The hour badly spent

I used to take the bus a lot. During the wait, after I whipped out a Parliament, inevitably some grungy-looking lady would make a big production out of faux coughing and fanning the air, as though I had just pulled her into the rancid colon of a dying mastadon. And I’d think to myself, what a prick; she needs this more than I do.

Then I contritely move downwind of her and enjoy my fine tobacco product. Because while the lady is being obnoxious, so am I, which was the focus of Mark Ehrbacher’s Collegian column today. No, not me, silly. Smoking.

“The Manhattan City Commission will vote Tuesday to determine whether to enact an ordinance that will ban smoking within Manhattan city limits at any place of employment or at any public place.

“The argument made for the ban is clear and easy to make. Cigarettes are unhealthy, and has been scientifically proven. It is also a nuisance to some pansyasses people who do not like the smell of cigarette smoke [ed. note: try cloves!].

Years ago, California agreed, outlawing our smoking practically everyfuckingwhere. Now a related bill will be put to the vote locally Tuesday. And lo, some ado is being made about our civil liberties or whatnot. "The ban is wrong on many levels," Mark writes.

"Many restaurants have taken it upon themselves to have smoking and nonsmoking sections. If people do not want to smell smoke while they are eating, no one is forcing them to eat at this restaurant. They can choose to eat wherever they like.

“If there was a large enough outcry for a smoke-free environment, business owners would take it upon themselves to provide one to make more money.

“If a person applying for a job doesn’t like the smoke, they can apply for a job somewhere else.

Then he makes an analogy with people who work in hazmat jobs.

As a dedicated intaker of the sweet, sweet, smokey goodness, I know I should probably take Mark’s side too. But the bill will probably pass, because these bills are passing everywhere. And it’s really not much of a big deal.

In California, you can’t smoke in bars or restaurants. And so, when you’re out at a table, you’ll say "I need a fag," and you’ll go outside and light up. Then a few other people will join you, because either they are trying to fuck you, or because they also need a few minutes away from some other annoying prig at the table, or maybe some will just figure it’s best to do whatever the cool kids are doing. And it will be a nice ten-minute clique. The smokers will all feel like they’re in on a dirty secret together.

And later on in the year, when it gets cold outside, you’ll become more scraggly and determined, huddling in a circle with muddy snow under your boots. And one of you will point out that you’re all pathetic. And you’ll all laugh and take a drag, all secretly knowing that yes, you really are pathetic, which is fine because the people who stayed inside are just not much fun, which is always worse.

[Source: K-State Collegian]

A couple of weeks ago on The Closer (a television show I do not watch), the police chief tod Kyra Sedgwick that an LA Times reporter would be following her around for the season premier case, involving massive arson in Griffith Park (episode 44: "Controlled Burn"). Immediately Kyra protests with her sassy southern firmness; a reporter will just get in the way, muck up the case, keep the police from doing their jobs, free every rapist in jail, make all the cops look bad when they’re really hardworking, plucky, sharp and competent, et cetera.

This whole "everything would be fine if the reporter wasn’t around, but as soon as he started nosing around it thrashed our whole investigation" meme on cop shows got trite a long time ago. Fact is, we need more of this.

(1) Cops are public employees; everything they do should be accountable to the public, because the public is sort of their boss.

(2) Have you read the LA Times lately? Me either. It’s kind of awful. It doesn’t even have a metro desk. Some local something on a regular basis — not just murder and mayhem or celebrity vaginas, but something — would really do some wonders for this rag. Los Angeles has 88 municipalities (Glendale, Burbank, Santa Monica, Redondo Beach, and so on), each with city halls and courthouses and police stations, but unless something obvious happens — like a natural effing disaster — the Times lets local TV stations scoop them all over the place.

(3) Why would a reporter want to hang out with cops all day when he could stay at his desk, sipping bourbon from the "inhalers" he keeps in the top drawer on the left, just like all the real reporters around him are doing?

It’s just there’s that myth is that a single reporter has — what, days on end? — to dig into the guts of a police unit and bring down the entire system just so he can have his byline over something sensational.

The likely fact is that this overworked alcoholic will lurch in there, read some reports, see what’s happened lately that’s grisly or sexy, write it up, and call it a day.

Everyone’s happy! Except the victim, who is decidedly un-happy until she is avenged by Kyra Sedgwick the Vampire Slayer.

At 11:42 am today, I was on my way to the barber shop. I had in fact just arrived and was tying up my bicycle (go green!) when a couple of people came out of the shop and looked around, as if making sure everything was okay.

"Day-um, that was a good one," said Tashie, the lady who puts the twists in my hair.

"It felt like this," said another girl, swerving her hips like she was hula-hooping.

This could only mean one thing: the barber shop orgy ended right before I arrived. Wait.

A strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.4 jolted large parts of Southern California late this morning, shaking a wide swath from Ventura County to San Diego and causing minor damage and a few injuries.

The quake rattled buildings in downtown Los Angeles and was felt as far east as Palm Springs. It was centered near Chino Hills, about 30 miles east of Los Angeles, the U.S. Geological Survey said. [source: Los Angeles Times]

All right. Los Angeles just experienced a middle-magnitude quake and I didn’t even feel it.

KCAL-9 News was reporting a 5.8 on the Richter scale.

"That wasn’t no five point eight," said a dude checking his text messages.

Tashie’s husband walked in. "Y’all feel that? That was me." Okay, I guess it’s probably for the best I didn’t "feel that."

Seriously, this would have been the most exciting thing since every second of the Dark Knight and I completely missed it. That wouldn’t have happened if I were at the place where I usually am at 11:42am on Tuesdays: a bar, browbeating a cocktail waitress. "You call this a Manhattan? I said shaken, not stirred!" She picks it up. Earthquake happens. Then I snatch it out of her hand, mumbling that’s more like it, keep ‘em coming.

"You all remember the Northridge quake? I ain’t never seen so many people out in the street that early in the morning," said the texting dude.

I remember the Northridge quake. That winter, rain had been coming down for two weeks straight and finally ceased a few days before January 17, 1994.

