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]

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!).

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.
 

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.

"The week passed for most citizens of the United States with little awareness of the powder keg ready to blow in Europe." And so begins this week’s issue of Neocon Weekly in the Collegian’s Op Ed page.

Brett King’s article focuses on the release of Fitna, a 15-minute documentary made by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, that reportedly shows video segments of militant Muslims declaring war on Western civilization, in addition to Quran quotes encouraging violence.

(As if those particular soundbites are the entire Quran. Like they’re even put into context in their respective passages).

In 1984 (what, don’t you fucking read?), Orwell writes about a daily ritual called the two-minutes’ hate, in which the ruling political party gathers all of its members together in front of a bigscreen TV and makes them watch a video depicting an Enemy of the People maligning the nation. Whipped into senseless fury, the party members shout and throw shit at the screen, expressing their surging rage against whoever the authorities tell them to.

 

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Sounds like their team is winning! So why, exactly, are they so pissed? Their authoritarian government has made almost every aspect of human nature illegal (especially fucking); the people come to the two-minutes’ hate so they can expel the violence and humanity simmering beneath their consciousness. That way no aggression will remain to direct against authoritarianism, the true enemy of humanity.

 

"The only hate speech which seems to be spread is coming from the radical Muslims themselves," wrote King, failing to grasp in the slightest how this film is patently offensive. That, presumably, is always the problem: willful ignorance.

The film is a one-sided portrayal of the Muslim world; a view that panders to racism and fear. Flyover-state neocons will see this and take this video to be the truth about all of Islam. They will write op-ed columns in newspapers across America that will marginalize all Muslims based on this small, vocal segment. I know how it works all too well; in L.A. we’ve all watched "Bowling for Columbine" ten thousand times. We think all Midwesterners are exactly like Tim McVeigh. Also: I learned all about women from 2 girls, 1 cup.

"Racial divides in Europe have increased substantially over the past decades as Muslims have immigrated to many European countries," writes Brett. "Refusing to integrate to European society and committing themselves to continue the practice of Sharia law within the borders of their host country has produced a difficult situation for many." Solution: strike down freedom of religion. Replace it with a border fence!

"Film should not be condemned but studied," reads the column’s headline, somewhat awkwardly. Yes, the video should be studied; but not in isolation, like a formula that purports to tell us exactly how all Muslims supposedly tick. Rather, it should — wait for it — be put into context with the rest of Islamic society.

An enormous portion of Muslim society has been quick to try to distance itself from the rhetoric on Arab TV stations. Yesterday, Radwan Abu Ayyash, deputy minister of culture in Ramallah, was quoted in the New York Times on this exact issue:

What is not fine is to build up children with a culture of hatred, of closed minds, a culture of sickness. I don’t think they always know what they are creating. People use one weapon, language, without realizing that they also use it against themselves.

Seriously man, front-page story. Don’t you fucking read? Of course you don’t. "The week passed for most citizens of the United States with little awareness…"

As usual, everything’s going to shit, according to Blake Osborn’s latest column. Whatever, just read on.

The fixation of the authenticity in politics and in food is a result of the overarching homogeneity in U.S. culture, according to a recent article in Time magazine. Legendary business consultants James Gilmore and Joseph Pine II, who together wrote "Authenticity," said in the article that America has "toxic levels of inauthenticity." As a result, they claim it is essential for businesses, if they want to thrive, to "start selling experiences" instead of products.

No longer are buyers concerned with only price and quality. Instead, they respond more to the product or the person as an experience. Companies must be "transparent," meaning they are what they claim to be, or they can openly fake their authenticity by offering cheap substitutes blah blah blah."

And in a single stroke, the entire public relations industry is unmasked!

Then he meanders on to his favorite target: teh Internetz.

The "virtualization of life, with friends meeting on Facebook.com and the increasing popularity of blogs, increases the desire for more authentic experiences with others…"

Meeting on Facebook? You can do that now?

But he may have a point. There was that time I went to milfhunter.com and since then I’ve been jonesing for Kylie Minogue. I just can’t get her out of my head. Her loving is all I think about!

Oh, right, I was supposed to say something about online degrees, wasn’t I? Well, how do you get access to education if you’re, like, ridonculously busy, can’t make the commute to class, but really need that extra certification?

Online classes are "not in par, in my opinion, with traditional classes at top-tier universities," a source told Osborne. "The general ambience of the class provides a better experience."

I would have to agree…in regards to education. I would prefer the interactive atmosphere of a classroom to the computer screen. Technology has its limits.

We must not forget the true meaning of authenticity, which is more than a blank computer screen or an ATM.

Authenticity? Nothing provokes an authentic existential crisis like a blinking cursor.

 

1. Observe a disturbing "trend" among the young’uns. Examples:

    a. Drinking diet soda.
    b. The interwebz.
    c. Fellatio.

2. Google or use Lexis-Nexis to find evidence documenting the spread of this trend.

    a. News flash: lots of us drink diet soda!
    b. News flash: lots of us use Facebook!
    c. Lexis-Nexis didn’t have much to say about this. I had use a different site for my research.

3. Keep quoting the articles until 80% of your column is really someone else’s column.

4. Use your last two or three paragraphs to decry this phenomenon as the downfall of civilization as we know it. Examples:
    
    a. Diet Dr. Pepper does not, in fact, taste more like regular Dr. Pepper!
    b. Facebook is the Diet Dr. Pepper of human activity.
    c. Speaking of Facebook, this really oughta be a Superpoke.

There! Next step: type it up on your mom’s old Smith-Corona (because computers destroy your soul. Not Macs, though). Have your "copyeditor" run spellcheck, and you’ve written Blake Osborn’s next column!

In "Hopped up: Mixing energy drinks, alcohol common despite health risks" - a thorough, nuanced article in today’s Collegian, Jonathan Garten provides the recipe for a Jager Bomb (Jagermeister, Red Bull) and then, bafflingly, warns us not to drink it!

