The restaurant critic in my local newspaper is a frustrated gourmet. Trapped in the snowbound wastes of Central New York, she does her best to order the most sophisticated, most disgusting item on the menu. You can do this, too. The next time you sit down to a meal, tell the server this:

"Yes, I'll have the baby duck, wrapped in the baby sea otter, stuffed with milk-fed veal and impregnated with baby goose, marinated in the lobster bisque and served in a hollowed-out goat's head."

If you're eating at The Cracker Barrel, add the adjective "chicken-fried" in front of all that. The Cracker Barrel is truly a culinary experience to rival all others; their beverage menu includes milk and gravy, which is a single item. Only at the The Cracker Barrel can you get chicken-fried salad; only at The Cracker Barrel can you get an entire alpaca fried in its own juices, breaded, then fried again and served with cheese stuffing.

It was the 13th of December. I stopped at my local Eckerd to buy a couple of microwave pizzas and a tube of cookie dough, which, if you're on my meticulously crafted diet, represents three of the four possible food groups. As I was walking up to the counter, the two teenaged minimum-wage-slave girls behind the counter were talking amongst themselves.

"Have you heard that Bush is going to be our next president?" cashier number one sneered.

"I know," complained cashier number two. "Bush is such a moron."

"Yeah, he is," cashier number one agreed. "But Gore is going to secede tonight."

Now, to be fair, she might not have said "secede." Her diction came wrapped around a thyroid-sized wad of gum. She might have said "succeed."

I looked at her. I snapped.

"Do you not see the incredible irony here, foolish girl?" I bellowed, leaping on top of the checkout counter. "Do you not see that while you are excoriating pitiful Dubya for being a 'moron,' you are proving yourself as blatantly stupid?"

Just then an off-duty English teacher ran to the front of the store, knocking over the Hostess display as he hurled himself at me. He knocked me from the counter with an arm-bar sweep to my calves, then jumped on me and put me in a head lock. "You pitiful cretin!" he hissed. "The letter 'W' is pronounced 'DOUBLE-EWE,' not 'Dubya!'"

"Three twenty-one is your change," the cashier said to me.

I blinked. Hallucination. There was no irate English teacher.

Taking my rumpled change, I walked into the snowy night, back into a world where crimes against Proper English go forever unavenged.

My latest copy of Alfred Magazine arrived not long ago. On the cover was an incredibly large picture of my former suitemate, Zack Butler.

I will probably never be on the cover of Alfred. As I read the article about Zack, I fear I shall never measure up:

Zack was a zygote as a freshman at Alfred. He was no stranger to early achievement; as a sperm he was responsible for personally breaking Nazi Germany's Enigma code, an accomplishment that served him well during his years with the United States Swollen Jeopardy-Brain Puzzle Championship Squad.

At AU, Zack quintuple-majored in Electrical Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, Art, and Skiing Whilst Spleen-Shatteringly Hung-Over. It was in the pursuit of this last degree, and while blindingly drunk, that Zack, still with the right hemisphere of his brain tied behind his back with duct tape, completed his senior thesis by building a robot that sings "Ave Maria" while building split-level ranches for Habitat For Humanity.

Now close to completing his doctorate in Temporal Mechanics at Starfleet, Zack still finds time to visit Alfred and save orphans from burning buildings, all while juggling. He also visits the autonomous family of cyborgs (artificially intelligent robots surrounded by living tissue) that he built while sleepwalking during his junior year.

"That's the thing about Alfred," Zack states. "While I was there and since I left, there have always been interesting people."