At 4:30 that morning the noisy rocking of the house woke me up. My five hundred heaviest books fell off the shelf and onto my bed. At that point, I figured, the worst part’s done, and rolled over back to sleep. Then my mom woke me up and handed me a flashlight. The next day our roof caved in.

 

Back in the here and now, about 20 minutes after today’s quake, the whole thing was filed and forgotten. I was sitting there, bored, while my stylist checked her cellphone. Across the room, some chronic ass was giving a civics lecture to a captive audience — a guy whose hair he was cutting. The news was still going on and on with the camera trained on a seismograph. Someone turned up the radio. "You know one rapper I never liked? Jay-Z," said Tashie. Earthquake or no, I hate it when barbers try to make small talk.

An hour later, the Silver Bullet texted me.

You know what’s funny? When the earthquake started, I immediately went to the hallway doorframe and held on to the tv. Shows you my priorities.

I don’t understand the issue. That’s not "funny." That’s not even unusual. I’ve seen her teevee. It’s flat and it’s big and it’s brand new. She did exactly what any of us would do in the same situation. Natural disasters always bring out our best. That’s why, when I go to Best Buy, I do the exact same thing; wait for an earthquake, then hold on to a TV. In a world that no longer has any use for heroes, I am a legend.

In keeping with the polarized political climate of the times, the Collegian went all Lincoln-Douglas on us with a spirited dialectic of great social and political import. Joe Vossen took our orders first in "Curly fry best represents Millenials with seasoning."

    Being only a humble opinion columnist with little training or understanding in food science, I will attempt to enumerate for this journal’s readers why the true snack of the future, the tastiest tuber, is in fact curly fries. In double-blinded taste tests administered in the Union food court last week, curly fries were favored for taste by twice as many people as waffle fries (three people were involved in this study).
    Before they are fried, curly fries are coated with paprika and other seasonings (unlike waffle fries, which are merely cut and thrown unlovingly into lava-hot peanut oil) leading to a much more palatable deep-fried experience. Said one person surveyed, "These so-called waffle fries taste like salty chalk."
    French-fry aficionados will appreciate the crunchiness of the curly fry. The spiral shape of the curly fry is achieved with a special cutting tool that is either motor-driven or hand-turned. The cutting implement is set into one end of the potato and the potato rotated, creating the trademark spiral shape. The advantage, of course, is in the increased surface area achieved with the helix shape (over a waffle fry). With more precious potato in contact with delicious oil during frying, the result is a crispier, crunchier fry.

Duly noted. With "Unfailing texture deems waffle fry America’s best," Adam Phan served an elegant, well-salted rebuttal.

One cannot take the particulars of potatoes too seriously.
    To establish a hierarchy is necessary; to crown the waffle variety king of that hierarchy is obvious; to offer a defense of such a position is effortless. And why should that be? The manifest weakness of the competition? We could distract ourselves with a drawn-out discussion of third-party candidates - the road too well-traveled - but most of the lot can be summarized in the space following the semicolon of a single sentence; steak fries are mushy, shoestring fries are gritty and almost everything else is either too trivial or too ordinary.
    Curly fries do deserve their very own special rebuttal, if only for their startlingly effective frivolity. Why have so many bought into the curly cult, anyway?
    "They’re curly," the apologists lamely assert, as if novelty alone could serve a legitimate function. "They’re so spicy and peppery, so savory; how could one fail to appreciate that?"
    And what should be said about this seasoning? As is the case with tasteless little outfits like Arby’s, this so-called seasoning isn’t anything more than a crude preparation of paprika and onion powder glued onto a flash-frozen product.

    These are deliciously the best op-eds I’ve ever seen in the Collegian. Yet, as I look around, it’s pretty clear that today’s young snackers have grown tired of all the ketchup-slinging of tasty morsels as usual. It’s time for change we can believe in.
    If it was possible to merge the two sides, to sculpt and curve your matted, crispy goodness into a swervy mouthful of chain-linked yummy, then this war would have no losers. We need a fry cook who can bridge this divide and heal our fractured palate. And the healing begins with you. Heap a helping of each on the same plate. Let them mingle and dance. In your mouth. Just move the penis aside (zing!).

Few things are more awkward than when a girl brings her friends with her on a date. Like backup in case the evening goes south, and the guy knows it. Saturday night I got to be one of those judgemental cockblockers; Ariana was meeting a soldier for drinks at Mae’s, and she invited everyone along with her.

As soon as I went down the stairs, I was greeted by a bunch of reporters in red T-Shirts. The Collegionnaires were pubcrawling tonight! "Hey, come with us across the street to Pat’s" said Brett King. Hey Brett & Co., just because I may have, on occasion, posted a few unflattering comments about  a tiny portion of your writings, this does not mean we can’t be friends, right?

They looked like they were having fun. And I did want to go with them, badly. Nevertheless, I had made a promise to Ariana. You know that I’m like the least manly person you know? That’s true, but it’d be great to have you there anyway. Besides, I really want you to meet him. By the time I showed up (an hour fashionably late), everyone was already drunk and surprisingly huggy - Ariana (felt good!), Cate (felt good!), Carolyn (felt good!), Cherry (slightly awkward!).

I spent an hour or so floating between Ariana, Ariana’s date, and Carolyn, who was kind of down because the football player she was seeing got mad at her for no apparent reason and slammed a door on her foot. That’s a definite no-no. He’s supposed to do that to the other team’s girlfriends!

When the soldier went to the bathroom, Ariana turned to me. You’re not trying to get with Carolyn are you?

Probably not, I said, drinking something that was in front of me. I’m not really in a flirty mood, and besides, my type looks and sounds much more like Ariana (reddish hair!) than Carolyn (skinny & blonde).

And then she hugged me again. Why is she so huggy tonight?

So how are you, The Hour Badly Spent? Her vowels are normally long anyway. Tonight all her small talk comes out like singing.
Super!
You know you can talk to me.
About what?
About anything. I search out her eyes. Maybe she really does want to get to know the real me.
How drunk are you?

