GUEST COLUMN: "Happy New Year"

Happy new year! How are you? What's up? How was your break? Where did you go? What did you do? Standard small talk aside, the DP editors gathered recently to choose the new bi-weekly columnists for the spring semester. Hopefully, our choices will soon provide you with something more humorous or deeper to discuss with friends than, say, What classes are you taking? When's add/drop over? Have you declared your major? It was a difficult selection process for the DP's editorial board, choosing 16 columnists from over 50 applications. And then there was all the begging, pleading, and bribing . . . But, how could we not accept a columnist with a cover letter like this one: Yes, by popular (or unpopular) demand, College senior Andrew Sernovitz returns -- starting Wednesday, January 22 -- and is as caustic as ever. And you were worried he'd run out of people to trash. "Luckily, the Penn community keeps doing dumb things that make me want to vomit," he wrote. Andy isn't the only controversial columnist to come back for another go round. Even graduate student Elizabeth Hunt acknowledges that we may never get rid of her. "Since I will be leaving Philadelphia at the end of the semester, I would love to have one last shot," she said in her application. "Though I am sure that even after one more more semester I will still get a vestigial urge to reapply." "The movers I hire will have to bring their van over to the DP offices and pull me off some terminal to which I am clinging for all I am worth," she predicted. We're sure some administrators would be more than happy to help out. There are also a dozen new bi-weekly columnists, with the first two appearing tomorrow. Several editors thought College sophomore Zelig Kurland deserved a column based on his name alone, while College junior Jennifer Kornreich somehow managed to tie together Tennyson and rhinoplasty in one column. Of course, there are other ways to get a bi-weekly column. College junior Reshma Memon might have struck upon one of them. "I would send you Mrs. Field's cookies, but I'm sure you have way too much integrity to accept bribes." Integrity-schmegrity. But we were also attracted to some of her column ideas, including "the unique thrills of growing up in a dysfunctional family" and: "What it is like to be married in college (and why I recommended it)." Wow, I've been accepted to Penn! Now how am I gonna find a spouse by September? We've reserved bi-weekly slots for both the humorous and the serious, freshmen through graduate students, both campus opinion leaders and people you don't hear from everyday. And there may be a spot reserved for you. The DP prints numerous guest columns and dozens of letters to the editor each month, so grab pen, typewriter or word processor and take a shot at getting published. The new year is also a good time to once again thank the hundreds of contributors whose guest columns and letters to the editor appeared on this page in 1991. These opinions are both important and necessary, since exercising the constitutional right to free expression is the cornerstone of our democratic society and all that jazz. Today, we humbly offer one of the DP's returning humorists, College senior John Lennon. But if you don't enjoy this column, John offered us plenty of other ideas to look forward to. Among them: "The cats who live in my apartment are not cats at all, but spies from the planet Venus who have assumed cat form." Right, John. Michael Sirolly is a Wharton junior and editorial page editor-elect of The Daily Pennsylvanian.