By Jaci Schneider, Copy Editor

Much Ado About Something

Don’t throw away this newspaper. Ever.

The editors don’t really care if you read the whole thing through, just don’t throw it in the trashcan.

Though recycling on campus has become more difficult this semester, you can do innumerable creative and useful things with a used newspaper, and none of them includes trashing it.

Now, the most obvious use of this work of journalistic perfection is to turn it into an equally perfect hat. With rain predicted, you will want a hat to protect your perfectly styled hair. Who wouldn’t want to traipse around campus with a super-cool triangle-shaped cap. Few students would want to be the only fashion faux pas without one.

For all those gardeners on campus, newspapers can come in quite handy when harvesting tomatoes. Just pluck a green tomato, wrap it in a few sheets of newsprint, and violA­, a few weeks later, you’ve got a ripe, tasty tomato, perfect for BLTs and fresh salads.

Newspapers also save your life when you completely forgot about buying a gift for someone’s graduation or wedding party. Grab a piece of junk lying around the house, wrap it in layer upon layer of paper, and you’re the hit of the party – except of course for the person who receives your gift.

Twice a week, up to 5,000 Optimists come hot off the presses for your reading enjoyment. At 8-12 pages each, that’s 120,000 newspaper pages every week ending up in trashcans and landfills.

But not if everyone pitches in to help. If you already own a cool hat or bought a gift for your party, you can always toss your newspaper into a recycling bin on campus.

And, if you can’t make it to a recycling drop-off point, this paper will make itself worthwhile in a couple of months when you’re packing your belongings into boxes to move home and don’t want to break your snow globes.

And, if you’re really, really bored, you could actually read it. But only if you’re really bored. And the TV is broken.