--- THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN THURSDAY, APRIL 14, 2011 PAGE 5A I may have voted for the two people I know, the Green Bay Packers, and four of the five people I think will start on the basketball team next year. apps.facebook.com/dailykansan Vote for Richard Nixon!!! I wish that Student Senate terms were four years like the presidency. That way we wouldn't have to be accosted like this EVERY YEAR. I never get nervous around girls... never. But I'm practically peeing my pants when I'm around you. Well played ma'am. If you are trying to sell me about KUnited...dont start by telling me you want to put concerts on in AFH. It is a temple to basketball, not a concert hall for Bieber! Yep. I'm that guy. The one that won't even try to hide my watch when I ask you what time it is... We both know what time it is. You know its bad when you start dreaming about weed. Do I deserve a cookie? No. Do I want a cookie? Yes. Then I'm gunna dog dang nabit get meself a friggan COOOKIE. My bed plays a mean game of free tag in the morning! How to choose who I'm gonna vote for: which ever one doesn't annoy me the most on my walk to class. BBQ for breakfast. I love college. Don't make me grow up in a month. I managed to convince my friends that I got into a sweet bar fight when I actually just burned my hand. #winning Watching all these underclassmen study for Gen Chem and Organic brings back good memories of when classes were actually easy. Facebook must know that I've been watching Lost all night, because one of the sponsored ads is for Goldfish crackers. I ALWAYS BURN THE CHICKEN NUGGETS!!! ... I can't do this anmore. Way too much stress. Don't be friends with an ex on facebook. That's a recipe for disaster, like trying to light a fart on firesomeone's gonna get burned To be clear, Teaching Assistant, highlighting the important parts does not mean highlighting the entire homework section Facebook wants me to be a part of a SWAT team. What other incredibly BAMF career options will you suppose that I explore? Well, now that Reed, Morningstar, Little and the Twins are gone, Teahan, it's time to 'Getcha Head in the Game'. The shirtless guy in the T-Mobile commercials has the reddest nipples I've ever seen. And I've seen lots of nipples. You know you've been cooped up inside too long when the birds start chirping the rhythm of "I'm a Barbie girl..." in a Barbie world. CAMPUS ISSUES Enhance your college experience: give a frat kid a hug I am aware of at least four variations of fuchsia. I can, more or less, explain the difference between a seersucker and a chino. I have lounged alongside a friend, six feet from a propane tank, as he smoked a cigarette in his sleep, muttering the word "Chiefs." I have seen a naked vaudeville fly through a moonlit sky. I can differentiate the smell of urine from vomit, semen, stale beer, deli meats and nacho cheese (spicy cheddar or jalapeno). I have walked passed a mother into a skating rink as she covered the eyes of her children and told them we had fallen from God's grace. I have awoken multiple times to beats, high heels and heavy breathing, over time developing an ability to turn the thumps, shakes and creaks from the bed above, below or on either side of me into sleep-inducing rhythms. I can picture the rules on the Wedding Crashers poster and the faces of numerous names incised into bar benches and bathroom stalls. I have witnessed the exact moment when a party-bus driver decided to quit her job and go BY MATTHEW MARSAGLIA mmarsaglis@kansan.com back to school, a moment just before my date concluded that all her problems in Connecticut can stay in Connecticut. I can sit through an hour of televised golf and can properly replace a divot. I have stumbled across a current stock trader hunched over a donut casing pilfered by punching through a secret sorority vending machine, the hole the shape of an onomatopoeia cantion I can visualize the grand trajectory of an egg as it traveled toward me from an impressive catapult several hundred feet away and remember feeling a mixed sense of primordial animosity and utter reverence. I can make an equally competitive catapult. voice relieved, "me too." Then wed relax our stance and compare stories like they were wallet-size photos of our jailbird sons. Though undoubtedly some of the most memorable parts of my time in college, these are also a few of the reasons why I invented impromptu living situations during my first two years at school. When asked where I lived, each occasion was an opportunity to find an honest, albeit incomplete answer that avoided the stereotypes associated with an avowal of