My math teachers insist that they are offering a valuable trade. I say they're nuts. Is math really that important to my future? I'm going to be an English major. I appreciate the advice.

Brixton

Brixton, you puzzle me.

Surely, any man so directed by conscience and patriotism, such as yourself, would know of course the manifold value of mathematics in the hands of a Major Britannia. It has come to my attention, of course by faithful hounds the Rob, my lab assistant, that certain illustrated texts of your culture tells much the tales of another Officer Britannia, though of lower rank, which perhaps you know: The Captain Britain.

Armed with some knowledge of the exploits of This Captain Britannia, one can easily demonstrate that if an Officer Anglicana of such a low rank as Captain has call to draw upon the Disciplina Mathematica, surely the vaunted title of Major could not come with any less effort in the world of numbers.

For this Captain Britain can fly, as it seems any officer of a greater rank must be able to as well, and in the varied joys of flight one must be attuned to the eddies and whorls of wind velocity. Much as a mackerel must know the calculitic majesty of matrices in order to safely navigate the currents of the deep, so too any airborne creature must understand the currents of that much thinner and more horrifying fluid, the air of the upspace. These flying creatures, be they marmosets, eagles, bandoliers, jet-packed shock troops of the coming new age or even the many flying commandos of her majesty's grand militaria, must surely know in intimate detail of all that applies in the mathematics of trajectory, and force, and wind sheer, and sheer hose of the woman's leg, and cloud mass, and St. Stephen's Mass, and of the falling, powerful falling, of the many tactical nuclear weapons that our own President seeks to develop and deploy in the many theaters of conflict which the Imperia American is engaged alongside your own brethren, these officers of Britannia.

When Captain Britain is fighting crypto-nazis, he must delicately calculate the trajectory of his shield. And when he is flying deep in space battling the blue-hued kree of his native star system, he must understand the long fingered pull of deepest, gravest space and gravity. So it must be as well for his superior, you, the soon to be Major Britain.

I cannot believe how little you chimps understand about your own ways. It is in the very paper stories of the children of your species, and of your dim-witted janitors high upon the inhalation of festering herbs.

"Do I need the mathematics?" he asks.

"I am to be a Major of the English," he says.

Pfah! I say to you: Elect me president or I shall crush your nancied, effeminate bones.

Much love,
The Giant Squid