Every year, the majority of seniors, along with many underclassmen, are eager to find out the results of the infamous senior superlatives in the May issue of the Omega.

The senior issue is perennially the highest selling issue of the Omega, partly because people enjoy finding out whether their peers voted them into any of several categories, from best smile and best dressed to most likely to become president.

The only issue with senior superlatives is the opportunity to misuse the poll to make potentially harmful jokes.

Throughout the tallying of the superlative results this year, things were, in a word, ordinary. The validity of the results may have been debated by staff members occasionally, but at least the results were reasonable and appropriate. Then, we tallied the results for Best Celebrity Look-Alike.

As a staff, the Omega decided we could not include these results in the final senior superlatives due to the sheer number of offensive responses and the inappropriateness of said responses.

The category had 85 responses for female look-alike and 84 for male look-alike.
Of the 169 combined responses, 19 were comparisons to animals, 13 compared girls to boys or vice versa, five were comparisons to prominent dictators, both contemporary and old, three more were comparisons to adult film stars, and 14 comparisons were negatively based off of one characteristic, such as weight, hair color, or race. Those results added up to 31.9 % of the total results for celebrity look-alikes.

In addition to these hurtful answers, there were 15 submissions that either made no comparison or were completely irrelevant, bringing our grand total of unusable submissions to 69 (40% of the results) or in layman’s terms, too many. If we were to tally the remaining results, the numbers would have been too insubstantial to make any top rankings.

At first, we weren’t sure what to do with the results. Afterall, the superlatives are meant for the seniors to be able to shape them however they want, and this is the path they happened to choose.

Besides, it’s not like the superlatives are a requirement and there’s no rule that says you have to take them seriously. They’re supposed to be a fun activity that allows the seniors to reflect on their class. It’s just for fun, right?

Sure, for the people that are in on the joke. For people who don’t understand the humor, or aren’t on board with a mean comparison, there’s no fun involved.

Because of these issues, we chose to exclude the best celeb look-alike category from the superlatives. We would prefer not to, so in the future, perhaps the results will focus more on lighthearted fun than cruel words.