Lawn mower theft skipped

Brad Hauter, a soccer coach from Terre Haute, is in the process of setting a new world's record for mowing the lawn. Well, he was. It was reported on Monday that Hauter's 6,000-mile journey across the United States hit a snag when the soon-to-be record holder's riding-lawnmower was stolen. According to Guiness World Records, Hauter will not be able to break the record if he cannot find the mower he started with.\nIt's a sad day for the coach, but it's a great day for newspaper readers. It's such a good day for all of us literates because this great story about dreams and grass-cutting thieves actually appeared in a real newspaper now that there is room for these "stories" without the 100 percent war-coverage we were getting used to.\nThis has been a difficult semester for column writing since most of the news coverage was simply just stories about Bush, Saddam, P.O.W.s and civilian death. I refused to write about war issues mostly because everyone else was, and because not one person reading this column actually cares about my opinions on our foreign conflicts. I am not the President, one of his chief aides or Geraldo, so why on Earth would anyone give a crap what a senior journalism student says about the war? I personally love Editorial Pages of any newspaper, but they were hard to read on a daily basis this semester. I would scan the entire page for the words, "Iraq, war, Donald Rumsfield, casualty, Carrot Top, boobs or Bush." If any of these words appeared in a column, I would skip it. \nI'm not trying to diss other writers, or media professionals as a whole because they are probably all better writers than I am, but I was just tired of reading, watching, hearing and smelling the war. I needed a break from it, and I hope that my columns provided that break for some people. \nIn my room there are piles of recent USA Todays due to my inability to clean. I randomly picked one up, April 8, and saw that there were 41 stories in the News section including sidebars. Of those 41 stories 36 were stories that had to do with the war. It's pretty hard to come up with decent ideas with the sources I had, but various people said I managed to do a good job without resorting to writing about how we still haven't found any "weapons of mass destruction," the one-time reason for starting this war.\nMy favorite topics were how many people are terrible drivers, are dumber than Amish people and that Tex from the IU porno is surely soon to be a household name. Well, at least households that watch a lot of amateur porn.\nI wrote about some issues that led to "Doctorate Candidates" telling me to "grow up," and some that led others to say, "I almost peed my pants." Hee-hee, peeing your pants is pretty funny. Some may have thought I wasn't smart enough to talk about serious issues, but I just chose not to. I could have had an intellectual article discussing the report that bodies the U.S. found in a southern Iraqi warehouse were from Saddam's brutal regime. The truth is that the bodies found were actually remains from the Iraq/Iran conflict in the '80s. I didn't want to bore you though; I instead wanted to teach about how not to accidentally become a NASCAR fan like I did. I hope I helped Wednesday become War-break day.\nWhich brings me to my final point. Isn't everyone in the world technically a "Doctorate Candidate" until they actually become a doctor? Even I could claim I'm a candidate for a PhD to sound smarter. Signed, Mike D'Avria, PhD candidate, Presidential candidate and Miss America Candidate.