Yet More Education Jokes

Quick Reference

• Sartre's Diary
• College Application Essay
• Elephant Hunting
• East Los Angeles Maths Exam

Sartre's Diary

October 3

Spoke with Camus today about my cookbook. Though he has never actually eaten, he gave me much encouragement. I rushed home immediately to begin work. How excited I am! I have begun my formula for a Denver omelet.

October 4

Still working on the omelet. There have been stumbling blocks. I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone. I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, and instead they taste like cheese. I look at them on the plate, but they do not look back. Tried eating them with the lights off. It did not help. Malraux suggested paprika.

October 6

I have realized that the traditional omelet form (eggs and cheese) is bourgeois. Today I tried making one out of cigarette, some coffee, and four tiny stones. I fed it to Malraux, who puked. I am encouraged, but my journey is still long.

October 10

I find myself trying ever more radical interpretations of traditional dishes, in an effort to somehow express the void I feel so acutely. Today I tried this recipe:

Tuna Casserole

Ingredients:

1 large casserole dish

Instructions:

Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light.

While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish? I am becoming more and more frustrated.

October 25

I have been forced to abandon the project of producing an entire cookbook. Rather, I now seek a single recipe which will, by itself, embody the plight of man in a world ruled by an unfeeling God, as well as providing the eater with at least one ingredient from each of the four basic food groups. To this end, I purchased six hundred pounds of foodstuffs from the corner grocery and locked myself in the kitchen, refusing to admit anyone. After several weeks of work, I produced a recipe calling for two eggs, half a cup of flour, four tons of beef, and a leek. While this is a start, I am afraid I still have much work ahead.

November 15

Today I made a Black Forest gateau out of five pounds of cherries and a live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word gateau. I was very pleased. Malraux said he admired it greatly, but would not stay for dessert. Still, I feel that this may be my most profound achievement yet, and have resolved to enter it in the Betty Crocker Bake-Off.

November 30

Today was the day of the Bake-Off. Alas, things did not go as I had hoped. During the judging, the beaver became agitated and bit Betty Crocker's wrist. The beaver's powerful jaws are capable of felling blue spruce in less than ten minutes and proved, needless to say, more than a match for the tender limbs of America's favorite homemaker. I only got third place. Moreover, I am now the subject of a rather nasty lawsuit.

December 1

I have been gaining twenty-five pounds a week for two months, and I am now experiencing light tides. It is stupid to be so fat. My pain and ultimate solitude are still as authentic as they were when I was thin, but seem to impress girls far less. From now on, I will live on cigarettes and black coffee.

College Entrance Essay

This is an actual essay written by a college applicant when applying to NYU. The author of this essay now attends NYU.

3A. ESSAY

IN ORDER FOR THE ADMISSIONS STAFF OF OUR COLLEGE TO GET TO KNOW YOU, THE APPLICANT, BETTER, WE ASK THAT YOU ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION:

Q. ARE THERE ANY SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCES YOU HAVE HAD, OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS YOU HAVE REALIZED, THAT HAVE HELPED TO DEFINE YOU AS A PERSON?

Answer: I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty - Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes.

Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prize-winning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But I have not yet gone to college.

Steven
sjohnson@pcocd2.intel.com

Elephant Hunting

• MATHEMATICIANS hunt elephants by going to Africa, throwing out everything that is not an elephant, and catching one of whatever is left.
• PROFESSORS OF MATHEMATICS will prove the existence of at least one unique elephant and then leave the detection and capture of an actual elephant as an exercise for their graduate students.
• COMPUTER SCIENTISTS hunt elephants by exercising Algorithm A:
  1. Go to Africa.
  2. Start at the Cape of Good Hope.
  3. Work northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent alternately east and west.
  4. During each traverse pass,
     1. Catch each animal seen.
     2. Compare each animal caught to a known elephant.
     3. Stop when a match is detected.
• EXPERIENCED COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS modify Algorithm A by placing a known elephant in Cairo to ensure that the algorithm will terminate.
• HARDWARE ENGINEERS hunt elephants by going to Africa, catching gray animals at random, and stopping when any one of them weighs within plus or minus 15 percent of any previously observed elephant.
• STATISTICIANS hunt the first animal they see N times and call it an elephant.
• CONSULTANTS don't hunt elephants, and many have never hunted anything at all, but they can be hired by the hour to advise those people who do.
• OPERATIONS RESEARCH CONSULTANTS can also measure the correlation of hat size and bullet color to the efficiency of elephant-hunting strategies, if someone else will only identify the elephants.
• LAWYERS don't hunt elephants, but they do follow the herds around arguing about who owns the droppings.
• SOFTWARE LAWYERS will claim that they own an entire herd based on the look and feel of one dropping.
• SENIOR MANAGERS set broad elephant-hunting policy based on the assumption that elephants are just like field mice, but with deeper voices.
• SOFTWARE SALES PEOPLE ship the first thing they catch and write up an invoice for an elephant.
• HARDWARE SALES PEOPLE catch rabbits, paint them gray, and sell them as desktop elephants.

East Los Angeles Maths Exam

Name: _____________________________

Gang: ___________________________

1. Jamaal has an AK-47 with a 40-round clip. If he misses 6 out of 10 shots and shoots 13 times at each drive-by shooting, how many drive-by shootings can he attend before he has to reload?
2. Jose has 2 ounces of cocaine and he sells an 8-ball to Jackson for $320, and 2 grams to Billy for $85 a gram. What is the street value of the remaining cocaine that he doesn't cut?
3. Rufus is pimping for 3 bitches. If the price is $65 for each trick, how many tricks will each bitch have to turn so Rufus can pay for his $800 a day crack habit?
4. Jerome wants to cut his 1/2 pound of heroin to make 20% more profit. How many ounces of cut will he need to reach his goal?
5. Willis gets $200 for stealing a BMW, $50 for a Chevy, and $100 for a 4x4. If he steals 2 BMW's and 3 4x4's, how many Chevys will he have to steal to make $800?
6. Raoul is serving 6 years in prison for murder. He received $10,000 for the hit. If his common law wife is spending $100 a month, how much money will be left when he gets out of jail, and how many years will he get for killing the bitch that spent all his money?
7. If the average can of spray paint covers 22 square feet, and the average letter is 0.8 square feet, how many letters can a tagger spray with 3 cans of paint?
8. Hector knocked up 6 girls in his friendly neighborhood gang. If there are 27 girls in the gang, what percentage of the girls in the gang has Hector knocked up? What percentage of girls in the gang hasn't Hector knocked up?

BONUS QUESTION:
Based on the information provided above, how many more girls can Hector knock up in his gang if he has sex 8 times a day with 3 different girls a week for 6 months using the highly reliable "rhythm method" of birth control?