JADED
From China Doll: Dear Network, I’m wondering if you could please please PLEASE help me with a PSA. Net: Always, as is our conscionable duty. I lost my very precious gold and jade bracelet early Friday morning walking down Washington Avenue toward Murphy Hall. If anyone has found it could you please have them contact me?? My friends said you could help me. I am very desperate for its safe recovery; my mother will kill me if I can’t find it! There is a reward! Net: Yes — an eternity of hand-fed grapes and constant fanning in nirvana … and maybe a couple of bucks. Thank YOU!

FOOTBALLRULES
From the Lithuanian Lizard: I experienced a bit of good ol’ fashioned 1950s-era sexism this weekend, and it was sparked by — guess! — Net: The tube top you were wearing? No, wait … your “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people” bumper sticker. No? We give up the Vikings game. Net: What else? How silly of us. As my father and I watched the game Sunday, I made some relatively informed comments on the players, the calls, the plays, etc. My father, who has known me to abhor professional sports and didn’t realize I’d become something of a football fan during my half-decade at college, was stunned at my recently procured knowledge and said as much. “Wow, it’s great to see that you women can pick up football,” he slobbered indecorously, honestly surprised that my weak mind could retain such complicated matter as players’ names, a couple trivial facts about them and a number or two to back up my assertions. My brother, on the other hand, was weaned on television gridiron and is therefore expected, nay, required to spout football facts when he and my father gather for a Sunday afternoon of Madden-isms and Budweiser. Net: Eeeeew … Budweiser? My goodness, you do have problems. My retort? “Consider this, Dad. It’s taken Doug (my brother) 21 years to obtain his store of football knowledge, and it’s taken me three seasons. Our knowledge base is basically equal. Your assumption that it would be more difficult for me to retain football trivia Net: Math is hard! because I wasn’t raised on it is wrong. Football isn’t a foreign language that’s easier to pick up when you’re a child. It’s a game.”

THEWAR, SOONBEINGOVER…
From Former GC student to G: I would like to comment on the stereotype of General College that has been set up in Network this week. First, GC is not necessarily for disadvantaged students. It is for students with academic potential who, for whatever reason, did not meet the criteria for admission into the college of their choice. I was one of these students, not because I went to a bad school or because I didn’t have the intelligence to make it in high school, but because my high school years were the worst years of my life. Net: Worse than junior high? You just lost your credibility there … In my high school the top 10 percent of my graduating class had a GPA over 4.0; because of this many people with perfectly respectable GPAs had a low class rank. And people like me who had problems in high school were left in the dust. Without General College I probably wouldn’t have gotten into the University. But because it exists I was able to come to this school; within one year I had been admitted to the College of Liberal Arts, and if grades are any indication of success, I’m doing just as well if not better than many students who were accepted to CLA as freshmen.
Second, you say that GC students aren’t bright enough to have learned elementary math and spelling in high school; I went through pre-calc in high school, and i thingk I spel farely well. Net: Oh, all right … we screwed up the spelling. Couldn’t help ourselves. Oh, and I type 50 to 60 wpm so you shouldn’t need to worry about my finding the letters of your name on the keyboard.

From GC: G, you continue to bash me and the rest of the current and graduated General College. Net: You have dishonored my family and now you must face me in a contest to the death! You say that I do not know where the keys are on a keyboard; being a double major in computer science and mathematics, I am fluent in computers. You make a statement about spending my mommy and daddy’s money; I am sorry to disappoint you, but I have three scholarships and am actually making money on them. Net: Hey … can you DO that? The reason that I am disadvantaged is that I came from a poor farm school that did not stress academics as much as sports. The school did not get the top-notch teachers like your rich little suburban school did. I am not “mentally challenged” as you so eloquently stated; in fact I consider myself to have an above average IQ. As for your education, I think a few remedial English courses would greatly help you communicate your hate for others. From now on you should call yourself g; you don’t deserve the G.

Net: And in the wee hours of the night, the minions of academia did converge upon the Northrop Mall to rage in tempestuous battle. And the IT students did line the north flank, and the CSOM students did line the south flank, and the music students did hammer the battle drums to lead the angry horde of GC students o’er the flaming bridges. And as the fervid donnybrook did ensue, the IT students found the booming drums to be frightening and did flee; the CSOM students heard the distant cries of plummeting stocks and did swiftly retreat to their shiny castle; and the GC students, amid the dead and wounded, made peace with the music students, no longer browbeaten for their innocuous existences, as the CLA students slept soundly under crimson moon. The college wars were over.