The Daily Tar Heel informed and…well, who are we kidding…weirded out the UNC student body with its front-and-center page coverage about bathroom graffiti last Tuesday.

The article, which dominated the page, made it clear that someone with a particularly keen knack for news value laid it out, ultimately helping students identify the most important story of the day.

Favorite quotes included: “It makes for unsightly looking bathrooms. A lot of things could be racial and sexual and should not be put on walls — no one wants to see those kinds of things except for the people that write them.” -Bill Burston, director of UNC Housekeeping services

and  ““If we remove the judgment aspect, we can learn a lot more about ourselves. And I think that’s what might scare people.”-Mark Ferem, author of a book titled “Bathroom Graffiti” (a whole book!)

In its defense, the article presented a fair and balanced view of the…er…issue: “There’s a folkloric quality to bathroom graffiti…But some of the graffiti reflects a darker side of anonymous free speech. Hate speech sometimes appears alongside more benign content.”

That did, actually, help me put into perspective that time I saw the lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine” written out next to “Fuck babies!”  Maybe it IS time that someone finally gave bathroom graffiti the acknowledgment it doesn’t deserve. And maybe I was wrong when I said that it’s not worthy of front-page coverage in a newspaper unless someone has learned how to draw animated graffiti…because that would be flippin’ awesome.

On the bright side, DTH, you now have the 10th hit on Google if you type in “bathroom graffiti.” Who shouldn’t be proud of that?