Editor’s note: Back by popular demand. Tom Tyner wrote the local column “Latte Guy” for many years for this newspaper back in the 1990s. This first one in his return is from his “Classic’s File.”
Five hundred thousand people lined the streets of Dublin last Thursday to watch a parade in celebration of St Patrick’s Day. The Dublin parade is the centerpiece of a five-day festival culminating in Europe’s largest fireworks display. My own St. Patrick’s Day celebration was perhaps not as grand, but it did include a pint or two of Guinness Stout. I’m not alone in my fondness for “the black,” an estimated 10 million pints of Guinness are downed worldwide each day. Clearly, Guinness is no longer just a breakfast drink.
In possibly semi-related news, last week an Oregon State University football player was pulled over for speeding in Benton County, OR and cited for driving under the influence. At the time of his arrest, Ben Siegert from Glendale, Ariz., was carrying a stolen sheep in the back of his pickup. He told police he had nothing to do with the stolen sheep and had no idea how it ended up in the back of his truck. The police believed him. It turns out that the 200-pound ram belonged to the university’s Sheep Center, and was part of a study being conducted by the university on homosexuality in sheep.
That story raises more questions for me than it answers. It does not surprise me that OSU has a Sheep Center. My college didn’t have one, but then again, in all fairness, there aren’t that many sheep in downtown Los Angeles. I was only a bit surprised that OSU would be conducting a study on homosexuality in sheep; until now I wasn’t aware that the sexual orientation of sheep presented much in the way of research opportunities. I’m assuming here, of course, that the research was part of the school’s agricultural curriculum rather than say, its Urban Studies program.
The only real surprise to me in this news story is that an intoxicated college football player speeding around on a school night in a pickup while transporting a stolen sheep of uncertain sexual orientation can tell a Corvallis policeman that he doesn’t know how the sheep got in the back of his truck and get away with it. I can see now that I’ve been way too conservative in what I considered plausible explanations for my own bad behavior in the past. I’m afraid that letting Mr. Siegert off without some charge — reckless endangerment of a cloven-hoofed ungulate at the very least — may serve to encourage other Oregon State football players to drive around in their pickups with all manner of purloined livestock. And how do we know for sure this wasn’t a hate crime targeting gay sheep?
That is a story that needs to be followed closely.
Finally, on a totally unrelated note, Webster’s just announced that the newest edition of its dictionary will include for the first time the word “wedgie” appearing as a noun and defined as a “prank in which the victim’s undershorts are jerked upward so as to become wedged between the buttocks”. It’s nice to see that in some ways, we never really leave high school behind us. I do fear that once the wedgie becomes socially legitimized by its inclusion in Webster’s Dictionary, we may see incidents of the prank extending beyond the borders of high school and out into the larger world. Giving wedgies may become a standard practice in the office, as common as stealing office supplies and visiting inappropriate websites on company time. And if that happens, how long will it be before we see drunken college football players dressing up stolen sheep in undershorts and driving them around town in pickups for the sole purpose of giving them public and humiliating sheep wedgies?
We’ve got to nip this problem in the bud so we can all go back to doing what we’re supposed to be doing at work — participating in office sports pools. Also being included in Webster’s latest edition for the first time are the words “Al Qaeda,” “blog,” “cargo pants” and “irritable bowel syndrome,” all of which seem oddly related, but none of which I’d touch with a 10-foot pole or a stolen sheep.
