Greetings and salutations, Gainesville. Are you surviving the first half of our summer adventure in town? Grand, if you are, because now you’re in for a treat as we deliver another weekly dose of...Darts and Laurels.
It seems nowadays that all anyone wants to talk about is who’s going to be dancing into the presidential hot seat of the United States. All we ever hear from our colleagues in the big news stations is Hillary that, Jeb this and 2016 elections yadda yadda. People have forgotten the important issues, the news that matters, the issues of both a pressing and critical nature: the fact that “Jurassic World,” which came out last weekend, surpassed the combined powers of Ironman, Thor, Captain America, The Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye box office-opening record.
That’s no small achievement considering that Marvel spent nearly five years hyping the hell out of The Avengers with every Marvel superhero movie of the year. But I guess when you’ve got the might of awesome dinosaur action roaring its way into the hearts of the 8-year-olds inside all of us, you’re packing some pretty high-quality box-office firepower.
However, that alone wouldn’t be enough to receive the much vaulted and honored status of “props” from the Alligator. We’d like to bring attention to Marvel Studios congratulating the “new box office king” in a display of good-natured competition by having their artist Andy Park illustrate the new king in all its dino glory. For being pretty cool, we’re going to award a laurel to “Jurassic World” for upsetting the record and one to Marvel Studios for being so good-natured on the matter.
But in all seriousness, whoever becomes the next president of the United States is kind of a big deal. Like nation-building big. He or she has got to be treated with respect and proper consideration, except when we get clowns for our candidates.
Allow us to introduce you to Donald Trump. In an announcement that’s increasingly making the Republican candidate pool look like a circus show, he announced his campaign for presidency, declared all Mexicans to be drug runners or rapists, implied his status as being an incredibly wealthy man to be all the credentials he needs, expressed a medieval desire to build a big wall, and did we mention he’s plunging head first into an already overflowing pool of Republican candidates vying for support in an already overflowing hot tub of Grand Old Party-candidate announcements?
I mean, we know you’ve been tickling the idea of presidency for decades now, Trump, but couldn’t you have made your actual announcement less of a joke? Heck, other Republicans don’t even really like the man, and he’s the epitome of rich, arrogant and willing to throw a lot of money at a campaign. I wish we could say “Good Luck,” but he’s really only confused an already churning pool of candidates from the GOP, so instead we’ll throw a dart at Trump.
And in other news, Rachel Dolezal, you are not, in fact, black. You are not, in fact, transracial. You are also not biracial, and you should stop telling people you’re identifying as black. All right, now that we’ve established that, we’re going to just throw a dart at your biologically white ass and move on with our lives.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 6/18/15]
