April 23-29, 2009
editorial@boulderweekly.com

Life is so damn hard
Administrators at Nederland Middle/Senior High School are considering condensing the amount of time that is dedicated to the annual spring musical. Normally, students and teachers spend 16 weeks preparing a top-notch performance. In fact, because of the hard work and dedication put into the play each year, in the past, the school has won national awards. But this year, some parents have complained that the rehearsal schedule prevents their kids from participating in both theater and a sport. So administrators are thinking about shortening the practice time by half, with the result being that students and teachers would have eight weeks to prepare for the play instead of the usual 16. And all because of a few whiney parents (and probably their whiney kids) who want it all.

Well, we have a message for the kids: Life is full of hard choices. Get used to it. If you want to play a sport, play a fucking sport and don’t try out for the musical. If participating in theater is important to you, suck it up and play soccer next year. In life, we don’t always get everything we want. Not everyone bows down to our every wish and need. Sometimes, you have to make sacrifices. If you don’t learn that now, you are bound to learn it sooner or later. And a message to the administrators: If you make this change, you will be doing a disservice, not only to the devoted drama kids who wait all year — and probably make sacrifices of their own — to participate in the play, but also to the rest of us in the real world who will one day have to deal with the snotty, entitled kids that will think they deserve to get anything and everything they desire. Let the damn kids decide what they want to do more and let the parents learn the lesson they should have when they were in high school. Life is hard. Deal with it.

Cached out
Haven’t heard of geocaching? It’s a new sport, kind of like scavenger hunting for nerds with fancy toys. It goes like this: People leave clues or riddles, and, along with the semantic cues given in the clue, hunters use a Global Positioning System (GPS) to track down the buried treasure. If the treasure is found, you can sign the log left inside a box, or exchange a trinket for the next finder.

Like we said, nerd central.

But recently here in Boulder, this tech-heavy sport garnered a bit more attention than cleverly organized message boards. On April 20, the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine shootings, one couple from Nevada went hunting for a geocache left by a local social studies teacher. This particular geocache happened to be buried on the front grounds of Fairview High School. So when a teacher noticed two strangers with out-of-state plates burying an orange tackle box wrapped in duct tape, they were a little suspicious. That suspicion was even further boosted when the teacher asked the man what he was doing at their school. His reply? “Good, it’s been a great day.” Turns out nerds can also be creeps.

The man immediately took off with his partner in tow, and the teacher called the cops. Turns out that the anniversary of one of the deadliest school shootings in the country is not the best day for adults to hang out at public schools burying tackle boxes and acting like that banjo-playing kid in Deliverance. Fairview was evacuated on a bomb scare while police determined the purpose of the box. When its contents were identified as a geocache and the situation deemed safe, irritated students were filtered back into the classroom.

In the future, perhaps the geocaching dorks can be a little more sensitive to their surroundings. If not, we have a clue where you can find your next treasure: Go to the airport with your weird GPS device and tell the security guard you’re looking for a strange box. As a reward, you’ll get a free rectal exam.

Snakes on a plane
Recently, four baby pythons escaped from a container on a Qantas airliner in Australia. A reptile expert was called in, but he could not find the snakes and so the plane was fumigated. No one knows if the snakes fled the plane or if they are still on board.

When the experts failed to locate the pythons, Indiana Jones was called. But the famous bullwhip-toting archaeologist only had one thing to say: “I hate snakes.” Samuel L. Jackson was then contacted to assess the situation. Said Jackson: “I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!”