Taco Shanks

If you've have ever watched Lockdown or had a family member (or five or six) in jail, you know what a shank is. For the rest of you (all of which do not live in my neck of the woods), a shank is a crude tool that is made by prisoners for the express purpose of stabbing or slashing another inmate. This term resulted in my favorite expression to yell at ass clown drivers -- "I will shank you in the neck." Basically, the inmates file down any object that can be made into a point and wrap something around the handle of the object for better grip and so they don't hurt their little hands when that use it to skewer their cellmate like a pig.  They use things like plastic toothbrushes, screws out of their beds and pieces of metal from their toilets.

But a taco shell? Really? Evel swears that this is the reason that they are only given soft shell tacos in his middle school (I highly doubt it, but it makes a good subject for a blog).

I guess it could make sense. I've pulled some ancient hard taco shells out of my cupboard and impaled the roof of my mouth on the first bite at dinner, but I could only imagine the school safety team meeting to discuss the possible dangers:

"Let's bring this meeting to order. First on the agenda, the recent outbreak of stabbings in the lunchroom. Seems kids are breaking their taco shells into pieces and filing them down on their rock hard dinner rolls to exact revenge on the rival tether ball team. Just last week, star player Billy Marshall had to leave the team due to a taco shell inflicted stab wound on his punching hand. All in favor of banning hard taco shells?"

Now I can see getting rid of metal forks (which my son's school still has) or the hard melamine plastic lunch trays (I saw a girl use one in a fight my sophomore year in high school. It looked like it did some damage), but food related violence? The only food related violence is what is inflicted upon the poor children that have to eat that slop. What is next, banning pizza wedges because they have a point or doing away with fruit cocktail because...well, I'll let you use you figure that one out (*snicker, snicker*)?

So after a good ten minutes of pressing Evel for the deets on what color school issued prison jumpsuits I'll have to order for him and Tinkerbell next year, he finally broke and told us that a kid was eating a taco and got stabbed IN THE ROOF OF HIS MOUTH (I totally called it back in paragraph three). Ahhhh, I see said the blind man. All of the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. I think I have a little story teller on my hands. Where he gets that from, I'll honestly never know...