Well, well. It’s Civil War time again.

That magical part of the year when athletes affiliated with this University (through allegiance, or more likely, chance) will square off against athletes likewise affiliated with that vastly inferior school some 37 miles to the north.
Vastly inferior, you say? How do you mean?
For one, the Beavers are not nearly as busy as their namesakes: While academics here were hard at work, trying to outdo last year’s figure of $78 million in research grants to the University of Oregon, 766 people found the time Sunday to converge in front of OSU’s Memorial Union and — in an act of unbridled intellectual achievement — stage the largest pillow fight in history.
The Beavers’ time management skills aside, maybe measuring academic success in dollars is unfair. In recent years, after all, funding for neurology has largely been more lucrative than that for studying, say, llama-breeding or lentil-growing.
Fine, OSU is a cow college. So what, you say? Who cares if it’s geared less toward petty educational details like “reason” or “literacy,” and more toward preparing each of its fine attendees for a proud life straight out of a Faulkner novel, trespassing on his neighbor’s Corvallis-area farmland and sleeping underneath rusting farm equipment like an imbecilic man-child?
Certainly not students at this fine institution, who opted instead to attend a real school, which boasts not only finer programs but indoor heat and running water. (And I like burritos as much as the next time-strapped student, but I don’t like them enough to name a stadium after a company that sells frozen ones.)
Even our city is a better place to live. While Eugene offers plenty of concert halls, art museums and the Hult Center, Corvallis’ cultural experience reaches heights no greater than the meat-fisted boxing matches at the Peacock, thirsty Thursdays and maybe the Memorial Union’s Panda Express.

Not that Eugene is an ideal, peaceful municipality; after all, this town’s fine residents have started a few riots in the last several years. But before you denounce Eugeneans for being pyromaniacal primitives for burning golf carts, remember that Eugene at least has motorized vehicles.
Well, certainly I can say something good about the Beavers? After all, their mud-munching mascot — the second-largest rodent in the world — is one of nature’s finest engineers, and makes for some of its most prolific roadkills. Even better, when these mouth-breathing vermin do snack, lunch is all too often their own nutrient-rich feces.
Ducks, by contrast, are the majestic eagles of the deciduous wetlands biome, monarchs among the lesser woodland creatures (including the very lesser bushy-tailed, biologically botched, buck-toothed, boneheaded beavers). Certainly, the athletes affiliated with a school that uses these amazing avians as a mascot will defeat their inferiors in the battle of the talented and the troglodytic.
But, for the intellectually meager Beavers reading this who are confused by polysyllabic punnery, I’ll translate: If you’re going to drop money on tomorrow’s game, don’t leave it to Beaver. Fowl play will win out.