By Kelly Kazek
kelly@athensnews-courier.com
July 28, 2008 11:32 am
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Appeared June 8, 2008
Poor blondes.
Everyone making all those jokes, entire books of them, and that was BEFORE Paris, Britney and Lindsay came along.
It’s a darn shame.
It’s not as if blondes are the only stupid females in the world.
As promised last week, in the interest of fairness and avoiding charges of discrimination, the topic of this week’s report from the Gender Intelligence Research Lab (or GIRL) is why we women are forced to endure really stupid Ben Stiller movies and repeated displays of public male scratching of areas that would otherwise be considered private.
I am such a kidder. What I meant to say is, GIRL will study why females, on occasion, might, just possibly, do things considered by others as being gray-matter challenged.
We’ll take this lesson in two parts:
1. Is the color of one’s hair relevant if no one can prove its natural shade?
And, 2. Females may be ignorant but we ain’t stupid.
Let’s start with an example of the theory that one’s brain activity decreases in direct proportion to the amount of dye on one’s hair.
The subject of this example is a reporter in our newsroom we’ll call Jean Cole (mainly because that’s her name).
She is not a blonde but she plays one on TV.
Kidding again!
Seriously, Jean is a redhead, a talented copy editor and gifted writer, who is known around the newsroom for — how can we put this delicately? —being a safety hazard.
I am not sure, but I think Jean’s mom coined the phrase: “You’ll put your eye out!”
Not many people know this, but when safety goggles first were invented, they were called “Lenses to Keep Jean Cole from Putting Her Eye Out.”
The inescapable fact is, we cannot leave Jean alone around construction sites, rogue rose bushes or hot-tempered Big Texas Cinnamon Rolls.
The reason is simple: No matter what Jean might be doing — editing, writing, saying “awwww” over pictures of cute kitties — her eye might suddenly suffer injury as if a bug with a serious case of Sky Rage just flew right in there on a suicide mission.
The time Jean did the most damage, hereinafter to be referred to as the Big Texas Cinnamon Roll Incident, or BTCRI, was a lesson in what can happen when you are so hungry you shove a vending machine pastry the size of a dinner plate in your mouth, causing the razor-sharp edge of the plastic wrapper to jam right into your cornea. (Why these wrappers weren’t safety tested before they were unleashed on unsuspecting redheads is a question for another day).
The injury had barely healed when some debris from a construction site attached itself to Jean’s left eye, causing one side of her face to swell and turn red, resembling a womp-sided, overripe tomato.
And then, days later, the recovering eye took a beating from a Rose of Sharon bush in Jean’s yard that, as she described it, came at her “from outta nowhere.”
Jean is now healed but all of us in the newsroom were stunned one day to discover the vending man had stocked our once harmless machine (if you don’t count contributing to massive coronaries, obesity and sugar highs) with — cue ominous music — Big Texas Cinnamon Rolls.
We moved Jean’s desk as far from the vending machine as possible and if someone does purchase a Big Texas Cinnamon Roll, he or she is asked to destroy the wrapper before entering the newsroom, which is a Big-Texas-Cinnamon-Roll-wrapper-free zone.
But it’s unfair to let Jean stand alone in the battle of gender intelligence. And, really, she was the victim in the aforementioned incidences. It’s not as if she DARED the rose bush to attack her.
So here are other examples that prove females can, on some occasions, be as dumb as guys:
1. Two of them married Michael Jackson.
2. They cannot stop at merely dressing themselves. That limits the shopping options. Some women dress their little yappy dogs in cute outfits to make them even more annoying to the general public. I see this as dog abuse.
What if these misguided pet owners, and I hesitate to even think it, are forcing their own fashion sensibilities onto their pets and are therefore embarrassing them to the point that they no longer want to hump guests’ legs or drink from the toilet?
What if Chico was a Bermuda-shorts-and-black-socks type of guy and his master is dressing him in a smoking jacket and ascot? Is this really fair to the dogs, and even if it is, is it fair to those of us who have to look at them?
And perhaps most telling of all:
3. A San Francisco woman, who has a medically recognized “objects fetish,” claims she married the Eiffel Tower, according to a story published in April by the Telegraph in England. She has taken on the name of her husband and is now Erika La Tour Eiffel, not to be confused with her sister Betsy Berlin Wall.
Sure, Erika may seem a little nutty, but is she really stupid? I mean, she is one of the only women in recorded history to find a mate who won’t argue or leave his underwear on the floor.
And — I’m going out on a limb here — I bet this is one spouse who will never, ever leave the toilet seat up.
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