PROS: Timely. Offers yet another chance to rip apart poorly reasoned naturalistic fallacies. Provides obvious opportunity to take George Michael's "Sex is natural, sex is fun, sex is best when it's one-on-one" lyrics out of context.

CONS: Again, insensitive to the deeply religious. Again, headline could get me Ad Boarded. And I'm bored stiff with this Peninsula thing anyway.

3. Harvard's Elite and Me. Football coach Joe Restic once challenged me to diagram a 5-2 defense. (I did it.) Athletic Director Bill Cleary once screamed at me for a half hour about a column I wrote. (He hadn't read it.) Dean of the College Archie C.Epps III once called me to complain that our cartoonist was taking shots at him. (Two days later, our cartoonist began taking shots at me.) Presidenstine Rudenstein took me out to lunch once. (He drew a lot of graphs on the tablecloths.) And that's not all.

PROS: The few people who read The Crimson today are undoubtedly fascinated by Harvard's elite.

CONS: Those same people couldn't care less about me. And Harvard's elite could get me Ad Boarded.

4. Brilliance Through Osmosis. All three of my roommates were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa last week. Could this mean that someday I'll get smart, too?

PRO: Should strike a chord among insecure Harvard students surrounded by intimidating intelligence.

CON: Too good an idea to waste on a day no one will read it. Stay tuned.

I'LL BET Paul Cowan whipped off his nonsensical little parable in less than an hour. Same goes for Joshua M. Sharfstein '91, last year's editorial chair, who used last year's Empty Wednesday to write a scintillating analysis of his trainrides home for Thanksgiving past.

This piece took me a bit longer, mostly because I heroically dug through some old Crimsons in order to chronicle the Empty Wednesday exploits of my lofty predecessors. (Or maybe I was just searching desperately for an idea. I forget.)

Occasionally, they wrote about politics. In 1966, T. Jay Matthews spewed out some incoherent ramblings about the governor of California. Matthews's "argument":

The governor "promised to do something about student radicals," but most observers think he won't, but restrictions on activism may be on the way, if California's Board of Regents is willing, which it probably is, although it usually doesn't get involved in this kind of thing, which is probably fine with the governor, because he sometimes expresses a "curious sympathy for student radicals," although he "rarely hides his distaste for anti-Vietnam protests," and so on.

Let's just say this convoluted diatribe did not ruin the political career of Gov. Ronald W. Reagan.

In 1974, The Lost Ed Page contained a Crimson staff editorial about the Middle East, urging Israel "to state that it is willing to sit down, not just with any Palestinians, but with the PLO." Good thing nobody saw it.

And why are you reading The Crimson's editorial page?