Angry hornets and a classroom full of teenagers who can't speak English is a very bad mix.  Waitaminnut!  What an incredible understatement!  It is like calling gasoline, dynamite, plastic explosives, and Crazy Billy who always sits in the corner muttering angrily a bad mix.  This was a disaster of monumental proportions!

Okay now, here's the thing.  As class was starting during 3rd period yesterday, a boy named Ammahd came up to me with his ring finger knuckle red and swollen.  Now, Ammahd has been in this country for only two years and speaks English like a fat man juggling potatoes with his tongue while trying to talk.  (Of course you know Ammahd will not be offended because that is not his real name and he can't possibly read this post about him anyway.)  I thought he was telling me he hit his finger against the hand rail on the walkway up to my state-of-the-art portable classroom (State of the World War Two art!).  I didn't see how something that red, swollen, and swiftly changing to purple could be caused by randomly smacking your finger on a hand rail, but high school kids have talent!   Besides, I really thought he had probably thumped Mr. Esteban Zorillo on his cranium, because, after all, old Steve is one of those attention getters who is always loud, obnoxious (the high school substitute for wit) and truly annoying to everyone but the Hispanic girls.  (He won't get made either because it's not his real name and he also can't, well... you know... read.)  Esteban's head is extremely hard and would probably break a finger if you actually lost control and whapped him on the old bean. (Nicaraguan Jumping Bean.)

Then, the teacher in the classroom next to me pointed out the nasty little critter nest hanging on the underside of the handrail.  (Aha!  My little teacher brain arrives at the right conclusion the same way the little engine that could reaches the roundhouse... Slowly!)  I went down and risked getting stung to expect them more closely.  Yes, the big yellow hornets!  The kind that cause people who are allergic to swell up like a puffer fish and die!  I sent little Ammahd to the nurse immediately.  Sure he is difficult to understand, but I like the little guy.  He's small, dark, and handsome in cute little Muslim-African way.  You will be happy to hear that the nurse sent him back right away and ruled that he would live, and even be able to write in English class after my class was over.  Lucky Ammahd!  Stung like that and not even time off from one period of school.

I determined that I would protect my students from further hornet depravity by making the danger clear to them.  In very stern, very loud, and very simple language, I let all eighteen of them know that there were hornets out there, (no, let's call them "bees" because they don't understand "hornet", or even..."sting"!  What's the gol' dang Mexican word for bees?  And, then, what about Viet Namese and Arabic?)  Okay, so fully warned I dismissed them for lunch.  The hornets, of course, were still there despite frantic e-mails to the principals, maintenance, and a phone call to the one guy the teacher next door knew was a bee keeper.  I tried to get them to walk past quietly.  No can do, boss!  They laughed.  They shouted.  The one kid I knew was allergic even had to go up close for a face-to-face because he just wanted to see!  After my heart started one more time, I realized that all of them made it safely away and no else got stung.

Next morning, this morning actually, the bee-keeper finally showed up with a can of bug-away!  We almost both got stung.  He promised me he would murder those varmints mercilessly after I got 1st Period class inside and closed the door against angry, dying hornets.  So, the hornets died an ignoble death quietly, without even a whimper.  Problem solved, right?  Not exactly.  3rd period again, one of the prettiest Mexican girls showed me a red, swollen place on her brown arm.  "Hornets?" I asked.  She looked at me, confused as all get out.  "Bees?" I amended.  "Yes!"  Okay, trip to the nurse!  No dying on my watch!  One lone hornet comes back from shopping to find her friends and family all dead, and has to take it out on a poor, innocent girl who doesn't even know what to call her attacker. 

You will be happy to know the nurse kissed it to make it better and sent her on to English class, able to write her essays if only she can figure out what words to use.

This is a revisitation from an old post.  I like it enough to bore you with it twice.



  I have to tell you, driving in Texas, especially the "Big D" is taking your life in your hands, gripping that old steering wheel in a grip of death, and trying like heck not to hit any of the myriad things flying by you at warp 12.9.  I have had in my lifetime three accidents and too many near misses to count.  Drivers that don't have their numbers of kills painted on the door are rare indeed.

    One of the scariest encounters on the road has to be the legendary Texas Killer Grandma.  They have a secret clubhouse somewhere in Irving, Texas where they can get together over knitting and compare the goriest kills they have managed with their oversized automobiles.  These old lady drivers are invariably white-skinned and have hair either of strange shades of blue and periwinkle, or silver, almost chrome.  They all have cool killer-grandma nicknames like Suicide Sadie, End-it-all Emma, and Wild-thing Wilhelmina.  They drive big, expensive luxury cars like Cadillacs, Buicks, and Mercedes, with plenty of room on the side for painting kill markers to represent their victims.  They have mostly expensive no-fault insurance so they can mash your children in the back end of your family car, or drive on the sidewalk into a crowd of tourists in plaid polyester outside the Kennedy Assassination Museum at Dealy Plaza without paying out a penny for damages or doing ten seconds of jail time.  They cruise around the Dallas-Fort Worth area watching for unwary drivers so they can leap out in front of them without signaling, getting bashed from behind by the victim to insure they are not found at fault, and sending the victim swirling off the overpass to a fiery death far below (every Dallas area mix-master is now by law at least seven levels high).  Then they cackle all the way to the next club meeting.  I am left with a neurotic fear of blue hair.

