Tag Archives: middle school

Freak Speak, Uncategorized

Which Names are Hot and Which Are Not?

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Humor Post #28 from Middle School’s Crankiest Curmudgeon’s Blog (and probably the awesomest YA blog too) –

El Cranko has been on the move again. You know, you can’t keep a good Crank down. Or is it up? Aw, who cares? What matters is that I have something good for you. See, I was noticing some of the cool names the people in my classes have and I decided to do some research. I looked up the most popular names from a hundred years ago and the most popular names today. OMG! I’m surprised some people left their houses back then. Seems like they would’ve been laughed out of their schools. But maybe I’m looking at it all wrong. ‘Cause some of those names are still popular. So I put together this quiz for you. You can either write down your answers or you can print out the test and circle them. (Sorry, I don’t know enough code to make an online test.) Be honest now. Write down what you think. Then at the bottom of the test, I’ll put a link that’ll take you to the answers. (Hey, I do know that much code.) So here goes. (You’ll notice I gave the test an appropriate title.)

DR. CRANKENFUSS’S AWESOME NAME GAME

Important Warning: Some of these have more than one answer
            so you have to get all answers right to get credit.

1. Which of these names was in the top 100 names in 1910?
A. Samantha      B. Brandon     C. Gertrude

2. Which of these names was in the top 100 names in 2010?
A. Viola      B. Ashley      C. Elmer

3. Which of these names was in the top 100 names in both 1910 and 2010?
A. Emma      B. Alexis      C. Kesha

4. Which of these names was in the top 10 boys’ names in 2010?
A. Andrew      B. Ethan      C. Joshua

5. Which of these names was in the top 10 girls’ names in 2010?
A. Abigail      B. Hannah      C. Olivia

Think you did well? Click here to find out.

So there you go. Don’t you feel smarter and cooler than you were a few minutes ago? Sure you do. Thanks to yours truly, middle school’s awesomest blogger (even though the guy can get in sort of a snit sometimes),

Dr. Crankenfuss

Freak Speak, Uncategorized

If I had a dime for every time I had a great idea…

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Humor Post #27 from Middle School’s Crankiest Curmudgeon’s Blog (and probably the awesomest YA blog too) –

So here’s something I pulled off on my mom this morning and I bet you could do the same. It made a lot of sense. (Of course it would, coming from you-know-who.) So my mom says something like, “Crankenfuss, if I had a dime for every time I told you to clean your room, I’d be rich.” So I decided to deliver one of my special-delivery zingers. “And Mom,” I said, “if I had a dime for every time I kept my room dirty, I’d be just as rich or even richer.”

No, she was not pleased with that answer. In fact, she made me stay inside till I had cleaned over half my room. But it was worth it because I was helping to educate her. See, that’s just a silly thing to say. First off, she’s not going to get a dime for having told me anything, much less get a bunch of dimes for having told me a bunch of times. And why be so cheap with your wishes? Why not say, “If I had a million dollars for every time I asked you to clean your room…”? That way, she’s at least wishing for something really worth something. If you’re going to wish for something, shoot for the stars, that’s what I say.

Also it might work better if she said something like, “If I had a heart attack for every time I asked you to clean your room, I’d be dead. And then you’d be sorry.” Now that would have a chance of working on me because I don’t want to be in any way responsible for hurting my mom. But guilt-tripping your son like that would be pretty mean, wouldn’t it? Maybe I could try it on her though. “Mom, if I get killed from one of these grody asparagus spears stabbing me in the heart after I swallowed it, boy, then you’d be sorry. I mean, they don’t call them ‘spears’ for nothing.” Hoo boy, can’t wait to try that one. I’m sure she’ll say, “Oh, Crankenfuss, I never thought of it that way. Here, have some cake and ice cream instead.” Yeah, that’s what will happen, I’m sure.

