DAVE HERBERT: Vice President John Garner famously stated that his office “wasn’t worth a warm bucket of spit.” I feel much the same way about the position of Daily columnist. It’s a pro bono gig, for starters. If you write about a certain congressman from Texas who is running for President — whose name I won’t mention because this column will pop up on Google searches — you get to wade through hundreds of nasty online comments.

And you can forget about making a difference, because Stanford students pick up The Daily for three things: the Bunnies, the crossword puzzle and the hope that one day a childless Atherton couple will be looking for a five-foot six-inch physics major with eczema and a club foot to be the “sperm donor of our dreams.”

I wrote a column from Berlin my junior year. My proudest moment? Proctor & Gamble read my satire about the multitude of Old Spice scents and mailed me a big box of deodorant. The accompanying letter gushed, “To express how much we appreciate your recognition, we’d like to familiarize you with some of our products in the scents you mentioned as your favorites — After Hours, Pure Sport and Glacial Falls.” P&G went on to offer me a lifetime supply.

The students who founded this newspaper in 1892 could scarcely have dreamed, sitting in their dank, clapboard dormitory, surrounded by raptors and Puritans and what have you, that their publication would one day be a vehicle for Japanese number puzzles. And yet here we are.

Why am I back for more, you ask? The answer sits across the room from me as I type. He is my roommate of three years and closest confidante. He is, in short, the pet lobster to my Oscar Wilde.

Brendan and I are about to leave here with master’s degrees in religious studies and journalism, respectively. But before we stumble into life, we’d like to have our say. We’ll offer some thoughts on post-grad life, the University’s infantilizing of the student body, the 2008 election and, of course, new Old Spice products as they become known to us.

But if you tie up the message boards with hate mongering, I will spend the rest of the volume writing about that Texas congressman running for president. I will make sure he is elected president, and then together we will crucify you bastards on a cross of gold.

BRENDAN SELBY:Why should you read this column? Because I’m a representative Stanford student. I understand what it’s like to live in this treacherous place. I’m just like you.

Have you heard about those guys who got placed in the windowless, basement study room in Crothers because ResEd ran out of housing? Well, the same thing happened to me. For the last 12 weeks I’ve been living in the stacks at Green. It’s true. You can come visit me on level W5, where my bed is shoved between two shelves, one containing every copy of Who’s Who dating back to 1796, the other containing 500 gilded volumes of Islamic law. It’s a tough situation, but at least they didn’t make me live down in the steam tunnels, like they had to do during the Battle of Britain — now those were tough times.

I’m representative of every political opinion. I vehemently support both Israel and Palestine to the exclusion of the other, and I make a point of protesting whenever either group brings a speaker to campus. I planted a cross in White Plaza two weeks ago in honor of the “victims” of Roe v. Wade, and then I promptly tore it out of ground, outraged at my own shameless exploitation of military and religious iconography.

I voted for Obama and then castigated myself for being a spoiled, rich, elitist intellectual. I represent both wine- and beer-drinking voters. My favorite mixed drink is Bud Light and Chablis.

Just like you, my favorite novel also happens to be the only novel I’ve ever read: Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” When I was in 10th grade my parents paid me $50 to read it in the hopes it would improve my verbal board scores. Suckers. I didn’t need board scores. I bypassed admissions and sent my application directly to John Arrillaga. Ka-ching.

Like all Stanford students, I’ve been working full-time at Google since freshman year.

Just like you, I’m a campus rep for JetBlue Airlines, and I think it’s perfectly okay to litter the campus with cheap plastic coins and harass my dormmates about the low, low weekday fares to Tulsa.

Finally, just like you, I think Donald Rumsfeld is a serious academic who deserves a place as a “distinguished visitor” to Stanford, that is, to the unaffiliated Hoover Institution that happens to be located here. In fact, I think he deserves primo accommodations from housing services if he ever decides to actually show his face on campus. I hear there’s still plenty of open space down in the steam tunnels.

When this comes out, Dave and Brendan will either be really hungover because Obama won, or really hungover because Obama lost. Email Dave at dherbert "at" stanford.edu and Brendan at bselb "at" stanford.edu.