By this time, Cherry had surrounded herself with guys, all of them much older and taller than her. One of them was like 50. Looking at her daddy issues on display from across the bar, I couldn’t help but feel cold and dark inside, like I was watching a puppy in a ritual sacrifice, except I can’t tell who’s the puppy and who’s the knife-wielding priest, who exactly is fucking whom, and maybe they are all victims with no predators or maybe they are all predators with no victims or maybe it’s just extreeemely creepy seeing some kid with old guys floating around her like stormclouds. If they’re going to swarm and compete to stroke this girl’s ego, why not just put their dicks on a chessboard? That’s a game I could play, because I get erect in an L-pattern.

At any rate, I settled into a booth, just sort of fading into the scenery. Ariana’s talking to her date. Carolyn left a while ago. Cherry’s doing whatever it is she does with clusters of older guys. I could sit here forever. I could also just go.

So I did.

Outside I tried to catch up with the Collegiannaires. How sick is it that although they’re snotty red-staters I really wanted to drink with them? The streets were full of people, cigarette butts, and vomit. There were purple T-shirts. Baseball caps. Girls with short skirts, long legs. Douchebag guys with their douchebag friends. A girl, frantically crying and pleading to an annoyed cop; her friend being responsible, "Christina, settle down. He’s not gonna do anything." No journalists. Starting with Pat’s, I went from bar to bar (the back of O’Malley’s smelled like gin and semen), skipping the ones with cover charges, peering through and around girls with impossibly clear skin, wriggling around more baseball caps, more short skirts, more long legs, more purple tees. Still no reporters. I went back into Mae’s and told Ariana that I was heading home.

Collegian, I noticed you’ve been distant lately. I thought you were under a lot of pressure, that maybe you just needed your space. I guess I didn’t pay attention to all the hints Blake Osborn has been dropping in every single column he writes about how we spend too much time on Facebook instead of outdoors admiring our muscles in the sunlight. So there it is: we’re just too fat and gross for you. But did you have to go and run two obesity articles at once? Sending Veronika Novoselova with the message, instead of just talking to me face-to-face; that was just cruel.

Genetic mutations, smoking, heavy drinking and negative environmental influences are usually listed as the most common causes of cancer. Now K-State researchers are finding that obesity can be another leading factor.

Say whatever you want to me, Veronika Novoselova; I can take it. But I will not abide the slander of alcoholics. They are a noble class of people who have at long last figured out How the World Works.

According to the Web site for the National Cancer Institute, obesity and physical inactivity can account for 25 to 30 percent of several major cancers - colon, breast (postmenopausal), endometrial, kidney and cancer of the esophagus.

Okay, I get it. We’re all gonna die! Which strikes me as not only a consequence of alcoholism, but also a leading cause of it.

In "Obesity an issue among all", without even bothering to let me down easy with a snappy headline, Krystle Richards notes:

Obesity is at a national, all-time high, and many are calling it an epidemic. According to the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007, the cases of obesity have increased substantially in the last 30 years, and 66 percent of adults are overweight.

Conclusions from a 2007 study revealed infectious causes of obesity are conceivable.

"Having obese contacts might change a person’s tolerance for being obese and might influence their decision of adopting specific behaviors." Similar behaviors are noticed among those who smoke and drink.

Now we can catch the fat. And pass it on to others, like syphilis (gross, but waaaay more fun to spread).

Like I said, I get it. We’re all rotund and lazy. But I’m doing all I can. In the morning I stand in front of the mirror and circle my flaws with a Sharpie. Then I say "fattie!" and hit myself with slabs of cheese until I cry. And at night I skip dinner to snort coke. See? I’m really really trying here. So why, Collegian, why won’t you just love me?

 

There has apparently been some sort of show running at Nichols for almost two weeks; Little Red Romeo & Juliet or something. I guess it’s such a big deal that the Collegian did a little write-up on it.

It included a profile of Romeo’s actor. "The roles he has played in the past have been more aggressive, and Romeo’s character is exceedingly vulnerable."

"I bring passion to the table," he said. "The role calls for a lot of passion, and I’m a hopeless romantic." More or less the same as every other handsome, slender, chiselled, actor-type I envy.

Juliet’s actress also got some inches. "I’m usually in musicals, and Juliet’s role is serious and emotional. She was sad, in love, frightened, angry and happy throughout the show. The range is so much broader than any other emotional range I’ve had to go through in a show before."

"Her character’s only 13 and I’m 21. I didn’t want to come off as too old." Ergo, she took Teddy Ruxpin with her on stage, a fact that the article seemed to omit.

Also omitted: everything else that happened on the stage. Fighting. Dancing. Tybalt’s outfit. Mercutio. MERCUTIO, dammit! We already know Romeo and Juliet are characters in this thing, because we read the title repeatedly, sounding it out very slowly, rolling the R’s and softening the vowels so they swim up and down in the air. Also, because everyone knows they’re in it. Everyone also knows fervor and emotion overtook the stage as Romeo enveloped Juliet’s face in his hand, tenderly kissing her as he gazed desperately into her eyes and recited the classically romantic verses that symbolize infatuated young love.

That harlequin-romance prose is in the brochures. Apropos of nothing, I have no idea what a Harlequin romance is, because I’ve never read any romance novels, not that I know it’s a brand of romance novels or anything. So how could Jenna Scavuzzo discuss the event and NOT MENTION any fabulosity particular to the performance (I’m looking at you, Mercutio). Could it be that she didn’t even see the performance at all? In that case, nice touch with the "gazed desperately into her eyes," but that doesn’t sound like Shakespeare’s style.

Months ago, when Brett King first ran an article about Indiana requiring voters to produce valid ID at the polls, the issue seemed a bit strange, and I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why. Requiring IDs to vote seemed like a benign enough idea, but why, exactly, was it necessary?

I can’t imagine Indiana has a huge turnout of illegal aliens sneaking by pollsters in droves, causing severe upsets in the makeup of school district boards or whatever. And most of the time, when I hear about election fraud, it’s less likely to be "Mr. Worthington paid 8,000 fake constituents to show up and vote" — which is properly called voter fraud — and more probably along the lines of "Mr. Worthington bribed a single official to toss out 8,000 ballots" — which is more properly called election fraud.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Justice John Paul Stevens said that Indiana’s desire to prevent fraud and to inspire voter confidence in the election system are important even though there have been no reports of the kind of fraud the law — backed overwhelmingly by Republicans — was designed to combat.

