Quitting LATE Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health

And now, a word from the esteemed Joshua F. Stricker:


To the Friends of LATE, uncomfortable acquaintances, and apathetic invitees wondering why you’re getting this message,

Greetings.

My name is Josh, I host LATE, and the publicity reps are allowing me to write the reminder. So before we go any further:

LATE Series Finale
Date: Thursday, April 10, 2008
Time: 8:00pm - 9:00pm for taping.
Doors Open at 7:30. Pre-taping entertainment starts when doors open.
Location: Warren Studio One
Other: I’m told there will be cake.

I want to mention that as I sit down to do this I am cranked up on Rift Valley blend. I’m also researching British Colonialism, the theory and practice. What better time to write than this.

As you may or may not have heard, this Thursday night LATE will be put to death. Now that you’ve heard, you’re culpable. You should at least give it a proper farewell. It’s common decency really.

LATE has been running for 5 seasons, and I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of what can now be called the final two. Some people have been asking why we are canceling the show. The truth is we’re not canceling the show because it’s not sponsored, and it’s on the internet. You can’t really cancel something like that. We are simply quitting. In the future please ask, “Why are you quitting?”

In the beginning, LATE was created by a student and run by students, and it remains that way. It is written, produced, directed, edited, publicized, gripped, and lighted by students who pretend to have free time. Now those students are looking at each other and saying alright, it’s time to move on. It’s not that we don’t want to do the show or that we feel we are unable to do it well. To the contrary, I’ve witnessed incredible talent, especially from the new underclassmen. These are fantastic people to work with, but it’s time for other projects. LATE has been around for 5 seasons, and in amateur showbiz years that’s about 43. We don’t intend to overstay our welcome. We certainly don’t want LATE to get washed up, make a lot of poor choices, and become a late night infomercial hawking products that exist solely for the “as seen on TV” demographic. That’s an ugly future.

So this Thursday night we plan to burn bright, and I think we’ll all witness the triumph of the human spirit. It is after all really about us, the people of LATE. I take that to mean anyone who ever worked on the show, knows someone who worked on the show, attended a taping, watched online, looked at an advertisement on campus, or accidentally walked into the studio while looking for a bathroom on McNally. This night is for us.

I recognize there are a lot of other things going on this Thursday night. There are at least two other things I’d like to do almost as much as the show. But this is the final LATE, and I would really like as many of us to be there as possible. The bigger the crowd the more energetic things get and the more fun we’ll have. There is plenty to get excited about. It’s going to be a celebration of the past, present, and hypothesized future. Elijah and I have been working on sketches that can really have no other place than on this finale. We’ll also welcome Venus Infers to the show, a band that has more hipster power in their promo pictures than I’ve managed in my entire life.

That’s it. I have no gripping elegy or ode to the finale. Maybe we can pat ourselves on the back Thursday night. I’ll try to say some really self-aggrandizing stuff. So come hang out, and celebrate 43 years of LATE. I’ll probably revisit some of this in the monolog, word for word. It’ll be like a sing along.

Thanks for all the support through the years. You guys make it worthwhile, and I hope we can all connect through the show one more time.

Godspeed,
Joshua Stricker

Let It Die

Dear Foo Fighters:

Please, just let it die.

Nothing makes me change the radio station like you.

To prove I'm not too harsh, I'll give you another chance when you write a song with more than ten words.

Sincerely,

Bradley
Clarke

A Time to Stretch the Boundary

From a speech given before the Wellesley Speech Society on March 29, 2008

Boyhood is the ultimate fraternity, a rite of passage all men hold in common. While this time period is individually experienced in nearly infinite permutations, with each future man dealing with his own unique set of struggles and opportunities, I am convinced that among the foundational features of boyhood is exploration.
Nearly every boy seizes upon and perhaps even creates opportunity to explore; to stretch the boundaries of his knowledge, familiarity, strength, will, being, and so forth. Take, for instance, the boy who rides his bike two houses beyond his parents’ boundary. When next he sets out upon his trusty steed, his mother reminds him of the limit, to which he replies that his sphere of influence has grown. Thus a boy begins by exploring a neighborhood and continues with exploring his city.
Look at Huckleberry Finn, the closest thing we of this holy fraternity hold as a sacred text. Tom and Huck set out along the mighty Mississippi River in search of adventure and fortune, plotting their course along what was then the greatest frontier known to modern man. These first among boys stopped at nothing to further the bounds of their own world over the course of their golden summer, much to the benefit of all who have had the privilege to follow.
My own childhood was filled with exploration. Living in a narrow valley, my brothers and I would dedicate ourselves on a warm afternoon to finding a new place or to understanding a known place even better. After half a decade of life in the country, we had expanded our own frontier from the small plot comprised of our house and yard to territory within a four-mile radius—the size of many large city centers in today’s world.
As I have put but a very little distance between myself and my boyhood, I have come to realize that this innate bent upon exploration in boys turns into something greater in men: conquest. Just as a boy seeks to explore the territory around him, a mark of the man is that he makes that territory a part of his dominion, whether it be physical land or the realm of business, of politics, or of society.
Over the course of years, a man will take on much weight outside of himself in the form of fiscal and familial responsibilities. The time of his childhood exploration then becomes ever more critical, for under this weight a man can no longer afford to expand his boundaries, he must tend to the land that is already his. Thus it is that the boy determines the measure of the man; a man can conquer only as much as his early shadow has long ago explored.