4A NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY HARRY KANSAN
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2007
CAMPUS
Students to battle in College Bowl Winning team to advance will regional tournament in Wichita
BY JEFF DETERS
ideters@kansan.com
Chad Davis and his five-member team, Sects Sects Sects, will test their trivia knowledge when they compete in the College Bowl on Saturday at 9 a.m. in the Kansas Union.
The College Bowl is a nationwide trivia tournament in which each participating university holds a tournament and the top team from each university advances to regional competition. If the team competes well in regionals, it could then advance to the nationwide final round.
Teams wanting to compete in Saturday's event can register for $10 at the Student Union Activities Box Office on the fourth level of the Kansas Union until 5 p.m. Friday. At the event, participants will receive free shirts, pizza and other items. In addition, members of the winning team will receive medals and an all-expense-paid trip to the regional competition on Feb. 22-23 at Wichita
State University.
Rob Schabel, Kansas City, Mo,
senior and SUA games coordinator,
said there was room for 16 teams in the round-robin tournament and each team must have four members, though a fifth member could play as an alternate.
Davis, Overland Park junior, whose team won the College Bowl at the University two years in a row. The team competed in regionals last year at the University of Missouri and competed the previous year at Kansas State. Davis said his team didn't practice for the event. He said the biggest advantage was having experience from participating the past two years. He also said the questions at the College Bowl could vary in difficulty.
"It can go from one question, which is very simple to the next question being about something that I never even heard of" he said.
Davis said he wasn't expecting his team to win the tournament this
weekend because each year the competition had proven to be equally tough.
Phillip Wrigley, Lawrence senior, has competed on Davis' team since 2005. He said that while the team enjoyed winning and advancing to regionals, the members weren't overly concerned with their performance at regionals.
"We usually end up about midrange in the end, because the other schools send their inhuman answer machines who defeat us pretty easily," Wrigley said.
Wrigley said that even if students were not serious about winning the tournament, they could still have fun and maybe learn something as well.
"It really is just a fun game," he said. "Go spend the day with your friends being as nerdy as you can be."
Edited by Rachel Bock
7-foot-8 man named tallest man in United States
>> GUINESS WORLD RECORDS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NORFOLK, Va. — To all those people who blurt out "Wow, you're tall!" as they stare up at George Bell: He knows.
And now, the world will know,
too.
The lanky, 7-foot-8 Norfolk sheriff's deputy is being recognized Thursday by Guinness World Records as the Tallest Man in the United States.
That makes him 2 inches taller than the NBA's current tallest player, Yao Ming, but too short to be the world's tallest living man. He stands
below, according to Guinness; Ukraine's 8-foot-5.5 Leonid Stadnyk and China's Bao Xi Shun, who is 7-foot-8.95.
To answer the inevitable questions:
Bell wears size-19 shoes, pants with a 43-inch inseam and shirts with 45-inch sleeves.
He did play basketball, in college and with the Harlem Wizards and Harlem Globetrotters show teams.
And as for how he feels about being so tall?
"I have no choice but to like it," Bell, 50, said in an interview with The Associated Press as he paced
the sidelines of a Pee Wee football game at a city park, where he was providing security.
"I'm used to a small man's world," he added in a deep voice that suits his stature. "I've been dealing with a small man's world since I was a kid."
Bell was to be revealed as America's tallest man on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Thursday, when 200,000 people worldwide were expected to celebrate Guinness World Records Day by attempting to set records of their own.
Dani Marvin/KANSAN
HEALTH INSPECTIONS
New state policy forces hotels to 'clean up their acts'
A new state policy now mandates that all Kansas lodging establishments must now undergo a yearly inspection. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment has already conducted several inspections in Lawrence hotels
BY BRENA HAWLEY
bhawley@kansan.com
The cart sat in the hallway of The Eldridge Hotel, filled with clean towels, coffee, shampoo, trash bags, a duster, cleaning solution and a mop.
Inside room 506, the maid went through her cleaning ritual. She folded a washcloth in an accordion pattern and placed it neatly into a newly changed towel. She washed the tub and sink, cleaned the mirrors, mopped the floor, remade the king-size bed and fluffed the pillows.
No detail was overlooked as she prepared the room for her manager's inspection.
"The girls will do a better job if they know someone is checking their rooms," Nancy Longhurst. Eldridge general manager, said. She said she was proud of the hotel's perfect health record this year.
All 780 of Kansas' lodging establishments are now being forced to clean up their acts because of a new state policy that is in effect for the first time this year. The policy requires them to be inspected by the state yearly rather than just after complaints.
"I think annual inspections will be a great thing for the hotel industry", Longhurst said. "For us, it would be great because we already adhere to all the standards they would inspect."
State lawmakers allocated $246,616 and four inspectors to lodging inspections. The inspectors are based in Lawrence, Wichita, Salina and Topeka, and each is responsible for about 195 hotels per year.
Michael Moore, general manger of the hotel, said the issues were not as problematic as the report made them seem. The trash was probably a small piece of paper in a corner that the vacuum missed, he said, and the hairs weren't plenitful.
In Lawrence, several inspections have already been conducted. Among them was the Marriott-owned Springhill Suites and 1 Riverfront Plaza, which was inspected on Sept. 5. Inspectors found "hairs on mattress pads, bits of debris on floors, stains on carpet and low water pressure," among other problems.
Moore said he thought that the inspections would make hotel's staff a little more aware of how clean the rooms are, and would push employees to look for smaller items, such as trash in the corners or a smudge on a light switch that may not be on a normal cleaning list. Hotels can't spend too much more time on rooms, he said. They have to find a balance between spotless rooms and long hours for maids.
"It's not like the mattresses looked like a dog had been dragged across them," Moore said.
Hallmark Inn, 730 Iowa St., was inspected on Jan. 11. The report indicated that there was mold on caulking, cigarette holes in sheets and stains on chairs, box springs and mattresses.
"I don't think any hotel will ever be 100 percent clean." Moore said.
Since the report, the hotel's management has changed. Now
the hotel is working on renovations, partly because of the inspections.
"We are taking into consideration inspections from different agencies," Art Kato, hotel vice president, said. "The purpose of our renovation is to improve overall appearance and quality of our product."
Mary Glassburner, who administers the inspection program for the Bureau of Consumer Health, part of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said the inspection program was put in place in May.
Glassburger said her department has already found problems in many hotels, including a statewide bed bug infestation, which health officials are now trying to control. Many of the inspections this year were conducted solely for this purpose.
"We asked for funds so we could inspect our lodging establishments the way we feel they should be inspected." Glassburner said. "They should be clean, safe and comfortable."