Retard

Some of my friends and I now play a game where we try to start sentences with the phrase "I'm not a retard". It's quite easy in some social settings, but none of us has managed to do it in a professional context.

It started a few weeks ago with my pseudo-niece. I was in Houston (Tx) with my brother, his wife, her daughter and a couple of other people. They were discussing a fancy vacation that they'd had in Santa Barbara and the Hotel California. I think we all started thinking of The Eagles song, except possibly my pseudo-niece who's 16 and there's no reason for her to have an encyclopedic knowledge of overblown 70's rock music. One of the guys said "How do you check out?" but my brother who remembered the lyrics better said "No, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave". We all laughed. When the laughing subsided Persephone supportively said to her daughter "Do you understand why we're laughing?" With enormous and misplaced confidence her daughter said "I'm not a retard, I know who the Red Hot Chilli Peppers are!"

Richard "Hotel California. Californication. Got to have a system" B