What’s black, white and stolen all over?
Hate crimes are awful — The Firing Squad won’t argue with that. But somehow it can’t comprehend why the staff of the Northwestern Chronicle tried to get the alleged theft of their newspapers from several residence halls classified as a hate crime alongside swastikas at Norris and racial slurs on dorm room doors.
The Firing Squad admits that anyone who would steal issues of the Chronicle en masse must be pretty hateful — or merciful, depending on your opinions of NU’s favorite bastion of quasi-conservative advocacy.
But it’s still a mystery to The Firing Squad why anyone would waste their garage space storing those rags. Let’s just hope they get recycled.
— Elaine Helm
Conflicts of common sense
But wait — The Firing Squad isn’t quite finished with its Chronny friends yet.
Following the Chronicle’s extremely poignant, incredibly relevant story about The Daily’s own Robert Samuels and his reporting on For Members Only, The Firing Squad has been alerted to a dubious conflict of interest: a black student reporting on other black students.
Had The Daily realized that FMO has students on its list serv even if they are inactive and nonvoting, it would have been obligated to fire the technically-inactive Samuels — without pension.
And beyond this issue, The Firing Squad thinks no white student should be allowed to report on other white students. It knows they’re all bitter on the inside simply because they get sunburnt more easily than their minority peers — a cause for great concern among the caucasian community.
In fact, The Firing Squad thinks — no, it knows — students should be forbidden from covering other students altogether. Clearly the temptation to manipulate the facts might be too much for an “objective” reporter to handle.
Come on, Daily — The Firing Squad is disappointed. But perhaps that’s being too conservative.
— Mike Saccone
Safety rocks so loud it hurts
Pop quiz: What’s louder and way less fun than a KISS concert, more frightening than an Iraqi air raid siren, and more dangerous to your cochlea than a shotgun blast?
You guessed it: the keychain safety alarms advocated by Associated Student Government.
If ASG ever gets around to actually passing the legislation, the keychain paraphernalia could go to 1,000 students on campus. Even with drunken students fumbling for their keys late at night, The Firing Squad knows the ear-shattering alarms with never accidentally go off.
The Firing Squad predicts at least 10 false alarms a night. At least the muggers will have to use the money they take from your wallet to buy hearing aides.
— Ben Figa
Task at hand: We need more task forces!
The Firing Squad is perplexed as to why task forces are being used to solve everything lately. Security, hate crimes, town-gown relations — all of them have their own task force.
Our illustrious governing bodies — Associated Student Government and Evanston City Council — have taken to creating these entities just to solve anything they can’t easily fix. If these “tasks” can be solved by sheer “force,” why the hell didn’t they institute a City-University Task Force circa 1851?
The Firing Squad has a few other task-force suggestions. How about one to probe why the football team can’t seem to hold onto the ball anymore? Oh, and maybe another could explore why The Rock (the wrestler, not the NU monument) and Avril Lavigne are famous.
But The Firing Squad would most like to see an ASG-sponsored task force on how to make ASG not completely suck. Oh wait, that might actually be useful.
— Matt Lopas