So I was kind of puzzled as to why we would focus the crackdown on the electorate, when the angle of entrenched-power cronyism seems more likely and more pernicious. Then I ran across some new information:

The Indiana law was challenged in separate suits filed by the Indiana Democratic Party and by another group of plaintiffs that included elected officials and community groups.The plaintiffs argued that the state had failed to justify a requirement they said would place a special burden on thousands of eligible voters in Indiana who lack driver’s licenses, a group that disproportionately includes the poor, the elderly and people with disabilities.

Writing for the 2-to-1 majority at the appeals court, Judge Richard A. Posner agreed with the plaintiffs that the law would have the greatest impact on people who were “low on the economic ladder and thus, if they do vote, are more likely to vote for Democratic than Republican candidates.”

I guess it always comes back to red vs. blue. Therefore, Brett’s column this week welcomes us to the New World Order; in which the poor and the undesirables don’t have a say, just like in the Old World Older. As long as we’re getting all regressey, why not just do it exactly the way we used to, where you had to be a property-owning white male in order to vote?

The problem with his argument, though, is the fact that Indiana provides free IDs to citizens who do not have a driver’s license.

Fair enough. I guess this is just like that time conservatives insisted that the government which governs best, governs least, except apparently under certain arbitrary conditions.

After the Democratic Party’s claims of voter fraud in many elections - including the 2000 presidential election - any individual with at least a small amount of common sense would think helping to curve voter fraud would be a good course of action.

Having eligible citizens voting in elections is essential to the progress of our republic, but to encourage participation, voters must feel their vote matters and won’t be canceled out by those attempting to commit voter fraud.

Yeah, a little perspective on that whole Y2K Florida debacle: the problem was NOT that non-citizens were voting. It’s that electoral authorities and the police were removing people from the poll lines and stopping them from voting, and that this took place only in overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhoods. It was pretty clearly NOT voter fraud and SO election fraud. And it wasn’t just the Democratic party making those claims: local newspapers told the stories of a pretty fair number of individuals who were there to witness democracy inaction. I can’t help but wonder if Brett King’s equivocation was accidental right-wing cluelessness or purposeful right-wing malice.

 

All right, ya got me. All semester long I’ve been making fun of Blake Osborn’s weekly articles, calling them "irrelevant," "outdated," "out of touch," "illogical," "asinine," "fucking pointless," "self-congratulatory rubbish," "osbornish," "like getting peanut butter in your hair," "like getting a papercut while reading the Collegian," "like listening to your grandpa rant about loud music," "like being stuck in traffic behind a douchebag in an Escalade who can’t drive," "like being flipped off by an illiterate manatee," etc.

And I was all set to make fun of him again, when I opened Monday’s paper to his column, Higher education vital for succeeding in United States (duh), and read this:

Today, as observed in The New York Times article, having a college education is vital to attaining a middle-class lifestyle.

Every 26 seconds a teenager in the United States drops out of high school. According to the the U.S. Census Bureau’s Web site, "85 percent of adults age 25 and over have completed at least a high-school degree."

The first time I heard these statistics, I was shocked.

I can only assume that "I’m shocked to find out people drop out of high school" is self-parody. Either that or he’s actually mocking my mocking of him. That’s so meta! But I refuse to believe that his message is meant to be taken at face value. Even in Kansas, nobody’s that dense. Right? Right? In other news, compact discs: they’re not just for music any more.
 

When I was talking with the Saucy Aussie the other day we both noted this one quirk of Kansas: people here tend to say the same things Stephen Colbert would say on his show, except when Colbert says them, it’s satire. The title of this post is a direct quote from a local gun nut. I was hoping that all the gun hoopla floating around campus lately was just whacko buffoonery that would die out if I looked the other way. Surely no one would seriously entertain the paradox that bringing guns to class would prevent school shootings. Enter the Collegian.

Last week they ran two front-page articles on the "debate" hosted by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. And by "debate" I mean "no one opposing carrying concealed showed up to argue, because as students, they’re probably worried more about writing term papers and shit than waving pistols around." Naturally, I stayed at home to watch porn. But Terence, a K-State senior, diligently went and observed.

The worst problem, and the reason I left, was what this particular audience member said. The question was about the difficulty of identifying the ‘real’ killer if other students were armed and firing. The man’s answer was basically, "If you have a classroom full of students that look like you and you and you, and then a guy in a black trench coat with an AK-47 comes in, you’ll know who the killer is."

When this kind of ignorance and narrow-mindedness is allowed to be spouted, it’s not a debate - it’s propaganda.

Duly noted. SCCC president Ryan Willcott said "the only reason people carry guns on campus is for self-defense purposes. He related carrying a gun to wearing a seat belt in that people wear seat belts in case of an emergency - he said it’s the same with handguns."

While Ryan raises an excellent point, the analogy breaks down in that people don’t use their seat belts to fucking shoot other people.

But why do these emergencies happen in the first place? Why, indeed, are gun-toting crazies springing up on universities? Do they just pop up out of nowhere? Is there a training camp somewhere in Texas? Is it remotely possible that when you tell alienated sociopaths that having and using lethal weapons is the truest expression of your liberty, that it makes you a responsibly functioning citizen, that it connects you with the soul of our nation’s heritage, blah blah blah, well what the fuck else will the frustrated triggerhappies do? Volunteer at a soup kitchen?

Nevertheless, the SCCC seems to have a strident following. It’s inevitable; the struggle between two factions will dominate this campus. On one hand, limp-wristed crepe-chomping femicommunist pacifist Jewish furries; on the other, us, the rugged, individualist protectors, who are really just following the 67th book of the Bible: the Constitution. That’s right; I said us. Between the team that’s armed and the team that’s not, which side did you think I was gonna be on?

"People have the right to defend themselves," said Concealed Carry Instructor Patricia Stoneking. "To post any place as a gun-free zone is to basically pose them as a target."

