The news in The Hatchet is bad.
Ed Meinert was only pretending to be Ed Meinert, of all people. Phil Meisner was only pretending to be SA president, of all things. Their stories ran in close proximity so that now everyone thinks President Phil Meinert got impeached for credit-card fraud.
Sex in the Marvin Center bathrooms. Or maybe the bad news is no more sex in the Marvin Center bathrooms. I understand the public health concerns, but going to the can seems like much less of an adventure now.
Drugs in the residence halls, counterfeiting rings, dozens of freshmen left out on benches to die of alcohol poisoning. If I look back on GW after graduating, will I turn into a pillar of salt?
The news from the rest of the city isn’t much better. It’s much worse, scatological, in fact. I turned on Fox 5 News Thursday to watch its special report on the District’s washing machines.
Always on our side, these brave broadcast journalists pushed their way into local laundromats and homes – not that anyone resisted or even seemed to notice them – to find out exactly what it is that comes out in the wash. They found fecal matter.
It’s always disheartening when fecal matter shows up anywhere. As a species, we’ve done our level best to keep away from the stuff, even going so far as to walk around on our hind legs so as not to be near it. But there’s only so much we can do.
I happen to think the gang at Fox 5 was just looking for it to remind us, yet again, of our human imperfection. What next, Fox 5? D.C. Colons: Are they as clean as they could be?
All the news is just plain awful, but if we, as a nation, are good at anything, it’s pretending everything’s OK and looking on the brighter side of our lives. In that spirit, here is some good news.
We’ve still got Ebert. We’ve still got one of the Two Fat Ladies frying bacon in lard. There was a Real World marathon last weekend.
So much for the world at large.
Things are getting better on campus too. We now have a tempietto on the Mid-Campus Quad. Some people wonder what good a tempietto will do us, but they don’t see how useful it will be for indexing. For instance:
Do you see that girl? That’s the girl.
What girl?
The one by the tempietto.
That one? Wow, you were drunk.
And so on.
You can make lifelong friends standing in line at the Taco Bell Express. Some will complain that express is supposed to mean fast, but as it’s used by chain restaurants, it means small. There’s a Starbucks express on K Street that is no bigger than a Mitchell single.
The weather has been exceptionally warm, always good news for a Southern Californian like me. Some of my friends are concerned that because of this global warming trend, they’ll never get to wear their winter wardrobes. Sweaters are important, and you can wear them in this weather if you don’t mind getting a little damp. No one will notice after the ice caps have melted, and we’re all under water.
So you see, things are really looking up.
