Hi, sorry, we seem to have misplaced the brakes on Spring semester. Silly us! Guess there’s no stopping it. To be fair, we’ve been listening to “The 20/20 Experience” on repeat for, like, three days.
That brings us to the help-how-do-we-become-real-adults-who-function-in-society-at-all edition of...
Darts & Laurels
Seven years ago, we were all just a bunch of young guns, unaware of how the world was changing around us. Then Twitter was invented. This week, Twitter turned 7 years old, and we basically couldn’t imagine life without it. Remember when people thought it was just a cheap, worse version of Facebook? Realized by now it’s mostly a place where you and all of your friends practice being funny and complain about your other friends? There are also subtweets, where you talk about someone behind their back, and “intimifavs” of subtweets, where you favorite a subtweet you know is about you. What a great thing that was invented! Cattiness aside, Twitter has done some amazing things and actually helps people track important political and social movements around the world. We give a it’s-still-a-time-waster-of-a-website-but-dang-social-Web-sure-is-the-future LAUREL to Twitter. (And happy birthday to Taco Bell this week as well.)
Journalism doesn’t stop to rest, uh, ever. It’s a crazy machine of breaking news and poop ships, and all of it has to get checked by editors and copy editors. Imagine our surprise when we heard a freshman reporter for The Crimson White, the University of Alabama’s student newspaper, made up about 30 people since January as sources for her stories. “I was overwhelmed and succumbed to a lot of pressure I’d been under,” the reporter said in an email this week, according to an article on the newspaper’s website. “I did it because The Crimson White had become so important to me that I didn’t want to lose it.” Her giant ruse came to light when one of her latest stories was being edited on March 13. “The paper’s copy editors, while fact-checking the correct spelling of one of the fabricated students’ names,” the article continued, “discovered that no such student existed.” Listen. It is so much more work to make stuff up than it is to do the actual research. We give a sorry-Alabama-hope-you-guys-all-chill-out-so-your-reporters-don’t-flip-out-again DART to The Crimson White.
Do you need something to spike your blood pressure? Good! Rush Limbaugh criticized Beyoncé’s new song, “Bow Down/I Been On,” this week. “She’s got a new song, ‘Bow down, bitches,’ a total 180,” Limbaugh said on his radio show, according to a Billboard article. “Beyoncé’s now saying, ‘go ahead and put up with it.’ And you know why? I’ll tell you why. She married the rich guy. She’s even calling herself Mrs. Carter on the tour. She has shelved Beyoncé.” We guess he missed lyrics from the song like: “I took some time to live my life, but don’t think I’m just his little wife” because they directly disagree with the extremism Limbaugh likes to spout. We give a please-retire-so-we-don’t-have-a-collective-American-heart-attack-about-you DART to Limbaugh, but, also, a LAUREL to Beyoncé for being flawless American royalty.
That about takes care of things for this week, folks. Have a fun and safe weekend, and go Gators!
