Issue date: 4/1/09 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Jonny Green [Click to enlarge]

I am taking this opportunity to inform you of a number of sweeping changes that will be made to the Voices page, beginning tomorrow, in response to a number of mail calls and letters from students, former students and staff members of Texas A&M.

It has been brought to my attention that a number of columns on the Voices page are sadly lacking in news and facts, and suffer from an overabundance of author's opinions and thoughts. This lack of fact-checking is going to change immediately. Starting tomorrow, I will require every article to be fact-checked on Wikipedia and scrutinized by the experts on Texags.com before it is allowed to print.

I have been told on countless occasions that the Voices page suffers from an extreme liberal bias. At the same time, I have received an equal number of complaints about the Voices page having an extreme conservative bias. This troubles and confuses me, but I have found a solution that will prevent the Voices page from ever offending The Battalion's readers with our overt liberally conservative bias ever again. From now on, the desk will only write about issues that have yet to be touched by politics. I'm not sure what issues will be available, but we will start with which ingredients make for the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and operate from there.

A startling trend in readership has been brought to my attention by recent research. I am told that Americans no longer take the time to read long articles and frequently only scour the front page, the opening paragraph and headlines in search of an interesting topic. With this in mind, I am aware that I am probably only talking to students from foreign countries by now. Beginning tomorrow, all opinion columns will focus exclusively on foreign affairs after the first paragraph, as American readership has moved on to the Sudoku puzzle by then. I hope you are enjoying your visit to the United States; please keep in mind that we drive on the right side of the road in the states, and McDonald's is just as cheap and nasty here as it is back home.

After playing an abundant amount of video games on the Internet, I have realized grammatically correct English is no longer how people communicate in writing. In an attempt to appeal to the modern American dialect, I am going to bring the Voices page into the 21st century by writing entirely in "1337-speak." The Voices page will never have "pwned" so much before. The humor columns will make you "lol, lmao and lmfao," and other columns will be so good you will scream "haxxors!" Be ready. Starting tomorrow, Voices will be "1337 sauce 4ever."

In my final improvement to the Voices page, I am going to address a problem that always vexes newspapers. The Voices page is at its best when it covers topics that are current and timely, but it is equally important that articles be planned out weeks in advance so they can be perfected in time to print. To solve this conundrum, I have bought a DeLorean, complete with installed Flux Capacitor (off eBay). Although purchasing enough plutonium to supply me with the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity necessary for time travel might come at the expense of budget cuts to the rest of the paper, it will be more than worth it when The Battalion has a well-planned-out, thoroughly edited and timely column the morning the column's events are to take place.

Thank you for all the wonderful mail calls and phone calls that led to these revolutionary changes to the Voices page. I look forward to seeing tomorrow's first issue.

Until then, have a Happy April Fools' Day!

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