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ARizona Daily Wildcat

Still cheaper than beer

By the end of the summer, analysts say that we can expect prices at the pump to reach two dollars per gallon. Apparently, this is bad. However, even if gas does reach two dollars per gallon, we'll still be buying it for a great deal less than most of the world. In Europe and Japan, it isn't unreasonable to pay upwards of five dollars per gallon. We have always received cheap gas, and will continue to get cheap gas, because, if nothing else, we treat the entirety of the Middle East like our prison bitch.

Despite these recent price increases, gas is still just about the cheapest liquid you can buy. Milk is a bit over $3 per gallon, and real good pulpy orange juice is close to $5. Sure, you can get "purified" water out of a machine in front of Safeway for 25 cents per gallon, but a quart bottle of the stuff that doesn't come directly out of the faucet runs for considerably more.

Gas prices aren't really that bad, and the problem isn't with them so much as it is with the unfulfilled need of our society to bitch until the sun goes down. If it is very important to you, and you really want to do something about it, make a real statement: walk.

The size of ... Delaware?

According to wire reports yesterday, a huge iceberg has broken off of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. People are concerned because it could float into South Polar shipping lanes. The new iceberg, which may be the largest ever recorded, was detected by satellites shortly after it separated.

All of this may sound pretty standard, but the scientists monitoring the baby berg did something rather unprecedented. In trying to give the public an idea as to exactly how big the berg is, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin explained that it was about as big as Delaware. That, my friends, is just wrong.

Nothing, and that means nothing, is the size of Delaware. If these people had paid any attention to the media in the past thirty years, they would realize that everything is either the size of New Jersey or the size of Texas. Germany, for example, is the size of Texas. Great Britain is about twice the size of New Jersey. Europe, of course, is about the size of Alaska; but that's acceptable because we all know that Alaska is about twice the size of Texas.

These examples have been used so often that they have acquired some meaning. We know how big New Jersey and Texas are. Putting something in terms of a weird little state like Delaware is just plain un-American.

Pulling a Perot

In the past two weeks, the NRA has gone stone-cold crazy. Sure, we all had suspicions when they elected Chuck "Get your paws off my guns, you damn dirty government" Heston as president. Then, executive Vice-president Wayne LaPierre, out of the blue, began launching massive attacks against President Clinton, saying that the president wanted a certain number of gun deaths in the country every year in order to justify his socialist agenda.

Let's think about this. Which would be better, politically, for Clinton: to be the president who presided over a large number of gun deaths, or to be the president who stopped all gun violence? Clinton may be a bit wacky, but the one thing he isn't is stupid.

Sadly, this mirrors the sad decline of Ross "Jughead" Perot in 1992. When he started, he was a little on the wild side, but still had some appeal to both sides of the political spectrum. Even if you didn't like him, you could see where he was coming from. Then, he dropped out of the presidential race, accused the major political parties of ruining his daughter's wedding, and demanded that the Superfriends and the Fantastic Four defend him against the black helicopters. By the time November rolled around, the dominant sentiment was something along the lines of "What?"

By making these attacks, the NRA is presenting itself as a much more extremist organization than it once was, and that's a shame. Because eventually, the rest of the public is going to turn against the organization, and the Fantastic Four can't protect you forever.

The end of the world as we know it

Last box of Twinkies known to Man?- Could be!

MintCakes! Still in the box! Never opened! Classic Condition! 70th Anniversary Packaging!

It's now official. We are all going insane.

Stop reading this column right now. Open another window and go to Ebay. Search for twinkies. Look at prices of upwards of $500 for mint condition boxes. Gag.

It turns out that the factories that make twinkies are on strike, and some people are predicting the end of all twinkies. Thus, it is important that we conserve them for the many long years to come. Buy a box or two, to pass down through the family, so that on some golden afternoon in the far future, your children and your grandchildren will be able to taste the creamy goodness of the white stuff. Don't worry about them going bad; we all know what it takes to make a Twinkie rot, and it isn't anything on this planet.

Of course, my biggest concern is how stupid these people will feel when the factory starts shooting out twinkies again. Then again, the rest of us would feel pretty stupid if twinkies really did go extinct, and the $2.25 really did become worth a few hundred dollars. My advice: go buy a box or two. If they're gone forever, you're sitting on a creamy gold mine. If not, you can always eat the evidence.