I was a little worried about seeing this as I had not see the first nine installments, but my video store rental clerk (last store in the entire region with actual videocassettes!) assured me that this one stands on its own merits. I didn’t check the box to see if this was a foreign film, albeit dubbed into English, but I suspect that might account for some of the oddities. The film starts in media res, with Dracula already attacking an unidentified woman—erm, well when I say “attacking” the vampire is not going for the traditional neck, but rather explicitly biting away in her nether regions instead.

5:00a: Wake-up in a cold sweat with acute nausea. Ask yourself for the 53,732,481 time if this is what you want to do. Tell yourself enthusiastically: “Yes, of course! Getting married has been my top priority since I was baby with formless thoughts.” Go back to sleep, relieved.

7:30a: Wake up for real, take a shower and welcome your bridesmaids. Ask Bridesmaid #1 why she brought a travel container of Starbucks blend coffee, when you, the bride, requested a tallskinnyvanillalatte. When she starts to cry, tell her it’s okay – but, roll your eyes, so she knows that it actually is not okay.

Hello, my name is Nick Hilbourn and I’m a professional English major. I would like to move away from the humor column format to talk about an important social topic: stabbing.

Common decency does not stop at the dinner table. Even as we speak, people are being stabbed without so much as an ‘excuse me’ or ‘hello, how are you?’ It is the downfall of society when something as small as a simple stab cannot be done without a bit cordiality.

I love dogs, and I dote on my children. But when our daughter started to beg for a dog for her sixteenth birthday, I was determined to resist.

“All I want is a dog. Nothing else. Nothing,” said Charlotte, used to getting her way with her parents. What Charlotte really wanted was a cat, but her father, Jack, claims to be allergic to them. Being resourceful, Charlotte went on the American Kennel Club website to find a breed that was as much like a cat as possible. She found what she was looking for and began to ply me with offhand remarks like “Pomeranians are exceptionally trainable” and “Sixteen is one of the most important birthdays of all.”

Some may call me old-fashioned. Some may call me backwards. Some may say I am standing in the way of the inevitable march of technological progress. I say to those people, “bah!” “Foh,” I say to them! Dear sirs and madams, our society is not experiencing admirable growth, as some may have you believe, oh no! We as a people are being drawn ever increasingly downward into a horrible pit of decadence, chicanery, tomfoolery, and no small amount of monkeyshines. One may be tempted to disagree. One may take the convenient path and brush off my warnings. One may lazily leave society to rot whilst he swills cheap brew and watches muscled men homoerotically grapple in an eight-sided cage. Mind you, gentle statesmen; these are no mere ravings of a madman. There is clear evidence of the backsliding of our society. One needs look no further than the deplorable state of formal letter writing in contemporary times. What was once an exercise in intellectualism and civility has all but vanished, replaced instead by communication so crass I can barely stand to think of it.