Magazine Dries Up

February 1, 2000

A somber and humorless M. C. Holohan, editor-in-chief of The Heuristic Squelch, announced that UC Berkeley’s premier humor magazine had tapped out its resources of funny. “We haven’t had a funny submission in weeks,” the monotonic Holohan told reporters. “Our editors’ wells have run dry. I even tried to tell my mom a knock-knock joke the other day, but I couldn’t get the punch line to come out right.”

“Yeah, I told your mom a knock-knock joke…if ya know what I mean!” shouted former assistant graphics editor Phil Tanofsky, who was met with a room whose silence was broken only by the occasional cough or throat-clearing. Tanofsky tried to explain his remark with suggestive hip motions, but to no avail.

“You see what I mean,” Holohan stated dolefully.

The staff of the Squelch remains hopeful, however, and is blowing the magazine’s remaining funding on research into alternative humor sources, like giant windmills, geothermal activity, and the “1001 Pornographic Top Ten Lists” books found in a number of popular grocery stores.

Volume 9- Issue 3

Problem 2b

Physics 137a

February 1, 2000

feature, Tommaso Sciortino

Physics, and the study thereof, is not an undertaking for the faint of heart. It requires a strong mental will and a keen perception of the world in which we live. Many people can boast of having these skills, but physics takes that and one thing more: the ability to deal with emotional rigors like those brought upon by problem 2b.

Problem number one went off without a hitch. Finding the reflectivity of a delta Dirac potential field harkens me back to my grade school days, when we would throw apples at a wall just to watch them explode. 2a? Cake. I’m not impressed by harmonic oscillators. Not even a little. But it was 2b that got us. A problem so simple and yet, so heinously contrived as to make one question one’s calling in life. It seemed to stare directly into your soul…past your soul. It seemed to see your soul, then see something more interesting and stare at that. It was holy. It was evil.

We tried everything we knew. We even got Rafael, the Marxist physics student who feared no problem set, to come work with us. As he began to work his socialist incantation over the problem we saw him wince a little, then freeze up. “That’s a pretty tough problem,” he mused. “Pretty tough.”

Tatiana, the Astrophysics girl produced her Pez and an industrial-sized bag of 600 pixie stixs. She might be going down, but her blood sugar level wasn’t. She threw them out on the table. It was going to be a long night.

The minutes dragged out into hours, the hours in to non-zero sets of hours. The silence of our contemplation was broken only by the occasional stray Trotskyist hymn. The tension was so thick, that it could not be cut, even by a knife. Finally, I did what I had to do, what I had put off, but could put off no longer. I went to get a burrito.

Tati and I returned to a changed room. Several of our now vacuous study buddies were there, but conspicuously absent were the body and genius mind of the people’s Raph. He was instead replaced with the spent casings of five hundred and fifty six individually wrapped pixie stixs meticulously tessellated across the table into an evolving pattern with five-fold symmetry. I looked left, I looked right, and realizing that I existed in 4-pi geometry, looked up.

Raphael dropped onto me with the force and intensity of capitalist bourgeois propaganda and began to viciously slam his second edition copy of Peter Landshoff’s Essential Quantum Physics into my head. “I don’t know how to solve 2b!” I cried, as I pounded fist after fist into his frail Bolshevik jaw, “Why don’t you try sticking missiles in Cuba now!?”

The pixie stixs had control now. But they were only the opportunist disease. What had reduced once physics buddies to bitter combatants was no simple tube of paper filled with rich sweet sugar. No, it was a humble physics problem. Problem 2b.

Volume 9- Issue 3

Student Receives Worst Hand-Job in History

February 1, 2000

newsflash

UC Berkeley 3rd-year student Horace McFeelenstein recently reported that the result of an amorous encounter last weekend has been nothing but pain and suffering. “Things were goin’ pretty good, y’know?” McFeelenstein was overheard telling his floormates in Griffiths Hall. “So we were all makin’ out and shit, and she starts goin’ down to my fly and all. Before you know it, she was giving me this monster hand-job!” McFeelenstein paused for the appreciative “Hell, yeah!”s from his gathered peers.

Things rapidly took a turn for the worse, however. McFeelenstein sobered quickly as he continued: “So she was stroking me and it was all good, y’know what I’m sayin?” But then we switched positions a little, and she started goin” against the grain. So pretty soon, I told her that was enough.”

