Editorial | Top 10 things we’d name our Valentine’s Day roaches

Madagascar+hissing+cockroaches.

Dan Gleiter | TNS

Madagascar hissing cockroaches.

By The Pitt News Editorial Board

 The bad news is that we’re not even halfway through the semester yet and you’re already behind in every class and you haven’t gotten more than five hours of sleep in about two weeks. But the good news is, for $5 on Valentines Day, you can name a cockroach after your ex, and the San Antonio Zoo will feed it to a bird, reptile or mammal. It’s called the “Cry Me a Cockroach” event, and it pairs quite well with The Pitt News’ Sex Edition, we’ve heard. Anyway, we’re not into roasting our exes — at least publicly — here at The Pitt News. But we have come up with a few other things we’d name the roaches.

  1. Finals week

In your childhood bedroom, with your parents running around the house, and your dog barking in the background. Imagine if someone said this to you a year ago.

  1. Your landlord

The only light in your bedroom burned out three months ago, and everytime you turn your oven on, the smoke alarm starts blaring. Also, the part of your ceiling that caved in doesn’t look “that bad,” and your $750 rent check is due. Need we say more?

  1. South Oakland in general

We were going to write a haiku about the garbage we’ve seen in South Oakland, but we’re just too tired. So here’s a list with no syllable pattern:

  • An empty Gatorade bottle in a bush
  • A half-empty Gatorade bottle in a different bush
  • A singular boot hanging from the telephone lines
  • A smashed jar of salsa and half eaten bag of tortilla chips on the porch stairs 
  • Our grades this semester
  1. The Associated Press Stylebook’s Oxford comma rule

We’ve gotten actual hate mail before about The Pitt News not using the Oxford comma. We’re sorry, it’s not our choice. It’s what AP Style says, and AP Style wears the pants in this relationship.

  1. Towers elevators

If you do the math, you’ve probably lost an entire month of your life just waiting for a Towers elevator to come. There are three, but one is often broken, and then Pitt fixes it, but another one breaks. It’s like whack-a-mole. They also seem to stop on every single floor.

  1. Pittsburgh sidewalks

Pittsburgh snow is something you love in the moment, but hate the next morning when the sidewalks turn into a sheet of ice and are “plowed” only by way of other people’s footprints.

  1. Bigelow Boulevard 2.0

For $24 million — give or take — Pitt will feed the capital budget to the unnecessary campus construction project of your choice.

  1. Chevron Stairs

Now we will write an actual Haiku:

No no no no no 

No no no 

No no no no no

  1. Zoom passwords

We are still not convinced that Zoom bombers are prevalent enough for teachers to require a 30-digit or a supposedly witty-but-not-really-witty passcode on the Zoom class. And if we were a Zoom bomber, Duo Mobile would be enough to make us give up.

  1. This year

We’re just gonna leave it here. Interpret it however you like.