Garage Days Revisited: 11/25/2002

Now the shit hits the fan. It’s the “5 Things” everyone was talking about!

1. After serving my one-column suspension and paying my 300 cafeteria-point fine for writing only 4 things in my last outing, I’m well rested and once again ready to bring the average IQ of the Hilltop News readership down to its customary level.

What am I trying to say? Only idiots read 5 Things? It was probably more BSC-bashing but it doesn’t really find the mark. I forget: did I actually miss a publishing?

2. Well, it finally happened. For the first time I can remember, someone from outside BSC wrote not a single article in the last edition of the Hilltop News. This is something that John Seay touched on in his article (if any of you bothered to read it). John is indeed right about the general placid nature of BSC students. 95 percent of us come from roughly the same demographic background, a background that does not lend its offspring often to progressive, reform, or political activity. And even if many of us were to take a stand on something, it would only be a regurgitation of some ideal that has been fed to us. I don’t want to hear someone say the exact same things that the talking heads on CNN are telling us every night. And I don’t want to hear someone go on a half-assed rant, thinking they have something new to say about world hunger or the destruction of the rain forest just because they’ve been on a big U2 kick. I want to hear someone from BSC come out and say something interesting. Bash our holiest institutions. Support something that may initially seem unsupportable, like cannibalism or racial profiling. Despite what our society (or college) may prescribe, you don’t have to think like everybody else does.

I AM SUCH A FREE-THINKER! But, why am I being such a dick? “if any of you bothered to read it.” Wow. I did get an email from a professor lauding this little guy.

I hate the phrase “a big [band name] kick.”

There really weren’t enough pro-cannibalism editorials in The Hilltop News.

3. Who is A. J. Heschel and why should I care what he thinks? “Our energies are too abundant for living indifferently,” is the quote that appears on the back of the 2003 service learning t-shirt. The quote is attributed to an A. J. Heschel. Now, if this Heschel character were in any kind of position to be evaluating the quantification of our energies, perhaps we would be wise to listen to his recommendations for the delineation of said energies. However, an Energy Department bureaucrat he is not. He is a Rabbi. I looked it up. Not that I have anything against Rabbi, but asking one’s opinion on the abundance of natural resources is like asking me my thoughts on flying a jet. All I’m really saying here is that even though it is a thought-provoking quote and gets service-learning’s point across, it is still just an opinion.

Pedantic! John was the first to point out that the Rabbi probably wasn’t talking about natural gas reserves. By the way, I really don’t have any thoughts on flying a jet.

4. Recently, I attended Kappa Delta’s fall semi-formal, entitled “Steak Fry.” I had a great time and all, but the name of the event does lead to some minor disappointments. It’s not that I was so much counting on encountering steaks either fried or in the process of frying, but I somewhat subconsciously expected some type of beef to be present in a fried form. It wasn’t really until the ride home that I realized the enormity of the misnomer. Calling the party “Steak Fry” is about as accurate as calling it “Kappa Delta’s Sobriety-Fest.”

I take it all back. There was no debauchery. Punch was served.

Two angry emails and one mostly civilized phone call from the prez are testament to the fact that if you mess with KD, you get the horns. Tensions eased quickly though and one of the enraged emailers actually apologized at a later KD function.

Also too, I wasn’t being a smart ass, it actually didn’t occur to me that “Steak Fry” refers to those big French fries that come with steaks and not an event where steaks are fried.

5. “Alabama’s the best defense in the country? They didn’t seem like the best defense in the country.”
- Auburn’s 16th string tailback Tre Smith who ran for 126 yards against the Tide

White guy. He never really did anything ever again. Except flip into the end zone and somehow not get flagged.