There you have it. Hordes of bloodthirsty villains lie continuously in wait for the chance to pick me off. With my back to the wall and all hope lost, I’ve got no choice, only one chance to take back control. And this has to be subtle. If it’s overdone, I’ll be posed as a target. Therefore, nothing fancy; just a couple of gats, a bandolier (looks like a seatbelt!), and some surface-to-air missiles slung tastefully across my back. Hell, if you’ve got a problem with my Second-Amendment rights, I’ve got a problem solver. Its name is revolver.

In today’s Collegian Sarah Burford shared a story about cocking and shooting off at a local firing range. At first I thought the article was mostly kind of bleh. But when I re-read it, I noticed it seemed eerily similar to the Jenna Haze (NSFW!) movie I’ve got open in another window, right now. I am perfectly aware that this says more about me than about Sarah Burford, but humor me:

"Whoa!"

I let out an involuntary yell as the rifle butt slammed into my shoulder [ed. note: That is HOT!]. The men around me chuckled and continued to advise my shooting skills. It was my first experience at a firing range, and I didn’t know the first thing about guns. To me, they were foreign objects, entirely too powerful and consequently, rather intimidating.

But my timidity lessened and my interest increased as the volunteers at the Fancy Creek Range instructed me on the basics of shooting.

This is where I made a major shooting range faux pas: I described a gun as "cute." No matter what a girl thinks a gun looks like, she [should] keep her comments to herself if they have anything to do with femininity.

So coy, so sexy. It’s totally obvs that it’s her first time, right? Of course you can’t tell a guy that his gun is cute. It invokes the castration complex. THEY ARE ALL BIG AND SHINY. My gun is the resplendent avatar of my virility. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say my actual penis doesn’t suffice at all, wink wink. In terms of length and girth, nudge nudge. This is what it looks like:

 

Is anyone curious about what it’s like to not have sex? The Collegian seems to think so. They weighed in on it this month. Twice. I wonder how much one could actually say about sex without having any subject material? On April 7, Ryne Witt shared his wisdom:

Casual sex for me was never going to be an option, because in order to have such an intimate moment with someone, I needed a certain level of trust with them. That trust can’t be gained in one night at a party or the bars.

Since that trust can’t be gained in one night, it would take a relationship to exist in order for me to have sex and, to be honest, everyone I have dated has never gotten to that point where I trusted them that much.

Blah blah blah blah mommy issues. Eric Davis followed up two weeks later:

I can remember the first time I tried to have sex with a woman who I didn’t know. From the minute we went back to my residence-hall room, I just felt weird. I will spare everyone the embarrassment and just say it didn’t happen. Also, I can’t remember a time in my life that I have been more embarrassed.

Details, Eric, details, or else we’ll be forced to engage in wild speculation. And you don’t want to let that happen, because we’re just going to assume she got freaked out when you told her you’re a furry.

Two of my friends keep going back to relationships they know aren’t healthy, but the sex comforts them. I feel like they have their self-worth wrapped up in their libido and if they sleep alone, they are unwanted.

Here’s the thing about a sex column: when I turn to this page, I expect to see titillating tales of frantic groping in the dark, not predictable bonerkiller haughty virgin preachiness.

There’s a special technical phrase for an otherwise painful relationship wherein one lonely party uses sex to medicate: your twenties. It’s not sad. It’s an awesome learning process. Plus, you get to fuck. Given the choice between - on one hand - an emotionally destructive mindfuck made better by the mutual celebration of sin and carnal delight, and - on the other hand - cultivating your self-esteem through enlightened solitude and frequent masturbation, I’d probably go with "fucking." Why in the world would you opt for a productive, healthy independence, when you could just be having sex instead?

 

Jimmy Carter recently began an attempt to reach out to Hamas, an inveterate and influential foe of the Middle East peace process. The logic is that since Hamas has enough power to disrupt peace talks by blowing shit up, making them a party to peace negotiations might discourage them from blowing shit up, which would be smarter than ignoring them and hoping they go away. The talks failed, of course, but in his latest Collegian column, Brett King honored the elder statesman for his courageous idealism:

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of senile is "relating to, exhibiting or characteristic of old age: exhibiting a loss of cognitive abilities."

With this definition as the base of examination, it is time for the family of former president Jimmy Carter to call the men in white pants and jackets to escort grandpa back to the home.

In 1979, Carter was successful in orchestrating a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel that has since held strong, but even a blind kid hits a baseball every once in a while.

So there you have it. Old men are useless, so you probably shouldn’t vote for one in November! The blind, too; not much point in having them around, tripping over shit and bungling foreign policy the way they always do, unless it’s to the point when you reach the 8th inning and you’re really counting on a long flyball deep into right field, cuz the blind can swing those stripey canes like they’re bats, and even if it’s not a home run, you can have the runner on third tag up and score. Back to the point: a peace agreement? Not historic at all. In the scheme of things, really no big deal.

Due to the Bush Doctrine and years of commitment to Israel, the United States has avoided communication with the Hamas government. But have no fear, here comes President Carter with hopes of orchestrating a peace deal to fix the whole situation.

Khaled Mashaal, a top Hamas leader who met with Carter, said the group was prepared to offer a "10-year truce if [Israel] withdraws from all lands seized in the 1967 war." How gracious of the murderous thugs to offer peace for only 10 years as long as Israel gives up half the city of Jerusalem and other land holdings it acquired from a war it did not start.

Palestinians didn’t start the war either, but that’s irrelevant to diplomacy. Continual suicide bombings is apparently better than 10 years of peace. Calling names and then leaving the room is the new "diplomacy." In a world where peace is insane, the Bush "Doctrine" is the only thing that makes sense. This is how you decide the future of nations:

Hamas: "American foreign policy has left our people destitute and angry. We will go to any lengths to get attention for our plight."

Bush: "Whatever. Hey Jeb, pull my finger. Heh."

 

The coming of Tax Day apparently brought me so much more happiness than I could ever put into words. So I’ll let Brett King do it for me:

Like the seven dwarfs skipping off to work, our representatives and senators on the state and national level believe every working-age individual should be singing this all the way to the post office: "I owe, I owe, to pay my taxes I go."
Yesterday marked the day when all the good little liberal boys and girls felt joy in their hearts because the "government" received more money to pay for social programs and pork spending.

