By Ben Hommrich
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – Penn State student Josh Fink (freshman-finance) shocked friends and acquaintances alike when he announced that he, in fact, watches documentaries and learns a lot from them.
This revelation came about when Fink and his friends attended a Penn State baseball game. Fink had recently watched all nine episodes of Ken Burns’ “Baseball” and was regaling his friends with in-depth knowledge of the history of America’s oldest pastime when a crowd began forming around him, including Padma Singh (freshman-chemistry).
“While he was explaining the intricacies of the original Knickerbocker rules of baseball, I was in shock at his intellectual superiority. I asked him how one man could know so much about sports. When he said it was from a documentary, the entire stadium went quiet, then immediately cheered. Two umpires quit on the spot in shame, knowing their hard work was for nothing.”
While some cretins spend their time enjoying books, movies, and TV shows about fictional people, Fink refuses to buy into the hype.
“As a worldly and intelligent person, fiction just doesn’t cut it for me. I recently discovered that I am an empath after watching the Vice documentary about them, and I think that just breaks the illusion for me. I see these soulless facsimiles of people on the screen and feel the void where their emotions would be. They are not real.”
With a well of knowledge that is eclectic as it is deep, it is no surprise that Fink is a master of intellectual debate. In his section of HIST 156 (History of the American Worker), he demonstrated his skills in a heated yet thoughtful debate with the professor.
“That debate began when Dr. Iger incorrectly stated that John D. Rockefeller was a ruthless and cruel businessman. Clearly, she had not watched the seminal History Channel documentary series ‘The Men Who Built America,’ or she would have known that we should be grateful for his contribution to America’s oil infrastructure and the resulting wealth that came from it. I put her in her place and she ran out of the room in tears.”
According to expert psychologists, Fink’s intelligence is growing and shows no signs of stopping. In fact, he just recently discovered what NPR is and will almost certainly talk about it exclusively for the next few months.