For the last three academic years, I have had a column in my school’s newspaper, The Torch, entitled “Becker’s Banter.” I write about whatever I want, and sometimes people read it and find it entertaining.

Recently, I realized that I don’t actually have all of these articles on my own computer. Many have been written in The Torch Office. Some have been written on school computers. Some have been written on friend’s computers. Some have been written on computers in hostels in various countries in Europe.

The only place that all of these articles reside is on Zues, the name of our friendly Torch Office server. Currently, I’m an editor for the Torch and have access to this server whenever the building is unlocked. Soon, however, I will graduate, and this will not be the case. So today I took it upon myself to collect all of these articles into a single folder, format them so that they all look the same, name them in a way that makes sense, and upload them to Google Docs.

This ended up taking a few hours, getting all of the articles into Garamond 12 pt (because that’s how I like them), and saving them in YYMMDDBanter-StoryTopic format so that they would sort in chronological order, when placed alphabetically.

Here’s some of what I found (Becker’s Banter, by the numbers, if you will)

• 70 articles published under the name Becker’s Banter (or “Becker’s Bantour” when I was in England).
• 14 written about things that pertain pretty specifically to Valparaiso University
• 13 written about food or drink
• 10 written from abroad
• 9 written about music or musicians
• 6 written in list form, or including lists
• 4 written about iPhone related issues
• 4 written in letter form
• 3 written about weather
• 2 written about apple cider
• 2  written by my father, Michael Becker
• 1 written in Haiku form
• 1 written from a bathroom

This is sloppy calculation, and any of those numbers could be off by one or two.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll find some way to get these out to the public sometime in the near future, whether it be in Tumblr form, a designated website, or perhaps a book. Would anyone buy “The Unabridged Becker’s Banter Collection? What if it included hand-drawn illustrations or other bonus goodies?