Anyway, just another awesome piece of analysis and advice from the internet’s best middle school blogger who provides so much to his readers.
Yes, that would be me, Dr. Crankenfuss

Freak Speak

Watch Out If Someone Says You Have Great Potential

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Humor Post #26 from Middle School’s Crankiest Curmudgeon’s Blog (and probably the awesomest YA blog too) –

Ooh, I just had the worst insult handed to me yesterday. That’s twice this year and we’ve only been back in school for two days! My English teacher was talking about this book we just started and she asked, “What did the author mean when she said blah-blah-blah?” So I raised my hand and said, “How are we supposed to know what the author meant? She didn’t tell us!” A couple people said, “Yeah, that’s right, Crankenfuss.” The teacher was NOT one of those people. (BTW, people don’t really call me Crankenfuss. I just thought it would make this post seem more literary.) Instead she looked at me, shook her head sadly, and said, “Crankenfuss, I don’t know why you insist on acting like this. You have such great potential, you know.”

Now in the past — how can something be both now and in the past? — I would have thought having great potential was a GOOD thing. Not anymore. Ms. ___ was obviously ticked off at me for being right. And what she said was meant as a putdown. So I have put 2 and 2 together and come up with 4, as is my usual tendency because I be so good in math, and now I’m ready to revise that famous and often-used saying. So here it is:

“You have so much potential” = “You ain’t worth squat right now, kid!”

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. If you don’t believe me, think about some superstar and see how many times you hear, “Oh, LeBron James has such potential!” Never or very close to never! Naw, people say, “That LeBron, he skyin’!” or “LeBron James is da bomb AND da bombardier!” Or if the person is kinda dorky and not rad cool hip hop like me, he might say, “Oh, LeBron James is a quite wonderful excellent basketball player.” No matter what they say, they don’t talk about his potential to be a good player.

So don’t go feeling so good about yourself if, for example, your guitar teacher tells your mom, “Oh, your son has so much potential. I think you should sign him up for 17 lessons a week to unleash that potential.” Hey, it’s not about you, Paco. The teacher is trying to get some big bucks from your mama, that’s all.

Just another platter of wisdom from your Brilliance Chef,
Dr. Crankenfuss

Freak Speak

I’m taking a stab at a superior vocab

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Humor Post #24 from Middle School’s Crankiest Curmudgeon’s Blog (and probably the awesomest YA blog too) –

Yay!! We’re back online. After 5 1/2 days! Thanks to Maureen, who went and found everything through the Google cache (or something like that, you’ll have to ask her), I am again free to bless the world with my unique perspicacity. Whoa! I know I got your attention with that sentence. (And don’t you go and say, “Wow, I didn’t know Crankenfuss could spell the word I.” Not funny!) Yeah, I found that word on one of those Word of the Day places. Usually I can’t remember a lot of what I find on the web, but that word got to me. It means “keenness of intellect.” (Plus, it would be a great rhyming word in a poem about cowboys. Hey, check this out —

There was this ol’ cowboy named Butch Cassidy
Justa ridin’ his horse named Perspicacity.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten, but it’s a good start.)

I know I like to write so it would probably help if I knew a lot of words. And learning new words would probably make me smarter and that’s a good thing. I mean, I don’t figure I’m going to be a pro athlete and when I sing, dogs lay down and cover their ears so no American Idol for me. So… I’m going to have to use my smarts to get rich when I’m older. And perspicacity should help me. I know there are a lot of people who think smarts are for dorks, but I’ve still never heard anyone say, “Wow, I wish I hadn’t made that incredibly smart mistake” and I don’t think anyone would say, “Ooh, he is so awesome. I love how stupid he is.” So even though I like hip hop and would really like to be a hip hop artist — See my post about that — I don’t think I can really pull it off. I can write stuff okay I guess.

Yo, foshizzy,
Ah’m like a beast with a fresh cut
Fool wit mah shawty, I mess you up.

But I don’t move right and my hands end up slapping me and I look stupid trying to look black. But I’m good at learning words and that could really help me with my writing. And hey, I just thought of a cool saying – Good vocabulary is a secret code that smart people use to communicate with each other. That kind of sounds perspicacious, don’t you think?

