As the school year grinds to a close, it’s once again time to announce the winners of the Crabbies.Last year’s ceremony was marred by the refusal of the Crabby for “Least Likely To Be an Academic All-American” by Andy Katzenmoyer, who in protest sent a smallish Indian woman to the ceremony to decline the award. This year’s winners receive a heaping bucket of my feces and were told of their victory last night on Andrew Hall’s radio show.The first Crabby goes to the “Best Rebuttal of a Lame Quote.” Compare and contrast:”The names of people in politics who were involved in USG don’t roll off my tongue,” said Don Stenta, Undergraduate Student Government adviser, in an Other Paper story about the Lantern’s criticism of the student government president.”Being USG president prepared me more for a career in politics than all of my political science classes combined,” said Brian Hicks, chief of staff for Gov. Bob Taft, in a Lantern article that ran about a week later.”It would be the same if we had a Department of Buggy Whip Manufacturing,” said Martha Garland, vice provost of undergraduate studies, explaining to me the logic in slashing funding of the journalism school.”I just don’t think a buggy whip could knock down the Berlin Wall,” said Jim Neff, head of the Kiplinger Program in public affairs reporting, in his investigative reporting class.The winner of the Crabby actually contradicts himself. In an interview with columnist/wire editor/Eric Stoltz look-alike Mike Bender, WOSU General Manager Dale Ouzts was asked if he supported student-run radio at OSU. Ouzts responded that he didn’t understand the question.Bender rephrased it: Did Ouzts think a student-run station would be good for local radio? Ouzts again said he didn’t understand the question, so Bender took a different route, asking him where he went to school and if it had a student-run radio station.Ouzts said that not only does the University of Georgia have a station, he helped start it. In the beginning, it only had a limited chunk of airtime on a commercial station.”By the time I was a grad student, we put together a request for a license and got it,” he said.The next award is the “Et tu, Bruté?” Crabby for backstabbing among media brethren. There’s plenty of nominees: It seems some local media outlets made up for the lack of their own actual reporting by running articles about this paper.Former Lantern columnist Kirk Richards qualifies as a nominee because of a piece he wrote for the Columbus Dispatch on an award given by a conservative organization for extremes in political correctness. The story was just a too little, too late rehash of the controversy that surrounded the now-infamous “Stillman” comic strip that mocked women’s studies majors. Despite the facts the award was actually given to the Feminist Majority and the organization essentially created the controversy, the article didn’t even mention the group.The campus conservative rag, The Observer, is also a strong contender because of its staff’s obsession with the “Stillman” mess and apparent intention to write about it well into the next millennium. A case can also be made for the aforementioned Other Paper article on the Lantern’s coverage of the student government race, which was little more than a forum for the poor USG president to whine that no one loves him.The winner wrote on the same topic, but she comes from within. Jessica Weeks’ column on the USG presidential election takes the Crabby for planting a big-ass dagger in the back of the lowly opinion editor who spends a good chunk of his free time defending her to rabid critics.The final Crabby goes to the “Worst Chain on High Street,” sponsored by McDonald’s™. Again, the contenders are many. Blockbuster Video is perhaps the only business that could add less to the local culture than the gutter punks who used to occupy their new campus location. Urban Outfitters deserves a special place in hell for pushing out the pop-culture emporium Big Fun so it could invade the campus with its unique brand of inflatable furniture and overpriced, pseudo-cool fashions.One would think the obvious winner would be Steak ‘N Shake, which forced out the 23-year-old Souvlaki Palace II to build another burger joint. However, the Crabby goes to CVS Pharmacy, which has made a tradition out of demolishing long-time businesses so it can inindate cities with locations every few blocks.First it was Lou and Hy’s, an Akron delicatessen torn down so that a neighboring CVS could expand its parking lot. Now there’s Short Stop and Arby’s, apparently facing the wrecking ball to make way for the pharmacy’s fourth campus-area location.That will just about do it, for both the Crabbies and Crabby himself. My last day is Friday, after which I’ll say goodbye to almost two years of working for the Lantern as a columnist/staff writer/campus editor/opinion editor.It’s not because I’m graduating: The J. Lee Giles record for most years as an OSU senior is within my sights. I’ll be in school until next spring while taking a stab at working for the man with a year-long internship in the Akron Beacon Journal’s statehouse bureau. Bender is taking over as opinion editor.It’s been a blast. Working on the paper and at the student-run radio station has been a unique opportunity to have a level of creative control that I might never again experience. Thanks to all who let me make a run of it.Hopefully, this next gig only serves to make me more dangerous. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Nathan Crabbe is a senior journalism major from Akron. Death threats, marriage proposals and dirty jokes can be sent to him at [email protected].