living in a fraternity, frat, frat castle, house or whatever term used to describe collegiate boys clubs decorated in the same oak-driven vein as men's department stores. Ranging anywhere on a scale of sketchiness from vague ("a place on Tennessee") to inexplicably confusing and conversationally stultifying ("more or less a school hall"), my efforts at avoiding judgment were, I assume, counterproductive. Not until the last possible point did I mention that I lived in a fraternity. To my surprise, a considerable amount of friends from classes met this transparency with resounding solidarity. "Really?" they'd say, hands upine and But sometimes things didn't turn out this way and I got that whole double consciousness vibe. Understandably, Ralph Ellison characters and marginalized groups garner more sympathy. Lots of fratters and sorority girls imbue cultural capital and are an easy target: loud, class conscious and fluorescent. But for each unabashed frat star there's a handful of plain-clothes frat boys and girls who work part-time jobs to pay off school and even a penchant for the Blue Ribbon. Some of them even plant trees So this Friday, consider forgiving the frat pack that cut you in line at a notoriously underage bar and celebrate National Hug a Frat Kid Day, because underneath that PataGucci pullover is someone who also has to take Western Civ like everyone else. Marsaglia is a senior in English from Naperville, III. CARTOON Nicholas Sambaluk □Yes, it represents the student body □Important, but I don't care □No, they just dress up and play Congress Vote now at KANSAN.COM/POLLS COMMENTARY: BEN HOLLADAY and leave a comment Facts aren't hard to find, just open up your laptop A few weeks ago I was at a friend's place watching movies with a group of people. Somehow a box of chocolates started getting passed around. Once the box was running low, somebody opened a second box only to find all of the chocolate in that one had a grayish-white coating over it. My friends began debating if this chocolate was safe to eat, while I pulled out my cell phone and began looking up causes of discolorations in chocolate on Google. I saw my response as the single most rational response a person could have to such a situation. I don't think that opinion was shared by my friend who laughed at me. Don't get me wrong. It's not like this friend cruelly heckled me. She just thought it was silly of me to get to the bottom of such a trivial matter. I hope that I can change some people's minds on this issue. I can understand why previous generations might have had adverse reactions to research. You had to go to a library, search for a book and then search through the book. I imagine it was a time consuming process. It's a much different story today though. I do all of my research on my cell phone or laptop, and it's very rare for me to not have one of those in my hands at any given moment. Figuring out the discoloration of the chocolate took me less than five minutes. It was most likely a separation of certain ingredients in the chocolate caused by humidity or storing the chocolate at the wrong temperature. It might change the texture or taste of the chocolate, but there's no harm in eating it. I can think of no reason to regret learning that information, and I feel like that was a much better use of my five minutes than defending something I had no facts on in a debate. This spreads into areas other than argument too. Another friend of mine was having me save a stack of Kansans for her because each one had a single story in it she wanted to read. This confused me, because I feel certain she knew she could have read all of those articles on Kansan.com. I don't know why there's still any resistance to looking up information on a computer. My first guess would be some people are afraid of looking like nerds, but if anyone is actually afraid of that I can't explain why so many thick-rimmed glasses are being worn now. I feel like the more likely answer is that the world is still in a transitional phase between physical and digital media. We know that all this information can be retrieved by computers, but we still uphold certain myths from the pre-online era such as facts are hard to find or newspapers are printed on actual sheets of paper. 