Thursday, April 30, 2009
Last week, I was pleased to learn that fellow Kansan columnists Michael Pope and Ryan Snyder had won a prestigious writing award. I was going to congratulate them when I realized: There’s no way I can personally profit from their success by merely congratulating them. So I decided to change my stance from “pleased” to “highly suspicious.” If I exposed their award as a hoax, it would be the scandal of the century. I could make millions of dollars and ruin the careers of two promising writers — truly a win-win. I set out to prove that the Faulkner Award for Kick-ass Excellence was fake, and not F.A.K.E. as previously reported.
My first move, as it is with every investigative reporter worth his salt, was Google. A search for “F.A.K.E.” came up with no results. Google asked me, “Did you mean D.A.R.E.?” I highly doubted Pope and Snyder were keeping children off drugs, what with their backwards baseball caps and soulless eyes.
I decided to get confirmation. I visited every parking garage in the Lawrence area, searching for a mysterious shadowy figure in a trench coat who could tell me something cryptic about the award. I wandered for hours until finally somebody emerged from behind a green Honda Civic.
“You have two coins totaling 30 cents,” the figure said in a deep, throaty voice. “One of them is not a quarter. What are the coins?”
KA-CHING! I finally had my proof. (And I’ll save you the suspense: The shadowy figure was Diane Sawyer.)
The story itself has many factual errors: Pope and Snyder claim to have an “Olympic-sized Jacuzzi.” Jacuzzi-ing has never been an Olympic sport or even a Goodwill Games sport. And they claimed that Nicolas Cage mutated to 500 feet tall when everybody knows Nicolas Cage is capable only of mutating to 475 feet tall.
Mr. Pope and Mr. Snyder should be ashamed for foisting such falsehoods upon the campus. This is simply unacceptable, and I feel it is my right — nay, my duty — to expose them to the world as frauds.
I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is yes, I will be writing a book about my heroic investigation. As both the Woodward and Bernstein of my generation, I expect to field offers from all the top publishers. Tentative title: “F.A.K.Ers: The Alex Nichols Story: How Alex Nichols Exposed Two Dudes As Frauds (And Became Very Very Rich in the Process).”
The moral of the story? Never congratulate when you could investigate.
— Nichols is an Overland Park sophomore in creative writing.
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Nichols: An undercover operation
Another inaccuracy: Pope and Snyder claim that Dan Brown will never win a writing award, when in fact he has already won multiple People's Choice Awards for "The Book I Read This Year."
THIS WILL NOT STAND
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