God wants you to drink. Or at least, that's one conclusion you could draw from the fact that Slope Day this year coincides with El Cinco de Mayo, a day for Mexicans to display their patriotism and for Americans to display their love of Cuervo and Corona. However, since most of the campus will be drunkenly enjoying themselves anyway, this year's Cinco de Mayo will probably pass without much notice (although you may see a certain Sun editor sprinting across the Slope wearing nothing but a Mexican flag and brandishing a tequila bottle in each hand as he celebrates his "cultural heritage"). The confluence of Cinco de Mayo and Slope Day might have provided a great topic for my final column, except that I already shot my journalistic wad (so to speak) in a piece about Cinco de Mayo I wrote for Kitsch magazine last semester, and The Sun frowns on recycling previously published stuff. So, with the obvious topic unavailable and my goodbye column already printed two weeks ago, I found myself flipping through the file cabinet in my brain to come up with a good topic for the last column of my Daily Sun career.

Maybe I could write a column about music? Not about Ben Folds. I actually like his music a lot, thanks to my freshman-year roommate (now housemate) who gave me plenty of chances to listen to Ben Folds. But there've already been enough columns about the Slope Day music lineup. Also, although, as a proud product of Rockland County, N.Y., I do enjoy "rocking the suburbs," when it comes to music, I usually prefer "rocking the opera," in a manner of speaking. I actually considered trying to convince you all that there's more to opera than fat women in Viking hats shrieking at the top of their lungs, but I don't think Slope Day is really a good occasion for that. Plus it's sort of hard to get someone to appreciate a new genre of music just by writing about it.

Could I write a column about politics? Nah. I could certainly fill enough space with my criticisms of the Bush Administration, my disagreements with the far left and my suggestions for the Democratic Party, but that's pretty much what all of my columns have been about anyway. Also, Slope Day should be about fun, not serious political discussions. But since people seem to ask me constantly to make political predictions (prophesies): I think the conventional wisdom is right and that Hillary will win the Democratic nomination in 2008 since she has truly outrageous amounts of money to spend ($20 million, more than a year and a half before the primary), but I think that Al Gore would actually be the strongest candidate since he already won one presidential election and seems to have gotten noticeably less boring over the last few years. And I predict that Virginia Senator George Allen's smarmy sort of pseudo-charisma, fake folksiness and unapologetic conservatism will play well with Republican primary voters who will pick him as their nominee over the more talked about John McCain and Rudy Giuliani.

Alright, not music or politics, but what about sports, baseball in particular? Now we're talking. The Sports section is the only one at The Sun that I never wrote for, so maybe I could remedy that omission in my last column. I always wanted to write about the irony that, even though as a Yankees fan, I oppose revenue sharing with small market teams and luxury taxes on big payrolls. As a Democrat, I support "revenue sharing" and "luxury taxes" in the form of progressive taxation. Am I a hypocrite? Maybe, but at least in baseball, the smallest teams still have millions of dollars in payroll, and even the worst players make more than $300,000 a year - very different than the real world where people at the bottom of the income scale struggle to make ends meet.

Also, like any true baseball fan, I've already got plenty of things to say about the still-young 2006 season. For instance, I can't wait to see the Royals break the modern major league record of 120 losses in a season (more than a month into the season they've only won 5 games). I also can't wait to see the Yankees win the World Series this year (sorry, Chicago, no repeat). The lineup is clearly the most dangerous in baseball with several MVP candidates and seven players who will hit more than 20 home runs. The Yanks as a team are batting .294, better than all but two other clubs and are tops in the game in on base percentage even with minimal contributions from A-Rod and Matsui. Even the pitching, a weak spot for the Yanks recently, looks fantastic (a 3.72 team ERA so far, 3rd best in baseball). My prediction? The Yankees and the Mets will play Subway Series II, and the results will be the same as last time. Of course, I'd love to see the Cubs win their first World Series in 98 years following the back-to-back triumphs of the Sox (Red and White), since it would make for such a great story, but given that I haven't heard any reports of blizzards in Hell, the chances of both the Cubs and the Democrats sweeping to victory at the same time seem remote.

Oh yeah, in case you never figured it out, my moniker refers to a man I share first names with, the Prophet Elijah, a Biblical badass renowned for his smiting power and being cool enough to have a place left for him at everyone's table on Passover.

Well, it looks like I'm almost out of column, and still no topic. You know, I guess that's OK; most people's attention spans on Slope Day are probably pretty limited anyway. And honestly, with my time at Cornell drawing to a close, I have so many different things going through my mind that this jumpy style is actually quite appropriate. After all, I don't know yet where I'll be in two months, let alone a year, but I can live with that. Wherever I am, I'll have great memories from my time at Cornell. And now I'm off to the Slope to make some more memories. Adios!

Elijah Reichlin-Melnick is a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be contacted at ear35@cornell.edu. The Prophet Speaks appeared alternate Fridays.

Archived article by Elijah Reichlin-Melnick