@StuffVladSays: UT Professor Posts Son’s Funny Thoughts on Twitter

By Jordan Schraeder in Blog, Special on October 21, 2013 at 2:03 pm | No Comments

If Kids Say the Darndest Things was still on the air, Bill Cosby would have a star in UT senior lecturer Robert Quigley’s 9-year-old son, Liam. And Quigley’s got the tweets to prove it.

When Liam started kindergarten a few years ago, Quigley—a former Statesman social media editor and current UT journalism lecturer—decided that his son’s extensive vocabulary and different way of looking at the world might make for some serious comedy gold. So Quigley started @StuffVladSays, a Twitter account dedicated to the fourth-grader (nicknamed Vlad for his tendency to be in charge, á la Vlad the Impaler) and his active imagination.

“He’s a very creative child who comes at things in a totally different way,” Quigley says. “We don’t have cable TV. We don’t need cable TV—he’s a constant source of entertainment for us.”

The idea for the account came about while Quigley, his wife Emily, and little Liam were sitting on the patio of Guero’s Taco Bar on South Congress one evening.

“He was just sitting there pondering, looking off into the ether, then he turns to me and goes, ‘Do you think God knows everything we’re thinking about?'” Quigley remembers. “When I told him I thought so, he says, ‘Well, I’m thinking about meatloaf.'”

That was just the beginning of Liam’s philosophical musings, which range from how to pick up women (“I will say to a pretty girl: ‘Hey baby, I am going to buy you'”) to his thoughts on reality TV (“I think American Idol is the worst thing in the world—besides Nazis”), and beyond.

While his frequent and opinionated thoughts (many of which are about tacos) may make him a handful in the classroom, Liam has developed quite the following on Twitter. But he had no clue his parents were publishing his musings until KVUE ran a story about the account this past weekend.

“I finally let him in on it, and he was like, ‘Wait, you call me Vlad?!'” Quigley laughs.

By capturing this period in his son’s life, Quigley hopes that Liam will one day be able to look back at the tweets with his own family and laugh at how crazy he was as a kid.

“I have those little bits of videotape and little bits of audio from when I was growing up, and it’s all incredibly precious,” Quigley says. “There’s always the danger that he might be mad about it someday, but he’s really just an easygoing kid who takes life in stride.”

Read a sampling of Liam’s funniest thoughts below, and follow @StuffVladSays to see more.

“Living in old times would be great and terrible; great because you rode horses, but terrible because you used pinecones for toilet paper.”

Even the school counselors betrayed me; they’re Aggies, too. I thought counselors were supposed to help people.

— Vlad (@StuffVladSays) October 5, 2013

— Vlad (@StuffVladSays) October 14, 2013

 

(Why do you want to be president?) “I want to help people. And make the White House chef make me tacos.”

— Vlad (@StuffVladSays) August 15, 2013

 

“I was born just a few weeks after Ray Charles died. I bet I was in your belly going, ‘Must get out earlier to see Ray Charles!'”

— Vlad (@StuffVladSays) May 2, 2013

 

To a herd of cows: “Don’t be too happy out there in the field, because soon you’ll be delicious cheeseburgers in my mouth.” — Vlad (@StuffVladSays) March 23, 2013

(Said to girl holding potato chip in front of face): “Lily, I hate to tell you this, but you look like Hitler.” — Vlad (@StuffVladSays) March 20, 2012

 

“I was like an astronaut when I was in Mommy’s belly. I pronounced it ‘asto-not’ though. I was too young to know.”

— Vlad (@StuffVladSays) January 31, 2012

 

(Replying to Mom’s question, “Which part of ‘don’t’ do you not understand?”): “The d part. That makes it on’t. Like oatmeal.”

— Vlad (@StuffVladSays) September 23, 2011

 

(Speaking about the president): “I just call him Baracko. It’s like that green stuff I eat. You know, guacamole.”

— Vlad (@StuffVladSays) July 30, 2011

 

“It’s not Torchy’s Tacos; it’s Torture Tacos, because they torture you by making you eat more and more tacos until you get fat.”

— Vlad (@StuffVladSays) November 24, 2010

Photo from a tweet that read, “Class project was to create a Valentine to anyone. Most kids wrote about their parents or their pets.” Courtesy Robert Quigley.

Tags: Liam, robert quigley, Stuff Vlad Says