First, you should know that there are certain accepted conventions that all Daily columnists must follow. To begin, your column must have an appropriate name - preferably, an awful pun based on your own name. Examples are "Miller on Tap," "Sharat in the Dark," "Mark My Words," and the putrid "Rose Beef." And let\'s not forget the timeless classics "Serrilla Warfare" and "Farah's Faucet." If your name doesn't lend itself to this sparkling brand of wit, your second option is to come up with something truly self-righteous, such as current Daily Editor Laurie Mayk's column "She Says So."

Having christened your weekly contribution to campus discourse, you are now ready to tackle the biggest obstacle: coming up with a column's worth of content every seven days. Again, you must follow the time-tested Daily formulas if you wish to join the select club. Here you have several options:

• Tripe-fests full of boring personal anecdotes that no one gives a damn about. Tell your loyal readers about bizarre family rituals, "warm fuzzy" childhood memories, and every single thing you do when not attending classes. Recount the fifteenth time you went to see Jerry Macguire with your giggly girlfriends to get just one more look at Tom Cruise's "to-die-for!" ass, or talk about how the music of Sting and Fiona Apple changed your life.
• Rant about your least favorite stereotypes. This is the easiest option, and the most fun, provided that you don't mind getting lots of angry emails from members of the groups you target. Don't like sorority chicks? Write fifty columns babbling about Jeep Cherokees, brown lipstick, tight black pants, and artificial tans that resemble a liver disease.
• Gripe about your roommate's annoying habits and idiosyncrasies. This is your chance to embarrass and humiliate them in front of thousands of people! Does your roommate leave the cap off the toothpaste or create unique biology experiments in your refrigerator? That's a thousand words right there!
• Whine about your love life (or lack thereof). Share your pathetic failures to attract the opposite sex with the entire campus! Seriously, it's been done - Chris Farah got an entire summer's worth of columns out of telling us about his romantic exploits last summer.
• Do a written version of your best Jerry Seinfeld or Paul Reiser impression: "Socks. What's the deal with socks? I mean they go on your feet, and they come in pairs. What's up with that?" Even better, put it in an academic context: "Professors. They're old, and they have bad breath. What's up with that?"

The overriding theme here is obsession with the boring minutiae of your personal life. Of course, you should make some feeble attempt to draw more general conclusions from your trivial subject matter, but success in this attempt is discouraged. That brings us to another necessity for an authentic Daily column: it must have no real point whatsoever. A good way to ensure this is to end your column talking about something completely different than what you were talking about originally. If you start out telling us why Clinton shouldn't be impeached, you should end with glittering prose about how pretty the flowers are in spring.

Of course the phrase to keep in mind when giving advice such as this is "show, don't tell," so I've decided to write my very own Daily column for you to examine at your leisure. You'll find it on the right side of this page. Heed these lessons well, and you too could be on your way to becoming a full-fledged member of the campus "intelligentsia." Good luck! MR

You know, one of the funny things in life is how our attitudes towards school supplies change as we get older. I remember when I was five, my older brother and I used to dread the day when Mom would say, "Okay kids, time to go buy your school supplies! Aren't you excited to start a new year?" (Groans.)

The thing about school supplies, was that they were like the schoolkid's version of a nice car or a good job - they were status symbols:

Hey, look at Mikey! He's got the 64-pack of Crayola Crayons!

Oh yeah? Well I've got the new Skeletor lunch pail and a He-Man three-ring binder!!

Ooooooooooooooooooooooh.

But of course, things change as you get older. Take my roommate, for example. He loves shopping for school supplies. We'll be in Ulrich's and he'll be sucked in by the Mechanical Pencil Tractor Beam:

Oooh, look at that one - extra fine lead!

Pencils. That's another thing. I don't like pencils too much, because one time in 3rd grade my friend Tommy was tossing one around and poked me in the eye - now I can barely see out of it and have poor depth perception. This makes it difficult when I'm trying to unhook some chick's bra.

The pencil holocaust has gone on too long. Too many innocent young people have suffered for our government not to take action now. It is high time those anal-retentive, capitalist oinker Republicans in Congress signed into law President Clinton's bill to jail pencil manufacturers who fail to install protective restraints on all #2 pencils. As Clinton says, "Dole-Gingrich want to stab your children's eyes out with sharpened pencils. Don't let them do it. Help me to build that bridge to the 21st century!"

But really, what's the point, anyway. Pretty soon we're all just gonna die. But when I start having negative thoughts like that, I think of my first teddy bear. His name was Oscar, and he was soft and cuddly. We used to get up at 6am on Saturday mornings to eat Cocoa Puffs and watch the cartoons. But then, before I knew it, it was Sunday night and I was dreading the thought of going back to school. Well, at least I had my A-Team backpack to show off for my friends.

- You can reach Lee Bockhorn over email at bockhorn@umich.edu.

Lee Bockhorn Bockhorns-a-Plenty