Wanna know my board scores, too, buddy?

"N'importe quoi" means most simply "whatever," but is usually said with the deliberate emphasis of righteous indignation, and that otherwise silent E becomes its own syllable. And, because I learned French while going to a French high school, and that word was the quintessential expression of righteous indignation for female adolescents in the '90s –– thank you, Cher Horowitz –– the phrase has a historic place in my vocabulary's development. I've also found it's useful in the job.

One thing that does not cease to amaze me are the things people bother to send us here at the paper, some of which gets printed. I spend a fair part of my week answering emails that ask, for example, where to buy a bocce ball set in Costa Rica, how to get back at the strip club that ripped them off while they were here in "San Juan" coaching a youth basketball team, or how to adopt that really cute puppy they saw by this grocery store except their vacation ended and now they were back in Connecticut and could we please call someone for them about how to adopt the cuddly canine. Connecticut. How they can find our general info email address and not a search engine is beyond me.

I usually spend a few minutes on Google, slap some links in an email, and do my best to mask incredulity with diplomacy in concocting something that somewhat resembles a sufficient response. It's times like these I'm beholden to my liberal arts degree.

This section is for these people. And for the guy who a couple weeks ago became the first person since freshman year to ask me what other colleges I applied to.