You have the right to remain stoopid

You have the right to remain stupid.
Anything you say can and will be posted online.
You have the right to comment, but only if you do it anonymously.
If you do not have a computer on which to post your comments, your friends are sure to get online and do it for you.
I figure that I’ve been hitting some pretty heady topics lately, so it’s time to have some fun. That brings me to another cute kid story starring my youngest child, Colton. A couple weeks ago he was on the phone wishing his great-grandmother a happy 93rd birthday. He told her, “I’m going to live to be a hundred, but that will take a couple hundred years.”
Several years ago, my oldest son, Wesley, was playing with a new toy. I don’t remember what it was, but I do recall that it was kind of expensive and he was banging it around pretty hard. I told him, “Stop that or you’re going to break it! What do you think it is, a toy?!”
The blank, incredulous look he gave me was priceless.
I also liked the look on his face a few weeks ago when he was talking about school and realized what he said when he told us that “I don’t have a conscious brain.”
Those things reminded me of the time back in my early 30s when I moved back into my parents house. At some point my mother started nagging me and we got into an argument. In all honestly I have to admit that I blurted out, “Who do you think you are, my mother?!”
Back when I was in elementary school, our family was taking a road trip to visit grandparents. To help pass the time, we were playing hangman. I won a round because no one could guess that my word was “stoopid.”
Another time in elementary school, a couple classmates got into a bit of a squabble. I was sitting too far away to hear what it was about. Suddenly one of them held up a book, pointed with his finger and said in a loud voice, “See! I told you ‘gullible’ was in the dictionary!” If that wasn’t bad enough, I took out my dictionary and verified it.
Then there was the time in high school when I was running for class secretary. Only on my campaign signs I said that I was running for seceratary. I didn’t win.
As long as I’m confessing my bloopers, I have to tell you about the time in college when I was a photographer for the student newspaper. We were doing a story on a blind girl. In all seriousness, I asked her to “look this way.”
Moving on, apparently there is a new television show starring William Shatner called $#*! My Dad Says (or Bleep My Dad Says). I’ve never watched it and I’m too offended by the title to give a rip about it. But it seems to me they could have used another four-letter word that begins with S and ends in T and means the same thing as the word they’re bleeping out.
Hollywood is becoming a little too aggressive with use of vulgarities in the titles of movies and TV shows. There is a certain superhero spoof I would have liked to have seen, but the name is offensive, so I won’t waste my time seeing it.
There are times when I am proud to see newspapers buck free speech in favor of morality and decency. The paper I worked for in Colorado refused to run an ad that promoted the band “The 4 Nicators.” The compromise was to drop the 4 in the ad.
I’ve also been told that the Amarillo Globe-News ran ads for a movie that starred Roger Moore as James Bond in “Octopus”.
Normally newspapers are stalwart defenders of free speech. And they should be. But I have to respect those who will put decency and integrity ahead of that right. To me it’s not censorship if the thing being censored is vulgar or otherwise inappropriate for a normal, healthy community standard. There are limits to free speech and those limits are under constant testing by mainstream media.
But getting back to that bleep word; have you figured it out? The word is “scat.” There, now don’t you feel stoopid?