"Energy drink cocktails…can cause a lower perception of intoxication, heart complications, and dehydration."

According to Dr. Priyantha Ranaweera, cardiologist at Mercy Regional, "mixing energy drinks and alcohol can cause people to drink for a longer period of time than they normally would. The caffeine in a can of Red Bull or Monster could offset drowsiness brought on by drinking alcohol."

What - you expected some smartass commentary? I’m taking notes! Please doctor, continue:

"It doesn’t make sense for people to mix alchohol and energy drinks," Ranaweera said, apparently unaware that she just explained it.

"I mean, how far are they willing to go to get drunk?" she ponders.

One presumes this question to be rhetorical; but really, in these trying times, I find it takes more effort to be sober.

Earlier today, Collegian writer and looker-awayer Adrianne let us in on her favorite workout songs - angry breakup music! But who wants to think about some douchey ex while you tone up? For me, a healthy part of the grieving process is to ignore the ex and fixate on pornstars. Therefore, I’ve selected a few choice tunes which I think are better suited for pumping iron.

James Brown: "Payback"
I don’t know about you, but something about remembering to walk up to someone and kick his ass really spurs me to go that extra mile in the weight room. Plus, you know, the song is uhh, funky (I’ve gotta practice saying that right).

Duke Ellington: "Sentimental Love"
The reason I go work out in the first place is to seduce hot chicks. What does it matter if I can do so after I leave or while I’m still there? Smooth jazz puts everyone in the right mood. I hate when I sidle up to some skinny blonde Jessica or Megan with my very best line ("Baby, don’t act like you don’t remember me") and she tasers me. Who would taser me to smooth jazz?

Theme song from Terminator 2: Judgement Day
That reverb of solid metal set to a sober military rhythm reminds me of what lies in store for me, and for all mankind: watching Sarah Connor Chronicles on veoh.com. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

Dance Dance Revolution techno music
Because, to tell you the truth, I’m not at the gym. I’m in the Stuni game room. Playing Dance Dance Revolution.

80s Pop music.
Don’t judge me.

Another Collegian columnist recently decried lazy Facebooking young adults as the corrosion that will soon make all of society crumble.

"We could spend our money in better ways," said Mark Wampler. We just need the vision to see those ways — clothes for the homeless, food for the poor and child support for single parents are just a few ideas." Guess he didn’t read Monday’s front-page story about students volunteering in New Orleans, building houses and taking care of stray animals. Seriously, how could you miss it? There was a photo of a hot chick with a newly-adopted dog right with the article. But I digress.

"How many people have "drinking" (probably not bottled water)…as one of their Facebook.com hobbies?"
As far as I know, alcohol predates writing and even Facebook as a staple of civilization. For a good reason: drinking is and has always been the best defense against self-important judgementalism.

At least Mark is doing his part to stem the tide of cultural decay. He sculpts figures out of chicken nuggets! Maybe he even does it while the poor press against the window and look on! And that’s not all! "You might have seen my friends and me a couple Saturdays ago, handing out ‘green party water’ and green cookies in Aggieville. We had a lot of fun trying to be creative by hanging out with people who we felt weren’t making the most imaginative choices with their lives. The most common resonse we got was, ‘Wow, it’s so cool you guys are doing this."

When I think of someone who just met me two seconds ago me passing judgement on my unimaginative life choices, I know without a doubt that person must be the absolute coolest! Thank you for emitting your artistic farts among the peasants, instead of hording them away in the newsroom. They smell baroque, pregnant with technique and dadaism, twinkling like fresh shrapnel on a summer afternoon. They are like nothing we’ve ever experienced before.

Prince Harry had secretly been serving as an army officer in Afghanistan. The news outlets in on the secret decided, for the sake of security, not to report this information. The Drudge Report got wind of it, blasted it front and center, and Britain was forced to recall the prince. Adam Phan, in the deceptively-headlined "Journalists should be punished for ignoring media embargo," argued that Matt Drudge should, well, be punished for ignoring the media embargo.

It should be noted that Drudge is simply not a journalist. He’s some guy with a blog. Like this one, but more famous and wingnutty and whatnot.

And as much as I want Drudge to be shipped off and waterboarded in a prison somewhere in the poorest, filthiest, most snake-ridden part of the world, punishing him would be an unacceptable kneecapping to freedom of the press. Without that basic principle, democracy is a sham, like in Russia; this particular blog could not exist, and I would have no reason to live. Other than, you know, the redolent spring breeze and all the people who love me and stuff.

There’s no such thing as a media embargo. The media can print anything that’s true. It is their job - and a necessary one - that they reveal, not conceal, information. So they found out what Prince Hal’s been up to. Kind of weird anyway, keeping him squirreled away like that. How long can you expect a figure as high-profile as the crown goddam prince of England to stay hidden? Hopefully his commanding officer, Dumbledore, showed him where to get all the primo Afghani opium, while his old pal Falstaff showed him what to do with it.

For the past seven weeks or so, the tone of the media has been, "Hill, you’re gonna lose, so you might as well just quit." At last, an op-ed columnist has offered a concise, realistic analysis of Hillary’s campaign and her treatment by the media. It’s not the lazy, puerile propaganda you’ll see every day in the NY Times (zing!); it’s trenchant, informed, and observant. And it’s from Adam Phan in the fucking Collegian. Behold!

"Clinton also drags alongside her the heaviest set of burdens. She is widely perceived as a conniving carpet-bagger with no sense of humor and a titanic sense of entitlement - an eclectic set of assertions that are part truth, part exaggeration and part fiction entirely. They generally betray more about the perceiver than the senator herself."

"The most grievous insult is that she is "unlikable," an insipid ad hominem whose hurtfulness is matched only by its vagueness, and the most dimwitted insult is that she is "unelectable," a circular contention that inexplicably has managed to become a piece of its own evidence. And this is not even to mention the effect of Clinton’s most fervent and visible surrogate, mixed as it might have been."

