A Few Vignettes

I used ChatGPT to find an obscure town in Iceland, translate a couple of sentences into Spanish and take an Aquinas quote and put it in Hillbilly.

Note: I've changed the Aussies' names to Angus and Malcolm so they stand out from the other boys' names.

I'm loving this.  Enjoy.

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As the boys pondered the new clues they'd learned this morning, Bobbylee spoke up. "You know, fellers, every reckonin' of the heart, be it righteous or wrong, be it 'bout things evil in theirself or somethin' just kinda grey, is a must-do, so that them who goes 'gainst their heart always messes up. That's Aquinas!"

Easily the deepest thinker and most well-versed in classical philsophy of the six, Bobbylee would recall appropos quotes from the greats and throw them intp his mind's Cuisinart with his rebel patois and put it on puree. What came out was both true genius and completely indecipherable.

Jimmy Winters sat there in stunned silence, trying to figure out just what in the world that meant. He blinked a couple of times and then shook his head rapidly. "Right, Bobbylee. That's a good point. What we need to do now is figure out what the professor did with the copper tubing."

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Jimmy broke the silence. "I think the professor is trying to throw us off his tracks. It's like Hercule Poirot said. 'When you look your most innocent is when you are up to something.'"

Angus laughed at this. "Poirot was a wanker!"

"No, he wasn't!" replied Malcolm with surprising fervor.

"No?"

"No, he was a nancy boy! All them Frenchies are. Nancy boys, the whole lot of 'em," pronounced Malcolm with certainty.

"That's right," agreed Angus. "Those Frenchies are a load of pooftahs. It's like Great Uncle Jack told us," and here, Angus dropped his voice as low as it would go to imitate his Great Uncle Jack. "'After the war, lads, half the children born in France looked like Yanks and half looked like Aussies. Them Yanks outnumbered us ten to one, but we made up for it with pure Australian vigor!'"

Johnny just sat there with his head in his hands, hoping none of the teachers were hearing this. One of these days, the Aussies were going to get all of them in a lot of trouble.

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The boys had all Wednesday off to search for more clues. On Tuesday, a white sheet had blown off Mrs. Zucker's clothes line and drifted through the school grounds. Convinced they were facing a KKK invasion, the teachers immediately put the school on lockdown and the principal called the police. With efficiency seasoned with a healthy dose of exasperation, the police arrived and apprehended the sheet.

Convinced the sheet could just as easily have been a march of the Klan through East Weevil High, the principal took no chances and mandated a day of racial justice training for the staff.

They loved every minute of it.

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Jimmy Winters, 13, was Johnny's cousin. He'd lived with the Wilson family ever since his parents died in a boating accident involving a gaff, a misplaced rope, a spare car battery and a poorly-secured can of marine petrol.

When the boat exploded, it had been tied up at the dock. The remains were cremated, of course, and it was anyone's guess as to how much of who was in each urn.

Jimmy felt certain the blue urn with the gold piping held mostly his mother. It smelled faintly of tequila and cheap Margarita mix.

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The class erupted into a stream of confused questions.

"Ms. Scharnhorst, my daddy is Honduran and my mommy is German. What box should I check?" asked Olivia.

"Ms. Scharnhorst, my grandfather was Japanese. Does that make me Asian or Pacific Islander? asked Lucas.

For her part, Ms. Scharnhorst was completely unprepared for these questions. Her classes in college had always assumed, as her racial justice training materials put it, "no mongrelization of the races."

In those brief moments when he looked up from his phone, Jaime Velasquez liked to tweak the teacher in Spanish. The teacher knew about as much Spanish as the average resident of Ísafjörður, Iceland. Now, seeing a chance for an easy layup in front of his friends at the back of the room, Jaime stood up and said, "Esto es lo más estúpido que he oído en mi vida. ¿Qué te pasó? ¿Te pegaron en la cabeza con una pelota de fútbol?"

Convinced that any disagreement with a student of color was inherently racist and having no idea at all what the boy had said, Ms. Scharnhorst simply nodded and smiled at him. She wondered if he was asking for a taco.

Jaime's friends all sniggered behind their books.