Jason: So Dave, another 4:20 has come and gone.

Dave: Dude, it’s 6:55. What are you operating under here? Mountain time?

Jason: No, I meant the date, April 20. Did you celebrate?

Dave: Hitler’s birthday? The anniversary of the Columbine tragedy??

Jason: No, Dave. 4-20 is a reference to “marijuana.” Apparently it’s popular for the kids to celebrate 4-20 by doing lovely things such as consuming drugs, acting crazy and breaking cars. You know, stuff like that.

Dave: How could I forget? I was in UDF on 4-21, and the clerk and two customers exchanged some verbatim. They were talking about celebrating last night. They were laughing as if they had some secret. I doubt either had a girlfriend named Victoria.

Jason: Did you feel excluded?

Dave: I actually felt kind of bad for them. It was probably the funniest thing they’d done since buying a Cocks hat.

Jason: Can’t forget the Woody.

Dave: Absolutely not.

Jason: When you’ve got to advertise the product, something is obviously the matter.

Dave: You know I wasn’t there, but I’d be willing to gather that there were an awful lot of Woody or Cocks hats present at the riot on Friday evening down there on Chittenden.

Jason: Maybe we should blame the hats.

Dave: Hold on, let me put on my thinking cap. All right, I’d blame the rioting on the baseball team. We lost to Penn State on Friday night.

Jason: You mean, 4-20.

Dave: 4-20? We lost 8-3. Whatever, and the last time we endured a spring riot was on Tax Day 2000. On that day the baseball team dropped an encounter against Michigan.

Jason: We seem to have a tradition of rioting after losses to our fine neighbor to the north.

Dave: If only we didn’t have to worry about those idiots down south.

Jason: Down south?

Dave: Woody? Cocks? You picking up on this lingo here, buddy?

Jason: It’s kind of creepy, Dave. Perhaps if many of those residents didn’t have the sufficient income capacity to purchase their Cocks hats, they would understand the inherent stupidity that comes with destroying their own neighborhood.

Dave: Actually, given the proximity to the south campus dorms, most of the people weren’t destroying THEIR neighborhood. And those same people come away proclaiming the riots as “cool.”

Jason: You know, in the classic cartoon strip “Peanuts,” Snoopy always began his stories with “It was a dark and stormy night.” Perhaps this should be amended to “It was a warm and springy night,” because that seems to be when all of these riots happen.

Dave: So then it’s the weather’s fault? I contend it’s “whether” or not you’re an idiot. Like, you’re in idiot if you woke up, threw on some Limp Bizkit and your “Highway 420” T-shirt and proceeded to smoke weed all day in your dorm room.

Jason: That’s “marijuana,” Dave. And at least those kids were probably too out of sorts to be rioting. Perhaps we could lie some blame on the massive quantities of alcohol being consumed by those fine young folks, many of them who were likely underage.

Dave: I still go back to the hats. In a recent trend, I’ve noticed something new.

Jason: Something new? How’s it a trend then?

Dave: Visors. No longer do golfers exclusively sport these semi-hats. But the “new” I’ve noticed is the backwards and UPSIDE-DOWN look. I thought this look was restricted to spring break. If you sport this look, you’re an idiot.

Jason: Speaking of backwards and idiots, that reminds me of Ohio University.

Dave: I didn’t think that was an actual college.

Jason: The jury is still out on that. But I remember back in the day when OU students would riot when the bars would close an hour early. And we would make fun of them. As foolhardy and stupid as that is, it’s still better than rioting for absolutely NO reason.

Dave: Do people in upside-down and backwards visors, with a stash of Cocks hats in their closets truly need a reason, my friend?

Jason: As much as I hate to agree with the often arrogant generation that came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, at least they gave excuses for when they rioted. Our generation can’t even come up with anything. We’ve cheapened the concept of rioting. Go us.

Dave: But students here are taking away this mentality. It’s like, when they go home for their summer break they’ll tell everyone, “Man, I was in riots this year! It was awesome!” Can you imagine? A full year of college and the best they come away with is “I was in a couple riots.”

Jason: “… and I bought a Cocks hat.” And isn’t that what “higher” education is all about?

Jason Mann and Dave O’Neil are Lantern editors who are actually the same product. They just market themselves differently. Jason is your Pepsi, while Dave serves as your Coke.