The Idol Bat

If you’re a student, you probably know the feeling: you’ll be sitting in class, waiting for your classmate to start giving a presentation, when you notice them over by the door, poking the wall and glancing back into the room with a confused look on their face.

And it hits you: they have a PowerPoint presentation. As you scream inside, “The humanity! Dear God, the humanity!” your classmate finally pushes the button on the wall the right number of times, the projector turns on, and they walk over to the computer and load up the presentation.

If you’re lucky, the PowerPoint will be a simple set of slides with a small amount of text or pictures to complement the spoken presentation. But luck is rare.

More often, the presenter walks to the front of the room, hits the mouse button to get past the first slide with the presentation’s title, and says, “As you can see from this quote, my blah blah blah…”

On the screen at the front of the room is a solid block of text, a black squirming mass of academia like the the throng of carnivorous bugs that swarm out of a mummy’s tomb, devouring all in their wake. As your eyes finally wade through the mass, you key back into the actual presentation just in time to hear, “…which is why Jesus was an alien love-child.”

What? That didn’t follow at all. If only they hadn’t thrown up a long and convoluted quote to distract you while they continued talking! But that is the beauty of PowerPoint. Even if the presentation has no need for it, it’s there to divide the audience’s attention.

Welcome to the first article for the new column here on the Idol Bat, Things that Hurt my Soul. Every Friday, I will be exploring various things out in the wide world that hurt my soul. This week, I’d like to start off by taking a look at the campus student newspaper here at Whitman, the Pioneer.

To the people at the Pio, let me just say first that you folks are doing a good job. You’re publishing a weekly paper, managing the large number of people involved with that, fighting through all the issues caused by those first two things, and generally making ends meet. I didn’t write this article because of you. I wrote it because, unfortunately, the Pio hurts my soul.

What volume is this, anyway?

Ever since I was a first-year I haven’t read the Pio all that often. I’m not much into factual news when you come right down to it, and even then I couldn’t get through too many articles without discovering several typos or grammatical errors. As I’ve gotten older and more set in my anal-retentive ways, things haven’t improved. In point of fact, I’d say that we’ve taken a turn for the worst. Admittedly, the most recent Pio (Issue 5, March 1, 2007) is a big improvement on past issues. But despite the fact that the Pio is being refined, there’s still some serious room for improvement.

One of my personal favorite Pio screw-ups this semester is the volume number, printed prominently on the top left of the page. The first couple issues claimed to be part of volume CXVIX. For those of you not as familiar with Roman numerals, this is not a number. It might possible be construed to be 114 (100 + 10 + 10 - 6), or maybe even 125 (100 + 10 + 5 + 10), although that’s stretching it. Someone at the Pio finally caught on to the fact that their volume numerals weren’t a number, though, and switched it up to CXX (120). Too bad that last semester’s papers are all clearly labeled CXVIII (118), which means that the volume is actually 119 (and thus should be CXIX on the front page). Oops.

Update: Karla, Caretaker of the Volumes over at Penrose Library, has written to inform us that the current volume number (120) is actually correct! Apparently, the Pio has been printing the wrong volume number since spring 2006. Now not only is my soul hurt from the Pio’s volume-number shenanigans, but I am saddled with guilt at incorrectly accusing the Pio of being wrong when they were, in fact, right! Oh, the burning!