War Journal, Day 40, 2300 hours:
Someone once said that a team of monkeys, given enough time and enough typewriters, could eventually pump out the collected works of Shakespeare. Unfortunately, someone got the story wrong; it turns out that a crack team of monkeys is only capable of producing a fortnightly newsletter.
That's right, Rover. You read me right. A fortnightly newsletter. Because when you produce but a lone, lame issue once every two weeks, you lose newspaper status, and become a newsletter. Put that in your crockpot and let it stew.
Last Friday, I received a text message from a friend letting me know about your latest issue. At the dining hall I thought I had picked up the wrong newsletter. I thought it read "The Raver" at the top, insofar as you must be stark raving mad to continue these rather one-sided literary smackdowns.
In your splendid Cheers and Jeers section, you entitled your little blurb "Tae-rade." While I appreciate the cute pun (a wordplay on "tirade"), once again you silly little Roverites got the story wrong. My name is pronounced so that it rhymes with the word "hey," as in, "Hey, nice job slamming the Rover!" Or perhaps the word "say," as in, "Say, have you read the Rover this week? Oh wait, no I couldn't because they don't publish for another waning moon."
No, Tae-Rade sounds like a customized sports drink, custom-tailored for my biochemistry and probably chock-full of electrolytes. Tae-Rade gives me the energy I need to continue battling morons day in and day out. If Tae-Rade went on the market tomorrow it would be a best seller.
The only thing the "Tae-Rade" blurb did was send me flying into a Tae Rage, which as anyone can tell you is one of the scariest phenomena in human history. In regards to your comments that I waste "tuition-subsidized" ink and paper, The Observer collects a separate fee from every student, which you can get back and have removed from your tuition payment if you so desire. Unfortunately, I can never get back the two minutes it took me to read your newsletter cover-to-cover, nor can I replace the atrophied brain cells that died in the cause of trying to read your stories. Evidently, you guys are still reading, given how your parasitic paper often consists of Observer knock-offs and criticism of our original stories.
To paraphrase the comedy classic Happy Gilmore: "Rover, what you continue to write is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent responses were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this campus is now dumber for having read your newsletter. I award you no shamrocks, and may God have mercy on your collective souls."
I had originally wanted to challenge you to a friendly game of mumblety-peg in the quad, but given your lack of either: a. a dictionary, b. a common-sense understanding of the English language, or c. the capacity to run a spell-check, I think I'll change the game in question to either Scrabble or Boggle, although that might cause one or more of your staff members to suffer from what I like to call "exploding brain syndrome."
I would also like to mention that you misspelled the name of President Ronald Reagan, your erstwhile hero and a former president of this great nation, on Page 2 of your newsletter, although I suppose I should commend you for spelling the month right this time around.
Thanks for the memo, guys. As always, I'll hear from you in two weeks.
