New Tikal, Mayan Cloud, Heaven- Mass riots resulted in a government coup in the Mayan heaven last week after the predication for the complete destruction of the universe proved to be false. The so called “end of days” myth was heavily supported by the ruling party in the Mayan afterlife for their impressive three thousand year control over the Mayan people. While support for the majority party has been waning since their complete annihilation from the planet earth 1800 years ago, the failed prediction of the apocalypse seemed to be the last straw for the Mayan people.
“We were informed by the government we trusted to pay off our debts and settle our disputes and we listened,” one citizen explained. Many sold their businesses, were nicer to their neighbors, and reconnected with loved ones they didn’t really like out of guilt because of the government’s prediction.
“I finally told my wife I never loved her. I’d been holding it in for years. Now, well, it’s just awkward,” said another protestor of the displaced regime.
While many former officials managed to escape the coup unscathed and sought political asylum in neighboring ethereal societies, reporters caught up with the former Undersecretary of Sacrifices and Virgins, who quickly defended his government by stating: “To be fair, we predicted this incident hundreds of years ago. There’s no way we thought people would still believe this stuff in the 21st century.”
After almost a week of violence, the people have established a temporary democracy until the Mayan’s first public election is held sometime in the next two months. While many leaders of the movement against the former government have expressed interest in the position of the president, Manny “The Jaguar” Ortiz, a front man for the radical activity and current temporary President, is the most likely candidate.
“We are responding to a public cry for rationality. My campaign seeks to depart from the former government’s fear of progress, and will not support off-the-handle predictions not supported by the seventeen calendars of the Mayan people,” Ortiz said at a rally on Tuesday the 10th (or Friday the 32nd if you are using the Short Count Calendar).
Rationality and logic are two major platforms of the new government, which has led to massive support for the movement by the Mayan people. The new government has recruited the realm’s most progressive and advanced scientists and cosmologists to debunk the 2012 legend for good.
“It’s an old idea,” one scientist said. After initial data collection, the leaders of the new progressive party now support the new 3023 “End of Days” theory.
“3023? Yeah, that seems pretty far away,” one civilian said in support. Pretty far away, indeed. With the intensity of the last month, most citizens hope they will not have to face eminent destruction or political upheaval for at least one thousand years.
In other news, reports from the Aztec cloud of heaven have announced the arrival of visitors from Spain!

We at The Slant have been following the Republican primary very closely over the past few years. We’ve watched all 25 of the debates (so far) and have been both watching the polls of others and keeping track of our own statistics. Up until now our role in the campaign has been strictly observational. But we’ve decided to change all of that today by coming out and endorsing one of the candidates.
We had a tough time settling on which candidate deserved our support. We had to figure out which of the remaining rich white men best represented ourselves, our newspaper, and our student community. It took weeks of intense debate among Slant editors before we finally came to a decision.
The Slant is now prepared to officially endorse (drumroll please) Rick Santorum.
All of the candidates had different strong points, making it very difficult to pick just one. But then one of our editors decided that we would be remiss if we didn’t pick a candidate that addressed the concerns of our (sizable) LGBTQI readership.
Our first thought was “Great, we’ll just pick one of the openly gay candidates.” But we quickly learned that none of the candidates are openly gay. We all thought there was at least one, but it turns out that it was actually his wife who was running, not him. With no openly gay candidates, we had to take the next best thing. We chose a candidate who seems like he’s still in the closet.
And that’s what we’ve got here in Santorum. You know, folks, it’s one thing to be against gay marriage. Lots of people are. It’s another thing to be homophobic. But at a certain point a person reaches a level of homophobia so absurd that anyone who hears them speak about gay marriage just has to wonder, “How the hell did this guy learn so much about homosexuality?”
Sure, Mr. Santorum has lots of ideas for this country. He has an economic plan. He’s got a plan for health care and even ideas to reform social security. But for some reason he chooses to not talk about these issues all the time. Much like the great Harvey Milk (another gay political pioneer) Santorum has decided to make LGBTQI issues the hallmark of his campaign.
To say that Santorum talks a lot about homosexuality is a bit like saying water is damp. The man mentions gay sex in an astounding 43% of his public appearances. He really is the only candidate who gives LGBTQI issues the amount of attention they deserve.
As I mentioned earlier, a lot of our readers are gay. And among those people, many have spent some time in the closet. So I’m sure that lots of you can sympathize with Mr. Santorum. There are lots of people out there who will tell Mr. Santorum that being gay is wrong. (Including Rick Santorum himself) Well here is our chance to take a stand and say together, in one voice “It’s OK to be gay, and you can come out any time you want!”

