It is at this time of the year (that is, the beginning), that we columnists traditionally write a column in which we list our New Year’s Resolutions. (I say “we,” as if there is some kind of Columnists’ Federation, when in actuality, any moron can be a columnist, Andy Rooney being a prime example.)
Not wanting to deviate from the norm (Norm would be very upset if I deviated from him), here are my resolutions:
I, Eric D. Snider, being a minor and therefore not being legally bound by anything I am about to say, do hereby resolve the following:
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AMUSING ANECDOTE O’ THE WEEK: On the day of Christmas Eve, K-Mart distributed flyers announcing that they were having a special sale that night from five until nine p.m., for everyone who suddenly realized they had forgotten to buy something. The name of the sale SHOULD have been the “Oops, I Forgot! Sale,” but the flyers, which were handwritten, said, “OPPS, I Forgot! Sale.” I can only assume that this is not what they meant. I shudder to think that the store manager sat in a meeting and said, “Let’s have a sale for last-minute shoppers who go around saying, ‘Opps!'”
This concludes the Amusing Anecdote portion of this column. We now return you to our regularly scheduled humor.
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But there are more important things to worry about, such as Judy Stewart’s duck. Judy Stewart is, as we go to press, still the school newspaper adviser, and just before she was supposed to come see the play I was in back in November, she had a Major Duck Crisis.
See, her daughter has a duckling named “Puddles,” and as Judy (or, as we like to call her, “Stew”) was standing in the kitchen, preparing to come see the play, her daughter came in holding the duck. She was not holding it tightly enough, however, because Puddles leapt from her hands and landed head-first on the brick floor. The result was that Puddles now had an extremely air-conditioned head, because the flap of skin on the top of his head came off.
Upon considering this, however, I came to the conclusion that dropping a duck straight on its head would not cause the skin to come off like that. I think Stew’s daughter took Puddles and tried to skip him, like you skip a rock across a lake. Stew denies this, as does her daughter, but of course they’re not going to admit it. All I know is that a duck falling on its head is a pretty FEEBLE excuse for missing my play. When I appear in EHS’s “Bye Bye Birdie” this spring, if Stew does not show up again, it had better be because her DAUGHTER fell on her head. And even then, I want proof.
In publication, two resolutions were cut out: the one where I refer to my editor as "Geek Face," and the one where I vow not to kill anyone saying "acrost" instead of "across." Also, where I list people who can't hurt me, "Will Buck" (a Lake Elsinore city councilman) was changed to "city councilmen." I can't imagine why my editor thought it was OK to say that crippled children can't hurt me, but not OK to say that Will Buck can't.
Just prior to this column, we had yet another problem with the school newspaper. We printed a picture of a student who had cut the butt out of his pants and written "92" on his underwear. This delightful image he displayed for the entire school in a lip-sync contest, and knowing good news when we saw it, we ran a photo of it in the paper.
Well, the principal decided the picture was obscene (although he didn't seem to mind when the student did it live, in full color, at the lip-sync contest), and confiscated all copies of the paper before we could distribute it. We protested and eventually won the right to pass out the paper, but there were about two weeks in the interim, during which this column was printed.
The funny thing is that while the principal was clinging to all the copies of the paper to keep innocent eyes from seeing the obscene photo, every newspaper in the county was running the photo, thanks to someone (i.e., me) "leaking" the negative to anyone who asked for it. So by trying to censor it, the principal wound up merely ensuring that even more people saw it than would have otherwise. We stuck it to him that time, let me tell you.
