>                 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO STUDENT BLOOPERS
>
>              One of the fringe benefits of being an English or
>         History teacher is receiving the occasional jewel of a
>         student blooper in an essay.  I have pasted together the
>         following "history" of the world from certifiably genuine
>         student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United
>         States, from eighth grade through college level.  Read
>         carefully, and you will learn a lot.
>
>
>              The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies. 
>         They lived in the Sarah Desert and traveled by Camelot.  The
>         climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to
>         live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are
>         cultivated by irritation.  The Egyptians built the Pyramids
>         in the shape of a huge triangular cube.  The Pramids are a
>         range of mountains between France and Spain.
>
>              The Bible is full of interesting caricatures.  In the
>         first book of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were
>         created from an apple tree.  One of their children, Cain,
>         once asked, "Am I my brother's son?"  God asked Abraham to
>         sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma.  Jacob, son of Isaac,
>         stole his brother's birth mark.  Jacob was a patriarch who
>         brought up his twelve sons to be patriarchs but they did not
>         take to it.  One of Jacob's sons, Joseph gave refuse to the
>         Israelites.
>
>              Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without
>         straw.  Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made
>         unleavened bread, which is bread made without any
>         ingredients.  David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the
>         liar.  He fought with the Philatelists, a race of people who
>         lived in Biblical times.  Solomon, one of David's sons, had
>         500 wives and 500 porcupines.
>
>              Without the Greeks we wouldn't have history.  The
>         Greeks invented three kinds of columns. . .Corinthian,
>         Doric, and Ironic.  They also had myths.  A myth is a
>         feminine moth.  One myth says that the mother of Achilles
>         dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intollerable. 
>         Achilles appears in the Illiad, by Homer.  Homer also wrote
>         The Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that
>         Ulysses endured on his journey.  Actually, Homer was not
>         written by Homer, but by another man of that name.
>
>              Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around
>         giving people advice.  They killed him.  Socrates died from
>         an overdose of wedlock.
>
>              In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled
>         the biscuits and threw the java.  The reward to the victor
>         was a coral wreath.  The government of Athens was democratic
>         because people took the law into their own hands,.  There
>         were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that
>         they couldn't climb over to see what their neighbors were
>         doing.  When they fought with the Persians, the Greeks were
>         outnumbered because the Persians had more men.
>
>              Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Greeks.  History
>         calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place
>         for very long.  At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlics
>         in their hair.  Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the
>         battlefields of Gaul.  The Ides of March murdered him
>         because they thought he was going to be made king.  Nero was
>         a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by
>         playing the fiddle to them.
>
>              Then came the Middle Ages.  King Alfred conquered the
>         Dames, King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harold
>         musterded his troops before the Battle of Hastings.  Joan of
>         Arc was cannonized by Bernard Shaw, and victims of the Black
>         Death grew boobs on their necks.  Finally, Magna Carta
>         provided that no free men should be hanged twice for the
>         same offense.
>
>              In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. 
>         The greatest writer of the times was Chaucer, who wrote many
>         poems and verses and also wrote literature.  Another tale
>         tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple
>         while standing on his son's head.
>
>              The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals
>         felt the value of their human being.  Martin Luther was
>         nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal
>         indulgences.  He died a horrible death, being excommunicated
>         by a bull.  It was the painter, Donatello's interest in the
>         female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance.  It
>         was an age of great inventions and discoveries.  Guttenberg
>         invented the Bible.  Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical
>         figure because he invented cigarettes.  Another important
>         invention was the circulation of blood.  Sir Francis Drake
>         circumsised the world with a 100-foot clipper.
>
>              The government of England was a limited mockery.  Henry
>         VIII found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his
>         knee.  Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen."  As a queen
>         she was a success.  When Elizabeth exposed herself before
>         her troops they all shouted "hurrah."  Then her navy went
>         out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.
