Frank Answers: Bear Baiting Teamsters, the Green Giant, and Backwards Batteries

Carissa (and Reva) from Berkeley, CA write:
I go to school at UC Bezerkeley, and am active in the Republican club up here(thank God, or I’d have turned homicidal by now… either that or hippie, not sure which would be worse… but I digress…) This Friday, John Kerry is holding a special event in nearby Oakland and some friends and I were planning on going in all our Republican gear, just to piss him off. However, his rally is being held at the local teamsters union hall, and I’m worried about health risks that are associated with going to such a place. What do you recommend? Is it worth the potential life-threatening effect to associate ourselves with such an organization, even if it is to taunt a Democrat? We’re quite torn and thought you could offer the best advise on the matter… so please help, our lives rest in your hands!
I’ll talk from experience here. During the 2000 campaign season, Al Gore came to speak at my college, Carnegie Mellon University. He happened to be speaking from the front steps of the building where my lab was, and, at the time he was speaking, I had to get a lab assignment checked off. So I end up having to fight my way past Secret Service agents to find a back entrance to the building, just barely getting there in time. I did get one glance of Al Gore through the windows at the front of the building and gave him the evil eye.
But that’s neither here nor there. A friend of mind did attend the speech, and he had a bumper sticker for Senator Rick Santorum on a folder he was carrying. A teamster then grabbed his folder and ripped up the homework. I don’t know how your professors will react to, “A teamster ripped up my homework.”
Anyway, teamsters are mindless, angry brutes, and I wouldn’t recommend confronting them unless you are well versed in ninjitsu or are lowered into the crowd in a steel cage to taunt them from. What do you call that? Oh yeah, a teamster cage. If you don’t have the cage, I’d bait the Democrats the usual way we do, by being capitalistic.
matt l from Dallas, TX asks:
Who would win in a battle between the Red Baron and The Green Giant?
The Green Giant because he eats his vegetables. Let that be a lesson to you kids. Oh, AND DON’T DO CRACK!!!
Doug from NC writes:
Hey, Frank. When I reverse the batteries in my little fan, it runs backwards; but when I reverse the batteries in my flashlight, things don’t get darker. What am I missing?
Well, I went to the local sciencetorium to find this out. The question was immediately met with, “Heathen! Bring your godless notions elsewhere!”
Another scientist said, “Follow the marking of the poles, fool boy; they are there for your protection.”
“But I’m curious,” I answered.
“Science is not about curiosity!” he shouted, “It’s about preserving order! Now be gone!”
“Wankers,” I uttered as I went back home.
I tried putting the batteries in backwards in a cheap flashlight I got from the supermarket. Nothing happened. So I opened it up. Ends up that inside was a little thing on the circuit that said, “ELECTRICTY FLOW GUARD – DO NOT REMOVE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD”. So I took it out and turned the flashlight.
Ends up, now the flashlight did not just make things darker, but permanently removed the light from whatever I pointed it at. And, in that darkness, I could hear the wailing and moaning of many spirits. One spoke to me.
“Thank you for creating this eternal darkness in which we can exist,” it told me in a harsh whisper, “Now once again we demons can plague your world.”
And I was like, “Wow! Demons! Cool!”
So I guess flashlight companies got sued a while ago for releasing demons, so they put that thing in there to keep batteries from working in it backwards. Stupid trial lawyers.


Please keep the questions coming (I would especially like more science and math questions), <a href=”mailto:THISISSPAMTHISISSPAMace you’re from, I’ll randomly select one.

No Comments

  1. I wouldn’t recomment pissing off the Teamsters, even for the pure unadulterated joy that comes from pissing off Hanoi John Kerry.
    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not fan of the Teamsters, but I am a huge fan of breathing and walking on my well-attached ankles, and either one of those things could be in jeopardy if you go into a Teamsters Union Hall wearing Capitalist Right Wing gear. That would be like going into a lions den slathered in Bacon Grease.

  2. The best way to battle teamsters is to go up to one and whisper in his shell like ear “you know that they are not giving regular lunch breaks or overtime pay for this job”
    Then they go nuts on the people they are working for. So tell ’em John Kerry is going to speak at the union hall only on their lunch break and that they wont get paid to be there.
    Then hand out free doughnuts and coffee at a Republican registration booth.
    This will work – but don’t trust me I’m a Canadian.
    Here is a fun fact about Canada:
    Americans did not invent the Thanksgiving we celebrate in North America. It began in Canada. Frobisher’s celebration in 1578 was 43 years before the pilgrims gave thanks in 1621 for the bounty that ended a year of hardships and death.
    YAY CANADA!!

  3. Canadians didn’t invent sitting down and eating a lot of food in the “giving of thanks”. People had been pigging out for thousands of years prior to that. Also, like currency, and everything else for that matter, canadian years are worth less than American years, so technically we still invented the holiday of thanksgiving before you did. So there 😛

  4. Meatriarchy was right (about the Teamster thing anyway) We should make an effort to suggest that Kerry supporters refused to unionize because they think unions are bad. This will encourage the Teamsters to harrass Kerry’s staff into forming a union and his campaign costs will sky rocket. He may even have to outsource his support to India! Then Bush can come out and say, “Go Teamsters!” and they will all vote for him when they get off break.

  5. “Heathen! Bring your godless notions elsewhere!”
    Oddly, you could use this statement against Teamsters as well.
    If you DO decide to confront Teamsters, bring along a pro wrestler. Wrestlers hate teamsters. Especially the Dudley Boyz; they kill a teamster every day to keep healthy. Oh, and don’t bring homework.

  6. On the Teamsters, I speak from experience, they are nothing but a courpt union run by imcompitant morons. They are commies who want keep their feet of the necks of workers, refusing to let them to join the union leaders in the aristocracy by taking money from the proles. The Teamsters are also run by the Mafia.
    By the way MI is a closed shop state, so I had to join the commies against my will.

  7. Here in LA the mob is striking at the grocery stores. With the strike now in its fifth month, they’re losing lots and lots of their people. So many in fact, that they’ve taken to bringing in people from other unions to bolster their ranks.
    At a rally a couple weeks back they were chanting “We are the unions/the mighty, mighty unions”.
    I couldn’t stop laughing at this. If they were so damned mighty, they wouldn’t be out on a five-month strike, now would they?

  8. When I was growing up, my father had some troubles with the unions. He was an electronic technician for a large telecommunications company. The shop was unionized. Even though he didn’t belong to the union, union dues were taken out of his pay every week.
    We were a single income family. When the union would go on strike, my father crossed the picket lines. He wasn’t a part of the union and, since the union took money from him anyway and, since we were a single income family, he felt quite justified in doing so.
    Eventually, in the last 70s, he decided to join. He never mentioned if he was pressured to do so, but his rationale was that, since he was already paying dues, he might as well receive some of the benefits.
    That lasted about a year or so, when the union decided to go on strike. A couple of months out of work, with no compensation. Tough times for the family. The reason for the strike? To support their sister union, the telephone operators union.
    The result was financial hardship for the family w/o any way of getting that money back. My father dropped out of the union soon after.

  9. Yes, I am more or less a Teamster. I live in MI, and it is a closed shop state, meaning that the state REQUIRES me to join a corrupt union run by incompetant morons. But of course when I lost my job because of symptoms of drpression, the Teamsters left me hanging in the wind. Anyways, given the choice, I would not join any union under any circumstance. Unless you count Rugby Union rules as a union (there are two different sets rules for rugby) and those were the rules that college rugby goes by.

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