Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY Kansan
Published daily since 1912
Linasey Henry, editor
Dave Morantz, Managing editor
Kristie Blasi, Managing editor
Tom Eblen, General manager, news adviser
4A
ware Harrell, Business manager
Colleen Eagle, Retail sales manager
Dan Simon, Sales and marketing adviser
Justin Knapp, Technology coordinator
Fridav. Feb. 27, 1998
W. David Keith / KANSAN
Editorials
Don't complain about food prices just bring a snack from home
Every semester NO students mean and groan as they spill out the contents of their wallets to buy food items on campus. They wonder why everything is so expensive, and without an answer walk to class in befuddlement, chewing their granola bars and drinking their bottled water. Food items on campus are pricey, but there is an easy solution: Don't buy food on campus.
Deals can be found if students are willing to look hard enough. And if students do not like the prices then they should not buy the food.
Jay Glatz, Food Service manager for the Kansas and Burge Unions and Wescoe Terrace, said that Food Service sets prices according to the market in terms of fast food and convenience stores.
When compared to the prices of food items at local stores, it is evident that the food prices on campus definitely are not bargains. In the following price comparisons, note that Food Service
University food may be pricey but you don't need to be Martha Stewart to make your own
prices include tax, while other prices do not...
■ Food Service price of Dannon's yogurt — $1.25.
Dillon's----73cents.
**Food Service price of a Bagel 'n Bagel bagel—$1.05.**
Bagel 'n Bagel — 59 cents.
■ Food Service price of bottled water
—$2.30 for 1.5 liters.
Dillon's----89 cents.
■ Food Service price of granola bars — 60 cents for one bar.
Dillon's — $1.99 for 12 bars.
Despite these inflated prices, it is the convenience of campus Food Service that keeps students going back. Many students often do not have the time to
go home and eat, so they shell out the money for a quick snack between classes. Given the choice, most people would not pay these prices. And there is a choice — instead of buying food on campus, students should bring snacks from home. It is more economical to go to a grocery store once a week than to buy snacks on campus everyday.
However, if students are looking for a full meal, there are some deals to be found on campus. For example, the Union Square has daily specials which are comparable to cafeterias and cheaper than restaurants.
Students could eat at the Union Square and even have some spare change to throw in the piggy bank. But if they are in a rush and buy quick snacks on campus, they will find holes being burnt in their pockets. The ultimate decision lies with students. Stop complaining, take some initiative and bring a snack from home.
Nick Zaller for the editorial board
Vegetarian options few in Lawrence
Vegetarianism on campus and around Lawrence isn't rare, but unfortunately, vegetarian options are.
Food services at the University of Kansas, as well as Lawrence restaurants, should do more to cater to the needs of vegetarians.
Vegetarians give up meat for many reasons, such as animal rights, health or distaste for eating once-living things. They should not be penalized for this choice and deserve to be able to eat vegetarian meals on campus and in local restaurants. However, few restaurants provide adequate vegetarian alternatives
quate vegetal diet.
In a period of extreme health consciousness, the lack of healthy, meatless food in Lawrence is disturbing. This food should be available not only for vegetarians, but also for others who want to decrease their fat intake. But it seems that one rarely can procure a meal without meat, whether it is a sandwich, soup, pasta or even a salad.
It is the same off campus. After Herbivores closed last year, Lawrence had no vegetarian or health food restaurants. Most other restaurants have only one or two vegetarian options and some have none. In any case, the "Veggie Special" is usually just a block of cheese.
Wescoe Terrace offers a veggie sandwich and the Kansas Union Carvery, ironically, serves a veggie entree. Although campus eateries have made slight headway in becoming non-discriminatory, they seem to expect vegetarians to eat the same lunch each day.
University and Lawrence restaurants should expand their menus to cater to those patrons that prefer health food and even vegetarian meals.
Kansan staff
Nadia Mustafa for the editorial board
Paul Eakins . . . . . . . . Editorial
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“A flea can be taught everything a congressman can.” — Mark Twain
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L let me preface this column with a few words to describe my condition: stressed, angry, overworked.
Students need to strike, or just hit the Courvoisier
Perspective
freaked, tweaked, perturbed and generally pissed.
Did I forget dirty?
I feel like some agitating:
Ryan Devlin
opinion@kansan.com
First let me start by say ing I refuse to let the Kansan print this until the editors agree to let me retake my mugshot. I have been lobbying for a new photo because my original mugshot makes me look like Timothy McVeigh.
McVeigh.
Other than that little rant, I can't say exactly what it is that made me the next candidate for spontaneous human combustion on the universal get-screwed schedule, but I think it began with the increase in my workload. Midterms and papers loom like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and the reading just keeps piling up, ascending toward the heavens like the Tower of Babel. Pardon the biblical imagery, but these are desperate times. I'm putting in 15, sometimes 16-hour workdays, and frankly, I'm underpaid.
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe what has me in the plaid funk is that mysterious directive from some mysterious office buried deep within a certain domed building in Topeka. I'm referring to the request of unidentified origin and purpose to the Regents to report any classes with content relating to bisexuality or homosexuality to some mysterious source within the Kansas Legislature.