Unlike normal people, liberals lrrrve paying taxes! Especially to bankroll a war they oppose! Especially if they can do it while skipping along, to a catchy song! Cue the Versificator!

Conservatives rightfully (get it?) hate these "social programs," like health care, public schools, public transportation, and law enforcement. Fuck the cops, eh Brett? So maybe we would be better off privatizing this stuff. Corporations don’t do "pork spending." There’s no waste or corruption in the private sector! All the legislative functions Congress does now should just be outsourced to Exxon’s board of directors. Outsource law enforcement to Blackwater. Do away with the school system; let schools be sponsored by Washington Mutual. In a recession, your monthly bank statement would read "Due to a poor third quarter performance, there will be no basic fucking science taught this year."

Don’t you ever wish people would stop making such a big fucking deal over the word ‘nigger?’ Two of K-State’s "best and brightest" journalism students (take that, Whitney Hodgin!) interviewed Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder in front of a crowd of captive hearts in Forum Hall. So Deborah Muhwezi asked him what was up with his characters’ frequent use of the n-word.

"I’d rather people say ‘nigga’ than say ‘n-word’ because n-word is stupid. It’s fundamentally immature, like saying ‘dookie’ among first-graders; like we are running from a truth we all know is there."

"I certainly understand the sensitivity and power behind it," he continued. But it’s vapid and pointless to huff and puff all your outrage on that. "There are lots of people whose job it is to keep the conversation of race at the level of ‘we shouldn’t use the n-word on TV’," he said, which keeps us from finding any real resolutions to real social problems.

Yeah, so politics is kind of a downer, and McGruder is in the funny business. How does he make it work?

"If you set out to tear down stereotypes, well then that’s positive, and we definitely try not to be that. We have to find a way to make it funny."

In his comedy, McGruder spins a version of what black people seem to talk like behind closed doors when they’re really fucking drunk (like me) and high (not like me, but I’m working on that). The nature of comedy and storytelling is such that positive portrayals are inherently boring; showing us the parts of ourselves that are dirty and embarrassing gives his work a special kind of truthful bite. Servicey!

"We don’t find the stuff very controversial. In other words, we’re not very sensitive people."

Also, without a line between entertainment and news, those two mated and gave birth to a voracious infantile media machine that’s set up to gobble up ratings out of whatever shlock it can find but then use our collective brains as its diaper. So fuck Fox News. And CNN and MSNBC and the whole pundit industry in all its incarnations. But mostly Fox. And BET too. And if Whitney Hodgins’ article ever goes live on the Collegian web site I’ll make sure to link you, ya know, whenever I get around to it. In the meantime I’m doing homework and NOT prowling for Boondocks episodes on teh YooToobz. Probably.

 

In "U.S. surpassed by other nations connecting," Blake Osborn rides the cutting edge of some new trend, globali-whatsit or something, all made possible by teh Intertubez. "This unprecedented collaboration that makes geographic distances irrelevant is something to think about. No longer are students competing with people of the same nationality." Really? Better double up on that border fence!

 

Thomas Friedman, columnist for The New York Times, wrote his book "The World is Flat" in 2005. He observed how, as a result of the Internet and other wireless communication devices, the playing field is being leveled between nations - and this is how the world is being flattened.

Nations from around the world, Friedman wrote, can now "plug in and play;" they can innovate without having to emigrate. In the U.S., the issue is what we look up to. "In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears — and that is our problem."

"Americans’ obsession with celebrities and the next winner of "American Idol" is in sharp contrast with the developing momentum in other countries like China. In a March 30 article in The New York Times, Roger Cohen pointed out how the baton has passed to Asia, where there is a "confidence and a burning desire to succeed. Asian business leaders are rock stars."

Because there are no rock stars in China (or maybe it’s because the Chinese music industry hasn’t achieved the same levels of amoral asshattery we have here, under the leadership of guys just like Bill Gates!). At any rate, the proles are all over each other clamouring for a glimpse of the bare crotches of old white geeks. They like this particular "Gates" fellow because in China you can can get Windows XP for about five bucks, which I hear is pretty rad.

 

"According to an article from the March 24 issue of Time magazine, the Pope created a new list of seven deadly sins. They extend beyond the individual and end up creating voids in society. This "social resonance" of sin resulting from globalization shows how much we are connected as a world, without any frontier or Manifest Destiny to carry us westward." Manifest Destiny; those were the good old days. We didn’t measure our progress as a nation by the same bullshit we go by now; "social justice," "sexual prowess," or "the OLD Book of Proverbs."

"The competition has crossed even the oceans, and Americans are now part of a bigger game. So travel abroad, read the newspapers and get to know people from other countries." I’m so confused. What ever happened to ‘innovate without having to emigrate?’ And if the foreigns’ magazines are full of Bill Gates pics, I think I’ll take my chances at home, where Marilyn Monroe and Lindsay Lohan converge into something so wonderful and beautiful that it fills me with "confidence and a burning desire." Heh. To succeed, you pervs.

Normally, tables for two seat a man and his penis. But when Brad, a freshman, went to Gaymous Dave’s to grab a bite with a friend, his date brought his own penis.

"We were worried the waiter would think we were gay," Brad said.

They wanted him to know for sure.

"I know straight guys don’t worry about this, but two guys eating cock together looked weird. We joked about it all night, spooning in each others’ arms, naked but not doing anything."

According to a New York Times article, the "man date" is increasing in popularity. The article described the event as "two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange witn a woman," adding "Eww, ladyparts!"

Examples of man dates include dinner, a movie, going for a walk, cooking together, or a 3 a.m. booty call.

"I don’t make it a big deal," said Brad, who said he had never previously heard the terms "man date" or "rusty trombone."

"It’s more sexy to keep it casual. A friend and I will just grab some food, then come back and play video games or catch a movie and teabag."

The Times article said attending a movie as a twosome can be an anxiety-inducing event for two self-hating gay Kansas tweens. Some will even go so far as to sit in each others’ laps. However, Brad said this is not something he thinks about and has seen multiple movies with male friends.

