Last night while I was playing Yahoo Checkers, I saw something amazing. It wasn’t on Yahoo.com, but it was on the internet. Anyway, the point is, I was online. While online, I checked out my webmail, since I was bored and couldn’t drive on account of beer.

Lo and behold, I had a letter from Gary Shultz. In case you’re retarded, Gary Shultz is an SMU bigwig who’s chief job is to flood your inbox with spam and all kinds of meaningless crap which gets in the way of important stuff, like being added as a friend to that hilarious kid at NYU who changed his facebook to portray Jeffrey Lebowski, a fictional character who many years ago engaged in crazy hijinks centered around a catastrophic instance of mistaken identity. It’s a long story but suffice to say it involves a ferret and a bowling ball.

Now that that’s been settled, lets discuss the letter from Gary Shultz.

Gary invited me and about 6,000 other people to come see Colin Powell on Sept. 6. He’s black and killed people, but he’s not like a rapper or anything. Anyway, he’s also completely awesome and is coming to SMU for us to ask questions.

He will be accompanied by David Gergen, who basically makes a living by hanging around famous people, like an older, uglier Paris Hilton with grey hair and testicles. He was also present at the Gore-Dole three-round idiot fest, in which two high-ranking politicians were confronted by a gang of Bush league high schoolers armed with hard hitting questions like, “Should people vote?” and “Do you like democracy?”

Let’s repeat that so I can make the word limit. One of the premiere educational institutions of America hosted former Vice President Al Gore and Senator Bob Dole to find out their yes/no opinions on voting and the institution they have devoted their lives to.

And while I respect them for not leaping over the podium and smashing these kids with a brick, I do wish they could have just skipped these intellectually barren queries in favor of those posed by, you know, the students of the college they are currently visiting. Unfortunately, Mustangs were hard to come by, since most of the venue space was reserved by students of various high schools and elementary schools around the metroplex.

That’s a problem. This year, I’d like to see a review panel for the high schoolers who up at this lecture. I mean, it’s nice that they care enough to miss class to come see this, but they are also denying genuinely interested SMU students the chance to see a speaker their university is paying for. And even those who do have the mob connections to get in are going be denied the chance to hear their burning question answered because Bruno Idiot from Hillcrest wants to know if Bush likes hamburgers.

So what do I want? Well, since these bottom feeders are basically costing SMU students seats, there should be a review board to monitor all questions being asked to Mr. Powell and D Gergs. Any query which cannot be answered by the panelists before a reviewer can Google search an acceptable response will be met by a swift blow to the head. No doubt this will result in a two hour game of whack a mole, but at least then I can walk away with some sense of satisfaction, instead of last year’s burning desire to throttle the little bastards until acne grease oozes from their bulging purple cheeks.

And come on, I should be allowed to, since I know any brain damage incurred can do little to hurt these well-damaged goods further.

So maybe it would be easier if they just gave us a list to go over and spell check for idiocy. That would probably better for the legal department. And the hammer department.

Austin Rucker is a junior philosophy major. He may be contacted at [email protected].