“You mean you didn’t come?” one of McFeelenstein’s chums piped up.

“Naw, man! And when I got home later that night, I couldn’t even finish myself off, cuz I was all chafed and shit! The next morning, I checked my email and she said she was breakin’ up with me because things had gotten too serious too fast. And now, my left nut”s been buggin’ me. I think I”ve got gonorrhea or rabies or some shit.”

“Didn’t you use a condom, man?” another of the assembled fellows asked.

“Naw, man. But I’m goin’ to the dick doctor tomorrow to get it checked out.”

“Hey Horace, who’s this guy with the notepad?” the first acquaintance asked.

“He’s writing down everything we say!” noted the second.

“Hey, man, get outta here! Who do you think you are?”

“I’m a journalist,” I said.

“Fuck you. I’ll fuckin’ kick your ass!” Horace yelled. This concluded the interview.

Volume 9- Issue 3

Humiliating Happenstances!

<I>Teen! Squelch</I>

February 1, 2000

feature, Kenny Byerly

I was in the bathroom at school and I was about to have a cigarette, when it occurred to me that I also needed to change my tampon. It was really cramped in the stall, and I had a tough time getting the proper items out of my backpack since I had nowhere to set it down. Finally I finished switching tampons, but when I came out of the stall all my friends were laughing at me. Somehow I’d thrown the new tampon away, and I was now smoking the used tampon! You can guess what happened to my cigarette!

My boyfriend and I were bowling together one night, and he was doing really well. After one of my turns, he went up to bowl again, but as he approached the lane, he slipped and fell on his back. He fractured his tailbone, crushed a vertebra, damaged his spine, and broke one of the fingers he’d had in the bowling ball. When I ran up to see what was the matter, I realized that my period had started, and I’d dripped blood all over the floor, causing him to slip. Talk about embarrassing!

I was out at a cafe with a bunch of my friends one night, and one girl had brought along her new boyfriend. He was telling us lots of really funny stories, and we couldn’t stop laughing. At the end of one especially funny story, I laughed so hard that I knew I had to go pee, but just as I jumped up from my chair to leave, I lost control and a big wet spot showed up on my pants. Since I was standing up, everyone saw it! Just then my period started and I bled all over myself, too.

My pals and I were at the library one night debating the merits of Joyce’s Ulysses, and I was about to contest the claim that Joyce’s use of stream-of-consciousness writing was fundamentally different from Virginia Woolf’s. But right in the middle of my example, I mixed up Stephen Dedalus and Richard Dalloway. My friends burst out laughing, and my face went bright red! I was so humiliated. Then, just as I was about to correct myself, my bloody pad fell out of my shorts.

I was having a fight with my boyfriend one night when I grabbed a hunting knife in a fit of rage and slit his throat from ear to ear. Still not satisfied, I stabbed his chest repeatedly, then busied myself slicing the skin from his face. Then my mom called me down to dinner and I went, forgetting that I was dripping with blood. When my dad saw me and my blood-covered clothes, he laughed and said, “Looks like your period’s come a bit early this month!”

Volume 9- Issue 3

Napsneerg!

or, It’s the Conspiracy, Stupid

February 1, 2000

feature, Sean Keane

It’s February, and we’re all still here. After months of warnings, countless disaster tests, and millions of gallons of emergency water, the Y2K bug was the most overhyped disappointment since The Phantom Menace. Though let down, I don’t blame the media or even the government for the faux crisis. Rather, I blame the true architect of the Y2K hype, Alan Greenspan.

Yes, Alan Greenspan. The Y2K “crisis” was just pretense, designed to increase the money supply and consumer demand, and drive the Dow Jones industrial average higher. In the summer of 99, Greenspan announced the Treasury would issue millions in hard currency, ostensibly to provide a safety net while cities were burning and ATMs were spewing $20 bills like a wealthy epileptic at a strip club. Instead, this move just gave jobs to programmers and disaster experts, and the stock market enjoyed unparalleled growth.

When Alan was in college, still a shy economics student, he fell in love with a beautiful co-ed. After weeks of building up his courage, he asked her out, only to be shot down. “Me, go out with you?” she questioned. “Maybe when the Dow Jones breaks 1,000 points!” Amid hooting and derisive laughter, Greenspan ran away, to his textbooks and stock ticker, and put into motion his dream of driving the Dow above that magical 1,000 point barrier.

