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In This Issue

• Life After Graduation? You're Kidding!
• Touched By Tom Brokaw
• Mr. McLaughlin's Culturally Confusing Neighborhood
• Livejournal: Hardcore Gateway(TM) Drug
• Columbia Decompiled
• Looking Back At Evolutionary Monkey Business
• How Right You Are!
• The Fed Kidz Page
• Veganism Sucks
• iPod Shuffle Advisory
• The Great Debate: Tune In or Pass Out?
• Weapons of Ass Destruction
• Letters to the Feditor
• THEY WATCH
• The Blue And White

M. Theadore Holden, I

Now, I may not be the most pretentious person in the world. However, I regularly extol the virtues of my regular iPod over my friends' iPod-minis merely on the basis of its higher cost. My idea of "downtown" is anything below 100th Street. Hell, I nearly bought a vibrator on the sheer basis of its being included in an episode of Sex and the City.

On this basis, I think I can easily criticize alternative lifestyles from my liberal armchair (or splintery Butler library commie pinko chair, as the case may be). To start off with: veganism. For one thing, the fake meat. It used to be that the basis for considering yourself badass was your ability to ingest gross, unnecessary and potentially life threatening creatures. Now, tofu chicken and soy dogs might also test our stomachs, but where's the danger? Frankly, soy just doesn't rank as a "cool" meat in the way that ill-prepared blowfish does. Plus, no one ever gets mad-tofu disease. And you know that if they did, they'd totally ruin it by giving it an uber-PC name like "Synthetic Meat Ingestion Syndrome." Perhaps I'm gauche and uncultured, but I think it's still really important to distinguish how cool someone is on the basis of how much they're willing to hurt or maim themselves in the pursuit of meat.

And to raise the next-and most important-point: If we all go vegan, how are we going to ingest the powers of our enemies? Traditionally, cannibalistic tribes have used this practice for precisely that reason. If everyone were vegan, this ancient ethnic ritual would screech to a tragic halt. And don't say we can eat soy heart substitutes, you callous, culturally insensitive, jingoistic Nazi, you.

But as I'm sure you're well aware, the real reason most of our cohorts go vegan is not mere xenophobia but rather a desire to rescue those millions of innocents whom we slaughter every day. That's something I did find initially difficult to oppose. After all, I am someone with a vagina, meaning that I should have sympathy for anything that meets a cruel and torturous fate at the hands of The Man^TM. But then again, I'm a superficial upper middle class vagina-full person with a roomful of stuffed animals and a Hello Kitty fetish. In other words: I like cute things! I find myself able only to identify with The Man^TM's more aesthetically pleasing prey, such as tsunami victim orphans under the age of ten, or homeless people who aren't (yet) covered in piss and feces.

And so for the adorable victims in this case, my heart bleeds. I love baby animals. In fact, you could say I wuv baby aminals (sic). However, the majority of animals I find myself eating are grown-ups. And when already unappealing adult chickens are forced into dirty conditions, pissing on each other and pecking off each other's feathers, they become a lot less adorable. Kind of like how Jesus looked a lot more sympathetic before he was covered in bloody lacerations in The Passion of the Christ. As for beef, it's made from steer, or castrated bulls. Castrated things become fat, and obesity just isn't cute.

Now, some of you might raise the point, "what about those cute baby veal calves?" First, have you ever seen a Beanie Baby veal calf? They manufacture Beanie Baby puppies, baby kitties, even baby whales, but no veal calves. Plus, since veal calves mostly just lie around in their own shit and are a lot less tiny and adorable than the in that South Park episode, they don't count. They also lack sad puppy eyes and the ability to cower when they're yelled at, which are both fundamental in terms of cuteness.

As for why I can still eat eggs, since eggs are, after all, baby chickens, I reiterate that I'm a self-proclaimed liberal, and a pro-choice liberal at that.  Eggs may be babies, but they're also fetuses, and fetuses have to die.  They just do.

So kids, there are a lot of reasons to consider the health benefits of a meat-free diet and respect the feelings of sentient creatures.  But just remember one thing: pork chops don't have feelings.