Well, yesterday sucked.
Despite it being cold enough to see our breath in our bedrooms, no snow fell in Gainesville — just tons of annoying, literally freezing rain. To make matters worse, while we were trudging to class with our hoods up, our friends at FSU enjoyed a snow day. Plus, Facebook is still sluggish from iPhone screenshot overload.
We guess the rest of the week was all right, but we’ve never been more ready for the weekend.
So here it is: your we’re-Beliebers-in-second-chances edition of...
Darts & Laurels
Tap, tap, tap... death. Start over.
Are you guys playing Flappy Bird as obsessively as we are? The free app is the worst (best?) thing to ever happen to the Alligator staff. The game is super simple, super addicting and super infuriating. We swear we didn’t hit that pipe, and for that, we throw a our-score-is-lower-than-our-GPA DART to Flappy Bird. Ugh. We just can’t quit you.
In other serious news, a new political party has emerged on campus. UF Student Government’s upcoming elections will now feature three groups: Swamp, Students and Taco Libre, the last of which has one platform point: Get Taco Bell back at UF.
Although cheap Tex-Mex is delicious, we’re more intrigued to see how elections play out with three parties. After all, George Washington once warned about bipartisanship, saying, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention ... is itself a frightful despotism.” We recognize that creating more parties isn’t necessarily a solution to that, but we digress — a this-should-make-for-a-strange-debate LAUREL to the Taco Libre Party for keeping things interesting.
Next, let’s talk about UF Online. The concept is great — everyone likes expanding the Gator Nation — but as we reported earlier this week, it’s negatively impacting some on-campus, traditional students. Almost every staffer at the Alligator has taken an online course, so we feel for them: Online classes just aren’t as good as in-person ones. They’re easier to blow off, you don’t get to know your professors, and it’s difficult to stay interested. Add in the weird test-taking methods like having to show a virtual proctor your room via webcam, and it’s cemented: We’re tossing an if-you-got-in-to-traditional-UF-you-shouldn’t-have-to-take-classes-designed-for-UF-Online DART to the university.
Moving on, we throw a quick you-are-such-a-bro LAUREL to Vice President Joe Biden for being an awesome addition to our State of the Union drinking games. Also a the-real-world-makes-us-want-to-puke DART to today’s graduation application deadline. Blech.
Finally, we hand a thank-you-thank-you-thank-you LAUREL to all of our readers who downloaded the Alligator app this week. Whether you’re student, alumnus or just a nice person, we appreciate your support. We worked crazy hard to get it off the ground — looking at you, Matt Riva — and sincerely think it’ll change the way you get news. If you don’t have it yet, visit bit.ly/1gh6vtc or search “the Alligator” on the App Store or Google Play.
That’s enough shameless self-promotion for this week.
Have a fantastic weekend, and go Gators!
[A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 1/31/2014 under the headline "Darts & Laurels"]
