The Economic Crisis Hits Larryville, Vol. II / Plus, Today in Sports News / Also, The Boys Consider What Larryvillians are Checking Out of the Library

The annual Larryville "Half Marathon and 5K Run" has been cancelled because many of the usual corporate sponsors cannot afford to fund it next year.

Chip: "First off, what the hell is a 'half-marathon?' If you can't run a whole marathon, stay home and train more until you can."

Richard: "It seems to me the organizers could have reduced it to a 'quarter-marathon.' Surely that would cost less and allow us to keep it."

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At tonight's KU basketball game, the official 2008 NCAA Men's Championship Banner will be unfurled.

Chip: "Truly, this is a dream come true. Unfortunately, this year's young new team looks more like the stuff of nightmares, the kind of nightmares in which you're being chased by two young drunk twin BB gun-wielding Memphis hoodlums, a guy who likes to wave his johnson around in elevators, and a big white kid called The Sheriff, Cole .45."


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A few weeks back we reported a new competitor in the field of Larryville cultural journalism: the LJ-World's "Go," a weekly "lifestyle magazine" that's twice as big as the actual paper yet somehow contains even less news. This week "Go" printed a fascinating column which simply lists the top ten requested books at the Larryville Public Library, which included four of the Twilight tween-vampire series, Brsinger (the tale of a boy and his dragon), current Oprah-pick Edgar Sawtelle (the story of Hamlet from a dog's perspective), and Watchmen (Chipnote: "Watchmen is a big comic book for geeky adults who haven't outgrown fantasy yet."). What do the boys make of this reading material?

Chip: "I find it surprising. I would have predicted requests for the several Obama books from the liberal set and maybe Omnivore's Dilemma from the local Green freaks and maybe The Anarchist's Cookbook from the hippies, which they read because they think it will help them 'fuck up the system' but then they get stoned and lose the book and can't remember how to construct the explosives."

Richard: "Yes, it's disappointly mainstream. I mean, sure, we have to read what Oprah tells us to read, and this doggy Hamlet tale is absolutely top-notch, but I thought financially-strapped hipsters used the library to get their dose of 'hipster-fiction' from Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Franzen, and Jonathan Safran-Foer. But then again, maybe local hipsters buy all their own books, so that the hipster girl or boy they are trying to impress can notice that first-edition copy of Everything is Illuminated on their shelves and bang them out of sheer respect for their good taste."