I may, however, be biased. I like Hillary. Yes, I know she probably won’t win. I tend to root for the underdog on general principle. Obama has said:

"To achieve the change the country wants, we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents, and Republicans together to get things done."

Get what done? Republicans have been getting "things" done for the past eight years. I don’t want them to get anything done ever again. Lots of teh yung peepl say we want someone who will put an end to the petty partisan cattiness of the last few years, someone who will transform the political climate by reaching across party boundries, etc etc etc.

Not I!

I need someone who won’t put up with wingnut bullshit. At all.

I need someone tough enough to kick their fucking heads in, carve them up like pie, dump their corpses out back with the Dahlia, the same way they’ve kicked the American middle class aside for the last eight years, and I firmly believe Hillary is the best candidate to represent my venomous fury. I think that out of all the candidates, Hillary is the one I’d most like to see in a fistfight. I bet she’d be beaten to a bloody pulp, left for dead, and seconds after you turn your back and walk away, she’d lurch upright like Dracula coming out of his coffin, pounce on you like a five-thousand-dollar whore, garrote you like a Harlem crack-fiend, and that, frankly, is exactly what I want to see in a Democratic president.

Piano Man: This is the best Collegian profile I’ve ever seen. First, it’s got a punny headline. Smarmy bastards like me lrrrve puns. Next, Adrianne leads with a scene:

"Wingfield’s instrument - the piano - sits toward a back corner with empty space surrounding it. Students and faculty members gather around the piano each day. A slim man dressed in dark pants, a dressy jacket and wire-rimmed glasses, Wingfield, performs piece after piece and serves as the musical vehicle as he accompanies students and faculty members each day."

So cinematic!

She proceeds with a deep, thorough portrait of campus microcelebrity Bill Wingfield, pretty much writing with as much style as Wingfield plays the piano. By the end, I vaguely got the idea of how awesome it is to be around Bill Wingfield. Then I remembered I have no rhythm, musical talent, or even anything funny to say about this article, so I hit the bars.

[Update: I just passed Adrianne on campus and she did that thing where you look at someone then pretend to be looking somewhere else, INSTEAD of just mutely nodding or waving hello, while you pass. I used to be like that too, but then I turned 15. Imagine being in a newsroom with a "grown woman" who acts like a high school brat. Still, this was a good article.] 

When Matt Combes wrote his anal sex column, two things ran through my mind. First: this is a sure way to get all the red staters on campus to get their heads out of their asses and slide some cock in there instead, which - judging by the student body reaction - is what they all secretly want. Second: although it’s informative and frank, it seemed kind of crappy to sort of throw anal sex in their faces; it’s insensitive to their tastes. Nevertheless, there it was. Matt pretty much managed to moon us, and on principle, I always approve of a well-timed ass.

Nevertheless, something bugged me about it, and I couldn’t figure out what until I read Whitney Hodgins’ better-written column, then went back and read Matt’s recent oral sex piece. Matt takes care, early on, to cite statistics and warn us about disease. At the end, when he pats us on the ass and sends us on our merry way, my penis began to feel abnormally cold and dead, as though my mom just had The Talk with me.

Shouldn’t sex columns be, well, sexy? When I go buy my next Porsche, the first buzzkiller to remind me to buckle up will be promptly run over. We read these things for the softer, more personal angle: the sturm und drang of awkward hookups, the agony of slow, drawn-out rejection, the acrid sting of betrayal, the intimate warmth of the layer of sweat between you and the leggy tattooed hipster (I actually have no idea what this feels like), and so on and so forth. Instead, he’s all "90.1 percent of men and 88.3 percent of women have engaged in heterosexual oral sex." Toe-curling epiphany: men and women like to go down on each other. Also: "herpes hits almost anywhere in the mouth region, and along with gonorrhea, can get in your throat." Or, in this case, VD can be written into a column and spread to unsuspecting promiscuous bastards like me.

Drinking age should span all college students. At first, I thought Aubree Casper’s op-ed piece would be shameless, thoughtless cheerleading for the cause of under-21 drinking. But she presented a persuasive, carefully researched argument, backed up by figures (plus, she’s kind of hot): the presence of a university brings people to town; if you allow more people to drink (responsibly), you could also tax their purchases and give some of that money back to the school. That way, everyone’s happy and everyone’s drunk, which makes them happier. We all win! Next round’s on you!

Aubree, I’m sure an intelligent, pretty columnist like you has no trouble obtaining cocktails when the moment is right. However, if you find yourself in dire straits, just, umm, leave me a blog comment. We’ll work something out.

On a related note, what’s with all the cute, smart women writing columns today? The Collegian is kind of making me wet. Thank goodness my martini’s still dry. If the paper hadn’t printed another preachy, unoriginal Blake Osborn column ("As college students we should heed the thrifty admonitions of older generations and not get tangled in the spending spiral that drains so many accounts"), I’d take this as a sign of the end times.

Today’s sex column, Students should improve sex IQ by understanding myths, courtesy of Whitney Hodgin, was written with humor, class, and balanced with sensitivity toward red-state tastes. I’m sure I’ll never see another article like it.

She gingerly reveals the typical deep-seated sexual fears of, surprisingly, men. Do women fake it? I’ve always found their blank, disinteresed expressions; their derisive amusement over my penis length, and their post-coital mantra: "Hey, it’s been real, but I’ve got a better party to hit up" to be extremely convincing. But Whitney meant something different by "it": "toe-curling orgasms." No, I’ve found that they tend to get bored and fall asleep before they can get around to faking those.

Does size matter? Dave, a K-State human sexuality instructor, said "As long as a guy is two inches long, he’ll get the job done." That’s right - this is serious work! Annisa, a K-State senior, did not agree: "I don’t think two inches would do it," which is not good news for me.

"On the other hand," she continued, "a guy could be really big and not know what to do with it, which is worse." I know what to do with mine. When it’s sunny, I hang my wet laundry across it. That way, all day long, it smells like fresh detergent, although I have to suffer the effects of fabric softener.

