Lesson plan

"Dear Editor,

I am offended. Not always, but often."

--David Hedengren, as published in The Daily Universe on February 15, 2001.

This brief missive encapsulates pretty well what I loved about the BYU campus paper when I lived in Provo. The pettiness of the student body gave me something to look forward to every Tuesday and Thursday. Alas, a little over a year ago, the Universe switched to a digital publication with a once-weekly print edition (at least according to an email I got, I haven't been on campus myself to verify), making it harder for students to grab some free entertainment on their way into a boring class.

Even worse...for a while, the archives of old articles and letters were absent from the Internet, apparently needing to be reformatted after a site redesign. But about a week ago, I got an email letting me know that the archives are back. I immediately got sucked into a black hole of reading the letters to the editor from the Fall 2000 semester. Somehow, Bush/Gore and a few other political topics got some mentions in the midst of student commentary on Julie from The Real World, the homecoming queen portraits hanging in the Wilk, President Hinckley's then-new stance against women wearing multiple pairs of earrings, and of course, the controversy over said women using single-strap bookbags. It was delightful.

Anyone who spent time at BYU since the advent of the World Wide Web can have a similarly awesome nostalgic experience. You can search the archive by month using the dropdown menu at the bottom of any page on the site, but it appears the search function is only available from the homepage. (In case you're curious...searching for "shocked" yields 562 results, and "appalled" returns 157 hits, but the phrase "shocked and appalled" appears in only 23 posts.)

Four of those 23 instances came from the one and only Eric D. Snider. If the thought of perusing online archives of the Daily U appeals to you, you are likely already familiar with Mr. Snider; for the rest of you--Eric Snider's humor column "Snide Remarks" ran in the paper for a few years. I knew of him during my freshman year (1998-1999), mainly because of some controversy that ended his column that winter. But one of my mission companions, Rob Gotfredson, was a friend of Eric's and had a book of his older columns. (Rob even got a shout out in the introduction. They were tight.)

We would read the columns over and over to each other when we'd come home every night, trying hard to keep a straight face as we read. This was hard to do, even after reading the same piece for the fifth or sixth time. The book is now out of print, but now all of these columns are back on "The Digital Universe" site for everyone to enjoy!

Except for one. There was one column in the book that was never published in the paper. Again, the Internet has come to the rescue, for Snider has his own website, and it appears to contain everything he's ever written. I can't vouch for his other stuff because I haven't read it, but his late-90s Daily Universe columns are all worth at least one read, and some of them are worth dozens. This "lost" column is one of my all-time favorites. It describes how BYU wards typically have a large number of returned missionaries, which is helpful in preventing the teaching of false doctrine.

Towards the end, Snider says these RMs fall into one of three categories: pro-Bruce R. McConkie, anti-McConkie, and the third group:

On yet a third side, you will have people who chuckle and say, "We're getting into some pretty deep doctrine here. I don't think it's necessary to my salvation for me to know that." These people will even say this during the announcements at the beginning of class, and when roll is being taken. These are people who, when they were missionaries, read the LaVell Edwards biography during their personal study time, and whose idea of a heavy gospel conversation is an exchange of J. Golden Kimball stories and a round of "Church Film Trivia" ("Which sister missionary in 'On the Way Home' is prettier?") (Answer: The blonde one.)

That, my friends, is an extremely well-crafted joke. I don't care that as time goes by fewer and fewer people will understand the "On the Way Home" reference, it kills me every time--one of the funniest lines I've ever read.

This Sunday in my ward's Gospel Doctrine class, there will likely be a large number of returned missionaries, but we will be discussing stuff that's necessary for salvation--in fact, it's the plan of salvation.

So yes, this was actually my weekly BASOTRUSSL* post al along. And yes, it appears that Eric D. Snider was writing BASOTRUSSLs long before I was. If this shocks or appalls you, please write an angry letter about it. I know a publication that specializes in them, and I would LOVE to read it.

*BASOTRUSSL = Blog About Something Only Tangentially Related to the Upcoming Sunday School Lesson