The Seattle Times

So, Taty asked me to get her two weeks-worth of The Seattle Times. No biggie.

I started on Monday. On Tuesday I came across a very interesting front page. Two things on it caught my eye:
First - American Idol is doing tryouts in Seattle, and Paula Abdul takes a dump on the tryouts, saying that the talent is "astoundingly awful". I'm a bit irked by that, but whatever, judges are meant to say stuff like that. Under her comment is the line from Simon. Seems the singers were mean to him. Mean. To Simon. Oh dear god, what will we do. The meanest judge in America is complaining that the singers used big-people words and hurt his fragile spirit? Simon, please be kind to shove it. You've been an ass for four years, and now you can't take it when a few of the attention-hungry idiots call you a bad name? Somewhere, there's a room full of people who care. It's Steve, the president and sole member of your fan club, sitting in his parents' basement, eating Cheetos and drooling all over your picture.

Second - UW revokes some admissions offers in severe cases of "senioritis". In the extreme cases where students' grades plumeted in the year, or semester, of high school after being admitted to college, the applicants were notified that their offers have been revoked. One poor bastard was notified of this two days after he moved into his dorm. Yikes! Anyhow. What's the reason? The school says that it's only fair to those students who continued to work hard right up to graduation. Like that, do you? In a related move, UW is instituting the following policies:

• All sports scholarships are revoked. The school feels it's only fair to those students who continued to work hard right up to graduation. And before graduation. And in college. All four years. And basically all the time.
  
• All classes are brought up to the same difficulty level. Students taking classes in Leisure Studies, Figure Skating, Film Analysis, Basketball, Business Ethics, Political Science Survey, Earth Science, Physics 101 (How Things work), Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a multitude of other classes, will now be required to do 20-page weekly reports, complete 4-hour lab sessions, do lab-work outside of class and take monthly no-calculator, closed-book, no-extra credit, 40%-average-score-for-the-class, in-class exams. The school feels it's only fair to those students who take real classes and have real majors.
• SAT, ACT and GPA scores will be divided by the IQ score of the applicant to get an adjusted score. The school feels it's only fair to those students who scored lower only because of their lower intelligence.
• SAT, ACT and GPA scores will be further adjusted based on: birthdate of the applicant, to offset any astrological effects; the applicant's average popularity score in high-school to be fair to students who were too popular and thus had spent more time partying and hanging out with the in-crowd instead of studying; the average teacher-unfairness score to be fair to students who were singled out and purposefully picked on my their teachers; the average bully-attraction score of the applicant to be fair to students who were singled out by the school bullies and could not concentrate properly on their studies.
• In the further interest of fairness, UW's campus will be split up into two walled-off, maximum-security sections to separate the students by gender. The school feels it's only fair to give the jocks the same chance of getting girls that the nerds have always had to put up with: no chance in hell.

If UW wants to be fair, it's got a long way to go. But revoking offers, especially so late in the process, is just plain wrong.