Well-dressed, athletic, and social people everywhere confirm that it’s once again uncool to be uncool, and conversely cool to be cool.

Uncoolness, frequently a problem for the lower-middle class, has been a drain on society from the 1950s, up until the late 1990s, when geeks grew some nuts and decided that it was cool to be uncool.
Donning their parents’ dusty jackets over ironic thrift store t-shirts, dorky kids took on a new identity—hipsters—and spent the past decade and a half trying too hard to look like they weren’t trying, in order to convince society that uncool was the new cool.

Well, it worked… for a while. Poll results this year indicate that after increasing and plateauing for many years, the popularity of artsy haircuts and skinny jeans has finally taken a downward turn, signifying that the nation believes it is once again uncool to be uncool.
Mothers are breathing sighs of relief, echoed throughout the entire American South, as their kids look in the mirror and decide that baggy flannel looks terrible, and a nicely fitting collared shirt would be a better choice.

Aside from the fact that “Kool” was the new cool for a while with these cigarette-smoking hipsters, cool has not been cool since approximately 1990.
Cool people today are ecstatic:
“Finally, I don’t need some greasy twit judging me for popping my collar and wearing a Patagonia jacket with my pressed khakis… or showering daily… or going outside… or listening to rap!” commented one man who self-identified as “always been cool” in our survey.

Of ten thousand participants in our nationwide poll of cool people, 15% claimed, like the above man, that they have always been cool, or have been cool since the early ‘90s. 9% claimed they hadn’t been cool before 2012, but have changed habits and recently become cool for the first time in their lives, and the remaining 76% checked the box for “Was uncool (which I thought was so cool) for a while, but I’m back to normal now.”

After sixteen seasons of being televised as the exemplars of genuine relationships and the models of chivalrous courting, the contestants on this season of ABC’s The Bachelor still inspire viewers to search repeatedly and boldly for true love on reality television. Yet, the bachelor for this season is content to let ABC’s hit romance series provide him with a house full of 25 beautifully-competitive women, all of whom want to shower him with small-screen attention and perhaps even meaningful companionship.
In previous renditions of the show, the leading bachelors have ranged from a US naval officer to a professional actor to a medical doctor to a literal Italian prince. This season’s leading man, Ben Flajnik (pronounced Flannick), is a return contestant who took second place on last season’s gender-flipped version of the series, The Bachelorette. Flajnik, a self-described Renaissance man who’s handy with a saw, had this to say about his first attempt for the gold ring at the love Olympics: “It was a good run, but I definitely should have trained more. I thought I could have won with just my looks and potential inheritance, but some women really do like conversations that go somewhere. [Long, contemplative pause.] But Ashley broke my heart when she chose that other guy over me atop that ridge beside the Mendocino coast. And my long, wind-blown hair was looking so good that day, too.”
Regardless of the natural rate of recovery, when the show’s producer Mike Fleiss presented Flajnik with the prospect of redeeming his public sympathy for a second chance at televised love, Flajnik immediately pounced on the opportunity to turn the tables and have the women vying for his attention. “This really is more my style, and it makes it easier for me to find my soul mate while nodding, giggling, and saying acquiescing, self-evident statements a lot. I really am just another shy, quiet, son of a California winery millionaire. Just like everybody else,” said Flajnik. When reporters asked him about his rapid recovery from last season’s heartbreak, Flajnik just gave the reliable smile-and-nod, and they instantly understood.
When they asked the man behind the camera about his growing trend of picking the runners-up from the previous seasons to headline future ones, straight-talking producer Fleiss extolled the benefits of shifting last year’s rejected contestant into the headliner role: “He comes with his own built-in demographic of aging, husband-hungry women who watched him lose last season.” The producer, like this season’s bachelor, likes to keep things easy.
After seeing so many other, regular people like Flajnik fall madly in love on TV over the past decade, millions of viewers have been convinced of the realistic prospects and promises of celluloid love. Carrie-Ann Saunders, a committed viewer from Denver and a single mother of two, volunteered her opinion on the comments section of ABC.com’s website devoted to the series. “Ben is so dreamy. I wanna run my hands all through that blasé bachelor’s hair. And I just absolutely love how the dates he sets up are sooooo romantic and affordible. Thanks to The Bachelor, I now know what to expect out of a REAL man. The next guy that wants to seriously impress me on a date better go out of his way to fly me to Venice for a dreamy gondola ride at twilight.”
This season’s premiere episode aired on January 2nd and showcased all 25 of those girl-next-door-beautiful women along with their creative attempts to catch Flajnik’s eye and make a memorable first impression. One thin, blonde contestant rode a horse up the driveway for the initial meet-and-greet. A second busty, blonde contestant brought her grandmother along to show her respect for family values. A third curvaceous, blonde contestant who claimed to have “a little gangster” in her even went as far as to rap a homemade verse for Flajnik. The bachelor, all the while, reclined with a gin and tonic in hand and let the show come to him. By the end of the night, those 3 contestants had all received roses and advanced into the next round of the competition.
Enthralling viewers with a teaser at the end of the two-hour premiere, ABC showed some highlights from the upcoming season. Selecting edited clips from the entirety of the filmed season, producer Fleiss put forth four straight minutes of multiple, attractive, more timid women holding large glasses of red wine and emotionally crying through their mascara while other multiple, attractive, more bold women were lost in deep, passionate kisses they had initiated with Flajnik amid various exclusive, picturesque landscapes.