I was doing research for a paper and came upon some interesting information about a strike organized by University of Chicago students in protest of the University's decision to expand requirements. What I want to know is why students don't strike anymore? And please don't feed me that hollow Generation X-slacker crap. 'cause I won't stand for it. Now seems like the perfect time to for us to strike. Midterms are here and we are being crushed. We are slaving for this outfit and work conditions are jack. We sit all day in decaying classrooms only to return to our homes and toil for countless more hours. Every year the syllabuses seem to get stretched as more material seems to creep into the course loads. I think a strike is justified.
source within the kelp forest.
I've got a bit of information to convey to these paranoid jackals. If your intent is to wipe out all classes with homosexual or bisexual content, you've just wiped out 80 percent of the curriculum. Homosexuals are everywhere, they always have been, and they always will be, they're probably even within your legislative ranks. And the world is a hell of a lot more interesting when you allow their contributions. Go read some Oscar Wilde or Walt Whitman.
volister during commuting. And speaking of Grammy questions: Why do they use the term 'infectious' to describe something that's supposedly nice and catchy? Syphilis and the gout are infectious. Of course they were referring to Hanson.
If a strike requires more spine than we collectively possess, then how about a good old-fashioned slow-down?
Or maybe I'm unnerved by the fact that the other day, a KUPD officer accidentally discharged his shotgun while cleaning it. On campus. At 4 p.m.
On campas.
Or maybe it's the fact that I just turned on the Grammys. Poor Kelsey Grammar looks painfully sober. If I had to deliver those awful scripted lines, I'd be hitting the Courvoiser during commercial breaks.
I will not disclose your identity.
C'mon, work with me, people.
Hanson. Which brings me to Hanson, and they are guaranteed to mess with your head. But seriously, it's nice to know that Hanson sold all those albums, because they'll need the money for rehab once they get kicked to the curb with Todd Bridges, Emmanuel Lewis, the Olson twins, and all the other cute-and-fuzzy pop-culture fascinations that grow up and get acne. Allegedly overheard backstage from Taylor Hanson: 'I want to be Kurt Cobain, but I feel like Bambi.'
Even after all that, I still don't know what was making me crazy.
But I'm feeling much better now.
Devlin is an Overland Park senior in English.
War means one thing record Nielsen ratings
OK. so we're not going to war—for now at least. At one point, however, for whatever the opinions of the Secretary of Defense, Secrete the National Security Adviser, were worth, it seemed that the nation was getting ready to rumble.
Tim Harrington
opinion kansan.com
So much so that a town meeting was called in America's heartland to discuss it or announce it. I'm still trying to figure out which it was. Often that discussion was interrupted by angry protests from the crowd —
But whether it's a testament to how well I'm suckered by mainstream media fears or to the magnitude of my ignorance or to my capacity for cowardice, the meeting's dissidents didn't convince me.
I still don't know what the hell to think of all this.
I wanted to be convinced. I've got a peace-loving, flower-child, pacifist streak in me. Violence, whether it be in a bar or on a battlefield goes against everything I stand for.
But it's hard to argue that Saddam Hussein doesn't have the means to develop and deploy one or many of the brand-name, nightmare-come-true chemicals now available in stores. Releasing said pestilence someplace outside Iraq's boarders would bring terrorism to new heights.
tests from the crowd very Constitutional, just like in the Bill of Rights. I like that.
The world may have taken away all of his tanks and planes six years ago and may have made Saddam promise he'll be good. It doesn't change the fact that the oil-spill of a man who is Saddam could find enough cash in the cushions of his couch on the -157 floor of his bomb shelter to purchase a doit-yourself thermonuclear warhead kit or a second-hand, Soviet, radiation bomb.
I remember reading about former Soviet and U.S. authorities busting a guy in Eastern Europe for having nuclear material in the trunk of his car.
So it could just be a matter of when and
where people start dying. Is it in Iraq for a few days or weeks or years? Or is it all at one time, taking Washington D.C. and it's suburbs, or Sandusky, Ohio, and Six Flags Great Adventure, or the world Trade Center and the Beastie Boys?
But then the United States would use nuclear weapons that still couldn't rumble Saddam's toilet water on the -157th floor. Everything in Iraq not already six feet under gets a 14-inch-thick coat of glass in the blink of an eye and Saddam becomes the undisputed ruler of a parking lot.
But much scarier is the idea that Saddam is a clever guy and knows something we don't.
So what the hell is Saddam thinking? Yes. I know he's crazy. I've heard that a million times. That can be said easily in a 15-second soundbite.
I know what it means to be living in a nation at war. I lived through the most one-sided war in American history.
But regardless of their war faring proclivities, we may yet have to commit to the ultimate sacrifice, and give up a few hundred or a few thousand of our brightest and most dedicated, and undoubtedly kill a few thousand or few million Iraqis.
Explaining the latter would take a lot longer than 15 seconds. Would anyone listen? We'd all probably have to be killed if we knew anyway. You know, national security. I saw Top Gun.
City. I saw top Gun Saddam crazy or Saddam sane, I just can't believe our diplomats are pro-war.
It was pretty scary.
It was pretty scary. Actually, it wasn't that scary at all. I'll bet it was scary in Israel. It had to be pretty scary in the deserts of Kuwait, but it was definitely not scary in Pittsburgh, Pa... where I sat and watched it on the tube.
Maybe it'll be more real this time around, but I sort of hope not.
So what does it mean to one University of Kansas senior? Not much I'm afraid; just the return of the most popular miniseries in history: the U.S. military hard at work, on live TV.
Harrington is a Pittsburgh, Pa., senior in journalism.