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In This Issue

• Graffiti: High Art with Penii
• War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Columbia is Friend
• COPS: Keeping You Safe, At Any Cost
• Pigs, Drugs, and Electric Shocks
• Letters to the Feditors
• Operation: Fed Freedom!
• Mike Ilardi: From Carman Mutant to Fed Helm
• Farewell, Mr. Lippert
• The Pope Vs. Katie, Round II
• Pranking Feditor Fades into Archival File Cabinet
• Oodles of Doodles
• The Last Days of Mary-Kate and Ashley
• Gangrenous Jaguar
• The True Story of How the Big Bad Bunny Stole the Easter Animal Election From the Cute Piggy
• What All the Cool Immortals Are Reading
• John Jay Flees, Kids Rejoice
• Arts & Entertainment : Del McCoury Band
• THEY Watch
• Meet the Staff of 20.8
• Get to Know Us!

Ed Rueda

Light refreshments will be served after the execution.

The other day I took new Feditor-in-Chief Sam Jenning up to the roof of Lerner. I held him out over the ledge by his armpits and spoke, "Everything the light touches is now yours." It was cloudy out, but I think he got the idea.

"But what about that area over there?" Sam gestured towards the lands north of campus.

"That's Harlem. You must never go there."

I pulled him over the edge with some difficulty--Sam's rather large for a lion cub--and set about telling him that when we die, our bones are ground up into frozen yogurt which is then served to the freshmen in John Jay (it's all part of the circle of life) but Sam wasn't listening. He was off chasing a butterfly around the rooftop. Ah, to be young and full of promise.

I was young once too, but then freshmen housing stuck me on the mezzanine of Carman--a frightening, grey-toned place where the infant mortality rate hovers around 25% and rebel forces frequently raid the potato crops leaving the inhabitants to starve during the cold, harsh winters--and I shed all that remained of my youthful innocence.

Lacking any semblance of a first-year dorm experience, I joined The Fed to gain social acceptance--and so that I could write words like "poop" and "panopticism" and not have them censored, and three short years later I found myself helming what had actually grown to be quite a large ship due to a confusing increase in interest in our little paper. And by ship, I actually mean one of those airships from Super Mario Bros. 3 that moves around the map if you fail to vanquish the koopa captaining it on your first try. Yeah, we pretty much operate like that.

Non sequitur references to old Nintendo games aside, The Fed has given me so much: painful spates of controversy, a lowered GPA, decreased social opportunities outside of the confines of our office, a child (I'm still not sure how that happened), and most importantly, a reason not to drop out of Columbia and attend a state school where I might actually be considered academically talented. At times, dealing with Columbia can be something like fishing for a needle in a haystack, only the needle is a hypodermic syringe infected with HIV and the haystack is actually a pile of elephant feces--but during those times I'd just put on my naked pants and take comfort in working on the paper's layout or belittling freshmen recruits for making small typographical errors.

And now, it's time for me to be hacked off and discarded, like a superfluous third buttock or an unnecessary women's college across the street from a perfectly good co-ed one. At one time it may have been my beautiful, ego-stroking dream that without my guidance, The Fed would collapse under its own terrible weight following my departure; but it's all too painfully clear that this will not be the case. And thus I hand over the reins to young Sam, whose powerful powers of sexual-leadership will lead The Fed into a new era of glorious glory.

It is now my hope that when I'm old and carry about with me a large cane with which I intend to hit small children who pass me on the street, my memories of The Fed (and my peers there who will have all tragically died years before me in various comical manners) will provide me comfort and the sense of a youth well-disposed-of. I bid you adieu.