Well, that’s all for now. Talk to you soon. And I have to say that the one good thing about being offline was that it gave my head time to heal. See, no more bandages up there.

From Dr. Crankenfuss, your paragon of perspicacity (and still the awesomest middle school blogger there is)

Freak Speak

Here’s how to make some real bucks. For real!

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Humor Post #22 from Middle School’s Crankiest Curmudgeon’s Blog (and probably the awesomest YA blog too) –

I can’t promise you a whole lot today. As you can see from my picture, I’ll still recovering from my recent encounter with Mr. Locker, a fight which left me injured and dazed. (I guess that’s why they call this daily grind we have to go through “School Dazed.”) But I’ll be okay. Ol’ Crankenfuss promises you that. You can never keep a good crank down, that’s what I like to say. But come to think of it, I’m always down so I guess it should be You can never keep a good crank up.

Oh, never mind.

Anyway, I found out something cool yesterday. After that terrifying locker incident, I was complaining to my friend Max — yes, I do have friends — that I should sue the school for a million bucks, something like that, and I started wondering why we call money bucks. So I googled bucks money origin when I got home and I found out that in olden times, like 200 years ago, pioneers would use deer skins to trade for things. (Except they called them buckskins since a male deer is called a buck.) It was a kind of money, see? For instance what if you were a pioneer in some town and you went to the General Store and saw this nice trail bike for sale? Well, okay, they couldn’t have had trail bikes back then, so let’s say you needed supplies and you saw a big bag of flour and a big bag of nails that you needed. (Work with me, okay?) You’d go up to the guy behind the counter and say, “Hey, podner, what say I trade you this buck here for them there bags o’ flour and nails?” and you’d haul out this big deer skin from your back pack (or whatever they’d call it back then). And the store guy would probably say yes cause that sounded like a good deal to him. (And it would be too.) So now we still say bucks instead of money.

But what I also found out is you can still make real bucks, that is, buckskins. You know there are always like a million pages listed under every subject at Google so I checked out this site called TwoWolves.org and they have a course that’ll teach you how to make buckskins. They’re in New Jersey, for gosh sakes! And it looks like I’d qualify to take the course. Here’s the requirements:

Simply, there are no minimum requirements or skill-levels. Whether you have never even touched a raw skin before, or have a few hides under your belt, you will benefit from a deeper exploration of this art, and taking your skills to the next level. All you need is a willingness to learn and work hard.

Well, that fits me to a C. This looked kind of interesting. So here’s more of what they said.

• Each apprenticeship program is in essence a “one-on-one” course. (Wow, individual tutoring. It doesn’t get better than that!)
• Course meetings will convene at our home facility in New Jersey. Meetings at the student’s residence will require compensation of travel expenses. (Uh-oh! Well, maybe my mom would agree to the extra expense. I mean, to be able to make real buckskins? Even she’d have to admit that was pretty cool.)
• During the duration of the program, students will be free to use all our tanning related gear (excluding chemicals, brains, and hides), to work on their projects. (Huh? Whose brains can’t I use? Theirs or mine? Without brains, this could be harder to figure out. Well, let’s go a little further.)
• All materials are included in the tuition cost, which is $1450. (Wha-a-a-a?)

Well, there goes that idea. But then I saw the picture of one of the guys at that place in his buckskin outfit.Here’s someone who made some REAL bucks!

Whew! I know we’re into Freaky Dudes here at FDB, but we might have to make an exception for this boy. But hey, you gotta give him props for his self-esteem.

So it looks like the old Crankoid won’t be making real bucks after all. But he did learn something in the meantime and he may even have taught you something. Hey, that head injury I suffered might have changed me after all. I actually did something nice for somebody.

Man, I gotta think about this. Maybe I’m one of those split-personality types. Oh, no! That locker may have literally split my personality in two.

Sorry, gotta go.

From Dr. C