Botched ideas '08

Because this is the week before spring break, and the Friday before spring break at that, my readership will doubtless have significantly decreased. Most of my eight loyal readers are probably already off vacationing somewhere, and the brains of any readers left in town are probably too fried from midterms to want to read anything at all. \nA deserted campus and a mess of students with fried brains. What’s a columnist to do? Hmm. This seems the perfect occasion for ... \nGeorgia Perry’s Botched Column Ideas 2008!\nThe following are my botched column ideas from 2008: \nThe first idea is something I noticed in an Us Weekly magazine in January. In the “Stars – They’re Just Like Us!” section, there was a photo of Kim Cattrall seemingly having trouble sticking a plastic straw into her Diet Coke bottle. No one really knows what caused her frustrated look (pondering Darfur?), but regardless, the caption read: “They can’t get their straws in cans!” To me, that seemed like a stretch. Not many people have trouble getting their straws in cans on a regular basis. I could have gone on with this idea in a real column and made a comment about America’s fixation with celebrities growing more and more unnecessary because of self-promotion Web sites such as YouTube, but that’s kind of lame. All I really wanted to say was: What the crap, Us Weekly?\nSecond, you know that one homeless guy on Kirkwood who always says, “Hi, pretty. You’re so pretty. Can you spare anything today?” I recently found out that he says this to girls besides me. In particular, he says this to a certain tactless friend of mine who apparently takes sick pleasure in shattering my self-confidence. I mean whatever, I wasn’t in love with the guy or anything. But it’s mildly disappointing. I just thought I was kind of special. \nOh, here’s a good one: Lots of out-of-state students like to complain about the squirrels here. “What’s up with their brown fur? Squirrels are supposed to be black/gray/otherwise different from Indiana squirrels. But these squirrels are brown! My mind is exploding!” OK, you know what? The squirrels here are just the right color. If you don’t believe me, rent any animated Disney movie with squirrels (“Cinderella,” for example) and tell me what color the squirrels in it are. Wait don’t bother, I’ll tell you myself: brown. Drop it. \nI thought for a while that it would be cool to talk about the Oscars and reference the “winners” as those with the best outfits, rather than the actual winners of awards. That would have been kind of funny, right? Well, whatever. It’s not happening. \nAnd lastly, I just wanted to call out the employee at a sandwich joint who really messed up the pita sandwich I ordered on my birthday back in October. That sucked. I didn’t want to chat with you. I just wanted a sandwich.\nAll right. Have a good spring break, everyone.