Mark Zuckerberg is going back to Harvard.

Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard as a sophomore with entrepreneurial dreams of starting a social network. Facebook was born, and Zuckerberg never went back to Harvard.

Until now.

Lest you think Zuckerberg is going back to complete his bachelor's degree--HA! That's a good laugh--think again. Harvard is looking the other way and asking the Facebook founder to give its commencement address this year, where he'll be bestowed with an honorary degree.

When you're a billionaire multiple times over, any degree from Harvard, real or fake, is just icing at this point.

Keep it pithy: George Washington kept it to the point the second go-around.

In 1841, William Henry Harrison gave an 8,445 word inaugural address. clocking in at one hour and forty-five minutes.

Harrison died a month later of pneumonia and is barely remembered as a president of the United States.

Lesson: Keep it pithy.

In 1793, George Washington's second inaugural address was 135 words, the shortest ever. It takes approximately two minutes to recite or read.

Monuments, states, and the nation's capital are named for him. Washington appears on currency and Mount Rushmore as well.

Lesson: Keep it pithy.

Is there a correlation between the length of inauguration speeches and worthiness as president?

The facts speak for themselves.

As it is inauguration day, here is the speech Washington wrote for his second inauguration, in a time when presidents prepared and wrote their thoughts.


Fellow Citizens:

I am again called upon by the voice of my country to execute the functions of its Chief Magistrate. When the occasion proper for it shall arrive, I shall endeavor to express the high sense I entertain of this distinguished honor, and of the confidence which has been reposed in me by the people of united America.

Previous to the execution of any official act of the President the Constitution requires an oath of office. This oath I am now about to take, and in your presence: That if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly or knowingly the injunctions thereof, I may (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony.

Who wrote the presidential oath of office?

____________________________________________________________

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
____________________________________________________________

That's it. In just 35 words (or 37 words if you count the alternative "or affirm") an individual swears the Oath of Office to The Presidency of The United States for the next four years. Yet, most Americans don't know who wrote the oath, mainly because no single person did.

The oath is written in the United States Constitution, and appears as the only sentence placed in quotation marks. James Madison--who would later become the fourth president--is largely credited with being the author of the Constitution, but an array of Founding Fathers offered their own thoughts of what to include in the document.

In the middle of the following draft from August 6, 1787, in the National Archives, George Washington annotated the presidential oath with his own thoughts, striking out "judgment" and changing the wording to a president's "abilities" (later changed again to "ability"):

During the Constitutional Convention, multiple committees of delegates debated various factors of the document, including a Committee of Detail and a Committee of Style and Arrangement, the latter of which included Madison and Alexander Hamilton, among others.

In the end, no one person can lay claim to the crafting the words forty-four men have said, and a forty-fifth will say later this week. It seems the presidential oath, like American democracy, is a child born of many fathers.

Political plagiarism as a teachable moment.

By now we all know Melania Trump channeled her inner 14-year old high school freshman and played a little verbal Freddy Fast Fingers with her speech at the Republican National Convention the other night.

In it, Trump plagiarized Michelle Obama's Democratic National Convention speech eight years earlier. Words and phrases like hard work, American dream, values--yada, yada, yada--the sort of political speech making where nothing but white noise is said, but it's an easy sell. Americans love a good fairy tale, regardless of political affiliation.

Which leads us to the teachable moment that has American teachers giddy with excitement. They can teach popularized plagiarism! The BBC reached out to various teachers, including Brad Francis, an English teacher at Davis Middle School in Evanston, Wyoming.

"Melania's speech is probably the most blatant example that I have ever seen," Francis told the BBC. "Eighth grade students need very literal examples, and her speech is basically verbatim to Michelle Obama's. It will help them learn absolutely what not to do in their writing."

Admittedly, Francis might need to learn a little bit of nuance. The speech is absolutely a case of plagiarism, but the entire thing isn't "basically verbatim." Francis would get a C+ grade for such hyperbole and exaggeration in his argument.

"I have students who try to copy and paste material from the internet all the time to pass it off as their own," Francis continued telling the BBC. "That speech was Michelle Obama's intellectual property."

The real disappointing angle that's falling through the cracks with all of this is that two different political parties actually wanted to claim that feeble and uninspired speech as either intellectual or property.

Ryan Seacrest is an American hero.

