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Tuesday, April 23, 2024

You’re sitting at a table in your favorite local coffee shop, sipping on an oh-so-delicious vanilla latte you’ve been craving all day. You sit there and somewhat pretentiously scribble away in your journal, pretending as though you have some sort of dark, mysterious thing going on. You hope maybe you’ll catch someone’s eye, and they’ll be enamoured by how deep you appear to be.

To your surprise, your plan seems to work. As you look up from your leather-bound notebook you paid way too much for at the Gainesville Indie Flea market downtown, you lock eyes with the most beautiful specimen you’ve ever seen.

You smile, and they walk over to you.

“Hi,” you say, “I know this is pretty forward, but any chance I could get your number?” Because you wouldn’t dare shatter the idea of your brooding, profound aesthetic, you hand them a piece of a paper and a pen, so they can write down their phone number.

Much to your delight, they eagerly scribble across the paper and hand it back to you. Strangely enough, instead of a phone number, the paper reads:

Darts & Laurels

Last week, we were lucky enough to have said our final goodbyes to Hurricane Irma. Not long after, islands in the Caribbean were ravaged once more by Hurricane Maria. Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló told CNN on Wednesday the island could be out of power for months. Islanders throughout the area are without power and resources and are living each day with little knowledge of what the future holds for them.

A little further West, Mexico was hit this week with its second major earthquake this month, leaving hundreds of people dead. These relentless natural disasters that have been plaguing our planet recently are nothing to take lightly and quite deservingly receive our first dart.

Enough about natural disasters. Let’s move on to the man-made ones. More namely, President Donald Trump’s address at the U.N. General Assembly. Some people exuded pride for Trump’s recent display in New York City, but we have to say, we were less than pleased.

For the first time since he was sworn into office, Trump spoke to U.N. leaders. His remarks showed nothing but immaturity and disrespect for the sanctity of the U.N.

He used his “America First” doctrine to address the U.N. While we agree it’s great to keep our nation as our first priority, this type of declaration has no place being emphasized while addressing the U.N. The entire purpose of the assembly is for nations to come together in an effort to selflessly protect humanity and each other’s best interests.

He proceeded to make immature “Trumpisms” throughout his speech such as referring to Kim Jong-un as “Rocket Man” in some sort of a dark and twisted joke attempting to exert his dominance over North Korea.

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Our president’s shallow, embarrassing and unfortunately unsurprising display at the General Assembly is our last dart of the week.

Despite all the negativity surrounding us right now, we like to leave you all each week on a positive note. This week, we’d like to call attention to the City of Gainesville for celebrating “Welcoming Week” this past week, a time meant to embrace and thank foreign-born Alachua County residents for their contribution to the community. We couldn’t be any prouder to call a city with this type of acceptance our home and thus would like to award the city with our laurel of the week.

Only one laurel? You read correctly, dear readers. It’s been a rough week. Bear with us, will you?

 

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