OK, fine, I’ll admit it. I couldn’t think of a compelling column topic for this week. So instead of my usual pearls of wisdom on a single topic, I present to you six column topics that I thought about before giving up entirely and writing about all of them at once.

1. I read The Daily’s story on its annual journalism awards this morning and was charmed to read that a “Coop” commented, “No award for Stuart Baimel? That’s insane.” It is insane, folks. If my beloved and staunchly loyal readers want to orchestrate an incensed letter-writing campaign to The Daily to write me a four (or five!) figure check, they have my full support. Otherwise, there’s always next year. I thought about writing a compelling case for myself as a check recipient due to my courageous opposition to Ron Paul and Admit Weekend, but thought the better of it.

I could even make a template for potential letter-writers, just like those incredibly annoying TSF templates.

2. The Draw might be the most dramatic phase of the Stanford calendar. The people you can’t stand get into Grove; you get into Robinson. Sucks. This week, I toyed with awarding the Draw the dreaded “insane” moniker but backed away from it, for now. Not only would that be a rather predictable maneuver, but it wouldn’t really help me erase the pain of my Draw number. If the Draw computer is reading this, hopefully it realizes I haven’t been mean yet, and it places me into Jerry.

3. One friend suggested that, instead of writing critiques and giving them gaudy adjectives, I should write a positive column about something I like. I don’t like many things, obviously. So I thought about writing an “All These Things Are Sane” column describing my favorite things — schadenfreude, T.S. Eliot, Chinese food, democracy. But would anyone outside my (admittedly enormous) fan club and maybe my mom want to read that? (Hi Mom!) Doubt it.

4. I’ve noticed that, when reading emails or online comments about my articles, most people call me “Stu,” not “Stuart.” I admittedly called myself “Stu” so it would rhyme, but few people in real life have ever called me Stu. Most admittedly, my awesome eighth-grade math teacher did, the one who had frequent open-book, open-note group tests. He was pretty cool.

Yeah, so that column idea was sort of a non-starter. Moving on.

5. I thought about the increasingly burdensome email situation on campus. Students seem to think that repeatedly emailing the same list will get students to go. If I see an event to which I don’t want to go, another 20 emails advertising the same event won’t get me to go. If an event speaks louder, does it attract more students? Sometimes I find myself wishing that events had a two email maximum; I received 15 emails advertising the Stanford Powwow over a two-week period. They must mean business.

6. My default topic is Hillary and Obama. We’re finally at a point where we are seeing the beginning of the end of the Democratic nomination process. As to where it goes from here, no one knows. We do know that the nomination process will never be like this again. Barack Obama will exit the primaries battered and bruised.

Clearly this has been a week of writer’s block. Maybe I should get some treatment for that. Anyone want to write a guest column?

Stuart is writing protest letters to The Daily. Send him a template at sbaimel "at" stanford.edu.