Shatner Rules Read Online Free PDF

decrepit pickup truck who had a long ponytail. This was 1948. People didn’t have long ponytails. But this one did. Part of the adventure—see strange places, meet new people!
    He also had fairly progressive views on sexual freedom. Meaning, he felt he had the freedom to explore my sexual bits. His advances were not the kind I was expecting from a resident of America’s Corn Belt, but he went straight for my buckle. Needless to say, unlike my voyages with Elizabeth, I suggested that we turn on the radio, play the license plate game—anything to rebuff his amorous advances.
    After a while, I thanked him for the ride and got out—as soon as he slowed down to about twenty miles per hour.
    (NOTE: If you do a tuck and roll at twenty miles per hour, you will most likely crush your cardboard
TWO MCGILL STUDENTS
sign.)
    Perhaps the most memorable leg of my maiden walk across the nation started in Pennsylvania, when an elderly rabbi and his wife picked me up. It was midday on a Wednesday, and the elderly Talmudist told me that he needed to get to Chicago by sundown Friday. I could get a lift from them, but I would be the one driving their car.
    Easy, you say? Those of you with your GPS systems and interstate highways.
    This was 1948. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act, which provided a road map for our nation’s highways, wasn’t signed until 1956. There weren’t many highways then, only byways. If I was going to make it to Chicago in forty-eight hours, I was going to need to step on it. Warp speed!
    With a sleeping ancient rabbi in the backseat. Who would wake up every time I hit a bump in the road, which were plentiful in the days before the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. The old man would pop out of the stupor, fix a rabbinical eye on me, and say, “Go slow, boy, go slow.” And then his head would fall to his wife’s shoulder and I’d continue driving into the night.
    Thanks to my precious elderly cargo, I was going much more slowly than I would have preferred when I hit the city limits of Chicago, and the panic set it.
    At around 6 P.M. , I was zipping around the streets of a strange city, chauffeuring an increasingly panicked rabbi in the backseat, who was looking at his watch and lamenting the setting sun, which was now vanishing behind the tall buildings.
    “The sun is down!” he wailed. “You promised! We have taken you across country and you have broken your promise to a rabbi!”
    The William Shatner seated at his computer now would have shrugged off such lamentations, but the William Shatner in this story was a seventeen-year-old Jewish kid from Montreal raised by Conservative parents. This wasn’t a narcoleptic octogenarian scolding me; God was scolding me.
    And when faced with the word of God, there is no better time for the emergence of The Negotiator.
    Yes, this may have been the first time my personage was taken over by the spirit of The Negotiator, but as I clutched the steering wheel, one eye on the road, the other scanning the buildings for the address of this temple, I began to debate the old man on what exactly “sundown” meant.
    I mean, were we talking God’s sundown? Or man’s sundown?
    The rabbi was perplexed. “What is the difference?” he asked.
    “Well, God’s sundown,” I vamped, “is determined by God’s hills, God’s forests, God’s horizon line on the sea. I see none of these, and therefore CANNOT determine the exact time of God’s sundown.”
    “Go on,” he said, as his wife pulled his watch from his pocket.
    “The sun has set behind the buildings. That is true. But who made these buildings?”
    “Man,” he answered. The teacher was engaging his student, despite our potential violation of the Sabbath.
    “Will you allow man to decide when the sun sets?”
    “No,” he answered, smiling.
    “And besides, how much of the sun needs to vanish before it has technically set? Ten percent? Twenty? Seventy-five?”
    His wife leaned forward and said, “Okay,