How is that little voice in your head that keeps saying to you “quit studying, you’ll be fine on finals, you can go out for just a little bit, just don’t drink.”?

If you’re like me that voice gets louder and a little more forceful with each passing dead-week hour.

This being my last column for the semester I would like to say thank you to all of you (if there are any) who read this column every week.

It may seem like I complain a lot, but I’m not really complaining. I’m just taking a different look at some of the things we see every day.

Case in point:

Have any of you people seen the advertisements for those speed reading courses?

More than that, can you believe this nonsense that they are throwing at you?

They all look the same: a picture of some moron smiling like he just made it through his first day of school without someone beating the crap out of him for his lunch money.

Underneath the picture there are the stats on how fast this idiot can read. The first stats talk about reading comprehension and speed before this magical program. The next set of numbers lets us know just how insane this program is.

The ad speaks of reading over 10 times faster with more comprehension.

Bull shit!

This just doesn’t seem possible. These people are trying to tell me that some schmuck can go from an average 200-or-so words per minute to reading 2,000-3,000 words a minute.

Three thousand words a minute is like reading about 10 pages of 12 point type in 60 seconds! You are honestly trying to tell me that this is possible with better comprehension?

If any of you people out there have taken this course you probably have finished this column and gone on to read the rest of the paper as well as half of Steven King’s “The Stand” all in the time it takes me to get out of bed and into the shower. Call me a skeptic, or a complainer, but I just don’t buy any of this trash.

These people can read entire textbooks in the course of a couple hours and supposedly understand almost everything.

My favorite part of the ad is the end where there is a quote that reads something like “reading this fast is not a luxury, it is necessity.”

Wrong! It means you are a freak.

If you don’t quite understand the outlandish claims these ads make, realize that if they were true you could read this entire column in a matter of seconds.

Just goes to show the gullibility of some people out there.

I would like to conclude with some good holiday cheer. I want to thank my editor for allowing me to fill this space every Wednesday, and extend my best wishes to all the people here at the Daily as well as all of you people out there who keep us employed.

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J.R. Grant is a junior in journalism and mass communication. He’s from Ohio.