As TiBber Gravitas pointed out, Andy Rooney is no longer with us. Now, I know we already have a Rant & Rave thread. However, the custom on that thread is to post rants that are pretty short and to the point, like: RANT: My girlfriend turned out to have a penis. Back to drinking. But Andy had a different style. So, on this thread we're going to memorialize him as he would have wanted. Post your best rants in the Andy Rooney tradition. The best rant will win the TiB Andy Rooney Award. In Andy Rooney tradition, the best rants will be those: With excessive length and detail Where the vitriol of the rant is totally out of proportion to the banality of the subject That liberally use statistics to justify their points (real statistics preferred, fake statistics acceptable) Have at it, TiBbers; I expect some creativity here.
Rant Regarding Andy Rooney's Death Andy, you were a great guy and the world is going to miss you. As the 30th President of the U.S., you singlehandedly ended the war between Earth and Za'porgnat 7. I always wondered what it was like being a time traveling dolphin, but I guess you could say I lived that dream vicariously through you and your exploits. Oh how we will mourn you, your sense of humor, your adjudication, and your love of squirrel taxidermy. I laugh when I recall the time you and I trampled other people's picnic baskets in the park and you got hit by car later that afternoon. You carried on a bit, but took it like a champion. The world is nothing without you. RIP, Mr. Rooney.
To the colored children drinking from the same water fountain as me. I remember when I was a young boy back in the 1920's. My mother had a special section of the dinner table where father would allow her to arrange flowers and pet her kitten while the rest of the family tried to eat their meal. You see, father knew that too much decoration or too much attention paid to adorable things would ruin the morale of the men in the family, and wouldn't allow things like that to interfere with our schooling and the work we put in to breeding horses. The difference between horse racing now and back then is that people used to wear big fancy hats to signify how wealthy they are and that they could afford to block the sun from their eyes. Today just about anybody can buy a hat. Orange hats. Green hats. Hats that look like stocking caps but have a bill in the front. These new hats scare me, just like the children that are wearing them. I remember when a young musician named Kurt Coltrain committed suicide back in the 90's. All the kids seemed to like his music. I think I saw a picture of him wearing a hat once.
"We can't bust heads like we used to. But we have our ways. One trick is to tell stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m'shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt. Which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now where was I... oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones..."