Full disclosure: I met Whitney at an English-majorey speech or presentation or something last semester. She suggested that I write at the Collegian, and because she is a cute geek girl, I did not disagree. Sadly, after I had been there for a few weeks, Whitney disappeared from the newsroom, leaving me nothing to look forward to except the aloof self-importance of the remaining more dedicated, if mediocre, writers. Occasionally I would look over at the old, un-manned Macintosh by the window and hope a left-wing geek girl would just materialize into the seat, but it just never happened, which is as good a metaphor as any for my time in Kansas.

Criminologist discusses gender, urban inequality among African Americans

If Adrianne doesn’t want me to criticize her, why does everything about her March 14 story, from the headline to the ending quote, sound like it was written by a first-year PR robot?

I’m pretty sure she has, tucked away in her repertoire, a passive-aggressive gesture of disapproval for writers who (1) lead with a quote, and (2) lead with an inflated, verbose block of text. So how does she justify this: "Youths’ descriptions fit quite closely to scholars’ examinations of how structural inequalities negatively impact the ability to generate social ties and protective networks necessary to combat crime."

I’d probably paraphrase thusly: "Experts claim that a in white-male centered society, crime is the only path to social mobility for poor urban ethnic kids, and - surprise! - poor urban kids agree." And confirm it with the expert, of course, who in this case was "Jody Miller, associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri - St. Louis."

At the end of the article, a source says "It was really interesting to hear a qualitative interview process and getting to see the actual quotes of what people saw in their communities and neighborhoods."

See that? His reaction to the presentation was "It was really interesting," perhaps as opposed to "It was really boring" or, more specifically, "I sat in the ninth row and felt up my girlfriend." People spew "it was interesting…" quotes when they don’t actually have an opinion or any information. At least he provided a handy, concise summary of the event. Maybe that’s how the lede should sound?

Kids these days! Anything for a thrill! When I was young it was circle jerking. Nowadays it’s auto-erotic asphyxiation!

According to K-State extension youth development specialist Elaine Johannes in Study reveals hike in choking for pleasure, “When there are cases of children strangling themselves or having friends do it, it can be difficult to know if the child is doing it to get a high or if it is a suicide attempt.”

I’m disappointed that Kristin didn’t even mention the OBVIOUS third option in her article: emo S&M. Include that angle and her figures would rise as sharply as the crack of a leather whip.

Blake Osborn in Students should be concerned about, fix unhealthy habits: We all spend too much time surfing the intertubes and eating pizza and it’s making us fat, unlike Blake, who “has learned how much willpower it takes to maintain a nutritious diet.”

Well, I always I worked off the calories by stumbling around hungover to class. Staggering in awkward semicircles is twice as aerobic as making a direct, efficient beeline. Other than that, this is another work of DUH brought to you by a self-promoting windbag. Why not come up with something relevant and topical for your next column? And for fitness’ sake, write it with a quill, on parchment, and then physically walk over to the newsroom and hand it in. If you send it by email, it will just go straight to your thighs.

In Brett King’s latest neocon rant, he compares the presidential debate to a circus. No fucking kidding. A CIRCUS.

As we near the end of the state primaries leading up to the Republican and Democratic national conventions, many voters are beginning to realize how each party has put forth candidates who have no business or experience running this country.

With fun-house mirrors, candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., enters the tent showing people distorted images of his experience and the future.

Apparently the Collegian is phoning in its analogies these days. But what motivated the need to wax all creative with the extended metaphor? Does having a viable black candidate remind him of a minstrel show? Does having a viable female candidate remind him of a burlesque show? Because both of those are absolutely HI-larious. Just like a circus! Maybe having strong Democratic candidates reminds him that the Elephants should have been roped in four years ago. Zing!

Hannah Blick offers more evidence that college is the new high school: Parents of new generation more involved in college students’ life decisions.

Running with a report from CNN regarding “hovering” parents, Hannah details the constant contact and influence of overinvolved parents on students. Biweekly phone calls, attempts at frequent updates from the registrar, and even negotiating job contracts.

According to K-State’s office of student life, “This is only crippling the [child] from achieving success on their own.”

Wasn’t it better when you’d flee home angry and bristling with resentment for a distant authority figure and young and dumb and full of come, then return years later still adrift and goalless? It builds character. Not that I know anything about character.

Brett King writes in "Kosovo not justified as separate country from Serbia…" 

"Clinton’s evidence of genocide was just as substantial as Bush’s weapons of mass destruction argument in Iraq."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Oh my god. Huge difference of a factual nature: It can be proved that WMDs never existed in Iraq; it can also be proved that Slobodan Milosovic was in fact responsible for the deaths of thousands of ethnic Albanians. See the difference? Of course not. Oh, wait -

"A Wall Street Journal investigative piece…demonstrated how the number of Albanians killed was greatly inflated and some of the bodies found showed no evidence of mutilation."

I see. Not really that many deaths, and no evidence of mutilation on some of them. Well, that’s that. Carry on. While we’re on the subject, I’d like to take issue with the so-called "Holocaust survivors" that were only in Auschwitz for HALF the time of the other, ahem, residents. Stop whining and come back when you’ve got a real tragedy.

As detailed in Residents ‘Plunge’ to raise money, Manhattanites and members of Phi Beta Sigma dove into the ice-cold waters of Tuttle Creek Lake as part of a fundraiser for the Special Olympics.

Doesn’t Scrooge Mcduck do this exact same thing, except instead of water, it’s gold? We should try it that way next year.

52nd-annual KSU Rodeo thrills contestants, viewers
To win 2008’s Miss Rodeo title, sophomore Janae Skelton "had to go through a pageant process which consisted of a written rodeo-knowledg test, a horsmanship contest, a personal interview with the rodeo’s judges, a modeling competition and speech."

A model dressed up as a cowgirl, eh? Why in the world did I miss this? Oh, yeah.

