We Don't Need No Stinking (Drunken) Badgers!

It had to happen, animals getting drunk and behaving inappropriately. BERLIN (Reuters) - A badger in Germany got so drunk on over-ripe cherries it staggered into the middle of a road and refused to budge, police said on Wednesday. A motorist called police near the central town of Goslar to report a dead badger on a road -- only for officers to turn up and discover the animal alive and well, but drunk. Police discovered the nocturnal beast had eaten cherries from a nearby tree which had turned to alcohol and given the badger diarrhea. Having failed to scare the animal away, officers eventually chased it from the road with a broom. I don’t know what is worse, getting drunk, sitting in the middle of a road or getting diarrhea? I can count on the fingers of my hand, the number of times I have been drunk. I have never, however, lost continence. I do have to say that once I did forget where I lived or how I got there, but I knew I was in North America. The sitting in the middle of the road is interesting. Allow me to explain. There is a pretty horrible movie, even though it has Jimmy Caan in it, called The Program. It is a cliché movie about all that is bad about athletic programs in universities, even high schools are not immune, using their athletic students to make money all the while espousing the virtues of amateurism. There is even that wonderful policing body, the NCAA, regulating and invigilating everything and then putting programs on probation or taking away their television money.  Instead of the craziness that they engage in, the NCAA ought to acknowledge that the public likes to watch college football or basketball. They don’t like to watch experiments in chemistry or how a beautiful sonnet can be written. There are some people who will be nothing more than professional athletes. Pretending that they are getting an education while playing a sport is as ridiculous as thinking that the best athletes are just enrolling in a particular university because of the education they will receive and the athletic tradition that exists there. Somewhere, somehow, some one is paying them something. Instead of this farce, pay the athletes and teach them to manage their money so that when it is all over or if they blow out their knees, they have something left. I digress. In the cliché movie, about football by the way, the alcoholic quarterback leads his team of bible thumping, steroid using, anger management needing, raping etc. etc. team to sit in the middle of a two lane road full of traffic in the middle of the night. He leads and they follow. Well I saw that particular scene cause I went to see the movie in the first few days in was released with my high school football coach friend, Coach K. Immediately, after the film was released, high school kids tried it and needless to say, a few of them died. That scene was cut from the movie, therefore, if you choose to rent The Program, you will not be privy to the scene of drunken high school kids sitting in the middle of the road at night with traffic whizzing by. I wonder if the drunken badger has a scholarship to the local Gymnasium or Gesamtschule.