The apocalypse occurred at 3:05 p.m. January 15, when freshman Brittany Anderson did not receive a bid from Gamma Theta Rho, the sorority she listed as her first preference during rush week, fulfilling the Mayan prediction that the world would end in 2012.
Eyewitnesses stated that when Anderson heard the news, the ground shook, fire and brimstone rained from the sky, and a supervolcano erupted, showering the earth with ash.
“This is, like, the worst possible thing that could happen!” Anderson said.
“The part about me not getting the bid, not the supervolcano, I mean,” she added.

Despite her disappointment, Anderson did begrudgingly accept a bid from Sigma Psi Sigma, a decidedly mid-tiered sorority.
“What, do you think I was going to be some GDI, or something?” Anderson said. “Please. Greek Life is, like, the whole reason I came to Vanderbilt. Plus ,I’m too pretty to not be in a sorority.”
She then went on to claim that she has “the best big in the world,” a point which she reiterated several times during the interview.

Though no Mayans were available for comment, Thomas Leary, Professor of South and Central American History at Vanderbilt, stated that their prediction was almost completely accurate.

“If there were any Mayans left, I’m sure they’d say ‘I told you so’!” Leary said. “The apocalypse occurred almost exactly the way they predicted it, which is impressive considering their civilization died off hundreds of years before sororities even existed.”

The Mayans were not the only ones who saw the apocalypse as a potential outcome of the 2012 sorority rush process, though. According to Jane O’Connell, Anderson’s roommate who chose not to rush, Anderson herself repeatedly said, “it would be the end of the world if I don’t get a bid from GTR.”
“It’s really all she talked about first semester,” O’Connell said. “It actually got really annoying. She wouldn’t shut up about how badly she wanted to be a GTR. If the apocalypse hadn’t happened, I would have probably checked into a hotel for a week to avoid the sob fest.”

Sisters at GTR cited Anderson’s bitchy personality and the fact that she wore the wrong kind of shoes to the final round of rush as the reasons for denying her a bid and, incidentally, causing the apocalypse, an incident for which they take no responsibility.

“She was, like, really fake and not very nice,” said Eliza Carter, president of GTR. “Plus, her shoes were kind of wrong, and that’s the real way we decide who’s in and who’s out. It’s not our problem if it set off a supervolcano.”

When asked about the apocalypse, as well as the ordinary severe emotional trauma caused every year by sorority rush, the Office of Greek Life issued an official statement.
“Unlike all other student groups, Greek organizations are free to discriminate on whatever arbitrary basis they choose,” the statement read. “It is up to the brothers and sisters, who are obviously all well-adjusted, emotionally mature, and not at all petty, to decide who gets bids. We take no responsibility for this or any other apocalypse.”

Anderson says that the future looks bright, despite all of the brimstone-haze blocking the sun. When asked what she thought about causing the apocalypse by not getting a bid from GTR, Anderson said, “So what? I never wanted to be in that stupid sorority. They’re all a bunch of sluts anyway.”