Latin is not a dead language, sharpens vocabulary skills
I couldn’t agree more, Blake! In fact, after reading this article, I felt inspired to take a crash course in Sanskrit, because it’s so close to Indo-European - widely considered the origin of so many Western language families. Now, I like totally have a much broader appreciation of modern culture. For example, I can understand the elusive LOLatin tongue:

"I’m in ur Sennit, stabbn ur Seezr!"

"Almust invaded ya…
wit mah invizible leejun."

"Tha die…
I haz cast it!"

Now, if only your column could help me translate the brutal language of love. Ha ha! Thank goodness for Annette Lawless’ advice yesterday: Sex secrets can be damaging, yet add touch of mystery to relationship.

Today in the Fourum, someone predictably called Annette a "prude" because she dumped the grown man who sleeps with high school girls and videotapes it. I had no idea R. Kelly reads the Collegian! Someone else also left this servicey nugget: 

"Hey, Annette Lawless: if you’d like to learn more about mysterious sex secrets, you should come by TKE this weekend."

Did they just invite her over for a fratbang? Those boys, so classy. Real ladykillers, one might say.

 

It occurs to me that I’ve gone slack on shitpicking at this paper. I haven’t paid attention to the ambiguous headlines, the typos, and the other mediocrity on these pages. And picking on you guys always makes me feel better about myself. So without further ado:

Just kidding. There will be some ado, regarding the candidacy of Pirates and Ninjas: Elise Podhajsky’s interviews cleared a lot of things up for me. While both sides have put forth excellent candidates, and either of them will most likely reinstate the right to duel at dawn, anywhere, I’m gonna have to throw my endorsement behind the Pirates. Ninjas, although you’ve got mad skillz, your ultraconservative anti-rum rhetoric bothers me a lot. Additionally, although you believe ninjas can offer students the best security, I don’t think you’re in any position to fend off the invincible Armada. There; it’s done. Now go disembowel yourselves with honor.

No more bra-burning: Movements have progressed much since 70s. Seriously, as a reader, all the information I need is right there in the headline. Had I known that beforehand, I wouldn’t have had to snooze through "The types of organizing that typefied social and political protest in the 1960s and 1970s have been supported and sometimes supplanted by technological advances and increasingly complex cultural identities."

I say the types of organizing that typefied social and political protest included more fucking drugs, which made everything look more colorful, and color is exactly what this article needs.

K-State Rodeo starts tonight at Weber Arena
"…K-State will compete well in goat tying, barrel racing, and calf roping, and….there is a member of the team that is good at the team roping event. The girls are in really good shape as far as being where they need to be."

They sure are.

Coulter uses shock, biased language to remain in spotlight
A minor objection: Coulter hasn’t been in the spotlight for some time. Why don’t we discuss someone more immediate and relevant to K-Staters, like Brigitte Brecheisen - the Ann Coulter of this very campus? Yeah, call her out and get right up in her grill and put the smack down. What, are you scrrrd?

4 local restaurants lend support to cancer-research fundraiser

"Booyah" is the term chosen to represent the recent community effort to combat cancer, according to Amanda Keim.

Amanda’s loose, fluid writing style is a dollop of pure in-your-face exuberance, which is exactly how a word like "booyah" feels. Sort of like hearing Robocop explain nipple rings. Please Amanda, go on.

"Booyah is a term that represents feelings of euphoric celebration upon fighting through extreme adversity and overcoming daunting obstacles, and we’re using it in this context to emphasize our belief that we will conquer cancer in our time," said her source, who could barely contain his own feelings of euphoric celebration.

I think what Amanda’s trying to say is that Booyah is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That’s what Booyah is, when we’ve all got to be tough enough and rough enough to fight cancer. From the hip. Get it?

According to Brett King’s latest right-wing ejaculation, gun control was a measure Nazi Germany took to ensure ethnic minorities were powerless when the government wanted to haul a bunch of them off to death camps. Gun control in America will be like Nazism in America. Get it? GUN CONTROL = NAZISM.

Brett, if you vote Democrat and elect a leader who’s black or a woman, you won’t have to worry about it.

Nevertheless, the central issue remains: will violence be stamped out if we let students with conceal-and-carry permits take guns around school and into classes? You bet it will! It’s like with the atom bomb; when only one nation had it, those white people basically blasted whatever Asians they wanted to; now that a whole bunch of people have nukes, the world is a much safer place! Still not convinced? Consider this chart:

As you can clearly see, the more guns in circulation, the fewer deaths. Until everyone gets them and we all kill each other. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it. The important thing is to take the first step and arm as many people as we can.

Enough quibbling over figures. Why stop with just letting students pack heat? I say we split the campus up, let the elites carrying concealed each be responsible for a different "territory," and the rest of us can just pay protection money!

Also: thanks for sharing that "Hearty Stew" recipe. But I’m kind of a city boy, so instead of venison, I use the flesh of urban schoolchildren. The only drawback is that it tends to be high in crack. On the plus side, it’s high in crack.

Instructors sacrifice comforts to teach in Afganistan
Sacrifice comforts? Of Manhattan? Holly Campbell, are you serious? This place fucking sucks.

U.S. should appreciate life free of forced-child warfare
No kidding, Blake Osborn. Way to make the issue of forced-child warfare really hit home. Now I feel bad, as though the "violence we see in our movies and video games" somehow encourages forced-child warfare in Africa. Wait.

Feminists should reach beyond U.S by Aubree Casper, and while I’m at it, a note on reading comprehension: so-called "hippie-feminists" know that "feeling pretty is something some truly enjoy." The point of books like "Beauty & Misogyny" - which, by the way, I have never read - is that many of us have been bred to accept only a heavily made-up, pornified ideal as the face & body of Beauty. As a culture, we should grow up and expand our understanding of beauty so it reflects something realistic, something that includes real women, not just big boobs and Holy Oil.