It's college commencement season, which means it's that delightful time of year when everyone baking in the midday sun catches heatstroke while desperately trying not to nod off during a lengthy speech about changing the world, living your dreams, yada, yada, yada. Commencement speeches are a lot like those "inspirational" quotes your annoying friend on Facebook posts, only fifteen minutes longer:

This should inspire you to try and use a comma better.

Some colleges and universities actually pay for their commencement speakers though. The idea of an honorary degree from, say, a Columbia or Yale is enough to lure most anyone to speak for free. Lesser known universities, especially state universities, can't woo big names though, not unless the wooing comes with a briefcase of cash.

Take, for instance, the University of Houston, which paid retired astronaut hero Scott Kelly $35,000 this year to speak at their commencement, according to the Associated Press. This was practically fun money for the school, which spent $166,000 last year on Matthew McConaughey to speak, plus an extra $9,500 for his airfare. To be fair, McConaughey donated the speaking fee, but the airfare cost wasn't, and the school still ponied up the fee regardless if it went to charity.

Likewise, Kean University in New Jersey reportedly spent $40,000 on its 2016 commencement speaker, Brandon Stanton. If you know who Brandon Stanton is, odds are you're his grandmother--and that's just adorable. (Hey, Grandma!) For the rest of America, Brandon Stanton is the founder of HONY--the website/social media creation better known as Humans of New York. Kean University also spent an additional $40,000 on having its own retired astronaut speak, too. Mark Kelly, the twin brother of Scott Kelly, was Kean's second speaker--proving once and for all that being the second fiddle sibling doesn't mean you get the second fiddle speaking fee.

"Our students worked very hard, and they deserve it," said Margaret McCorry, a spokeswoman for Kean University, to the Associated Press. "It makes their commencement just that much more memorable." Imagine how memorable it might be if you actually knew who the person was beforehand!

The University of Texas at Austin paid $3,300 for its alumnus, Darren Walker, to come back last year to speak. Walker is the president of the second largest philanthropic organization in America, The Ford Foundation. The $3,300 was spent on Walker's two night stay at the Four Seasons Hotel, which covered a $450 spa tab. Philanthropy apparently starts at home.

The University of Georgia paid $22,000 to charter a private plane for ABC news anchor Amy Robach to come on down. This is reasonable when you consider only 216,000 people fly in and out of Atlanta every day at the world's busiest airport, so it's not as if she could have found a Delta or United flight connecting there.

All of this brings us to Ryan Seacrest. The most ubiquitous human being in America is apparently also the most sensible about commencement matters. This past week he returned to his alma mater, the University of Georgia, free of charge to speak at their graduation.

Whereas Toni Morrison once charged Rutgers University $30,000 for her to scowl for twenty minutes, Ryan Bleepin' Seacrest flashed his polished Chiclets for free--and was probably more memorable to a bunch of twenty-somethings in the audience than Toni Morrison will ever be.

But imagine how much Ryan Seacrest could charge if he was a semi-famous retired astronaut.

Not only do the 2016's candidates for president act like sixth graders, they sound like sixth graders, too, study shows.

No one politician comes unscathed from the recent study on the speech and grammatical patterns of various politicians from the 2016 election--except for Abraham Lincoln, who isn't around to run. But we'll get to him in a second.

"A Readability Analysis of Campaign Speeches From the 2016 US Presidential Campaign," published this week by Carnegie Mellon University, looked to analyze the reading level of speeches given by the prospective 2016 presidential candidates and found that the group of them largely falls into the 6th-to-8th grade range.

That's shameful and embarrassing and pathetic. And it's also very close to the same reading level of where this blog resides. That said, I'm not running to be a fairly awkward individual with the power to rule hundreds of millions of people. I'm just running to be your number one blog for random stuff, like Herman Hesse hiking mountains in the nude. I also know how to write like a research wonk, super-heavy on a polysyllabic craziness and jazzy punctuation, but you'll be bored, doze off, and--oh, hey, is that Ray Bradbury shirtless, too?

(That crap I just wrote above, that one paragraph you just read right there ↑↑↑↑? That gets a 9.1 grade level through various testings, like the Flesch-Kincaid Scale, on this site. If my drivel can enter the high school realm, imagine what Trump is pushing.)

This is all to say that politicians dumb down and pander to Americans because it works, although some are worse than others. Bernie Sanders wants you to have a high school education, so he speaks at a tenth grade level, says Carnegie Mellon. Donald Trump? More like a grade 5.7. Which one looks to have a better shot at winning the election?

