Spring: the time when a young man’s fancy turns to love. And the time when the rest of us begin to entertain thoughts of picking off all the happy couples cuddling on the Arts Quad, one by one, with a long-range precision sniper rifle.

I hadn’t realized the aphorism was true until I got to college. Fall and winter surrounded me with the usual college relationships, students forming and breaking alliances like Styrofoam peanuts. But as soon as the sun returned from its six-month rendezvous with the southern hemisphere, the campus became filthy with couples: feeding each other in the Ivy Room; walking across Ho Plaza with their hands in each other’s rear pockets; parting to go to class, their arms slowly disengaging. This year, the cycle repeated.

Maybe it’s hormones. Maybe it’s that people look far more appealing when they aren’t buried under several layers of fleece. Whatever the reason, spring is guaranteed to be a depressing time for the single — I mean, “significant-other-impaired” among us.
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It’s that time of year when Ithaca has to mediate between two opposing and equally urgent needs. On the one hand: it’s springtime, which means that Ithaca is feeling an even stronger tug than usual to open up the skies and unleash a torrent of rain, hail, fog and sleet upon its all-too-suspecting residents. On the other hand: Cornell Days. Ithaca’s meteorological organs spent each night preparing to whip out the sooty cumulonimbi, and then Ithaca would realize, Hey! There are still prefrosh here. Don’t want to scare off the prefrosh.

The evil subterfuge of the trustees’ weather machine aside, spring is here in Ithaca, which means that sooner or later we all will face an onslaught, a veritable smorgasbord of the precipitation we merely sampled last week. The continuous downpour isn’t all bad: it will return Beebe Falls to its usual violent glory, it will finally clean all the salt off our shoes, and, of course, it will help nurture all the wonderful greenery that unites the disparate architecture of the Cornell campus. April showers bring May flowers, after all.

However, April showers also bring something else, something insidious, something stealthy and perfidious, something that even Thesaurus.com cannot help me describe adequately. You may not even notice them at first, but then you look down and realize their guts are all over the bottom of your shoes:
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Spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) has the dubious honor of being the most unwelcome thing in developed nations, second only to painful death or Drunk Uncle Bob’s vaguely lecherous comments. Initially just a sprinkling of special offers from Yahoo! amongst one’s messages from the Save the Whales mailing list, spam has now become so proliferous that it’s easy for real correspondence to get lost in the deluge.

People hate spam — unless they’re the people earning thousands of dollars sending it out — and will go to great lengths to eradicate it. Nearly every proprietary e-mail client comes with a junk mail filter that aims to identify spam, and there’s no shortage of add-on programs that claim to kill more bulk mail than all the competitors.
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For well over a decade, people have been arguing about the use of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, that 15-second comma-infested sentence that most elementary school students recite every morning right before delving into their spelling homework. The argument culminated two weeks ago as Dr. Michael Newdow, a parent/doctor/lawyer in California, argued his case in front of the Supreme Court. He and his supporters claim that the phrase clearly violates the separation of church and state; those who disagree with him hold that the words “under God” do not refer to any specific God but to a nebulous all-encompassing power, or that the Pledge is merely acknowledging the role that religion has played in the creation of our country — or they simply state that the Pledge of Allegiance is religious, as it damn well ought to be.

I don’t think we should get rid of “under God.” I don’t think we should keep it, either. I say we toss the Pledge of Allegiance altogether: it’s an archaic, useless bit of tradition that serves no purpose but to waste 15 seconds of classtime.�
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