I'd like to start this week's column with a bit of reader education.
During the course of my time here at The Post, Let's Get Farcical has managed to net me a few e-mail responses. And inevitably, they bear subject lines like Regarding your article and About your editorial and Please to verify you account information with SkyBank.
What is important for my readers to know is that I write columns, not editorials or articles. I stress this distinction to you not for the purpose of demonstrating my arrogant belief that you should know the difference - I think my arrogance has been well enough established in past weeks that I needn't waste time reasserting it - but because I would not want to demean the efforts of my harder-working colleagues here at our fine college newspaper.
It would be unfortunate for them and their eventual employment searches if their articles and editorials, which entail a developed news sense and significant amounts of research and crafting, were lumped in with my columns, which entail me coming up with ridiculous nicknames for various administration officials (sadly, University Advancement VP Leonard Raley left before I got a chance to call him Neon Leon in print).
Still, I aspire to a certain level of truth in my rampant lying (think about it), and thus have to make at least token efforts toward establishing greater credibility. Which is why today, I would like to go back through my past ... one, two, carry the seven, drop the remainder ... 16 columns and set the record straight, correcting some gaffes, clarifying some misconceptions, and most importantly, meeting my weekly word count without having to write an entirely new column.
Let's start at the beginning, shall we? No, not the beginning? Okay, how about the middle?
On Oct. 20, I wrote that wooing a lady by cooking her a meal might inspire her to pay you back by cooking you breakfast, giving you the perfect opportunity to get dressed and sneak out the window without leaving your number. That column, I feel, casts an unfair portrayal of college-age males. It implies that we are interested in nothing but getting sex from fellow female students, when in fact most of us are not so single-minded and would be more than happy, were the need to arise, to settle for backrubs.
In last week's column about Chuck Norris (who forgoes the needle and plastic bag when giving blood in favor of a pistol and a bucket), I wrote that Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story was irredeemably awful. That was a bit of an overstatement, and after a critical analysis of the film and its characters, I have decided that I actually did like the part where that annoying kid from Ed got a wrench in the face.
Now for a slightly more sensitive issue. In my first column of Winter Quarter, I wrote a retrospective on 2005 that contained the phrase die
Toby Keith die. This, for inexplicable reasons, managed to anger a lot of Toby Keith fans.
But I was, in fact, exaggerating; I do not wish for Toby Keith to die, or even to come to any amount of harm. I merely wanted to imply that his songs were the epitome of what is wrong with popular music in this country - not too harsh a statement, I feel.
Still, I did offend a few people, and so I would now like to say, from the bottom of my heart, that I am truly and deeply sorry that so many people made the mistake of taking me seriously.
Finally, I would like to go back to Fall Quarter and my first column (oh, the memories) to address a piece of advice I imparted on the freshman class. In that column, I state that all the dryer sheets in Athens wouldn't conceal the smell of marijuana in your dorm room.
That is not entirely true. During my freshman year, I did live near two rather industrious gentlemen who managed to conceal the cheeba smoke with dryer sheets, although they were only one part of an elaborate system that involved a towel, a dampened washrag. cardboard paper towel tubes, a disposable plastic poncho, duct tape, an oscillating fan and a healthy disrespect for state drug statutes.
Well, that's about all the half-truth I can handle. So farewell, and remember: next time my writing makes you angry, make sure you include columnist among your list of pejoratives.
- Noah Blundo is a senior journalism major. Send him an e-mail at nb344002@ohiou.edu.
17
Archives
Noah Blundo