Pirates vs. Ninjas in the SGA Election: Together, these articles left me with a deep and thorough understanding of the political process. Perhaps they lack insight into a few key platform issues (Pirates: what will you do about the menace of scurvy? Ninjas: where can I get one of those Naruto headbands?), but overall, this is what political reporting should be! Good work, Rebecca Perez. Willow: superb and amazing! That is all.

Wednesday the Kansas Board of Regents rejected a motion to cap tuition.

According to the Collegian, "The purpose of the final motion was to avoid creating a cap while still finding a way to ensure that tuition prices do not increase by such a great percentage as they have in previous years."

Yeah, so about that other way to keep tuition down. Did the reporter leave before the Board got around to that part of the meeting? I’m dying to know. It’s like that time Curly pointed over to the left, then while one stooge looked around for buried treasure or something, the others dashed away to the right.

Just knowing that my pathetic blog got some attention from an editor (wow!) re-ignited the spirit of my vigorous Collegian-bashing. I skimmed through the past two weeks of Collegians looking for typos, stupidity, and basically whatever material I could find. All in all, meh.

I did notice one thing - which I have noted before: this paper hardly contains any news. There are often profiles: a math professor, the president’s son, a community service group; but unless a planned event - such as a speech or a meeting - takes place, we hardly get the impression that anything ever actually happens here.

Having said that, Feb. 4’s Collegian was phenomenal. Monica Castro’s article on a student who has survived cancer and joined Relay for Life was nuanced, informative, and brief, seamly transitioning between the student’s story and the success of the project. Well done.

Aubree’s op-ed piece: "Students should relax, learn to give up control of their lives." I loved this essay, but I have no idea what it was about. That’s good! Keep us guessing! Clarity is like sex: keeping it out of reach only heightens desire.

Thank you, Matt Combes, for being gay enough to tell us all about staging a virtuoso anal sex performance, because I couldn’t just google that. Seriously, it’s good that this kind of stuff would make it into the paper. I would suggest, however, that we ease the readership into an anal sex article - lubricate their expectations, so to speak, instead of just bending them over and ramming it into their eyes. Your comment board is lit up with the back and forth of "Anal sex is nasty!" vs "Stop being so prudish!" yadda yadda yadda. I’m not really sure what to think about the "I’m gay, therefore I’m an anal sexpert" angle Matt took - it probably just made him look obnoxious and he didn’t necessarily need that background info to gain street cred (ass cred?) with the students.

Brett King has been publishing recipes! So helpful. But he’s still hasn’t let us know what goes well with his favorite dish: Flesh of the Poor. I’m guessing he enjoys it with fava beans and a nice chianti.

Real life not about winning, money. Well, I’ve got no money and no winnings, and to be honest, I don’t quite see the point of going on. What gives?

Speaker, workshop promote use of nonviolent communication. As if violent “communication” is really an issue among middle-class college students.

Brett King: Tax rebate stimulus plan awards those who don’t pay.
Those who pay the most in taxes have the most money. Those who already have a lot of money are more likely to squirrel it away instead of spending it. Squirrelling it away does not stimulte the economy. Those who file tax returns but don’t pay - the reason is not that they’re shirking the IRS. The reason is that they just don’t make enough money to have to pay taxes. This special tax bracket, with the least money, these people are most likely to spend it right away, putting money into the hands of enormous private corporations (who also don’t pay taxes) we’ve come to know and lrrrve.

Glaring omissions in “City Council discusses contracts, transportation, blah blah blah.” The city will apparently go ahead and purchase property owned by O’Reilly’s Auto Parts so that O’Reilly’s can move to a different location.

Where, exactly, is the old property? Why is the city buying it, instead of a private purchaser? And if the city is already $3 million over budget and reluctant to make the deal, why did they go ahead and unanimously approve it? Inquiring minds should want to know.

Postponing sex can heighten desires, extend relationships - Annette Lawless
There are a great many jerkwads who despise their sexual partners immediately after sleeping with them. For the rest of us, life is short, and we should seize the day (night).

“Hold out for that first kiss.” “Repressing desire can only make it more powerful.” I guess the basic principle is the myth of “Acting like a fifteen year old is the key to happiness your whole life.”

I firmly believe that the sooner you have sex, the sooner you can have sex again.

Hyper-literate Bastard,

I worked very hard with you last semester and helped you when you were new at the Collegian. I stayed at the paper one too many times too late waiting on your content to come in. I did my best to work with you and how am I repaid? With rude blog comments about my reporting and writing, which I pour my entire heart and soul into. Did I ever insult your writing and reporting? Nope. I respect your decision to exercise free speech via your blog, but realize that your words are hurtful. I’ve worked my ass off for four years at K-State and at the Collegian, and while I’m not perfect and not even a "real" journalist yet, I don’t appreciate your words.

-Frustrated Editor

————————————————————————-

I believe all the problems with the Fourth Estate are right here in this self-indulgent "complaint." To illustrate:

1.    I didn’t criticize her personally. I didn’t even criticize her overall writing style, which is so bland it makes me want to slit my own throat just to make sure I can still feel. I criticized a specific element of a specific article she wrote. I also criticized other specific elements of other specific articles other Collegian staffers wrote. BFD. Yes, my tone was breezy and irreverent. Hello? That’s my writing style. She’d know that if she exercised any reading comprehension skills on the rest of my post; all my remarks were made in a catty, condescending voice. I’m not trying to tiptoe around the tender feelings of these so-called "writers." I’m trying to make fun of them. I won’t flinch. And I’ve got A LOT of material.

