It’s a rite of passage for the poor scribes at the Daily Californian: the almost-annual, multiple-part series on crazy characters that scream occasionally amusing rants at passing students. It always comes complete with a strangely ominous editor’s note, to the effect that more stories like this are coming. And so we have yet another profile of Stoney Burke, who has burped lefty tirades at students since the glaciers carved the valleys of this glorious country. But this time, Selina McClaren and Desiree Matloob, the writers of the first installment of the series, have added a lovely bit of non sequitur mischief into the body of what is usually a by-the-numbers piece of human interest fluff. While describing the antics of campus character “Festus Chris King,” McClaren and Matloob inserted the following paragraph: “Of his relationship with his dad, who died of a heart attack when King was thirteen, he says, ‘We were close, close enough for him to hit me.” Apropos of absolutely fucking nothing. Nothing about his dad comes before or after this observation; it just hangs there like a gratuitous bit of dada art. Just like the people they’re writing about. Thank you, Selina and Desiree, for doing something interesting and meta with the dreadful assignment you were unfortunate enough to be handed.
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