"I would definitely sit in the lap of a guy friend," Brad said. "It would be a waste of time to find an extra seat in a theater. I just want to unzip his pants, get in, watch the movie, and get out."

He acknowledges there is a line between what is appropriate for two heterosexual males and what is not, but added it can be difficult to define.

"Anything intimate would not be cool," Brad said. "It’s a tough line to draw, and I’m not much of a cuddler. I don’t want to be the one to draw the line or step over it. Cooking a meal for a friend is weird, but breakfast the morning after is different."

Brad said there are three types of "dates" for men.

"There’s man dates, manly dates, and gay man dates," Brad said. "It’s like Bush’s terrorist threat meter, with elevated, high and low risks." Gay man-dates threaten national security.

He said hanging out with a guy friend one-on-one is more spontaneous and less planned.

"Anything can happen! It’s just so beautiful and natural," he said.

Other men, like Matt, senior in manology, agree that man dates are more spontaneous.

"A date with a woman can have more pressure on it," Matt said. "With a guy, it’s just two guys hanging out. A quaint moonlight post-coital stroll with a buddy is just more casual."

Matt said he prefers the term "Cleveland steamer" to "man date," and would probably opt for lunch with a guy friend instead of dinner to avoid awkwardness. He said, however, he would not worry about the stigma of two men being out together.

"I wouldn’t be doing anything to attract that kind of attention," Matt said. "I can give blowjobs discreetly, under the table, like Michelle in American Pie."

Other men believe the type of place you go to can make a big difference.

"Eating cock casually with a friend is OK as long as it’s not anything big, shiny, and veiney," said Joel, junior in pre-professional business administration. "Eating cock at a nice place would be awkward though. It wouldn’t be any fun to go with just any guy to a restaurant to eat a $30 sausage."

While man dates might be becoming more common, that does not mean all men are comfortable with the terminology.

"The term ‘man date’ is dumb," Joel said. "It is a double standard with women. Two Korean schoolgirls with breast implants, high-heels, hoopy gold earrings and heavy makeup doing an Alaskan pipeline would not be called a date. It’s more normal and accepted, which is fine with me."

[Source: More men spending dates eating out, gaming together (K-State Collegian)].

The International Festival of Talents took place Sunday at McCain Auditorium. The performances were apparently a hit. Whitney Hodgin provided a servicey recap in today’s Collegian.

Singer Minako Nemoto and pianist Jun Tadaki, junior in business administration, conveyed "the beauty of spring" in Japan with such precision that it was easy to forget that most of the audience didn’t understand the language Nemoto was singing in.

"My initial reaction is ‘wow’," said Vikas Bahirwani, graduate student in computer science. "These performances are doing away with the language barrier."

    Doing away with the language barrier? All right Whitney, I get it. Whitney’s cultural enrichment this weekend obviously exceeded mine by far. She attended the International Festival of Talents. I attended TengaiCon, a local supernerd gaming convention.

    Whitney heard a Japanese man sing The Marriage of Figaro, bringing Mozart’s score to life. I watched a bunch of kids from Wichita dress up like bit parts in Princess Mononoke.
    Whitney saw Philipinos light up the stage "while balancing candles on their heads." I saw a fat middle-aged guy light up a D&D game board with a lucky roll of the dice.
    Whitney saw an Indian student perform a "personal" dance piece that "combined modern music with several decades of dance moves, including the moonwalk." I stumbled and flailed in front of Dance Dance Revolution for two hours, quitting after I got schooled by some skinny nerd.
    When Whitney walked away from the event, she probably still had "the beauty of spring" resounding in her dulcet ears. When I walked away from the dance pad, I heard the kid go "What does ‘high score’ mean? Did I break it?" Then he dropped a smoke bomb, and although he was no longer there when the smoke cleared, everyone could still hear his villainous laughter.

In "Climate hype? People should look at the research," Mark Wampler presents the issue of global warming as bunch of blowhards shouting at each other. One side makes one claim, the other side claims the opposite. Which side is right? It is apparently not Mark’s job to check up on either of their claims. His job is to present one side as a bunch of wild-eyed kooks, and show the other side as being calm and rational without even adding any science to the article, as if his point is self-evident. Instead of putting forth a single bit of evidence either way, he just sells us an image of the people behind the argument, and so undermines the validity of his own headline.

In actuality, leading scientists are divided on the seriousness of the perceived global warming threats. While the cries of ignorance are abound, there is not an overwhelming amount of scientific data that supports climate change disaster.

Underneath Mark’s PR job, his point is that, ecologically, we have nothing to worry about. But what is this conclusion based on? Someone else said so. But why did that person say so? How do rising temperatures affect ecosystems? What does hotter air actually do to the environment, and how does this affect the human population? Though they seem like obvious questions to bring up in an article on global warming, Mark just glides right around them, preferring instead to just cherry-pick some "experts" from either side and call it a day. A vast majority of the scientific community does indeed believe that global warming, a result of increased CO2 emissions, does have lasting effects. This isn’t some radical hairy-fringes brainwashing; this is chapter 13 in a textbook I’m holding in my hand right now.

Measurements made on bubbles of air trapped in Greenland and Antarctic ice deposits show that there was little change in CO2 concentration in the ten thousand years before 1860 [which coincides with intensifying industrializing in Western countries - ed.]. The CO2 content of the atmosphere has gone up by over 20 percent since 1860 and is today increasing faster than ever. The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is currently 27 percent higher than it has been at any time in the past 650,000 years.

Once industrialization become widespread and far-reaching, CO2 concentration throughout the atmosphere rose. More CO2 concentration bulked up the earth’s greenhouse effect, according to Konrad Krauskopf and Arthur Beiser’s twelfth edition of The Physical Universe, ©Mcgraw-Hill, 2008.