1 encourage you to bust these myths though. The next time you have a question, just look it up and see how easy it is. Ben Holladay is a senior in journalism from Mulvane. GOVERNMENT Budget cuts: Not everything should be on the table Well, the government didn't shut down last Friday night, as a lot of us were expecting. The House and Senate agreed within minutes of deadline to cut $38.5 million dollars from the federal budget within the next six months to keep the government going. Both sides had agreed on the amount of spending to reduce; the last few days of arguing were primarily about a few unrelated policy riders that Republicans had attached to the bill, attacking perennial favorites such as health care, the EPA and reproductive health. The bill eventually passed with only some of the riders still attached. Both sides, of course, are declaring the final agreement a victory. Was this a victory for the democrats? I don't know that I would claim "barely preserving the EPAs right to enforce the Clean Air Act and women's rights to access contraceptives, health care and abortions at Planned Parenthood, for now at least" a heartwarming victory Those policy riders should have never been on the table and the fact that their temporary security is the one thing BY ALI FREE afree@kansan.com worth cheering over is really just sad. Women's health and environmental protection are rather necessary to the overall health of the country; reducing them to bargaining chips, as happened with unemployment relief and middle-class tax cuts back in December, is vile Women's health wasn't even completely protected in the deal. A surviving policy rider, crowded about by Speaker Boehner, restricts federal and local funding for abortions provided for low-income women in Washington, D.C. Notwithstanding that this wasn't about the budget at all (clinical abortions cost about three to five hundred dollars. worth cheering over is really just sad. The deficit is over fourteen trillion), but federal funding is already prohibited for abortions. It's clear this was absolutely nothing more than pandering to their base, at the expense of D.C. women. As far as the economy goes, choosing to cut a big chunk of spending in the domestic economy so soon after the official recession is over, while simultaneously fighting in two wars and heavily subsidizing natural industries while the rich have a tax cut, is probably not the best we could do. This is a victory for somebody, I'm sure, but certainly not the ordinary American. Of course, none of this is over. The GOP has said that it plans on pushing through its riders on the environment and Planned Parenthood sometime soon, and it will have plenty opportunities to do so. This summer we'll watch as Congress and the President fight over raising the debt ceiling, which should be quite a spectacle, as many Republicans have vowed against it out of loyalty to their Tea Party base. It might be fun to count the number of politicians who talk about what a travesty it is to leave a huge debt for our children and grandchildren while leveraging that to cut programs for those same children. Well, that might get exhausting, actually. Also in the summer and fall, Washington will have to decide on a budget proposal for the next fiscal year. A few in the Congress have already put out their proposals ranging from the far-right to the actually moderately progressive ensuring some heated debates, especially with election season just warming up. Compared to what we face ahead, the work it took to get this budget agreed on might look like fun and the results maybe even reasonable. Who knows, by the time it's all over the Democrats may have to count it as a victory if they preserve the EPA at all. Free is a sophomore in women's studies from Blue springs, Mo. RECTION: Yesterday's editorial should have been attributed to Spencer Davidson on behalf of the Kansan editorial boar HOW TO SUBMIT A LETTER TO THE EDITOR LETTER GUIDELINES Send letters to Bansanopdesk@gmail.com. Write LETTER TO THE EDITOR in the e-mail subject line. Length: 300 words The submission should include the author's name, grade and hometown. Find our full letter to the editor policy online at kansan.com/letters. Length: 300 words Nick Gerik, editor 864-4810 or ngerik@kansan.com Michael Holtz, managing editor 864-4810 or mholtz@kansan.com Kelly Stroda, managing editor 864-4B10 or kstrode@kansan.com D. M. Scott, opinion editor 964-4924 or scdott@kansan.com Mandy Matney, associate opinion editor 864-4924 or mmatney@kansan.com CONTACT US Jessica Cassin, sales manager 864-4477 or jcassining@kansan.com Macalum Gibson, general manager and news adviser 864-7667 or mgbson@kansan.com Jon Schitt, sales and marketing adviser Carolyn Battle, business manager 864-4358 or cbattle@kansan.com Jon Schlitt, sales and marketing adviser 864-7666 or jschlitt@kansan.com THE EDITORIAL BOARD BRINE BOARD Members of the Kansai Editorial Board are Nick Gerik. Michael Hotz, Kelly Stroda, D.M. Scott and Mandy Matthey. --- 。