DARTBOARD

Check All Tabasco at the Door

Have you heard? The nation is now coping with another schoolhouse tragedy, this time in Castle Rock, Colo. Thankfully, no firearms were involved in the latest episode of playground violence. Nor did any of the pint-sized victims require serious medical attention. Nonetheless, we at Dartboard are horrified by what transpired at the Rock Ridge Elementary School on Wednesday.

The perpetrator? A mild-mannered sixth-grade girl. The weapon? Dave's Insanity Gourmet Hot Sauce. According to school officials, the offending student offered the sauce to her unsuspecting classmates during morning snack time. After the sauce worked its gastrointestinal magic, paramedics were called to the scene. Six pupils went home to convalesce and watch cartoons. One girl was treated by the school nurse. Eight others reported stomachaches but decided to tough it out and stay in school for the day.

In the aftermath of the incident, rumor has it that the Democratic Party has decided to make condiment control a key issue in last-minute ad campaigns for Tuesday's elections. Meanwhile, the parents of the victims in Colorado can only shake their heads and wonder, "Why us?"

Globe Trotter

We at Dartboard were pleased to open yesterday's Boston Globe and find an op-ed by Mike Barnicle, forced to leave the Globe last summer after failing to provide corroboration for quotations he had used in a 1995 column about two children with cancer. Finally, it seemed, three months after leaving, Barnicle was taking responsibility for his actions and apologizing. Or was he?

His op-ed reads like the typical Barnicle columns Dartboard used to know and love: equal parts schmaltz, anger and righteous indignation. But Barnicle, the self-styled fighter for the downtrodden and voiceless, doesn't seem to realize he was in the wrong. In one rationalization of his behavior, he writes, "...reconstruction dialogue in a 1995 column is a clear failure to abide by today's standards. It was not always so but is now." The implication is that this 25-year veteran of the Metro page was taken by surprise by suddenly stricter standards. He also implies that the greater good accomplished by his column outweighed his occasionally cutting the corners of honesty.

Sure, many of Barnicle's columns were moving, enlightening or wickedly on-target, even when we somehow suspected he was fudging the details. But when it came out that he had put words in other people's mouths, he lost all credibility. It would have been nice to see him admit his mistakes in the paper he served for so many years. But maybe he can't even admit it to himself.

Blast From the Past

Yesterday afternoon, as the nation watched, one of our living legends blasted off into the heavens. Thirty-six years after becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), now 77, has once again captured our hearts aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

There are those who have criticized Glenn's mission as a mere publicity stunt to revitalize NASA's flagging space program. After all, Glenn is merely a guinea pig on the nine-day journey. Dubbed "Payload Specialist 2," he is the lowest ranking member of the crew.

But we at Dartboard have no qualms with a little old-school nostalgia. Though Glenn's pioneering journey came well before our time, we all know heroism transcends generations. How many of our kids, three decades from today, would flock to Busch Stadium to see Mac take a few (feeble) cuts? Though Glenn's encore expedition may be scientifically trivial, it is just as heroic as his first.

HOT SAUCE--Noah D. Oppenheim; BARNICLE'S BACK--Susannah B. Tobin; SENATOR IN SPACE--Richard S. Lee