Grinnell-- For months, The B&S has been a source of entertainment and information on the Grinnell College campus, keeping students abreast of stories ranging from President Osgood losing his house due to a poor room draw to President Bush's new campaign slogan, as well as making students aware of new products like Tablitra and using words like "abreast."
Above, The B&S publishes increasingly self-referential material, including posters, awards and Nick Lloyd.
Lately, however, the student publication has become overly self-referential, forgoing its long history of satire in favor of making jokes about itself.
Student Maria Lopez '06 said, "Yeah, I'd noticed that... I mean last month the editors put themselves on the front page? And I heard this month they were writing articles about themselves again. Come on guys, isn't there anything else funny going on? I'd rather read about Bush doing something stupid. Or pies, pies are funny. Or, hey, what if someone threw a pie at Bush? Why couldn't you write about that? That's classic."
Not even the newspaper's promotional material has remained free from criticism.
Last month, posters featuring the image of a large ampersand, made up of smaller images of Andy Ampersand, the newspaper's mascot, went up all over campus. The posters said simply, "In the Post Office Friday," much to the confusion of insipid and stupid students.
Thomas Simpson '05 said, "It's an ampersand. I don't get it. 'And' what?"
When he was informed that the posters were, in fact, for The B&S, he replied, "Oh. So... what, because they have an ampersand in their name, they're supposed to become synonymous with it? That's pretty lame. Couldn't they at least have picked a cooler punctuation mark, like maybe an asterisk or a tilde?"
Said B&S editor Aron Szapiro, "Well, since I have my own personal vehicle for voicing my opinions, let me just point out that the posters kicked ass and so do the trophies I have in my office... that I gave to myself."
