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Earlier this week, those taking their evening constitutionals by the dirty River Charles were overwhelmed by a most unusual phenomenon: a veritable swarm of sweaty, raving undergraduates charging down the red-brick paths, waving tattered caps as they yowled. Cheers drowned out boom-boxed anthems; in the Quad, where Dartboard makes his reluctant home, an explosion of some sort shattered the air.
Dartboard was puzzled. Surely only the rarissima of aves—some infrequent occurrence, entirely foreign to any man or beast breathing today’s air—could have provoked such a violent, Hobbesian reaction. Sure enough, the Red Sox were going to the American Leagues Championship Series (ALCS), where they now battle Dartboard’s beloved Yankees.
Dartboard has little to say to natives of Boston and the pro-team-deficient wasteland that surrounds it. They are beyond Dartboard’s reach, and deserve to grasp at their bit of irrational hope. There’s more than a little pathos in their insistence on clinging to a moronic dream, backs bent by 85 years of hard labor under the weight of a curse.
But Dartboard can summon no such pity for the vast majority of that growling, racing bunch: the transplanted natives of the rest of the world, who seem to have picked up a fanatical devotion to the Yale of the baseball diamond along with their study cards and room keys. To them, Dartboard has the tersest of advice: give up.
The Red Sox are underdogs for a reason; the Yankees are destined to prevail. Rooting for a team that cannot possibly win the World Series—a team whose best player, Ted Williams, will remain on ice for at least the remainder of the post-season—is the sort of quirk that many pick up in their college years and come to regret passionately upon graduation. But unlike a gauche tattoo or a heroin habit, Sox support can be tucked under the rug easily right now, before the shame of defeat strikes its certain blow. There’s still time not to be a loser.
—SIMON W. VOZICK-LEVINSON
Mather Blather
Recently inspecting a map of Harvard Square and its surrounds, Dartboard decided to empirically investigate a matter that had been gnawing at his mind for some time. Measuring the distance from the Leverett towers to the Science Center with Dartboard’s thumbs, Dartboard was surprised to learn that while that distance was spanned by the width of seven thumbs, not even a single thumb separated Leverett’s towers from Mather’s ugly slab.
Yet how often Dartboard’s Matherite friends lament the distance that separates them from campus! They were “Mather than hell” when they first learned of their fate in the housing lottery last spring and they still begrudge Dartboard and his blockmates for getting lotteried into Leverett.
Dartboard urges them to examine a map as Dartboard has done and desist in their whining. Leverett’s towers are so proximate to Mather that if Dartboard were to fall out of his own first floor window, Dartboard would not be surprised to find himself in Mather’s courtyard.
How can Mather’s residents delude themselves into thinking that among River Houses, they are uniquely cursed by the blight of distance? Perhaps they are spoiled by the decadent luxury of having a personal “Mather Shuttle,” which exists solely for their benefit, lest they should sully their pristine soles by having to walk to class.
Perhaps, when Leverites want to return from weekend debaucheries in Mather, a Mather-Leverett shuttle should be ready and waiting to transport them across the endless expanses between the two houses. Actually, no, there shouldn’t. Dartboard was being facetious. And Matherites are being babies.
—EOGHAN W. STAFFORD
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