Apropos of nothing

I guess I blew it last week when I said, “I know the cold winds of winter will probably be here before this week’s issue is off the newsstands.” It’s 80 degrees outside as I write this. I love it. I was talking to a flak from Fayetteville, Ark., this morning. She was trying to get our paper to write something about the opening of the new Wal-Mart Superstore, or the addition or something (yeah, I know, but I try to be nice to most people). Still, somehow we got to the topic of weather, and she was complaining about how the heat had deprived her of her usual fall colors. Just goes to show you, one person’s mild autumn is another’s heat wave.

Did you see I also blew Oppenheim’s name in the last sentence of the cover story last week? That’s the kind of stuff that makes me wish I’d gone into bricklaying, weather casting or geeking chickens. I don’t mind making a spectacle of myself—that’s kind of the nature of this beast we ride—but, man, that one hurt.

Along other apropos-of-nothing lines, I’ve been watching these battles over the dress codes at some Washoe County schools. I’m 41, but this little issue has me feeling about 12 again. These are, for the most part, the very same dress styles that school officials were trying to ban in 1975 when I was in seventh grade. OK, there was a little difference; it wasn’t bra straps or spaghetti straps on blouses they wanted to ban; the target was tube tops. And I went to Catholic school.

Interesting to note in all this tempestuous tempest, is that there is at least one school in Washoe County where there is no dress code. It’s TMCC High School, and educators theorize that there isn’t as much a problem with daring duds because the high school students don’t want the college students looking down on them. Funny what peer pressure in an academic atmosphere can do. Whatever. People who make moral judgments based on others’ apparel will never, never understand the fundamental flaw in their world view.