The University Speaker Series was founded on a noble idea; bring important people to the university to speak, and knowledge-hungry students will harvest their knowledge.

Of course, this has failed. Just look who has come to UW- Oshkosh so far this semester. People were more interested in seeing the principal from "Saved by the Bell" than anyone else who has ever come to the university, except for the “Heads vs. Feds” debate last year.

My first reaction to the buzz surrounding this speaker was "What in the Hell?" Dennis Haskins, the actor in question, is most famous for a show that hasn’t taped a new season in nearly 10 years. The most important thing he’s done since then is play a band teacher in the terrible movie "Max Keeble’s Big Move."

If I had to guess, I would presume that Haskins had the choice of either coming to Oshkosh to speak or going to the Radisson three-star Ballroom in Hialeah, Fla. to MC a bar mitzvah.

And who else has come to speak this year? Why, U.S. Army Ranger John Collett, who was involved in the famous firefight nine years ago in Somalia where 18 Army Rangers and hundreds of Somali militia died, as documented in the hit movie "Black Hawk Down."

It’s not that I have anything against Army Rangers or Somalia, but this happened nine years ago. The average attention span of a college student is four minutes, except for episodes of "Saved by the Bell," which seem to be lodged in peoples’ brains. Not only does the majority of this university not even know what, where or who Somalia is, the majority of the university wouldn’t care about Somalia unless Vin Diesel went there to kill terrorists.

So now the question arises: If all those other speakers are worthless, who should come to speak? Since this is, apparently, an advice column and not a humor column, I have one man in mind who is influential enough to attract the entire student body. And that man is, of course, Billy Mays.

In case you don’t own a television, Billy Mays is the bearded salesman who whores out every single consumer product ever created. He is on television so much that at any given second out of any given day, he is guaranteed to be on at least one channel screaming that if you call in the next five minutes, he’ll supersize your five-gallon tub of orange cleaner crap to a 50-gallon drum.

Mays would make a great speaker. He’s extremely famous for some reason. How else would he be allowed to appear on TV 47,218 times a day? He must have done something to warrant all of these endorsement deals.

Mays has endorsed everything from hands-free cell phones to car bombs. He would have a lot of important advice for the students of Oshkosh. However, much of that would be screaming pleas to students to buy as many dent repair kits, wood restorers and stackable plastic crates as they can afford.

Who wouldn’t be delighted by a performance by Billy Mays? Instead of hearing questions from students about what Screech was really like when the camera stopped rolling, students would get to see Billy Mays take a nine-inch steak knife and slash a leather sofa while yelling, "Would you do this to a brand new sofa? With my new leather repair crap, now you can!"

There are other people I would like to see come to Oshkosh to speak, such as prop-comedian Carrot Top, the Crocodile Hunter and that kid in the Dell computer commercials who says, "Dude, you’re getting a Dell!" I don’t want them to come to the university to speak, I just want to lure them here so I can smash their faces open with a cinder block.