Lightning struck The Reveille yesterday.
With us printing all that news about sinnin’ and fornicatin’ and them other abominations of the holy word, it was bound to happen.
God don’t like that junk.
Fortunately The Reveille has a back-up plan to bring you your daily dose of news in case of power outage, attack from weapons of mass destruction, earthquake, malaria, locust invasion or other disaster.
Last night your student newspaper switched to full-on squirrel power.
Actually, it was the first time we performed the Small Mammal Exercise Recovery Protocol.
A crackerjack team of freshman engineering students developed SMERP last year when the Reveille was looking into alternative power sources to combat rising energy costs.
These super-geniuses decided that since we have a plethora of squirrels on our campus, we should harness their power and put them to work.
We keep about 4,000 of them in a backshop closet.
(Don’t worry. Last semester they unionized.)
They eat a strict diet of espresso and PowerBars to keep their energy up.
Then, the squirrels simply run on their exercise wheels and create energy that we harness and usually use to power a large-capacity subterranean greenhouse.
But sacrifices must be made when disaster strikes.
We went into the closet post-outage yesterday and told the squirrels we were switching to SMERP.
They were so excited that they emitted a collective squeak.
You should’ve seen those little vermin run.
Pretty soon all the lights were back up, the printers were running, the computers were buzzing.
Heck, they even gave us enough juice to watch Real World / Road Rules Battle of the Sexes and make a round of pina coladas.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last.
See, we were all really into the Real World /Road Rules thing, and by the time we realized we were losing power it was the part right at the end when you find out who got kicked off.
You can’t miss that part.
After the show, we went to check on our little rodent friends to see why they were being such slackers.
Much to our horror, some of the little buggers had passed out.
I mean we weren’t buying all that espresso and PowerBars for them to sleep on the job.
We decided right then and there that SMERP wasn’t working out anymore.
The squirrels were just too lazy.
So we let them go in the quad and produced the paper at a dorm with a generator instead.
I’m only telling you this in hopes that you’ll think about how the squirrels let us down before you hand over your hard-earned freedom fries to some lazy, low-life rodent begging outside the Union.
Stupid vermin.