Well, it's time for our semi-annual Zero Tolerance Follies tale. A senior at Blaine High faced expulsion because he left a box cutter in his car. OMG: They used those to hijack planes. True. But in this case the guy used the tool in his job at Cub, where he cuts boxes, and it's been years since anyone hijacked a grocery store and flew it to Cuba, right?

Doesn't matter. The school has zero tolerance for pointy objects. Verdict: Suspension, with a recommendation that he be EXPELLED. Have a nice life.

Let us now make the obligatory noises about respecting the rules and the people who make them. I'm not one of those parents who'll rush to protect my Precious Snowflake from the consequences of her actions. If the school has a no-monkey policy, and it's there to ensure no child brings an ebola-infected primate for show-and-tell, and my kid brings an inert packet of Sea-Monkeys to class, well, technically we have a Monkey issue here, and we'll have to work this through.

But if the school's policy requires that the child be stoned in the parking lot with over-inflated dodge balls, I think I'd have the right to ask for some common sense.

You know the answer: Sorry! The school has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to monkeys, however loosely defined. But Sea-Monkeys are actually brine shrimp. Sir, it starts with brine shrimp, and it ends with an enraged silverback gorilla throwing the gym teacher through a plate-glass window.

I'm sure it can, but really. Common sense would seem to dictate a reasonable solution. No one disputes that the Blaine student didn't deserve a confab with the principal. They would tell him that school policy forbade sharp objects, not including Oscar Wilde quotes, and he would draw the obvious conclusion: I'd better hide it really well next time. Life would go on.

But Policy insisted that he be expelled, cast out, spat from the mouth of the educational system like a rotten fig, with classmates shrieking UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN! as he stumbled into the wilderness. Zero tolerance means zero tolerance for anything other than zero tolerance, regardless of circumstances.

Aside from that, kids, think creatively!

Eventually the situation was resolved; the judge's gavel came down hard, but it was made of Nerf. The school has theoretically expelled the student, but hasn't expelled him in reality.

Said the Strib article: "Technically, the punishment will be considered an expulsion for the purposes of record-keeping." Everyone's a winner, and here's a medal for playing. Perhaps there was some metaphysical juju played out behind the scenes -- the kid's soul was expelled, but his physical form was allowed to remain in the school, and the two are rejoined daily when he leaves school property. His physical form, however, will be expelled if his soul is caught smoking. Or something like that. Really, it's almost like a zen puzzle: When is an expelled person not expelled?

This will probably lead to new rules: Knives are still banned without exception, but the school shall not penalize a student for thinking about a knife within 50 yards of a school, or 25 yards of a building that looks like a school, or 10 yards of a person who had walked past someone who worked in a school once, but that was just a temp job doing some filing. Spoons are permitted. Forks are banned. We'll get back to you on sporks.

Situations like these always prompt the old-timers to recall how things were different in their time, what with kids bringin' spears and lances to school in case the mastadons showed up. But times have changed. They're always changing. This week, for example, we learned that zero tolerance means exactly what it says.

Except when it doesn't.

jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 More daily at www.startribune.com/buzz