Vanderbilt males who are currently in relationships with freshman girls were reporting extreme levels of apprehension leading up to the sorority rush process, occurring this January.
The Slant talked to several students about the issue and the results were largely the same. “Yeah, rush week is going to blow,” said Brendan Haynesworthy ’15. “I just know she’s going to come complaining to me about how so-and-so said something about her dress or the girls at whatever house don’t like her and then I’ll have to, like, reassure her or whatever. It’s bullshit.”
Upperclassmen had similar attitudes. “I’ve dated a freshman every year I’ve been here,” said Clayton Roberts IV ‘12, “and none of the relationships made it past the third week of January. Why do you think that is? I’ll tell you why, it’s because rush turns them all into crazy fucking psychos.”

Vanderbilt boyfriends said that the extreme amount of self-esteem issues brought on by sorority rush will require up to eight times the normal amount of consoling, reassuring, and the use of the phrase, “No, you are beautiful. Don’t listen to her.”
Male students who have been through this before had little to offer in the way of advice. “Just try to stay out of her way if she’s crying,” said Bryant James Bryant ’12, speaking to campus males. “Asking her what happened isn’t going to make it any better. For you, I mean.”

Boyfriends, though, aren’t the only ones affected by the harrowing process.
The Psychological Counseling Center (PCC) reports a 60% increase in claims of harassment and bullying during the week.
In addition, the Commons munchie mart reports that the day after bid night is the single highest-selling day for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to females, a phenomenon likely caused by shame eating and as a celebration of the end of weeks of starvation.

Despite the overall feeling of dread, some boyfriends chose to take a more positive approach.
Said one junior who wished to remain anonymous, “I understand, it’s a tough time for her. Getting judged by a group of your peers on qualities that you largely have no control over would be tough for anyone, and I’ll be there for her to help her feel better about herself and to let her know that she’s loved. But if she doesn’t get a bid from Tri-Delt, she’s fuckin’ dumped.”

A democratic gathering that began at Zuccotti Park near Wall Street has received a great deal of outrage from right-wing critics. The democratic assembly in New York City has inspired many similar movements all across the country, particularly in major cities and college campuses.
Participants and supporters of the movement have been using the slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” commenting on the “atrociously unequal distribution of wealth in this country,” as well as the “horrendously corrupt influence of corporate America” on the democratic process.
Phil T. Richman, a former Wall Street broker and current executive at Goldman-Sachs, claims, “It’s about time for these dirty hippies to wake up and smell the eggs benedict, champagne and caviar. This is America, where I have a Constitutional right not to be taxed. That’s what this country was built on.”
Richman, who was raised in a wealthy Connecticut neighborhood, went to Yale on a legacy, and was hired by his father at financial firm Goldman-Sachs, also had this to say: “Those liberal Commies need to get a job. That’s what the American Dream is about! You start at the bottom and work your way to the top. That’s what I had to do- all the way from a small Connecticut town to the top of the world here on Wall Street!”
When asked whether the “lazy” democracy participants could find work in his company’s manufacturing plants, CEO Seymour Cash said, “No, I’ve actually been cutting hundreds of jobs. Congress finally passed a tax law that’s letting us reel in billions we have stored in offshore accounts, virtually tax free, plus we have some money left over from Obama’s stimulus package; what with that, and all the salaries we won’t have to pay, our executives are getting great raises this year.”
Many supporters argue that the participants in the democracy activity in Zuccotti Park are exercising their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, assembly and petition. Critics argue that the movement is merely “Communist liberals who want to take all our money that we worked hard for,” claiming that “It took a lot of effort to be born into the upper class and then lobby for Congress to give us billions.”
Wesley Dawson, a member of the democracy participants in New York, said “We are the voice of the American people. We have Constitutional rights to assemble here, voice our views, and demand that our government be of and for the people!”
In response to this statement, Cash claimed, “I have a Constitutional right too! The right to free speech, and according to the Supreme Court, money is now a form of speech. I am exercising my right to donate extensively to campaigns in order to be compensated with lax tax policy.”
Said Dawson, “We believe that in a true democracy, the government responds to the voice and needs of the people, and that the people have both a right and a responsibility to speak up and participate in the democratic process.”
However, according to Richman, “The government is responsive to the voice of the people – our lobbyists.” When asked whether he actively voted in local and national elections, Richman responded, “Hmmmm….I think the last time I voted was….in 6th grade student council elections. They made us fill out the ballot in Social Studies class for a completion grade.”