Say What?

This archived article was written by: Les Bowen & BJ Harmon

Happy Birthday!
We’d like to give a shout out to Jonas Harmon. Yesterday Jonas turned 23. One of the original writers of Say What, Jonas attends USU. We wish him well.
Our own soap opera
Not that anyone out there cares, but there’s something we’d like to make perfectly clear to members of The Eagle staff: if you write something that people don’t like, expect others to rip you to pieces. Expect criticism.
In the last edition of The Eagle, an article was printed claiming in effect that The Eagle and its staff have gained such notoriety so as to rival certain deity in Western culture. Normally we don’t respond to articles printed in our own paper. But in defense of our good reputation, which we feel the writer has somehow damaged, we must respond.
It’s not usually our place to indicate people by name, so as to avoid any libel suits. Of course, his name was on the article, so you can figure out who the good man is. Despite the sarcastic nature and satirical attitude with which the article was written, some campus journalists have found the article offensive. Of course we don’t know what everyone else thought of it. Maybe we’re just out of touch with our audience. That might happen from the rush we get driving 15 miles over the speed limit in a small rural Utah town.
In defense of the writer, we hope he had a good laugh. He managed to make a mockery of The Eagle in The Eagle. We’ll give him props. We wish more individuals had the strong opinions he expressed. He calls it satire and sarcasm. But we would like to throw a different literary term at him: irony. It is somewhat beyond satire or sarcasm when his column appears in the very paper he is mocking. The writer is not above the news organization he mocks when he is part of that organization. Which is perhaps, his downfall.
Sidewalk chalk, glitter and bed sheets
This is not a kinky porn flick; it’s ASCEU elections. Despite the fact that we don’t want to care about anything related to our student government, we realize that we should. There are some great individuals running for the various positions this year. We know that if nothing else, they’ll have some leadership to list on their applications for admission to Utah State.
We all know that if you lose, you know that you’ll end up getting appointed to chair a committee next year. So you’re going to be involved, and the election is just a formality so you can decide who is top dog and get bragging rights.
More importantly, we’d like to issue a challenge to the winners of today’s elections. We challenge you to make the slightest difference. And we’re not talking about managing to host a couple of great stomps, or trying to divvy up student fees a bit better. We all know that the trustees and regents will override you on that decision anyway. You may convince facilities maintenance to water the lawn this year so it doesn’t die. Better yet, you might convince them to buy more sod to cover the dirt lots on campus before the dust bowls blow away. You might even rewrite the ASCEU constitution again. Congratulations, you get a trophy!
But the real challenge is to show us that you have the ability to change something that really affects students on a daily basis. How about trying to convince food service that they are charging more than they need for a substandard product? Or maybe convincing IT that if they want students to have Internet access in the residence halls, that they’ll need to install more access points and place them in better locations? If you can’t meet the challenge, don’t try to tell students that if you are elected to some position that you’ll make a difference. Our student body presidents in elementary school weren’t able to get us longer recesses, and neither will you.
If you haven’t learned that lesson, maybe you should go back to elementary, where it’s actually cool to draw on the school sidewalks. Speaking of which, we have buckets we’re willing to let you borrow after the elections. We hear it’s a bugger to clean off. In the mean time, may the best – or most popular – candidate win.
We know that ASCEU does a lot. They are a driving force behind most of the extracurricular activities on campus, and we’re sure it’s a barrel of laughs to be involved. More importantly, some of our friends are running.
BJ sleeps in his skivvies
At first, BJ wanted to apologize for his attire during the sleep-wear category of the Mr. CEU Pageant, after hearing that people were offended. But then he realized, Michael Jordan gets away with it in Hanes commercials every day. So BJ doesn’t care if he offended you. If you didn’t like it, you shouldn’t have looked. If you looked and were offended, he hopes the image is burned into your psyche forever. BJ isn’t a bad guy. Those of you who think otherwise (and you know who you are) just don’t know him. Grow up. Don’t be a baby.