As the joke goes, UC San Diego is the official honors-nerd backup school, home to an awkward conglomerate of all those academically gifted enough to avoid Irvine but too white/Asian/boring to get past the UCLA personality and diversity boards.

In this particular nerd’s case, UCSD wasn’t backup — in fact, it was top of the list — but that sad fact has most everything to do with one silly little error by a high-school guidance counselor who, in her careful planning of my entire future, somehow got into her head that UCSD had a top-notch journalism program waiting for me with open arms. (Our university, in fact, barely even offers a course in the field.)

Arriving to my dark freshman dungeon in the bottom of Tenaya Hall that fateful September, dejected and without a career prospect in the world, I’ll admit that I too felt a small wave of the backup-school blues. So I unpacked and switched on my cute-ass childhood television set — complete with doctor’s-visit stickers and a built-in VCR — to find Koala editor Steve York’s hairy ass bobbing where my favorite Disney Princesses used to prance. And that’s when I knew that everything would be all right.

Yep — we might not have had a journalism program, but as I learned so very well that evening (and the three next evenings I absolutely did not spend catching re-runs), we sure as hell had “Koala TV.” Now, being an official Guardian head, it probably does not serve my cause to admit this — but after hitting the racks and thoroughly digging both publications that Fall, it was the Koala that made me thank the prison bricks above my dorm bunk that I’d ditched Berkeley for this science experiment down south.

The most classic and detrimental symptom of fandom is to idealize the way things used to be; still, I admittedly compare every new issue of the Koala to Jizzlam, the Barton regime (archives, baby) and the first time I heard a Revelle-fat-chick joke. But upon returning from abroad this quarter (read: now that I’m a cultured schmuck), eager to indulge in some good-old-fashioned racist and sexist stabs like only the Koala can deliver, I soon felt a new set of critic’s welts begin to deepen in my brow and a violent urge to complain about the fact I hadn’t laughed for a good five minutes. So, seeing as one can only deny her deepest urges to player hate for so long — here it is, my first official rant on our nasty little brother next door, and perhaps a plea to the new crop of recruits (currently barfing and sexing all over the Student Center bathrooms — good beginnings) to stop talking about your dicks for one second and realize the ridiculous potential such an unregulated publication holds.

First and least importantly, leave the dorky shit to us. Alliteration and flowery descriptions of the douches on Library Walk is an insult to the standards of raging inappropriateness on which the Koala was founded. We all wish we were in the position to be as disgusting as you — at least take the job seriously and dig a little deeper up your insulting assholes for that real gold shit. You owe it to the legend of your publication.

Secondly, what being a boring writer has taught me is that no matter how superficially ridiculous, everything must exist for a reason. Jokes about cock-sucking rape victims and Asian losers are not funny just because they’re dickish and derogatory. Okay, fine, maybe a little. But anyone can throw around stuff like cunts and sacreligion and dirty fags and get a reaction based on pure shock value, kindly set up by times not-so-long past in which those words represented something pretty shitty for a lot of people. The best racist jokes, in fact, are often making a commentary on their own origins. I’m all for keeping around the flippant sexism and shit — that is, after all, what initially turned me on to the Koala — but don’t insult your rampant free-speech opportunity and waste everyone’s A.S. fees by using offensive keywords as an insta-funny factor. And on that note, yes, there is a shelf life to “fucking the shit out of vulnerable freshman chicks” jokes — the new crop of which promptly caused me to wind the entire issue around the toilet-paper peg in our bathroom at home, ready for that moment in which it could possibly find a higher purpose to serve.

I’ve shared many a drunken couch conversation with the randy kids over at the Koala, and know they generally like to mouth off about the first amendment and dramatically defend their God-given right to effectively piss off as many people as possible. But if you’re only fighting for the luxury of being a douchebag on a widely circulated piece of newsprint, the whole free-speech thing sort of loses sight of its original purpose for existing. Being an uncensored dick is only funny if one is somewhat self-aware. We’re all a bunch of privileged, highly educated college assholes with the time to make fun of everything and everyone — so stop jacking yourselves off and make use of it with offensive shit that actually means something, because jizzing out a self-important party review is surely not as wildly funny for everyone else in your line of fire.

In the end, carelessly ripping on the Koala is just another one of its many perks, since its own principles invalidate any sort of offense its contributors could take. Too bad, really — we need some fucking controversy around here. Or at least a homemade porn for the new generation of freshmen to hope on.