Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   2

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36
S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
Advantages:
 May elicit an initial chuckle from new students
Disadvantages:
 Like all puns, gets old fast
Effectiveness:
 0
Anecdotally:
 Oddly enough, Converse College was 
not
 paid 
by Converse shoes to name themselves the “All Stars.” And 
perhaps for good reason—in 2005, the basketball team went 
3–24.
Senior Superlatives
Most Likely to Have Been Thought Up by a Five-Year-Old Girl:
 
Starkweather-Munich (N.Dak.) High School Magic Storm
Most Likely to Have Been Thought Up by a Five-Year-Old Boy:
 
Rowland Hall (Utah) High School Winged Lions
Most Likely to Encourage Juvenile Delinquency:
 Yuma (Ariz.) 
High School Criminals (whose school once occupied an aban-
doned prison)
Most Nimrodish:
 Watersmeet (Mich.) School Nimrods
Most Likely to Bravely Mumble “Please, Sir, I’d Like Some More”:
 
Centralia (Ill.) High School Orphans
Most Indebted to a 1980s Sitcom:
 Blooming Prairie (Minn.) 
High School Awesome Blossoms
Most Likely to Gross Out Opponents:
 Algonac (Mich.) High 
School Muskrats. (The muskrat is like a regular rat, except four 
to fi ve times bigger. Muskrats are also extremely close cousins 
to lemmings, which reminds us . . . )

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37
04
Fourteen Lies Your Mother Told You
The Lie:
 Lemmings commit suicide en masse.
The Truth:
 Lemmings are stupid, not depressed. Th
 e myth of 
lemming suicide goes back a long way—at least to Freud, who 
in 
Civilization and Its Discontents
 (1929) examined the human 
death instinct in the context of the purported mass suicide of 
lemmings. But suicidal lemmings didn’t fully enter the pop 
culture lexicon until Disney made the “documentary” 
White 
Wilderness
  in  1958.  Disney  shipped  dozens  of  lemmings  to 
Alberta,  Canada  (where  they  do  not  live),  herded  them  off  a 
cliff , fi lmed the poor creatures falling to their deaths, and 
passed it off  as nonfi ction. Ah, the magic of Disney. In fact, 
lemmings aren’t suicidal. Th
  ey’re just dumb. When the tundra 
gets crowded, they seek out new land. Sometimes they fall off  
cliff s.
✖  ✖  ✖
The Lie:
 When elephants get ready to die, they go to elephant 
graveyards.
The Truth:
 When elephants are ready to die, they just fall 
down and do it, just like the rest of us.
✖  ✖  ✖
The Lie:
 Th
  rowing rice at weddings causes birds to explode.
The Truth:
  Th
  rowing  rice  at  weddings  causes  birds  to  have 
something new and delicious and totally undangerous to eat. In 
fact, there are many species of birds in Asia who survive pri-
marily on uncooked rice, which they take from fi elds. Th
 e myth 
had its start in a 1988 Ann Landers column in which she dis-
couraged readers from the practice. Th
  e USA Rice Federation