Best New Weekly Feature, Week Four

It's hard to write these posts about the Firearm when it's finals time, but I said I'd do these every week, so I'm doing them every week.

Volume 1, Issue 6

First of all, perhaps by now you've noticed that each issue features a different little statement up by the title. Thinking up and agreeing on these statements for each issue was one of the things Andrew and I enjoyed most while making the Firearm. This week's statement, "Amor et cautela" (Love and Caution) was one of the first statements we wanted to have . . . better said, we wanted it to say "Love and caution" up there in Latin, but it took us a while to figure out what "Love and caution" was in latin. In fact, we had assigned Andrea Clemmens, a friend of the Firearm, to look it up for us . . . Andrea was great at many things and great for many reasons, but Latin-translation research was not one of those things or reasons.

From the Editor Sleeping With Women In anticipation of Andrew contributing his own commentary to this post, I'm not even going to touch this one. Okay, I'll touch it a little. The summer before I moved into Apartment 120, the residents of Apt 120 (and some of their close associates) went on this enormous bike trip to raise money for this disease (exact details escape me, but you can check out the website for their incredibly successful endeavor). This means I moved into an apartment full of guys who had a lifetime's worth of stories about a huge bike trip that I had to catch up on, this being just one of them.

Editorial Get a Grip! An honest to goodness editorial by me to the Anthrax-fearing denisons of Utah Valley. After writing this article numerous people stopped me on campus to tell me their own great Anthrax-panic stories, there were some really good ones, like an incident involving the University of Utah football team and the chalk used to mark the field, I kid you not.

Communication Phone Message Here's the truth. This is a message Andrew and I left on Dan Hoopes' cell phone. "Rob" and "Matt" were made up names. Everyone else is real. We just felt like leaving Dan a really long message, it wasn't until later that we decided this message would make a "good" article for The Firearm.

Sports Girls Intramural Flag Football I am terribly proud of this little bit of art. I suppose that if this post were perfect, I'd have discovered the old list of 107 girl's flag football teams from that year and made a comment about each team name. Too bad I don't have the list anymore. Eventually I heard from girls who's team name I put down, as well as girls who's team name did well. I guess this is as good a time as any for me to say that I had always wanted to write an article for the Firearm about the BYU Girls Lacrosse team, and I wanted to call it "Lacrosse is My Life," after Hunter S. Thompson's "Polo is My Life." I never wrote such an article, instead, I remained fascinated by the fact that BYU had a women's lacrosse team made up of East Coast girls who had grown up loving lacrosse.

Volume 1, Issue 7

From the Editor Get Ready He wasn't kidding. Issue 8 of Volume 1 was one of the most epic issues of The Firearm ever made and involved actual journalistic daring-do. Just come around next week, you'll see what I mean.

Campus Life Creepy Guys Club This article was born of a conversation I had had after my Hemingway class the year before with Andrew and Adam Bateman. A conversation where I think we were all joking, right? At about this time, people were bugging us, asking for their names to be used in articles, so I popped a few guys' names into this article and then thought, "Wait, what if they're mad that I'm making them into some of the Creepy Guys?" Turns out they were totally psyched to have been in the Firearm. So it goes. In the second to last paragraph, the stuff I wrote about the Hostess Cupcake? I thought it was too creepy and wanted to take it out of the article, but Andrew insisted I keep it in, as creepiness is what I was going for, anyway.

Police Beat Thanksgiving Vacation Another signature bit of Andrew-style Andrew writing. "Rebecca Clark" was the name (still is, I suppose) of one of our teachers from that semester. It was a very small class, maybe there were ten of us, Andrew and I managed to turn the whole bunch into fiends for the Firearm, Rebecca included.

Positivity Corner Things I'm Thankful for On BYU Campus I was always concerned that The Firearm not be considered a negative or cynical paper, so I wrote this bit to bring positivity to the forefront. Each of the 11 items was something that would bring a smile to any Cougar's face, especially Tyler Bruford. Seriously, if you were at BYU between 1995 and 2002, you knew Tyler and also couldn't believe how Tyler was at absolutely every party or event around campus that was worth being at. It just got to be a given that you'd be seeing Bruford, that's why I wasn't even surprised to see him at the bonfire I went to in Newport over break.

Counterpoint Girls Can Be Creepy Too Absolutely a true story. I didn't mean for this article to indicate that such advances aren't, uhm exciting or anything, but the girl wasn't trying to insinuate, she was trying to conversate, and her stabs at wit got away from her. If I remember correctly, she was some sort of turbo-blond in a turquoise shirt.