What I know

It was 1996, and I was in a high school algebra class in a small town in South Mississippi. The teacher was talking about slope-intercept form, and several of my classmates were puzzled.

I thought it was easy; I couldn't understand why they didn't get it. That's when the African-American girl spoke up. She was trying to help the one-legged boy in front of her. See, the slope was 1.5 but the line never crossed the origin. It had a y-intercept of 7, and he only had five toes to count with. His dad was deployed to Bosnia, and his mother was having a tough time with it.

That's when I learned why the Bosnian war was wrong. Those were strange times, the 90's. But we all managed to get along in that little classroom, and eventually we determined that y equaled 3x+14 divided by 2.

Divided by 2. That's a lesson we should all learn.

YAHOO! NEWS
Trainer Crushed by Elephant at Nashville Zoo
by Tim Ghianni | January 15, 2011
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110115/us_nm/us_zoo_death

An 8,000-pound elephant at a Tennessee zoo backed a trainer into a wall and crushed her to death, and the zoo said on Saturday it had temporarily closed its elephant exhibit.

"It's a difficult day, but our staff is very professional and they are carrying on with their duties today," said Tina Rolen, assistant director of marketing at the Knoxville, Tennessee zoo. She said the review of Friday's tragedy is continuing.


It's just like Bill Murray said: "No matter what happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I'm happy now, because I love you."