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Wednesday, October 11, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Mid-Night Court concert not in sync with basketball
It seems as though the student body is holding the Athletic Department in contempt.
The plan to change the Jayhawk's annual midnight basketball practice into more than just a student event has raised some ire. Students are charging that Mid-Night Court is a first-degree offense.
Now fans will have to cough up some money for the chance to see the Jayhawks. The department is charging $3 in advance and $5 at the door.
first-degree offense.
When the tradition of celebrating the first practice started, it was a simple event. Fans poured into Allen Field House to watch their team take to the court.
and so at the end of the line As well as being able to see the Jayhawks practice, fans also will see and hear the bands Shooting Star and the Nace Brothers.
brouthers. He married Konzem, assistant athletic director, said that the admission charge was being used for two reasons: to pay for the operation of Allen Field House during the practice and to pay the bands.
pay the band.
Konzem said that in past years the practice was like adding another game to the season without bringing in any income.
This game is booked up by the foot that the Athletic
point Department is already feeling the financial crunch of NCAA probations in the Big Eight Conference.
There may be a need for an admission charge, but why spend a lot of money trying to make what has traditionally been a night for basketball into a night for a concert?
Konzem said that the facts that the first night of practice fell on a Saturday, or rather a Sunday morning, and that the attendance at last year's event was lower than in previous years' gave the department the idea to change the format.
Why fix something that wasn't really broken in the first place? A night to celebrate basketball should be be just that, not a circus.
Clean air more important than emission-control cost
Environmentalists had a long-awaited political victory last week when the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment voted unanimously to tighten automobile tail-pipe emission controls.
The Clean Air Act of 1970 established federal guidelines for our country. The last time the act was amended was in 1977. It's time to look ahead and bring the act up to date by creating a new piece of legislation that will lay the foundation for the environmental standards we want to accomplish before the year 2000.
With the establishment of stricter requirements for tall-pipe exhaust, we are on our way to creating a better air standard. Fifty percent of the U.S. smog problem can be attributed to automobiles. The committee's plan would bring the national standard to that of California, which has the strictest regulations in the nation.
The California program requires reductions in emissions of hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen and particulates. Hydrocarbons are chemical compounds that are commonly found in fuels such as gasoline.
to force the plan. The plan requires that pollution controls on automobiles last for 10 years or for 100,000 miles. The Clean Air Act of 1970 only requires that pollution controls on automobiles last for 50,000 rules.
Although the plan is stricter than Bush's proposal, the House is expected to adopt the committee's position by Jan. 1.
The program may not be official yet, but its popularity is an indicator that the government is keenly aware that the environment is in danger.
Those who oppose the plan, mainly automobile makers, are complaining about increased production costs, which will affect the consumer's price tag.
A price tag has been placed on our environment for long enough. It's our own fault that a clean environment has become so costly because we have abused it for so long.
The subcommittee's proposal is a move in the right direction. It is hoped that more plans, establishing higher standards, will follow.
Kathy Walsh for the editorial board
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Wilderness ends at highway's edge
Autumn brings a passel of new sensations; new, anyway, to this year are the mornings dawning on fog-shrouded ponds and streams. If the sun's lower southerly arc has contracted the evening to a cursory . . . to nightfall, then the delicious cider-amber afternoons are prolonged by the same measure.
For many, the fall always marks deer season. Some deer-watchers love early autumn because they can finally den their camouflage and munk scent and sit motionless for hours in a deer blind, waiting for an opportunity to lose a quiver of broadhead arrows at a trophy-sized buck.
This deer-watcher regards the onset of hunting season more as the perennial inspiration for Gary Larson's most misanthroptic crtoons. This is because I finally get to do my go-to-work clothes and Jade East or English Leather cologne and sit motionless at the steering wheel during my daily commute, wary of the opportunity to total both my car and the luckless deer that tonight may bound without warning into the space between my headlamp beams.
Oh, I've never hit one yet, or even had a really close call, but every now and then my late-night highway woolgathering is derailed by the realization that the dusky wrist that coursed briefly across the far reach of the headlamps had been a deer. I say coursed because the impression is more a recalling than a recognition, so fleeting and ephemeral is the event. Then the image of effortless speed merges with a reckoning of the mass that such grace belies and, oh man, does the night get big and those headlamp beams narrow.
And then by day there are the tell-tale fresh reddish smears on the highway, a new one every week or so, that signify by their size and the absence of a carcass that there a deer surprised death, and was in turn surprised.
death, and was in the womb of
the too-slow opusum or vagabond dog that dies
Stuart Beals
Staff columnist
there is usually left to succumb to the impress of tires and sun, mingling indistinctly with the road itself. The car-slaughtered deer is usually claimed on the spot, its venison and trophies the product of a "lestimate road-kill."
It seems probable that several factors combine to make autumn the peak season for such encounters. It is the rutting season, and anyone who has watched "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" or similar shows knows that deer get deranged when in rut, using their skulls and antlers to simulate the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's head-on crash tests on each other. Caution gives way to passion; a deer in pursuit of a rival or lover may not behed on-coming cars, or it may conclude, in the way of all reckless youth, "aw hell, let's go for it."