    "As fossil fuels continue to be burned at a high rate, the greenhouse ‘window’ of CO2 becomses a better trap for heat and the atmosphere will continue to warm up," according to Krauskopf and Beiser.  The proliferation of greenhouse gases produces a global warming feedback loop: as Earth’s average temperature rises, more ice melts. With less ice, sunlight is absorbed instead of being reflected back into space, making the temperature rise further. Krauskopf and Beiser go on:

On the basis of plausible assumptions, the best guess is that the average temperature in a hundred years will be between 1.4°C and 5.8°C higher than it is now. Even the lower figure represents an extremely quick jump, a warming rate nearly 40 times faster than the warming that ended the most recent Ice Age. At a 5.8° increase, the world would be an unrecognizably different place.

But that’s all just "scientific research," which is frequently the least persuasive point one can make in a red state. So if the back-and-forth thing is more your style - as if science is a basketball game - I defer to an international group of scientists who recently convened to report on the effects of global warming. Their results line up nicely with the figures in my textbook. Almost like lovers spooning (actually I don’t really know much about stuff like that). It’s as though their research is based on universally accepted nuggets of information. "Facts," so to speak. Before dismissing them as batty doomsday rhetoreticians, global-warming maniacs, whatever, be aware that they do have a large part of the scientific community behind them. They are the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they won a Nobel Prize last year. They are among the scientists Mark sourced for his column. Too bad he didn’t manage to fit their research in with his argument.

 

I’m kind of puzzled. Former yearbook staffer and passive-aggressive gesturist Adrianne DeWeese seems to be on fire with her profile articles, artfully translating slices of someone’s life into something strikingly detailed, so that the readers get a coherent snapshot of her subject. Case and point: "Retirement community resident has seen little change by aging process," in which I found out that at 95, Helen Toburen can beat me at basketball. Whatever; I’d still win at cigarette smoking.

But why can’t looker-awayer Adrianne do the same thing with stories that are not profiles? Case and point: the first two paragraphs of "Study finds more people living to, past 100:"

A recent study suggests the compression of morbidity and compression of disability might be separate phenomena, making it easier for people to live to age 100.
Compression involves delaying morbidity or disability so it takes up a smaller percentage of a person’s total lifespan. The study was published Feb. 11 in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

By the time I finished her article, I had prostate cancer.

 

 

The Collegian is running a "four-part series investigating the disconnect among certain student demographics on campus.
Apparently if you’re not young, white, and single you’ve come to the wrong fucking school, bro. Scope it:

Dealing with "the other" - meaning anything unusual or out of the ordinary [ed. note: thanks for clarifying!] - also can make American students uncomfortable to try and understand people from different backgrounds, said Bradley Shaw, associate professor of modern languages and director of international and area studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.

"I think that we are sometimes a little hesitant or a little reticent when we’re dealing with things that we don’t understand or don’t know," Shaw said.

Did people from Kansas not know this already? Forget I asked.

In other news, people who are married or have kids have trouble merging with the general population of wingnutty barhopping vikings about campus because they never get to go to the really cool parties.

 

Many students agree there is a disconnect among traditional and nontraditional students on campus.

As a traditional student, Shane Howard, senior in electronic journalism, said it is not easy to connect with nontraditional students.

"There is a natural disconnect between traditional students and nontraditional," Howard said. "Nontraditional students are forced to do things that traditional students don’t have to do, like taking care of kids. It makes them less free to do spur-of-the-moment things."

Shane, you don’t wanna hang out with these kids anyway. There’s nothing like watching a bunch of 20-year-old drama brats sip tequila out of each others’ bellybuttons to make you really sit down, take a long hard look at what your life really is and how it has led up to this moment, and then just go to hell with it and have an OD, but not on any of this crystal meth/jenkem the kids are into these days. You kick it old school. You kick it opium style.

 

Alex Peak and the rest of y’all think you’re all so stressed in college, probably because in high school you got good grades without studying or doing homework and still managed to be peppy and popular, but suddenly a few years later it’s getting close to finals and the teachers just fucking pile on those exams like Halloween candy and you’ve actually got to study. So listen up kids: that is not stress. Stress is fighting 10 miles of highway traffic to eek into a job where you juggle your coworkers’ backbiting, passive-aggressive bullshit with the demands of a boss whose idea of encouragement is not firing you, and after ten, eleven, twelve hours of that every day you fight traffic again going home so you can catch the last fifteen minutes of Grey’s, which is really all you wanted all day long, and as you nod off for the night, you ponder what your life has come to and has it all been worth it or whatever. Then you wake up three days later in a Mexican jail, with a heroine dependency and a case of the runs, right in front of two middle-aged Federales who are seconds away from cumming in your face, and you think to yourself, "shit, this is just like high school." The awesome thing about college is that once in a while you can just call up someone sexy and interesting, get high and play hookey, and just come back whenever you get around to it. I, unfortunately, am old, and those days are far behind me.

In "Army pays professors $4.5 million to build laser," Scotty beamed reporter Corene Brisendine into the physics department to scout around for new life and new civilizations or whatever. She found a superweapon! Okay, maybe not.

"Star Trek" pushes the limits of space by "going where no man has gone before." Two K-State physics professors and an associate professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering are pushing the boundaries of technology by developing laser technology that might be applicable to futuristic technologies similar to those viewed on science-fiction shows like "Star Trek."

The professors are attempting to build the fastest pulsing laser in history by using attosecond optical technology based on recollision and gating, said Charles L. Cocke, university distinguished professor of physics. An attosecond is .25 billionths, billionth of a second."

In a remarkable display of self-discipline, I am carefully avoiding any "LaserCocke" jokes, which should allow me to focus more on how much of a nerd Corene is. See, nerds are meticulous, loving to do research and find out new and fascinating stuff, pondering diverse applications for new technology.

"On an episode of "Star Trek Voyager," Capt. Janeway uses a hand-held device to check if her food was edible. On another episode, a crewmember uses a device to scan a rock formation on an alien planet. Another crewmember heals an injured patient by waving a device over the patient’s forehead."

Or they bat their eyes at someone and borrow his Star Trek collection, whatever. It’s still hard work. When I went out on assignment, Adrianne also used to make us gather information with our Tricorders. I found them cumbersome, and kept mine hidden whenever I made out with hot alien chicks, which I did every episode of the third season.