Cursives! Foiled again.

The writing’s on the wall, and it ain’t in cursive.

According to many news stories by bored education reporters who were faced with the choice of writing a cursive story or finding a way to creatively tell people their kids are dumb for the 432nd time, the art of handwriting is dying.

Apparently, schools are no longer focusing on cursive penmanship, as computer word processors have made handwriting obsolete. As someone who did battle with the Scott Foresman writing handbook in the early ’80s, I can’t say I’m shedding any tears.

Despite the best efforts of many elementary school teachers, my handwriting was terrible. My handwriting was so bad that I was once accepted to medical school on the basis of my low elementary school penmanship grades alone. My i’s were illegible, my u’s unreadable and my capital s’s looked like g’s who hung around with the wrong letter, made some bad decisions, and are now expecting a lowercase bundle of joy in a few months.

Today, I remember just enough of my handwriting classes to sign my name on a check. And on those electronic touchpads at the store, my signature is usually replaced with pictures of smiley faces.

My point, if I have one, is that all those hours of penmanship instruction didn’t amount to much, and perhaps if I had spent that time being taught other skills, like grammar and composition, this column wouldn’t be half as bad as it is. Times have changed, and the advent of word processing has made cursive writing as obsolete as landline phones or bothering to pay one’s mortgage during a Democratic presidency.

Now, of course, there are those who will disagree with me, generally because it’s a scientific fact that at least 10 percent of the population has an IQ of less than 80. This is America, and, as evidenced by the large audience for reality television, we all have the right to be as dumb as our innate tendencies for intellectual sloth will allow.

Handwriting afficionados, (sorry, handwriting afficionado Millie just died and it’s down to just Winifred now) make the point that your penmanship says a lot about you, that the ways you dot your i’s and cross your t’s can reveal insights, like, in my case, “Hey, this idiot can’t even write his own name.”

Despite what they think, I, for one, am glad that cursive handwriting is joining HD-DVD, buggy whips and the American economy on the scrap heap of history. It’s going to save teachers a lot of time, schools a lot of paper and many uppercase g’s from looking pregnant.

Local pill fiends, and let’s face it, Dothan’s full of them, who want to use my old grade school history notes as bogus hydrocodone prescriptions can reach me at .