Meow
[A conversation Lynn C. Rees had once with his oldest niece]
Crazy Uncle: Do you know what a good cat name would be?
Teenage Niece (impatient): What?
Crazy Uncle: Chairman Meow
Teenage Niece (bewildered): What?
Crazy Uncle: Do you know who Chairman Mau is? Mau DzeDung?
Teenage Niece (with half-eye roll): No.
Crazy Uncle: He ruled China. He killed 100 million people.
Teenage Niece (incredulous): Really? Did he get punished?
Crazy Uncle: No, he died in his bed, of old age.
Teenage Niece (still incredulous): Really? That sucks.
Crazy Uncle: Yes it does. Do they teach you, um, history or whatnot in school?
Teenage Niece (authoritatively): No. My history teachers suck.
Good news for the niece: Justice may have happened after all.
The World’s Most Dangerous Man™, Edward M. Luttwak, has revealed he was in Peiping when Mau died. Coincidence? Never: with Luttwak, paradoxically, there is no coincidence, only the Romanian Death Cuff. Watch and gape below at a man who’s killed ninjas while armed only with a paperback edition of The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, January 1, 1979).
September 10th, 2013 at 3:06 am
The Yale system vexes.
September 10th, 2013 at 3:31 am
Proper americanization is as foreign to sinology as it is to American lexicography.
September 10th, 2013 at 3:42 am
Ok, I laughed out loud at “Chairman Meow”
September 10th, 2013 at 3:53 am
Not my worst pun ever by a long shot. Greater punishment was inflicted by the Infamous German Chancellor Pun.
September 11th, 2013 at 2:29 pm
btw, ignorance of chairman Meow is not new. I was teaching a group of medical students in New Jersey in 1993 and made some comment about Chairman Mao. I got some blank looks, so I asked the group (about 12 or so students) if they knew who Mao was. One of them said “wasnt he someone in China”..and that was the best they could do. I am not kidding. Medical students with four years of college. I kid you not.