You can’t believe you’re getting your first tattoo. It’s the one you’ve always thought about getting. The infinity sign with Chinese characters in one loop and barbed wire in the other. “All right, that about does it,” the artist says as he reaches to get a mirror. He holds up the mirror behind you, and you can’t believe what you’re going to have to live with for the rest of your life. It’s not the infinity sign with Chinese characters and barbed wire in it. It’s just two words and an ampersand in between. Every time you take your shirt off and someone’s behind you, they’ll politely pretend to ignore the tattoo big with bold lettering that reads…
Darts & Laurels
It’s been an exciting week, dear readers. Early voting has officially started, and many students have already submitted their ballots for counting. We give a laurel to all of you out there who have already cast your ballots. Seriously, we can’t wait for this train wreck of an election cycle to be over, and early voting helps us get it out of the way sooner. Maybe. Not really.
Even closer than Election Day is another favorite holiday: Halloween. Here at UF, we have a hotline for those who are distressed by costumes they deem inappropriate, marginalizing or offensive.
While we’re all against overreacting here at the Alligator, it seems the hype against overreacting is a massive overreaction in itself. Irony at its finest: The people who make fun of hypersensitivity are themselves the most hypersensitive. We lob a dart at you ironic crybabies for being the real thin-skinned annoyances.
Seriously, though, that hotline is available not only for students “triggered” by costumes, but it’s also for students who feel distressed for literally any other reason. Prank-calling takes time away from respondents who answer the calls of students with very real and very serious problems. We lob another dart at the folks with too much time on their hands, prank-calling what is actually an amazing service.
Speaking of Halloween, the clown sightings seem to have slowed down. We here at the Alligator are grateful these people figured out there are better things to do with their evenings than dress up and spook people. We drape a laurel on the makeup-free heads of the former evening-shift clowns. Really, leave the clowning around to the professionals.
Honestly, we’re all surrounded by clowns in one way or another. One California jokester dressed up like a construction worker and carried a sledgehammer around Hollywood, using it to smash Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Originally, he was going to steal the star, sell it and donate that money to women who have come forward about Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct. We give you the lauriest of laurels, funny fake construction man, for making political protest entertaining and meaningful.
You know what’s not funny, though, dear readers? The fact that 58 percent of the world’s wildlife has disappeared since 1970, according to a recent report from the Zoological Society of London and the World Wide Fund for Nature. C’mon, fellow humans, we can do better than this. We only have one earth (that we know of), and we’re really blowing it. We need this planet to be healthy and diverse: It’s good for us. We present a dart to you, human race, for slowly destroying the one good planet we have.