2.    She tried to work hard with me? That’s up for debate. Yes, I was extremely late on several articles. Not that she cares (she made it quite clear that her own crankiness is The Most Important Thing In The World), but when deadline came around, I was also studying for 18 credits worth of midterms AND working on ways to scrape up enough money to, you know, stay in school (out-of-state fees are a bee-hotch). I’m fairly sure this has happened to lots of Collegian staffers. Whenever I tried to talk to her, she’d act like she didn’t have time (BTW, impatient supervisors are a real pet peeve of mine. You sign on to a position of authority only if you have enough patience to sit down and engage other people. If you’re gonna sigh like you’re too important to be bothered with the paeons, well, grow up. "Working with people" implies a certain measure of patience and helpful, friendly advice, not arrogantly forcing people to pussyfoot around your frazzled nerves). She’d edit the story without reading it; moving chunks of text here and there, changing the flow of the story to make it suck, then leaving me to clean up and make new transitions so it did not, in fact, look like it was edited by a careless snob. The best part: whenever I turned in a story early and left it there for editors to review at their leisure, the next day, the story would appear in print with EXTRA GRAMMATICAL ERRORS (We copied and pasted but left out the prepositions! Oops!) or factual errors (copyeditors should probably not work their "magic" on numbers and figures).

3.    "Free speech?" Don’t be so dramatic. Make no mistake; this is not the Washington Post. This is a dumb blog nobody reads.

 

Fact is, there was nothing wrong with my specific criticisms. The problem lies in the newsroom. I want to stress that this is not the fault of any one particular editor. They all believe that They Are The Deciders. Therefore, they put out a rag full of dull, misleading headlines, factual errors, grammatical mistakes, op-ed columns made of moronic drivel, and STILL THINK THEY’RE DOING A GREAT JOB! They have no capacity for criticism - from themselves or from the hoi-polloi - because in that newsroom, when heads go up asses and don’t come out, they start to think their stuff don’t stink. But when the rest of us actually read the paper, we can smell it just fine.

 

 

Dear Collegian columnists:

Why bother?

Collectively, your recent spate of indignant finger-wagging strikes me as lazy and dull. Last week Kelcey Childress "reviewed" movies it was pretty obvious she hadn’t even seen; this week pretentious literary snot Blake Osborn whined about how all his peers are hyperactive Youtubers and Facebookers, then he proceeded to - no kidding - name-drop his grandfather’s reading list as though it was his own (Tolstoy! Fitzgerald! Hawthorne! Aristophanes!). Today, Mark Wampler reminded us all of how we don’t "care about the issues of our world blah blah blah," and pretty soon Brett King will vomit more right-wing claptrap about how we’re not doing enough to crush minorities and the poor, just like he always does. Then he’ll probably shake his fist at some newfangled "horseless carriage" as it putters by.

At least your fifth-year advice columnist is fresh and topical. I can only assume it’s because he sits down with a fifth of gin while he’s writing, like I do. The rest of you: get with it. Get off your soapboxes, get out of your rocking chairs, cut out the newsroom navel-gazing, and give us something upbeat, personal, and specific. And for the love of all that is sweet and holy, PLEASE have a drink before you pull up to the keyboard, so that I don’t have to.

Very truly yours,

Hyper-literate Bastard

 

Two things that ruin a fresh snowfall:

1. In cold weather, condensation clings to my nose hairs. I walk around feeling like I’m dripping snot. I hate that.

2. Ennui. What’s with that?

Manhattan’s temperature dropped about five thousand degrees overnight. AND it’s windy. In the morning there were itty bitty snowflakes zipping around like gnats. Then it really started coming down. Oh mother nature, why not ease into this with a nice, steady decline? It would feel like using lube before getting intimate - something we can all appreciate.

Scrambling to adjust to the change in weather, at once a refreshing crisp-white and a bland blah-white, we begin to feel disconnected from everything else. The day feels fragmented and broken. The heart feels split in two (zerrissenheit, baby!).

So today, despite the hustle and bustle of finally getting ready to attend classes (confidential to FPS; kinda pissed that the creative writing professors seem to be blowing me off), I just felt sort of like giving up and taking a nap.

Even the Collegian was lame today. And not even in a vibrant, forceful, offensive kind of way. It was more of the same old shitty headlines ("Union Holocaust display educates visitors," "Students are asked to donate in blood drive," and the op-ed’s "Historical events should not be disregarded, forgotten" - which misrepresented the article - which was more half-assed irrelevant finger-wagging, just like "Media spotlight should focus on relevant issues"). At least Eric Davis shows he’s still on the cusp of culture; "MySpace, Facebook users must use caution when dealing with potential online predators." Confidential to Eric: if you’re going to phone in vacuous drivel of the "no shit" variety, would it kill you to take like THREE SECONDS and jazz up your headline? Just throw me a friggin’ bone, know what I mean? Also, according to Allison Voris, a rape occurred somewhere, by someone. Thanks for the heads up Allison! Kthxbai!!!1!!1!!!

Like I said, kinda lame. But sadly, not lame enough to evoke a more heady, vigorous thrashing. You know, the kind where you grab it by the balls, twist as far as you can, and giggle. Maybe some other time, eh? 

Cherry’s sick. Do you (just who am I writing to, anyway?) think that has anything to do with my blah mood? Like, we’re bonded on some deep, metaphysical level whereby I intuitively feel her discomfort? Or that maybe, like everything else in the universe, her sickness is really just all about me?

I hate worrying about these “feelings” thingies. I am a simple man, and these things are all murky and complicated.

Perhaps it’s the secrecy element of the whole sitch.

When Cherry and I are alone, it’s like being in our own corner of the world, a warm fuzzy bubble of awesome. Leaving the bubble is the most depressing thing in the world. There is you Inside the bubble, and there is you Leaving the bubble, and never the twain shall meet. But outside of the bubble, you feel alone and disconnected wherever you are. Keeping a secret like this "screws with your sense of reality. It makes you, in a sense, split right down the middle. It cracks you in two. [Strawberry Saroyan]"

I guess the fresh snow just reminds me of my own complicit silence in the whole affair. Le sigh.

Freshman English major douchebag columnist Blake Osborn enlightened us on the plight of our generation, cunningly pointing out that Everyone Else is a bunch of illiterate Youtubing toddlers, and we should all read more Proust or something, like he does.