On the other hand, at this time of the year heading flight is often the prudent course. Imagine the effect on your disposition if the leaves that conventionally shielded you from predators spontaneously fell away just as belligerent armed bipeds reseking of musk and Jim Beam hit the neighborhood.
Some impetus of lust or terror must have been responsible for one particularly affecting casualty that I saw on the way to work. It was a quarter until eight in the morning and there, in the middle of the center lane of Interstate-435, where that highway passes eastbound over Interstate-35, was a recently killed deer. Around the deer the mad
traffic swerped and rushed; the deer seemed oddly larger and wilder than usual lying there in that vast concrete wasteland. It lay several hundred yards from the nearest fragment of unpaved land and miles from anything like natural cover, and I shivered at the imagination of what it must have taken to drive that poor creature into the very center of any innocent's hell.
These and related thoughts arose uneasily one night last weekend as I lay in my tent in a clearing close by a small, fog-shrouded lake. I can't say what it was that first awakened me, but I know it was the deer that kept me up. One of the others in the tent had started several deer by emerging to answer the call of nature, and the deer had snorted a strange wheezing, epithet as they turned to flee.
The deer returned almost immediately and resumed that loud, trulucent snorting and stomped their hooves just outside the tent door. This confirmed until I finally climbed out and stayed there for some time in the dark, sweeping 'the camp perimeter with a flashlight.'
We all eventually got back to sleep, but I at least retained an unmistakable impression of hostility, even resentment, in those beaugranted deer that had chanced upon their enemy in its nest.
They had no need to fear any arrows or bullets from us. And, the deer horns on my car supposedly any alder near the road to my approach. Still, it is hard to believe these silent-to-human-ears sirens will work, at least in the autumn. After all, the morning after our nocturnal encounter a large white-tailed deer bound out of a cornfield nearly on top of an on-going contest of young human lung power.
All of our admonitions about frightening away timid creatures had no more effect on autumn-infected kids than had natural instinct tempered that impetuous deer.
> Stuart Beals is a Lawrence graduate student in journalism.
Cable TV censorship violates rights
I recently received a letter from home, and what I found inside greatly disturbed me. It seems that the First Amendment is being constricted, beneath our noses, by the fierce, tyramical serpent of Bible Belt America. It 'm not being done by the government, the church or even the local 4-H youngsters, but our Constitutional freedoms are now being strangled by a thin razor-sharp piece of Multimedia Cable.
Home, for me, is Wichita, a city of 300,000 people about three hours southwest of Lawrence, and I must admit that sometimes I miss it. However, a man I respect very much once told me that Wichita is a storefront community with big-city ideals, and recently that statement has struck me like a sack of wet mice.
True, the most important civil event to hit Wichita in the past five years has been the acquisition of the B-1 bomber at the local air base. But I did expect more modern social conscience from the people of Wichita than to sit idly by while their constitutional rights were dragged through a cesspool of facist censorship.
You see, "The Last Temptation of Christ" is being aired on Cinemax this month, and Wichita's Multimedia Cablevision service has decided that the citizens of Wichita and the surrounding area are too ignorant to make their own decisions when
Scott Mcintosh
Guest columnist
faced with the art-versus-crap question.
I would like to offer a hearty thank you to MMC for taking such an avid interest in my immortal soul. Being the average Joe on the street, I MIGHT be felled by Satan's rusty trident If I were to see this film, in truth the company has become a legion of eumucha, exercising control over what we view in order to appease what it must believe to be the dominant pointview in Wichita.
on conde. dare they take my Constitutional freedom to judge something's aesthetic worth by assuming that I and my neighbors all drive big pickupps with gun racks in the back window, listen to Hank Williams Jr., and regard botagna on Wonder Bread as haute cuisine. I am sure that if MMC showed a hint of intestinal fortitude by showing "The Last Temptation," every Skal-poitin' good *q* boy in the area who-wears his Tony Lamas to church ever" Sunday would attempt to burn the cable company's offices to the ground like some neo-facist barbecue party.
Ladies and gentlemen, Multimedia Cable is practicing censorship. This censorship has been enacted not by the government but by a caterer of leisure-time activity. If I went to McDonald's and found that the pickles were left off my sandwich because a group of narrow-minded ultrconservative sheep found them offensive, I would feel the same way. In effect, Multimedia Cablevision of Wichita is removing our pickles, folks.
I am forced to say that my birthplace is still a cattle town with metropolis aspirations. Perhaps the next time that the Chamber of Commerce meets to discuss the overabundance of office space in Wichita, or an entrepreneur with fresh ideas files for bankruptcy, someone will bring up the notion that those with a strong voice keep cowtowing to the wishes of an ignorant number, thus perpetuating the erosion of Wichita's prosperity.
Maybe those who envision the city as a potential Dallas or Chicago will one day do something to agitate the stagnant public into standing up for its rights as citizens of these United States. But heed what I say, until someone discards the greed and fear of men like those at Multimedia Cablevision, Wichita will stay on the slow back road to the place where tumbledweeds roll down the main streets in a veil of dust and a solitary shepherd passes through, leading his flock back to the country. > Scott McIntosh is a Wichita freshman.
CAMP UHNEELY
BY SCOTT PATTY
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