Gulliver's Kids

Kimber would like to note that the stupid girl who took Kimber's spot in class is going to get jumped on her way home unless she stops sitting there and lets Kimber take her rightful place.

I was supposed to have read Gulliver's Travels twice over the course of my college career, and even once in high school. Thanks to a very battered personal copy of the Gulliver's Travels Cliffsnotes, I've never had to. However, as I've gone over the book more and more, I've realized that I really don't care for Gulliver, and I feel very badly for his children.

For those of you who, like me, have not read the book, I'll summarize. Gulliver works on ships as a doctor, but gets shipwrecked and ends up in a land of tiny (or lilliputian) people. He eventually finds his way home, and guessing that the odds of shipwrecking again aren't that bad, goes sailing again. He gets marooned in a land of huge people where's he's treated like a pet and made to striptease for a bunch of giant ladies. When he finally gets back from that misadventure, he's stupid enough to go out again and finds another land, which I'm not very clear on because the Cliffsnotes version doesn't cover it very well. Since Gulliver is the dumb of all dumbs (Gulliver=gullivble) once he's home from that, he goes out a fourth time, and finds a land where horses are completely sensible humans are naked hairy men grubbing around in the dirt.

Gulliver gets a little more messed up with each adventure, but by the end of the fourth book, he's decided that people are crap, and spends most of his time acting like a horse, hanging around in the stables, and emerging only occasionally to lecture his children about the evils of pride.

I know that a lot of kids have absent fathers, but imagine if you had a father who had to travel for his job, was shipwrecked and assumed dead several times, and then came back, but only to hypocritically drill you about how bad pride is. Now imagine that he was whinnying like a horse when he did it, and only let you eat oats. If I were one of them, I'd probably plan a little "accident" that would finally put Gulliver, and countless English students around the world, out of their misery.

That is all.