Barney Would Have a Hard Time Loading a Musket

One of the joys of coaching travel soccer is driving a van-load of kids to some obscure location (such as Berkeley  Heights) and eavesdropping on their conversations -- this weekend there was much talk of warfare (for example: the Revolutionary War must have been "really boring" because it took so long to load the muskets) and Barney: according to my son, Barney was fired because he "cursed at little kids" and had "cigarettes hidden in his tail," but I checked Snopes and neither of these rumors is true (I'm referring to the Barney rumors, of course . . . the rumor that The Revolutionary War was boring is hard to substantiate one way or another, but I tend to doubt that gangrene, frostbite and septicemia made 18th century soldiers yawn and nod off).