‘Statesman’ columnist is really quirky
TSC BASEMENT – New Utah Statesman columnist Joe Don Stanley uses his twice-weekly column in the ‘Aggie Life’ section to manifest his myriad personality quirks in front of the student body. Intended to be humorous, Stanley’s musings on his own creeping dementia have been running for three weeks now in the Statesman, to generally poor reviews.
Despite receiving feedback like the following, “It’s pointless. [The column]’s just very, very weak, almost rote, observational stuff sprinkled in amongst a bunch of fucking shit, which I guess is his attempt to demonstrate how unique and special he is for the benefit of the entire Statesman readership,” from students like Lane Elliott, Public Relations sophomore, Statesman Editor Todd Derr said he has no plans to halt, somewhat curtail, or even edit Stanley’s work, which runs alongside a suitably offbeat mug shot and the name “Baboon Shavin’ Tunes.”
Stanley is majoring in print journalism, which means he actually entertains fantasies of graduating to make a career of loafing around a newsroom somewhere, perhaps even at a major, major paper like the Deseret News, forcing his wearisome “insights” on readers on a daily basis. Because, people are still going to be buying newspapers.
Although Stanley writes 10,000 words a week essentially boasting about his own (his words) “multifaceted quirkiness,” his friends, like poli sci junior Taye Riggs, insist that he is in fact very conventional, and that the newspaper column is the weirdest thing he does.
Close friend Amanda Fagg said she has never understood Stanley’s “seemingly endless public declarations of a quirky personality. His favorite movie is The Dark Knight. Favorite color blue. Mormon kid, his mom buys his clothes, mainly Izod and Nautica, and interestingly, he’s a latent racist, though he doesn’t know it. Politically, he’s cluelessly right-leaning and didn’t vote. Oh, and he uses a moderate amount of product in his hair to achieve that Nintendo-character look.”
According to Fagg, Stanley’s position as leading columnist at the Statesman is safe for the foreseeable future, as long as he is married to Haylie Busby Stanley, cousin of Melanie Derr, who is married to Statesman editor Todd and totally runs his shit.
“Me and Joe Don get along real good,” Derr said. “He likes Nickelback, I like Nickelback. Joe Don wears white socks with Teva sandals, I wear white socks with Teva sandals. Besides, his column is really funny. We’re lucky to have a columnist who can write really long to fill up space so we can get done laying out the paper faster.”
Stanley was unavailable for comment on this article, being, in the words of hot Statesman receptionist Taisha Larson, “really busy writing 6,000 words explaining why the videogame character Sonic the Hedgehog would make a great mailman: he can run fast and he’s already wearing a blue outfit. When are you going to let me cook you dinner?”
After a meal of Veal Prince Orloff, accompanied by a few glasses of Cote De Brouilly, we got Larson to tell us that for now, everyone in the Statesman office is more than happy to put up with the insipid but essentially harmless Stanley, as he is so much better than the old columnist, Barry Schwarz. Schwarz, now graduated, performed a thrice-weekly bowel movement on the pages of the Statesman, generally skewed toward bragging about how much beer he drank.
“Thank you. That was amazing,” Larson said. “Like I was saying before you took me like I’ve never been taken before, everyone in the office much prefers Joe Don’s garden variety, nonsensical yet unthreatening ramblings to the ‘I’m suuuch a big alcoholic’ PR campaign that hosehead, Barry Schwarz, used to write.
“Not only was Barry’s column even more tiresome than Joe Don’s, but because he drank so much cheap beer, he had a really terrible chronic case of the beer farts and was always stinking our windowless office up something terrible. He ought to have called his column ‘I guess what I’m trying to say here is, I’ve got a wicked case of the beer farts.’ Now quit hogging the covers and fuck me some more.”