This all brings us back to Abraham Lincoln--specifically, to the Gettysburg Address. Potentially the greatest speech in American history, it still maxes out just over a 10th grade level grammatically, and 9th grade for vocabulary. Yet, despite such modest levels, Lincoln would surpass all of today's politicians.

Does this mean I sound like Abraham Lincoln when I talk?

God, no.

But does it mean I sound smarter than a billionaire Sunkist orange with pigs-in-a-blanket for fingers?

Yessss.

School superintendent steps down amid claims of plagiarism.

Mansfield, MA, school superintendent Brenda Hodges has stepped down from her post after allegations that her four minute commencement speech at last month's high school graduation was plagiarized from Navy Admiral William McRaven's commencement speech a month earlier at the University of Texas, Austin.

As The Boston Globe reports:

In his speech in May, available on YouTube, McRaven told a University of Texas at Austin audience that “if every one of you changed the lives of just 10 people, and each one of those folks changed the lives of another 10 people, just 10, then in five generations, 125 years, the class of 2014 will have changed the lives of 800 million people.”

In her speech, Hodges said that if “every one of you changed the lives of just five people, just five, then in five generations, 125 years, the class of 2014 will have changed the lives of 400 million people.’’

Well, hey, might as well lower everyone's expectations by half and hope it makes things more realistic. Bonus points to Hodges.

Despite resigning, Hodges still claims she didn't plagiarize, stating that McRaven's speech was "a hundred times better," and that the admiral's speech wasn't really her inspiration, but instead that she largely borrowed passages from a pastor's talk in her native Oklahoma a year earlier. For not citing her pastor, Hodges apologized.

If you're desperately confused as to who is allegedly plagiarizing from whom at this point, you're not alone.

75-years ago today, Lou Gehrig was "the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is the formal name, but is popularly known today in North America as Lou Gehrig's Disease, named after its most famous victim, and New York Yankee's Hall of Famer, Lou Gehrig.

Gehrig felt the onset of ALS in the midst of the 1938 baseball season, despite posting solid statistics, reportedly saying "I tired mid-season. I don't know why, but I just couldn't get going again." By 1939's spring training, Gehrig had slowed even more, tripping over his feet, unable to muster any energy to play first base, with base hits dribbling out into the field. During April, the first month of the season, Gehrig's statistics dropped dramatically, causing media speculation as to what was the cause, and resulting in Gehrig removing himself from the starting lineup--the first time his name didn't appear in 2,130 straight games.

Weeks later, on June 19th, Gehrig visited the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, seeing Charles William Mayo (the surgeon son of the namesake founder of the Mayo Clinic) for a diagnosis. Mayo determined Gehrig had amyotrophic laeral sclerosis, a grim diagnosis with rapidly deteriorating outcomes, with maybe a few years to live. Gehrig's career was over immediately.

Within two weeks, the Yankees held Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day in the middle of a doubleheader against the Washington Senators on the 4th of July. The ceremony was filled with official dignitaries from the world of baseball, politics, and local civic organizations, in which Gehrig was presented with numerous awards, plaques, and trophies honoring him for his service to the game and to the community. Gehrig, too weak to hold some of the awards, often placed them to the ground.

To cap off the ceremony, Gehrig was asked to give a speech. It was then, on a warm, beautiful 4th of July in 1939, that Gehrig gave a largely extemporaneous speech claiming that--despite his death sentence--he was the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.

Excerpts of the speech are shown in the video above. The text of Gehrig's speech is below:


"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I'm lucky. Who wouldn't consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky.

When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift--that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies--that's something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter--that's something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body--it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed--that's the finest I know.

So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for."


Gehrig died two years later on June 2, 1941, at the age of 37. It was 16-years to the day of when he began his streak of 2,130 straight games played.

Oklahoman valedictorian denied diploma because she used the word "hell" during graduation speech.

Specifically, the moment of in-yo'-face-upside-yo'-head language occurred when Kaitlin Nootbaar said "How the hell do I know?" in a lighthearted moment where she channeled the Twilight franchise where Bella says something similar regarding what to do upon graduating high school.

Because Oklahoma has its fingers on the pulse of 1952, the school district denied granting Nootbaar a diploma because of her use of the word "hell."

In other news, the real crime here was that Kaitlin Nootbaar referenced Twilight without snickering.