s everyone thought it was smoking dope.”
– Walt on hashing algorithms.

“Maybe it’s a database of stolen cars. And the one you bought doesn’t show up there. That’s a good thing.”
– Walt on the positive aspects of databases

“I have nothing against fractions and some of my best friends are decimals, but…”
– Walt on his relationship to math.

“Dang it to heck.”
– Walt on stubborn B-tree algorithms.

“Dammit anyway. Or ‘gracious’, whatever the expletive of your choice might be.”

“Sometimes your little sister could answer it.”
– Walt on the obvious answer to some final questions.