Greenspan is an old man now, and he realizes he has little time left to achieve his plans. So in the past ten years, he has pulled out all the stops to try and get the economy larger and larger. He lowered the Federal fund rate to provoke investment. He forced the cancellation of _ Roseanne _, while simultaneously pressuring Fox to develop more spinoffs for _ Melrose Place. _ And when Tupac Shakur was directing attention to the plight of African-Americans and the inner city with his music, Greenspan had him assassinated so that Puff Daddy’s gospel of Benzes and platinum jewelry could be spread to the masses instead.

The explanation for many questionable facets of society and culture becomes clear once the Greenspan conspiracy is revealed. The deregulation of the electrical industry? Greenspan. The unprecedented rise in online investment? Greenspan. Four different Blockbuster franchises within the city limits of Berkeley? Alan Greenspan. Greenspan is unstoppable and Greenspan will not be denied. Resistance is futile – you will be assimilated into American consumerism, at least until the day that the Dow beats 1,000 points and Greenspan smiles, sighs contentedly, and then dies.

Volume 9- Issue 3

Words from the Top

What it Was, Was Clubbing

February 1, 2000

feature, Matt Holohan

Being the great lumbering couch ‘tater that I am, I find myself watching a great deal of alarmist news stories about club kids and their various sinful pleasures. While millions of senile geriatrics were watching these depictions of youthful sexual and drugual adventures and thinking, “These unruly young’ns will destroy us all!”, I was watching the scantily clad shenanigans and thinking, “My, but I’d like some of that.” And so, I threw on my favorite Gap outfit and my luck sex havin’ hat, rounded up a few friends and hit the SF club scene.

Shortly after arriving at what would be our first and only destination for the evening, I realized that about 90% of the people in the elephant cock-sized line outside the club could be lumped into one of two categories: trashy eighteen-year-old girls and horny twenty-five-year-old guys. I knew I’d need at least two good drinks to develop and interest in the former and a liter of pure ethanol to develop an interest in the latter, so early on I decided to make a beeline for the bar as soon as we got in the door.

After an only slightly sexual pat-down from the burly boyish bouncer I ditched my underaged companions and approached the purveyor of brain-erasing refreshments. The bartender wanted seven dollars for a lousy Long Island Iced Tea. As he handed it to me I quipped, “for that price there had better be some crack in here.”

“No crack,” he retorted, “but for an extra quarter I’ll blow my load in there for you.”

Never able to turn down a round of banter, I countered, “Ha! Most places you’d have to pay me!” Then I realized that he wasn’t wearing any pants and seemed about to make good on his deal, so I quickly headed upstairs to the observation deck.

From up above I got a reasonable view of the rest of the establishment, and the first thing that caught my eye were two of the aforementioned trashy females, one wearing a cowboy hat and the other one not, rubbing their bottoms together and enjoying their reflections in a nearby giant mirror. A hapless male tried to get in on the action, but was swiftly denied when a third girl joined the other two for a disturbingly suggestive ass-to-cootch stationary conga line. In all the excitement I downed my drink in no time and decided to head down to the madness and see if I couldn’t get me some.

After joining the madding crowd I thought I’d woo the ladies with some funky white boy dance moves, but much to my chagrin I soon found that most girls were either already attached to even seedier fellows than myself or had conglomerated themselves into exclusive all-female faux lesbian dance groups surrounded by eager young men trying to work their way in like greasy sperm attacking a not-quite-underaged ovum. Even in my drunken stupor I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy this spectacle, so I rejoined my companions, who themselves had already tired of the scene and were standing near the door with their arms folded, and headed back toward the east side of the bay with my front-facing tail between my legs. Lousy boxer shorts.

That night I lay in bed cursing the sensationalistic reporters who had fooled me into thinking that nests of readily available debauchery were a short BART ride across the bay, and all I could do to lull myself to sleep was remember all the bottoms, bosoms, and bare backs I had seen, and fantasize that later in the evening, after plenty of alcohol and a shroom or two, the lovely ladies of the club would move past pawing and grinding and realize the splendor of sapphic love that penis-laden lesbians like myself can only dream of.

Volume 9- Issue 3