March 26-April 1, 2009
editorial@boulderweekly.com

Spacing out
In an effort to fully participate in the democratic system, NASA recently opened its doors to public opinion. The nation’s space agency needed to name a new room in the international space system, and they wanted the public at large to “be a part of history” by choosing one of NASA’s selected names, or writing in their own. The name with the most votes, they decided, would be the winner, forever cherished in the infinite expanse… or at least until it’s sideswiped by a meteor.

Of course, NASA thought one of its pre-chosen names would win, and the write-in votes would just be for fun. They thought wrong.

What the top minds in science did not anticipate was that fake (and hi-freaking-larious) newsman Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report would encourage devout viewers to write his name in for the historical christening — and win. At the end of the contest, Colbert walked away with a landslide 230,539 votes, destroying any of the competing names.

And because they weren’t expecting it to happen, NASA, of course, is reserving the right to renege on the deal.

But, really, how can NASA be surprised at the win? Their suggested names were “Earthrise,” “Legacy,” “Serenity,” and “Venture.”

Serenity? Seriously? This is a space station we’re talking about here, not a line of scented body lotions. NASA should feel lucky that a hoard of Star Trek nerds didn’t join forces to name the room “Klingon Schlong” or “Lieutenant O’Hara Has A Nice Rack.”

While NASA sits around and debates the legitimacy of their public vote, we say long live Colbert!

You dirty frat
Oh, CU Greek life! Thank you for being such great fodder for our ICUMI section. You put the “fun” in “dysfunctional.”

Currently, Boulder police are looking for four young men who allegedly beat the snot out of a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity named Andrew Smith. Smith told officers that he was just hanging out, being all fratastic and whatnot, when he saw a quartet of dudes throwing rocks at a statue outside the fraternity house. Of course, Smith confronted them, because that’s what guys in fraternities do when they see a potentially volatile situation — they make it worse. They have to; it’s in their bylaws. The four men then taunted Smith for being a “frat boy,” and he retaliated by challenging the entire group to a fight. He lost.

According to the police department, the suspects are described as “four white college-age males, all standing about five-feet eight-inches tall.” The police are currently searching every Abercrombie & Fitch in the tri-county area for anyone who looks like Stiffler from American Pie. If that doesn’t work, they plan to set a trap for the criminals using a keg of PBR and a copy of Maxim Magazine as bait.

And while we don’t necessarily think Smith’s actions were all that smart, we want to take a moment and recognize the sniveling cowards who thought four-on-one was a fair fight. Congratulations on being a bunch of gutless wieners!

Google’s mail goggles
Technology can be a blessing and sometimes a curse. The drinkers among us know the latter quite well. The advent of the cell phone has made for many a late-night drunken phone call from the bar to the ex. The pleas to get back together or “just give me one more chance” quickly become painful regrets to accompany the morning-after hangover. Then came texting — yet another reason to hide your cell phone from yourself before a night of beer-goggles and beer-brained ideas. And technology continues to curse us as more and more people have access to e-mail via their cell phones or have learned the hard way that coming home from the bar to e-mail a friend (or former “friend”) is a BAD idea.

But the kind folks at Google — apparently drinkers themselves — have used their big brains and their own beer-goggle experiences to create the ultimate technological blessing for alchies around the world: math. The idea is that, if you are the type of person who truly has to delete phone numbers in order to protect yourself from drunk-dialing, you can now protect yourself from drunk-e-mailing as well. All you have to do is set up your gmail account to recognize the hours in which you may be drunk. During said hours, any e-mail you try to send will be saved as a draft until you are able to successfully solve a series of math problems. The idea is that if you are too drunk to solve the equations, you are too drunk to be e-mailing anyone. Pretty smart, huh? We only see two potential problems with the system. For BWers, we may have to set the mail goggles for round-the-clock service, just in case, which is fine except for the other problem, which is that we are unlikely to get past the math quiz in even our most sober state. Can’t we have a drunken spelling bee instead?

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