“The Age of the Internet, which appears to be the new medium that has united the world blah blah blah.” Seriously: did this guy actually apply to come here, or did they just thaw him out on the 5th floor of Hale?

We know he must be, like, super-smart, because of the name dropping. Tolstoy! Fitzgerald! Hawthorne! Aristophanes! Wow! We’ve never read anything they wrote, because we’re too busy Facebooking or whatever. Then he went on talking about some “horseless carriage” thing. Then he poked us with his cane and fell asleep in his rocking chair.

In Kelcey Childress’ takedown of the recent spate of comedies involving pregnancy, she takes them to task and pronounces disapproval of these movies for mocking pregnancy. In attacking the supposed premise of the movies, however, she completely misses the point.

The point of the movies wasn’t to mock pregnancy. Pregnancy is not "funny" and no one is trying to make it so. When Kelcey thinks of comedy, she thinks of slapstick. "Juno" and "Knocked Up" are not slapstick. It’s the characters, not the situation, who bring the funny; characters who, not being prepared for the event that lies before them, are forced to grow up fast and, in doing so, bring a unique perspective to the sitch, a perspective that is not parrotted ad nauseum by happily married couples on soap operas and furniture commercials, a meme that is not rammed down your throat by all those shitty Lifetime movies, wherein some innocent wide-eyed country maiden gets impregnated by some cad with 10 kids by different mothers and has to learn the hard way that, except for the handsome, gentle, patient, avuncular white knight, ALL MEN ARE ASSHOLES!!!1!!1!! OMG!!!!!1!1!!

The point of the movies was that pregnancy is an impactful event; it doesn’t happen only to certain people, and it’s not just certain types of people who deserve the honor. Given the right circumstances, it can happen to any of us, and in the end, the characters demonstrate, through their maturity and grace, that they can handle it. To know that, Kelcey would have had to watch the movie, listen to the dialogue, become familiar with each character’s style, and treat them all the same way you should treat people in real life: with compassion for their flaws, and awareness and respect for their capacity to develop and learn. Neither memes are more or less realistic than the other; but Juno and Knocked up provide a new way of thinking about it, a way that refuses to demonize people involved just because they don’t fit the molds you’ve been accustomed to seeing; a task that, perhaps more than anything, is the entire point of art. You narrow-minded clod.

Yesterday, Jessica Hensley loftily told us that candidates should address The Issues instead of fighting.

But what issues was she talking about?

I suppose it’s common knowledge that elections in general are full of pointless mudslinging, but Jessica opted not to regale us with any particular recent examples. Those who read the news (which you can’t get from the Collegian, obvs) probably know that Hillary and Obama bared teeth and came out swinging the last time they met, in a nationally publicized debate. Jess didn’t even mention it. Therefore, she also failed to mention what specific mud they were slinging, and whether any of it was valid or not.

Further questions loom. Are there other examples of mudslinging? Who are the worst offenders? From the looks of things, John McCain has run an extremely classy campaign, as always, which is MIRACULOUS, really, when you consider that we pretty much expect Republicans to act like 3rd-grade racist, ladyhating bullies at every opportunity (thank you Giuliani, Tancredo, Huckabee, and Romney for NEVER disappointing).

John Edwards has doled out his share of catty backhanded barbs (I’m thinking of a dig he took at Hillary after hearing about her "crying"). In every instance, however, he has apologized for everything he’s said that was anything less than professional. He has done so immediately. I feel this is a mark of great character on his part.

Just scanning today’s front page. Hmm… “KSU Horse Judging team wins world championship.” Fascinating! Not a sport that I particularly follow, but it is kinda kewl, because chicks look hot with those boots and that riding crop. And they rode those fillies all over the world, no doubt! WOW!

Looks like Ryne chose to lead by making grammatical errors, using too many words (“When COMMA most people think of successful K-State team, one of the basketball teams or the volleyball team might come to mind.”), and apparently talking about some other sports, presumably because those sports are exciting. But horses are fun too. Wait a sec… did you say horse JUDGING team? So they don’t actually ride; they gawk at the athletes, rank them, and then get ranked on that? 750 words, you say? It takes NINE people to do this, you say? And you can get a trophy for this?

Well, I guess this was educational, but I totally just lost the interest I barely had. At least the photos are nice.

The article about Ice T’s speech probably should have been front and center instead of the aforementioned horse shit. It was actually a good article! Eric hit the nail on the head: “Despite the lack of discussion of serious modern day civil rights movements, the crowd was receptive of the message blah blah blah.” Kudos sir!

Glaring omissions in Adrianne DeWeese’s “$1.8 million grant funds pathogen research:” what the fuck does Ehrlichia chaffeensis actually do? All that "vector" info is really really helpful - who knew ticks and mosquitos actually - wait for it - carry germs? - but once infected, what are the symptoms? Adrianne doesn’t seem to want to tell us anywhere in the article, except that it “kills about 3 percent of those infected.” I can only assume that it’s instant, and it looks sort of like getting Vader’s force-choke.

You know what the problem is with this sad excuse for a student newspaper? There’s no actual news in it. Ever. They send people out to pre-planned events, and when something happens that’s a big deal, say an ice storm that knocks out power to half the town for a week and leaves a swath of destruction, they’ll get some nice photos, but since they have no beat reporters, when it comes to what the fuck is actually going on at school, they’re clueless. I get more news about this place from Facebook status updates.

I could fall asleep just reading last Thursday’s shitty headlines. “City funds additional downtown developments.” “Large amount of tickets left for Will Ferrell performance.” How bout “College paper swaps real copy editor for third-grade spelling bee runner-up.”

Then there’s Brett King, the op-ed neocon, with his typical vomit of irrelevant right-wing hackery. I have a theory about him: his writing is so poor, his logic so flawed, his shit so weak, that he has to use Brigitte, the offensive airhead, just to get attention for his little dusty corner of the world.

I can’t wait to see what they think of next.