Ah, the salad days of middle school--my memories of those graceless years include riding the bus in sixth grade while listening to Another Brick in the Wall.* It was great fun to yell out in unison, "Hey! Teachers! Leave those kids alone!" I'm sure the bus driver thought it was a real hoot.

Anyway, my tour down memory lane was prompted by reading the obituary of Syd Barrett that appeared in the WaPo earlier this week. One of Pink Floyd's founding members, Barrett--a bit of a whimsical chap--was forced out of the band in part due to his predilection for LSD.

The last line of the obit is a bit of a puzzler, "He enjoyed gardening . . . and was said to be skillful at stuffing peppers."  Was this really the best the obit writer could come up with for an ending? Or was the writer merely a victim of bad editing? Or did Barrett somehow arrange to get this line in as a final prank? Or, perhaps this is only interesting to someone who has been home sick with their family all week?

*Being the uncivilized middle schoolers that we were, we asked the bus driver to turn on the radio by yelling, "Tunes!"  Of course now that I work for an organization that represents bus drivers, I tend to look down my nose at such boorish behavior. What can I say, at the time I thought it was cool.