let’s give ’em back their furshlugginer zero!

Es­ti­mated reading time is 2 min­utes.

LET’S GIVE BACK THE ZERO! To hell with base-10 mathematics—it is part of the Muslim Agenda to bring down the Chris­tian world! No more pussy­footing with ANY thing from ANY Mus­lims! These and sim­ilar thoughts trumped my usual commie pinko fag bleeding heart li­brull ra­ti­o­ci­nating and lib­er­ated me!

And it was all due to the head­line from a piece in to­day’s Think Progress newsletter: “High School Teacher’s Lesson In Arabic Cal­lig­raphy Prompts Clo­sure Of En­tire School Dis­trict.” Ap­par­ently, all of the public schools in Au­gusta County, Vir­ginia, will be closed on Friday (today) after a ge­og­raphy lesson caught the at­ten­tion of some red-blooded Amer­ican parents.

“The con­tro­versy started when a lesson in World Ge­og­raphy class asked stu­dents to try to copy an ex­ample of Arabic cal­lig­raphy. The phrase was a state­ment of Is­lamic faith but the stu­dents were not asked to trans­late the state­ment or to re­cite it. Rather, the pur­pose of the ex­er­cise was to give stu­dents an idea of the artistic com­plexity of calligraphy.”

Subtle yes, but this un­der­handed crap didn’t make it past one parent, who was on her toes and rec­og­nized the subtle but ob­vious ma­nip­u­la­tion of wee Amer­ican minds. She saw the lesson for what it plainly was: an at­tempt by the teacher to in­doc­tri­nate her students.

The vig­i­lant Mom ral­lied a protest of like-minded par­ents: “[The teacher] gave up the Lord’s time. She gave it up and gave it to Mohammed!”

The re­sults?

Voila!

The a local brouhaha went viral and now it has na­tional media at­ten­tion and schools are closed until this mess is cleaned up!

Zero_illo copy

Here is the of­fending script, which may or may not have had an af­fect on Ma­tis­se’s cut-outs and Arp’s col­lages! WARNING: Do not stare it! Pro­longed ex­po­sure can cause philo­soph­ical up­heaval and re­li­gious con­vul­sion in Chris­tian brains.

A world history lesson here

The Arabic nu­meral system reached Eu­rope in the 11th cen­tury by the con­quering hordes of Moors. (They also brought as­tronomy and such in­stru­ments as the as­tro­labe.) For this reason, nu­merals were often re­ferred to as Arabic nu­merals. Be­gin­ning in the first years of the 13th cen­tury, the Italian math­e­mati­cian Fi­bonacci (aka Leonardo of Pisa) in­tro­duced the nu­meral system into Eu­ro­pean mathematics. 

From the 13th cen­tury, man­uals on cal­cu­la­tion be­came common in Eu­rope where they were called al­go­rismus after the Per­sian math­e­mati­cian al-Khwārizmī. Until the late 15th cen­tury, Arabic nu­merals pre­dom­i­nated among math­e­mati­cians, while mer­chants pre­ferred to use Roman nu­merals. By the 16th cen­tury, Arabic nu­merals were common throughout Europe.

We have never looked back, but per­haps we should . . .

See, all our num­bers and es­pe­cially the zero are part of VMC (the Vast Muslim Con­spiracy), so let’s get rid of them! Let’s use some good old Amer­ican know-how and in­vent a system of num­bers of our own, un­tainted by Mo­hammedan genius!

So, let’s start by showing them there Mus­lims we’re onto ’em!

That we mean business!

Let’s give ’em back their fur­sh­lug­giner zero!

Be­cause re­ally, it’s giving back nothing at all . . .


AL­TER­NA­TIVE ENDING:

Let’s give ’em back their fur­sh­lug­giner zero!

We don’t need no zeros—we got computers . . .




10 thoughts on “let’s give ’em back their furshlugginer zero!”

  1. That’s it! Giv’em nuttin’!

    Zip.

    Squash.

    Zilch.

    An’ let da great amer­icun un­washed print ev’r thang, an use New­Math ta cal­cu­late how many 2s in ten.

    Oh, the im­pli­ca­tions for Spencerian and Palmer Method, let alone calligraphy.

    Let con­fu­sion and blither­a­tion reign!

    If we can’t figure out the dif­fer­ence be­tween Arabic Cal­lig­raphy, Arabic, Islam or Is­lamic, we don’t de­serve what they’re gonna get.

    Gimme back my zeros, also.

    Still means “nothing”.

    Reply
  2. What DID we ever do be­fore com­puters? I still have my slide rule and a gadget called a pepper grinder. Steam­punk, but after you learn how to use them you never need to plug in again. Ex­cepting for the weirdweb, ut­ter­wize this con­ver­sa­tion would take days... And it wouldn’t be recorded (some­where) for pos­terity, and Mama.

    Reply
    • With com­puters, the facts re­garding al­most every­thing are within a few min­utes of re­search. Alas, this ability to al­ways be cor­rect has had zero af­fect on those among us who feel it more im­por­tant to be right all the time . . .

      Reply
      • I’d settle for being right some of the time! I’m ever so thankful for spell-check, Snopes, Wikipedia, and all the re­li­able elec­tronic re­sources avail­able at a touch.

        Reply
        • Anyone who can type a com­ment on Face­book can take the time to look it up (Snopes, Wikipedia, etc.) and not make an arse of him­self. But you and I may be the only ones who do . . .

          Reply
          • Well, snopes hasn’t asked me for a do­na­tion yet, but Wikipedia has! Makes me wonder if they track users. Ya’­know ya might be right! ‘Spe­cially con­sid­ering some of the hyper-intellectual re­marks made re­cently by var­ious politicians.

            Reply
            • 1. It is so rare for a righty to look some­thing up, that I take note of it when it hap­pens. It hap­pened today on an­other guy’s Face­book page: the guy ar­guing with me took the time to re­search the topic and came back with ac­tual facts! They still didn’t make his point, but I was im­pressed and AGREED WITH HIM and then got outta the con­ver­sa­tion be­fore it got weird!

              2. That said, I be­lieve every non-rightwingnut reading the hy­po­thet­ical Face­book con­ver­sa­tion I have com­posed below will nod in recognition . . .

              RIGHTY: Obama is the WORSE Pres­i­dent in his­tory! He hasn’t done ONE good thing in office!

              LEFTY: Oh come on. There have been three times (3x!!!) as many jobs cre­ated during Obama’s first six years than there were in all twelve years of the two Bush ad­min­is­tra­tions combined!

              RIGHTY: Bull­shit!

              LEFTY: Why don’t you spend a little time looking things up on the In­ternet be­fore posting this crap? It only takes a few min­utes to look some­thing up on Snopes or FactCheck or Poli­tifcat. Then you won’t look like a buffoon.

              RIGHTY: I don’t use Snopes or any of those li­brull sites!

              LEFTY: Wud­daya mean li­brull? They’re all pretty non-partisan.

              RIGHTY: They’re all li­brull liars!

              LEFTY: How do you figure?

              RIGHTY: ‘Cause they post four­teen times as many ar­ti­cles ex­posing righty lies as they do left­wingnut lies!

              LEFTY: Um, have you en­ter­tained the no­tion that rightwingnuts lie four­teen times more often than lefties?

              It usu­ally de­gen­er­ates from there . . .

              Reply

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