>
>              The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William
>         Shakespear.  Shakespear never made much money and is famous
>         only because of his plays.  He lived at Windsor with his
>         merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies, and errors.  In
>         one of Shakespear's famous plays, Hamlet rations out his
>         situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy.  In
>         another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the
>         King by attacking his manhood.  Romeo and Juliet are an
>         example of a heroic couplet.  Writing at the same time as
>         Shakespear was Miguel Cervantes.  He wrote Donkey Hote.  The
>         next great author was John Milton.  Milton wrote Paradise
>         Lost.  Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.
>
>              During the Renaissance America began.  Christopher
>         Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while
>         cursing about the Atlantic.  His ships were the Nina, the
>         Pinta, and the Santa Fe.  Later the Pilgrims crossed the
>         Ocean, and this was known as Pilgrims Progress.  When they
>         landed at Plymouth Rock, they were greeted by the Indians,
>         who came down the hill rolling their war hoops before them. 
>         The Indian squabs carried porpoises on their back.  Many of
>         the Indian heroes were killed along with their capooses,
>         which proved very fatal to them.  The winter of 1620 was a
>         hard one for the settlers.  Many people died and many babies
>         were born.  Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.
>
>              One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars was the
>         English put tacks in their tea.  Also, the colonists would
>         send their parcels through the post without stamps.  During
>         the war, the Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls
>         over stone walls.  The dogs were barking and the peacocks
>         crowing.  Finally, the colonists won the War and no longer
>         had to pay for taxis.
>
>              Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the
>         Contented Congress.  Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and
>         Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of
>         Independence.  Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his
>         clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm. 
>         He invented electricity by rubbing cats backwards and
>         declared "A horse divided against itself cannot stand." 
>         Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.
>
>              George Washington married Marth Curtis and in due time
>         became the Father of Our Country.  The Constitution of the
>         United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. 
>         Under the Constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep
>         bare arms.
>
>              Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. 
>         Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log
>         cabin which he built with his own hands.  When Lincoln was
>         President, he wore only a tall silk hat.  He said, "In onion
>         there is strength."  Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg
>         Address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the
>         back of an envelope.  He also freed the slaves by signing
>         the Emasculation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment
>         gave the ex-Negroes citizenship.  But the Clu Clux Clan
>         would torcher and lynch the ex-Negroes and other innocent
>         victims.  It claimed it represented law and odor.  On the
>         night of April 14, 1855, Lincoln went to the theater and got
>         shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture
>         show.  The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a
>         supposingly insane actor.  This ruined Booth's career.
>
>              Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable
>         time.  Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book
>         called Candy.  Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton.  It is
>         chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when the apples are
>         falling off the trees.
>
>              Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so
>         was Handel.  Handel was half German, half Italian, and half
>         English.  He was very large.  Bach died from 1750 to the
>         present.  Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf.  He
>         was so deaf he wrote loud music.  He took long walks in the
>         forest even when everyone was calling for him.  Beethoven
>         expired in 1827 and later died for this.
>
>              France was in a very serious state.  The French
>         Revolution was accomplished before it happened.  The
>         Marseillaise was the theme song of the French Revolution,
>         and it catapulted into Napoleon.  During the Napoleonic Wars
>         the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their shoes. 
>         Then the Spanish Gorillas came down from the hills and
>         nipped at Napoleon's flanks.  Napoleon became ill with
>         bladder problems and was very tense and unrestrained.  He
>         wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was
>         a baroness, she couldn't bear children.
>
>              The sun never set on the British Empire because the
>         British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West. 
>         Queen Victoria was the longest queen.  She sat on a thorn
>         for 63 years.  Her reclining years and finally the end of
>         her life were exemplatory of a great personality.  Her death
>         was the final event which ended her reign.
>
>              The nineteenth century was a time of many great
>         inventions and thoughts.  The invention of the steamboat
>         caused a network of rivers to spring up.  Cyrus McCormick
>         invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a
>         hundred men.  Samuel Morse invented a code of telepathy. 
>         Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis.  Charles Darwin
>         was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species.  Madman
>         Curie discovered radium.  And Karl Marx became one of the
>         Marx brothers.
>
>              The First World War, caused by the assignation of the
>         Arch-Duck by a surf, ushered in a new error in the anals of
>         human history.
>
>         Richard Lederer
>         St. Paul's School