I was thinking the other day about some of those twisted 'safety' films they used to show us in school ~ I think going to Weird Al's show a few weeks ago stirred this up in my head.

I remember that the two worst ones to show us these...uh, 'films' were both coaches. Coach Herndon was a football coach (I could never get along very well with the football coaches ~ they had attitudes that I just couldn't stand but I guess Coach Herndon was the most tolerable of the bunch). Coach ...shoot, I just blanked on his name! I had it right up until I started to type it and ***whooosh*** it was gone. I can see him as plain as day and even hear him tell that god awful joke in my mind's eye...

The joke:
One day a farmer was walking toward his barn when he heard the awfullest noise he had ever heard. It sounded as if something was in the barn, killing everything in sight. Well, he runs into the barn to see what is happening and he sees his rams (male sheep, for those you in not in the know.) running as hard as they can into the walls of their stalls. The farmer gets the sheep all calmed down and everything and starts to walk out of the barn when the rams start butting the walls again. He just can't figure out why the sheep are trying to kill themselves. Well, this farmer kept a radio playing constantly in the barn so that his animals would get used to the sound of human voices and be gentler...and the song playing was "There Will Never Be Another Ewe..."

Coach Hopkins ~ that's his name! He was a basketball coach and he was pretty cool ~ especially when he taught 9th grade Health class, despite warping all our young minds with those 'films'.

One film he showed us was one about what could happen to a person if they weren't careful while driving. (Remember these?) It was one of those where they recreated the events up to the actual wreck and then show the actual scene, minutes after it happened. Coach Hopkins made it even worse (and you know he planned it this way) ~ he was stand in the back of the room and 'warn' us that the wreck scene was about to hit the screen (pardon the pun)...and it would be a scene of the car going around a curve or something. Of course, when the wreck scene did come up, he never said a word. I'm also sure that he waited to show that film until they served something with lots of ketsup in the cafeteria. I remember that movie pretty well, thanks to Coach Hopkins ~ one scene was where a dump truck ran into a car with two lovebirds in it at a stop sign (it was awful ~ all you could see of the people in the car were their faces. The rest was crushed inside the car. Ugh.) The other was what happens when carbon monoxide leaks into a car ~ nothing like starting your lunch hour with a little decapitation.

Now, Coach Herndon was worried that we, a bunch of 7th graders, wouldn't know what to do in the event of nuclear war. He wanted us to be prepared...actually, I think he liked watching us all turn green. I remember he showed us several films about this ~ what to do with a compound fracture (yep ~ bone and all.); radiation sickness (I couldn't tell you the first thing about that now.) and what to do if an unconscious person begins to vomit (you guessed it.) I what I remember most about these 'films' is that the class was in a portable and at one point, I got disgusted and moved to the back of the room ~ as far away as I could get and that it was the second class of the morning. No where near lunch.

Gee ~ no wonder I turned out the way I did...:::wink:::