Monologue
Idle Hands
J. Dana Haynes
Editor In Chief
Important notice to all Americans: There are now only
515 shopping days until the next presidential election.
That’s right, folks, there are a mere 82 weeks
left for us to choose our candidate. Enough of this
dawdling!'
There must be some mistake here. Perhaps
the politicians of this country don’t realize that
the elections will be held on the second Tuesday
of next year, not this year. Perhaps they are under
the impression that they have only seven months
in which to win us over to their camps, not a full 19
months.
But in fact, that is exactly how much time
there is between today and Nov. 13, 1984. Yet
already, the politicos are tilting against each
other.
We are barely more than halfway through
President Reagan’s first term in office, and
already the fight for the job is on. The Democrats
are probably the worst offenders here, since they
are currently out-of-office and playing from a posi
tion of weakness. However, that does not explain
why we are even now seeing the opening gambits
of several contenders, including John Glenn,
Walter Mondale and Gary Hart.
And to make the comedy all the funnier, the
press has dubbed Mondale the front-runner, as if
someone, somewhere in America already cared
enough to know the political differences between
Messrs. Mondale, Glenn and Hart (of course, no
one can really tell the three of them apart yet,
anymore than anyone knows which of the Andrew
sisters is Maxine. So far, all the public knows
about the candidates is that they wear three-piece
suits and walk around unemployed people, shak
ing their collective heads).
As early as January of this year,'we were even
given the cataclysmic news that Senator Edward
Kennedy was going to disappoint us all and not
run for the oval office. The reason given? Teddy
didn’t want to spend the next year and a half on
the campaign trail and away from his family.
Never mind the fact that Kennedy couldn’t win in
this country if his running mate was Jesus.
And another almost-candidate, Morris Udahl,
dropped out in February. The reason given? At
that point, it was simply too late to start raising
money.
I have rarely agreed with Gore Vidal, the
novelist-turned-would-be-politician who was
trounced so badly last year when he ran for the
Senate in California. However, Vidal has had one
or two viable notions about politics in America.
One of his more logical suggestions is to
place limits on the amount of time and money any
candidate may spend when running for office.
Vidal has suggested 90 days be all the time allow
ed between the candidates’ announcement to run,
and the election day. There are some people who
would say the idea is absurd, that the American
people are simply too lackadaisical and
uneducated to make so major a decision in a mere
three months.
Perhaps they are right. Perhaps six months
would be better. But certainly everyone (well,
everyone not running for office) would agree that
90 days is more logical than 589 days!
One of the persons most affected by the in
sanity of the 20-month contest would have to be
the president himself, in this case Ronald
Reagan. If he should run for office, and most
analysts and bookies think he will, then he must
start sometime soon, definitely no later than this
summer. That means the country will probably
have only a part-time president for a year and a
half while the battle wages. That was certainly
true for the last third of Jimmy Carter’s term in of
fice, and it was true of Gerald Ford’s briefer-than-
normal reign.
Is this a fair plan? Is this logical? Is this a
musical comedy?
No, no and yes.
Page 2
Country under seige by
plague of “Valley” jargon
Brett Bigham
Arts Editor
Like gag me with a spoon!
If I hear one more ‘totally’ or
‘tubular’ I’m going to barf out!
Of course you know what
I’m talking about. That dreaded
language that has washed over
TV and radio and into our per
sonal lives. I mean, of course,
the language of the Valley Girl,
VAL-speak.
Valley Talk started, of
course, in California, in the
San Fernando Valley. Now this
would have been fine if it had
stayed there, but enterprising
Frank Zappa decided to use his
fourteen-year-old daughter,
Moon Unit Zappa, to cut a
valley-girl disc. The record was
released nationally, climbed
onto the charts and gave every
impressionable person a new
way to talk.
The hit record proved that
valley talk was saleable and so
valley products flooded into the
market. Television and radio
ads also picked up on the new
talk.
Kech 22 used the talk to
describe “Leave It to Beaver”
and “Bewitched” as totally
awesome. Jean and clothing
ads swamped TV and radio
sporting valley girls and TV
started guestspotting them left
and right.
Even the Christmas
Season was attacked by the
Valley Girls. One card sported
three VALs on a classic Cor
vette and gave the always tradi
tional message: Gag me with a
spoon! Christmas is so tubular!
Valley girl posters are
available in all different sizes
and types now. There are
some showing a labeled picture
of a VAL with all her parts
labeled and catalogued from
her tubular bracelets to her bit
ching mini-skirt.
The best posters, though,
are the ones defining VAL-
speak. Like for instance, did
you know that Barf me out
means: Total, terminal rejec
tion. “Like my parents make
me listen to Don Ho records.
It’s so GROSS, like barf me out
totally, fer sure.”
Grody, Grody is ultimate
slime, like you know, moldy
lint in your belly button. Like
spam with marshmallow sauce.
Fatal grunge.
A Jel is having fewer than
15 brain cells left. Jell-O head.
Having the IQ of Cool Whip.
Beastie means you are not
a nice person. In fact, you are a
gnarly geek, like totally!
The word like is very im
portant to the VAL. You
know, LIKE! A sound designed
to fill air pockets in the brain.
Valley Talk was really
tubular when it first came out.
But it’s getting kind of mundo
grody. Maybe it’s time to let the
Valley Girls go back to the San
Fernando Valley and let us get
back to normal.
Editor’s note: The ter
minology is from the “Totally
Awesome Glossary” poster
distributed by
Western
Graphics Corporation.
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