  Killer Grandmas drive a class of vehicle common in Dallas which I like the call the American Wasp Rocket.  These are large, unwieldy, but pricey vehicles, sometimes including SUVs (Super Ugly Volkspanzers), but made by Ford or GM, that wreak havoc on smaller, slower cars with littler engines, especially foreign-made cars like Toyotas, Subarus, and Volkswagens.  In the northern precincts of Dallas, Austin, and Houston, where these vehicles truly dominate, you will often see BMW, Volvo, or Italian Wasp Rockets, which are almost an oxymoron by their very nature ("I only buy them gol' dang furrin cars iffen they're status symbols, cause I only buy American, but I figgur high-dollar Wagons with honkin' big engines like them thar Lambourghinis count as American too!").  These cars are all large and powerful enough to mash and grind the humble family car under their wheels, and, of course, they are only driven at hyper-speeds while winding their way through heavy traffic so the occupants can arrive anywhere they are going FIRST.  Besides Texas Killer Grandmas, the majority of these drivers are white and male and driving alone (with wife and kids in the car they will slow way down and become a different species entirely, prey instead of predator).  And, of course, they are mostly overweight like me, over-worked, over-paid, and easy to beat up if you ever trap them outside of their high-dollar death machines.  The simplest way to actually deal with them is to pull over to the side of the rode, let them pass, and watch as they die further down the road due to work-and-family-related-stress-caused heart attacks.

The most common vehicle on the Texas highways are, of course, the typical Bubba.  Bubba cars are always pick-up trucks, and almost always Chevys (Ford trucks are driven by Billy Bobs instead of Bubbas, and I have reason to believe the two are separate species and incapable of interbreeding).  In fact, the Chevys almost have to be white, brown, or red, or they don't count as a proper Bubba.   Bubbas drive like Foster Brooks on speed, always weaving, wobbling, wagging, and wrecking.  The highway is their own personal demolition derby, and if they don't get you with a straight-on hood-smash, they'll ding you with whatever falls out the back of their pick-up (beer bottles, kids, used tires, parts of the vehicle that have already fallen off once before, and sometimes ugly wives).

  A more-or-less brain damaged subspecies of Bubba, or possibly an emerging new species (see the suspicions mentioned above) is the Billy Bob.  The distinguishing feature of the Billy Bob is a Ford truck rather than the Chevy.  They are mostly rich guys who want to be Bubbas, but simply aren't smart enough to know how.  They will kill you no less quickly than a Bubba, but they do tend to have better insurance.

 

  Of  course,  I  can't even talk about  Beaner Cars.  It is not  politically  correct, as  a  young  Hispanic  student  pointed out to  me  last year.   "I  can  say  Beaner,"  he said,  "But  you can't  say  it  because  you're a  Gringo  Loco.   Only  Beaners  are  allowed  to  call  a  Beaner  a  Beaner.   You  could  be  killed  for  that  in  the  barrio,  man!"   So  I  won't  talk  about those cars  on  the  interstate  in  the  fast  lane doing  a  mere  twenty-five  miles  per  hour.   I  won't  mention  how  they  have  eighteen  kids and a  Tia  Carmen  in  the  back seat  and  can't see out the rear view mirror.   I  won't talk about the rosary beads, fuzzy dice, and numerous brightly colored stuffed animals (especially Tweety Bird) hanging from the rear view mirror blocking the windshield either.  It just wouldn't be nice to talk about that.

So, I guess I have to sum up with a concluding statement that makes sense out of all of this Texas-road-rage-and-bumper-car nonsense.  It would have to be something like this:  If you ever plan to drive in Texas, be prepared.  Have your burial plot purchased, your insurance paid up, and "Drive Friendly!"

A year ago I had to leave Xanga because I started a new job as an ESL reading teacher at a major high school in the DFW area.  It takes a lot of time to be a teacher. 
But I also became a published novelist.  No kidding!  I got published by a cheapo publisher called Publish America.  They didn't charge me money to print my book.  They actually paid me a dollar in advance, and I've made a whopping $3.60 on royalties in the year since.  The name of my not-quite-a-bestseller is Aeroquest.  Yep, a Sci-Fi novel that inspired by nerd-o role-playing games in the 1980's and my own weird sense of humor.  My cheapo publisher spends absolutely nothing on promoting my book.  I have to do it myself.  This is obviously why I've made such a vast fortune already, a mere year later.  That I guess, in a nutshell is what I am doing wasting my time back on Xanga.   Are you interested?  We are talking about Aeroquest, a novel by Michael Beyer, ISBN # 1-4241-9982-4!  All you have to do is go to any bookstore with a computerized ordering system, weather the funny looks you get for asking for such a dumb thing that they would never put on their shelves unless slavering crowds start demanding it, or unless I find a bottle with an all-powerful genii in it, and then wait the two weeks to twelve months for the dang thing to come in so you can pay too much money for it. 
The novel is actually a story inspired by throwing a copy of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in a blender with Frank Herbert's Dune and J.R.R. Tolkien's, well... everything, and turning it on chunky-blend.  I don't think there's any plagiarism in the thing that anyone can actually prove, but I hope the book is a good enough read for that one or two persons out there who are actually demented enough to read it.  I suspect that the people who have actually bought a copy of it... all three of them...are probably members of my family.