STANFORD –  We all know the Tree.  Its lovably bizarre costume, its happy dancing at Stanford games, the annually recurring tales of misbehavior.  All in good fun, some might say.  But AHA!—Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics @Stanford—is calling foul. 

“Open your eyes,” said Lewish Marshall, public relations officer, speaking at an anti-tree rally AHA! held Monday at White plaza.  The organization claims that the Tree’s presence in Stanford sports and culture will lead students, impressionable freshmen especially, to accept irrationality “just because it’s fun.”  Marshall continued, saying that “talking trees, ghosts, and stuff like that teach people to make bad decisions based on a false reality.” 

Pro-Tree groups have come together to respond to what they call AHA!’s “militant anti-treeness.” 

More moderate groups claim that they accept the Tree in a figurative way, citing statistics showing that people who believe in the Tree live longer, commit less crime, and donate more to charity.   

Tuesday, February 18th, an open debate will be held in Memorial Auditorium between the Stanford Tree and Richard Dawkins. 
 

IRAN –– Last Wednesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held a press conference to explain the purpose of Iran’s recently discovered nuclear weapons program.

“The world has finally recognized that nuclear technology can be used for good. We don’t plan to launch an attack against another country. Instead, we are going to use these weapons to make things better in Iran.” Ahmadinejad continued, “We only plan to produce enough highly enriched uranium for three nuclear weapons. One to knock out the political opposition, another for the homosexuals and heroin addicts, and the third for the Baha’i people. The international community has nothing to fear.”

Following the announcement, many world leaders backed off their recent criticism of the nation and its leader.  White House staff member and economist Lawrence Summers even lightly supported the decision. “Such action would at least serve to increase GDP per capita and would in the long-run lead to greater individual wealth. The increased GDP would also allow Iran to place more of an emphasis on health care, which will become more of a priority after the nuclear blast.” When asked by the press if he considered his reasoning to be circular, Summers replied, “No, it’s economics.”

Anybody who has attempted to interact with the Microsoft mogul over the past few weeks has the same thing to say: Gates just isn’t himself lately. Reports have surfaced that the world’s richest man takes a solid thirty seconds to answer even the simplest questions such as “Is it raining?” or “Where are your mittens?”—seconds that clearly cannot be blamed on Gates’ underlying algorithms, which by all industry accounts are solid.

Microsoft has refused to release official data pertaining to the topic, but speculation has run rampant. Analysts are fairly confident that Gates’ boot time is through the roof, and most predict that he sits on the edge of his bed for thirty minutes upon waking up, desperately trying to marshal his thoughts.

While Microsoft has kept silent, Gates’ own wife Melinda has been surprisingly candid about the whole affair, opening up to the Stanford Flipside. “It’s just the little things… we’ll be sitting down at the dinner table, and I ask him how his day was and he just gets this empty look in his eyes for a second, like a deer in the headlights. But of course it’s Bill, so there’s this machine-like blankness instead of the animal bewilderment that deer have before you plow into them and spill their guts all over the highway.” She swallowed violently. “But usually he comes up with some answer eventually, even if it’s an unsatisfactory one, like ‘good.’”

But it is when Gates is actually unable to come up with an answer that she senses trouble. “That’s when you know that he’s not responding, and at this point, there’s not a whole lot you can do. It’s just so frustrating. You just wanna slap his side and yell at him, but of course that doesn’t do anything. He just sits there motionless, staring straight ahead, completely silent, and then you have to do a reboot, usually.”

Her candor reveals a deep-seated vexation with the situation, but she wants to be clear that this road block is merely temporary. “Look, I love Bill 6.0. He’s been a dutiful husband and has done the world a great deal of favors through the philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. But it’s just time for an upgrade. Not some small scale cleanup and defragmentation. The real thing. A whole new operating system. Bill 7.0.”