Fall from Ethos

As I write this, I am eating pancakes and sitting in the corner of my room where my bedroom door and closet door intersect (I recently discovered--this morning--that this is the best place to catch the warm air as it exits the vent), fuming over earlier events from tonight. At this point in time, due to my limited funds reserved for the heating bill as well as the onset of this cold spell, I have no immediate desire for my blood pressure to lower because I at least want to stay warm until I snuggle up in bed. What transpired, however, is something that I think you will all want to hear.

I am in a night class. Had I had my way, this would not have happened. This class, though, is semi-required, and so it came about that I signed away my Wednesday nights from 6-9pm to Intro to Communication Theory. I have had classes at this time before, and I had noticed a trend in that I always seemed to find these classes particularly odious--whether because I had such an intense dislike for the subject matter, the time, or a combination of the two is still unclear--so I was particularly worried about having this class fill the exact same time slot.

My fears were answered the first day of class when I accidentally fell asleep during lecture and dreamed I was taking notes.

The professor hardly endeared himself to me this week, the second week, when we somehow began talking about how people tend to believe tall people more than short people, possibly because the general population believes that a shorter person thinks they have more to prove. The professor began talking about how whenever presidents are shown on tv, they are always shot from below, giving the appearance that they are much taller than they actually are.

"Like Richard Nixon," Professor said. "He was this tall." He held out his arm perpendicular to his body, creating a perfect 90 degree angle in his armpit. "I know. I've stood next to him. But you wouldn't guess he was only this tall by looking at him on tv. That's because they exaggerate the camera angle."

I was a bit surprised by this, but Nixon being well before my time, I was easily convinced that he was the president who also carried the title "Shortest President."

Professor continued talking about other presidents, placing Obama in the "6 foot range" and Dubya in the "mid- to high-five feet range." Given what I'd seen of the two of them, I found these very general representations of their heights to be accurate. I, however, do not consider myself to be a particularly political person, and therefore cannot consider myself to be quite the authority that some are on presidential heights.

Then Professor got a bit more into my territory.

"And how tall do you think Brad Pitt is?" he asked the class. I heard some estimations from around the class, mostly around the 5'10" and 5'9" range.

"FIVE FOOT FOUR!" Professor revealed to us. There was a general murmur of "bullshit" throughout the room immediately following the announcement.

"Are you sure you're not thinking of Ben Stiller?" someone asked.
"Or Tom Cruise?" asked another.

"No, no. It's true," Professor informed us. "He only looks taller because Angelina Jolie is such a tiny thing. And I know this because Brad Pitt was in the movie 'The Mexican,' with Julia Roberts. Do you know how tall Julia Roberts is? SIX FEET TALL."

By this point, everyone had pulled out their laptops, cell phones, and iPods to look up Professor's statistics. I heard one of the TAs sitting behind me whisper to the other sitting beside her, "It's a new age."

"And in the movie 'The Mexican,'" he continued, "They had to have Brad Pitt stand on a ramp to make him appear taller than Julia Roberts so they could be like the image we have in our minds of what a couple should look like--with the man taller than the woman."

I was among those who had immediately turned to my iPod for verification of my teacher's blatant incorrectness. Searching Google, I quickly found my answer--Brad Pitt is somewhere between 5'9" and 5'10", though he lists himself as 5'11"--right where we predicted he would be, and a good half foot taller than Professor claimed him to be. Moving on to Julia, I discovered that, rather than being 6 feet tall, Roberts stands a bit above average at 5'8". Rather than being eight inches taller than Brad Pitt, she was two or three inches shorter. The necessity of the ramp Professor claimed they had used in filming the movie had changed from being a necessary prop to make Brad Pitt taller than his co-star, to being a prop that merely amplified the difference between their heights.

And, finally, on to former President Nixon. After finding his height, I spent the last forty-five minutes of class trying to gauge the height of Professor. He seemed to be a fairly average height, probably "in the six foot range" though I couldn't determine much beyond that. His waist hit at about the same height as the counter to the table that served as a desk at the front of the room. Were I to stand at the desk, the counter would probably hit just above my navel. Keep in mind, though, that I possess abnormally short legs. No, as far as I could tell, Professor is of fairly average height, not the extreme height of 6'6" or 6'7" (possibly higher depending on head size and neck length) that he would have to be for a 5'11-1/2" Richard Nixon (the tallest in this trio, I will note) to come just to his shoulder.

Given, he never told us at what age Nixon stood next to him--a pre-pubescent Nixon could easily have been the one to which he was referring--but with the authority and importance that he made his statement, I can only imagine that he stood beside Nixon at some point during his presidency, pre-Watergate.

I quickly lost all faith in Professor, and for good reason. Telling us, with such authority no less, that Brad Pitt is about the size of a jockey just about killed me. When I told someone in Prague that I was a Communications major, he promptly responded that at his school, girls who were Communications majors were really just in for their M-R-S degrees. This major being such an obvious joke, I really have to wonder how it is that a professor could be so blatantly misinformed about one of the most important celebrities of our time.