Can we stay hidden?

Well it’s finals week, the panic is spreading like an overeager cancer, and we have to reveal ourselves. Oh Snap! We had actually thought we could just stay hidden forever, or fake our deaths and then release an underground humor column like Tupac. (Tupac was an extremely accomplished humorist, didn’t you know?) But, alas, we are being coerced, possibly with threat of molestation (help, please) into throwing our actual, mediocre identities into the ring of public ridicule.

We admit that sometimes our writing turned out disconnected as a result of two people with different writing styles (funny and… not worth reading whatsoever, even if you’re reading it on the crapper just so you can wipe your ass with it afterward, but we won’t say whose is whose). You might ask what’s with all the parentheses (Ashwin sold his soul to the devil for a bottle of hot sauce (So hot, it’s straight outta Hell!) and one condition was that he use parentheses excessively (You don’t want to know the other conditions). See, he’s pretty messed up.

If you’re asking the same thing we are, which is “Who the hell is this foreign guy writing a humor column?”, the answer is “We have no clue.” The thought was that, living in a nation of excessive nationalism, we are about as ethnocentric as they get, so why not make a foreign exchange student character we can make fun of for being foreign. That’s supposed to make us feel better about ourselves, right? Wrong, everything we wrote about this random guy wrought from the womb of Mister Rogers’ one sexual encounter sounded awesome and made us feel more inadequate. It’s funny how things work out. Hilarious in fact.

The name is equally random, possibly the most random thing ever thought of by man in this century (those people in the 1800s were too random for us to step to). Yes it’s true; SIR ELTON is merely our alter-ego. For the entire semester we have been quiet unassuming students by day, loud obnoxious students by night and frantic columnists by afternoon on Sunday about an hour and a half before deadline when we hadn’t started. It’s not our fault, we really would have started it sooner but the Elton John costume we chose to write all the columns in just wasn’t designed for two people to squeeze into, especially not when one of them is a sweaty Indian kid who’s eaten a little too much Indian food in his lifetime (Hey, I’m big boned!). OK, so it wasn’t really an Elton John costume exactly, more like a little girl’s ballerina outfit. But hey, dressing like a Tiny Dancer was the closest we could get to our idol.

We didn’t even apply until after the deadline when a Chronicle staffer told us all the other applications sucked and knowing comedic genius when he sees it, came to us. Actually obtaining the column spot only served to boost our egos enough that we assumed top quality humor oozed out of us. The censors were on us like a jimmy hat there for a while, when a body odor joke got cut out because it didn’t have Larry Moneta in the same sentence (oops, we didn’t start that rumor, you did). But what can we say, we’re pretty evil and probably going to hell (although Ashwin’s going to hell anyway, because he’s a pagan worshipper of non-Christian nonsense).

We are glad to have gotten the opportunity to do something we could exaggerate completely on our résumés, as well as the chance to exercise our inflated egos. For those of you who didn’t think we were as funny as the general humorous crowd, we are willing to refund all the money you paid to read our column. We thank you for reading it, although if you hadn’t, we would have assumed you were anyway, so in effect your actually reading the column didn’t matter at all. We could thank the people who ruled over us with an iron fist, but as suggested before, we are ungrateful. Really, do Tracy Reinker and that other editor need these thanks to make them feel better about themselves? We don’t know, we never actually met them.

Ashwin Bhirud and Stephen Reading are Trinity sophomores.