eat cake.
By The Jaguar
Opinions Columnist of Death

So, apparently this week TSL is printing its humor issue. This comes as something of a surprise to me, seeing as one would think that April Fools Day would be opportunity enough for any newspaper to be humorous, especially a newspaper which blurs the line between seriousness and irreverence as often as TSL. Frankly, I'm a little worried about the prospects of a TSL humor issue. My editor said we should "dispense with all this serious opinions business" and be goofy, but that doesn't seem very appropriate advice for me, seeing as I've been doing that all semester. I thought that perhaps I should try to live up to the spirit of the humor issue by writing a really serious article, but upon further reflection, I decided to do what I always do- write randomly about nothing. After all, I reflected that this was the "humor" issue, and not the "do something so amazingly improbable that you open a massive rift in the space-time continuum issue," so my potential career as a serious journalist wound up having a very short life.

This serves as but further proof that my career as a serious journalist has almost nothing in common with that large dark-chocolate cake with cherry filling that has been sitting smashed on the ground behind the Oldenborg Faculty Residence for well over a week now. I'm really not sure how the cake got there (I'd guess it met its maker during some organized cake-smashing event, although we shouldn't be too hasty in ruling out the possibility that it fell out of a zeppelin), but upon seeing it for the first time I assumed its life on Earth would be as short as the life of my serious journalistic career. Where I come from, a large, appetizing-looking cake that was dropped outside would quickly be overrun and devoured by a multilateral force of insects, mammals, and reptiles. And I come from New England, where the insects and animals are all rather mellow. In the South, there are bugs that eat whole houses, so I figure a cake would be no problem for them. And, according to some local residents, the bugs and animals here are pretty hungry, too.

I've totally lost the subject, but the point I'm trying to get at is that there was this big cake a while ago, and it's still here. As far as I can tell, the bugs have wanted nothing to do with it. Equally surprising, Pomona's Perfection Maintenance Task Force has also failed to remove the cake. It just sits there outside the Oldenborg Faculty residence, reminding us all that not even insects are willing to eat the cafeteria's chocolate cherry cake.

Speaking of the Oldenborg Faculty resident, very few of you showed up at last weekend's "Mall Madness" event at Professor Cluett's house, which is really a shame, since Mall Madness is a psych or women's studies project just waiting to happen. The object of the game is to take one of four female shoppers (one of the two editions has male shoppers, which might have allowed me to preserve some small vestigial remnant of my manhood, except that I wasn't playing on that edition) and buy as much stuff as you can, as quickly as you can. There's a perky female narrator, who the game's box proudly proclaims to be "electronic!" and who tells you where the sales and clearances are. She also tells you when you need to go back to the parking lot because you've left your lights on, which can happen to you several times in a game-you are a woman, after all.

The Digester claims that Mall Madness led to the collapse of communism, which seems obvious enough to me. After all, only about one half of your Mall Madness attempted purchases are foiled due to long lines or goods being out of stock, which must have seemed like some sort of dream-come-true to the Soviet shopping community. I'd be willing to bet that the ATM in the middle that dispensed a limitless supply of hard currency may have also contributed to the game's appeal behind the Iron Curtain.

So Mall Madness helped defeat the Red Menace, which is a good thing. On the other hand, you've got to wonder what sort of deep-seated psychological damage this game may have caused in young, impressionable girls. After all, while they were rushing to the clearance at the Jewelry Store, so that they could increase their consumption of luxury goods, my friends and I were desperately rushing to the Red Falcon mother brain, so that we could destroy it with machine gun rounds. On the other hand, whereas none of the girls I know regularly play Mall Madness, I still play all sorts of stupid guy games. And Mall Madness, too, I suppose. So I really shouldn't talk.