April 23, 2012

• The pineapple, the hare, & the New York Times…

  

  i think it was yesterday that the New York Times wrote a mind-numbingly long article about Daniel Pinkwater’s The Pineapple and the Hare, which was included in a standardized reading test for NYC’s eight-graders.

  It’s been said that reading tests are almost as monotonous as the LSATs–i wouldn’t know since in the sixth-grade i came to believe that if you took enough LSD you’d eventually play like Hendrix–so afterwards i’d take mescaline or mushrooms for all the big tests so i wouldn’t be bored, but would be mellow…don’t try that at home kids

  IF you hit the link, you’ll see that the Times used the second version of the story, which i prefer, but the holiest of Holies in journalism did not mention there was an alternate take, as NPR did

  i’m pretty sure most kids haven’t done 200 hits of acid by the time they’re in the eight grade, but i was straight in the fourth…and some substitute thought she could sit back and read her NYT all day as she laid this on us:

  and there’s a fuckin’ YouTube for it

  It took me about five tries to figure that out, and about twenty minutes for the next compeer in my class to come up with the solution–and we were IGC–yet by the end of the day only half of the class had figured it out…and of course we didn’t tell the others

  THAT Ken Jennings could be stumped by the questions clearly demonstrates how rigid thinking in America has become

  Pinkwater zenfully takes an Aesop morality tale to absurdist levels and arrives at a logical conclusion–which is why i like the second version better

  Of course the MORAL to the story is pineapples have no sleeves, as the moose sagaciously points out–so where’s the confusion

  The correct answer to the first question is both a metaphor for Obama’s exotic/strange fruit presidency, and in a shout-out to Steve Harvey, also a metaphor for Plato’s cave allegory: If’n expectations are high and you don’t win the race, the animals in the woods are gonna eat you up!

  • 10:07 pm
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