MONDAY, APRIL 1, 2013
PAGE 4
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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Text your FFA submissions to 785-289-8351
Can we all just agree that we have a good looking band?
Is it basketball season yet? (Never too early)
I don't know what kind of apples you eat, but apple-flavored things taste nothing like apples. Apple juice doesn't even taste like apples.
That sad moment when you think that you have a funny FFA, but then realize it won't even be published until Monday.
Uh, I don't know about you, bro, but
I already have two thumbs. And they're
great.
Hahahahahaha Heat!
I really like muffin flavored muffins!
Can you drink milk from a bowl at a gas station?
My horoscope just told me to chop food and carry water, so not happening.
BUT CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL.
I don't always decide to chug the remainder of the milk jug but when I do, I greatly underestimate how much is actually left.
Professor, it would be grape if you don't give us a raisin to lettuce go to class today. Hotdog I'm hungry!
is it weird when I read the word "self"
I think of Bill Self?
I was under the impression that most people do have two thumbs.
Improperer is most improper
You will be happy to know that I didn't waste the milk, I simply drank it spoonful by glorious spoonful.
The longer I'm in college the more I consider just marrying for money.
There are some glorious mustaches on campus lately! Bravo!
KU meet my pasty legs. Pasty legs.
KU.
To all guys: holding a door is a little thing that can make a girl's day. Give it a try.
I wonder if Missouri calls it "March Sadness."
Please Bill Self wear a bow tie.
Sincerely, KU basketball fans. #safresh-soclean
Can we get a little recognition for our bros at Wichita State? Just because they're out west doesn't make them any less Kansan!
I still love y'all, Rock Chalk Jayhawk!
Just found a hair in my food at Mrs. E's. After last night's game, I'm not sure how much more I can take.
Im going to bed, wake me up next October.
The state of Kansas: 20 final fours
The state of Missouri: 0!!
SOCIETY
Wah.
When did calling out injustice become a problem?
As an outspoken feminist writer whose articles get a fair amount of traffic, I've gotten used to my articles getting a bunch of online trolls commenting. There is always the person who is going to vehemently disagree with me, whether the topic is expanding sex education or marriage equality. I've got pretty used to not paying them much heed, as there will always be trolls on the internet hoping to validate their views by wreaking havoc in the comments section. Yet, my experience with my most recent article, "Men Need To Confront Sexual Violence" honestly floored me. No matter your politics, I thought, surely ending sexual violence is one of those things most people can reasonably agree needs to be done, right?
Apparently, I was very wrong. Within the first few hours of my article being out, it was accruing comment after comment attacking feminists, attacking
women, attacking me for trying to create a discussion where we could talk about sexual violence.
Literally in the hundreds now, of these types of comments; apparently I was being horribly discriminatory toward men because "What about all the women who make false accusations of rape? Why don't you talk about that??"
When did the act of "accusing" or calling out injustice become considered more detrimental to an individual than the actual act of injustice itself?
These commentators were furious at the idea that I wanted to confront the source of the problem (which in this particular instance of discussing sexual violence against women, is unfortunately overwhelmingly men who have been raised in a culture that validates sexual assault). I didn't take it personally, but it did make me think.
This can be clearly seen in regards to sexual violence in
terms of the internet reaction to my sexual violence article and to the recent case of Steubenville, where the two men who raped an unconscious girl at a party were repeatedly referred to sympathetically by the media. You can Google CNN or Fox News's coverage of the case from Monday, to see this exemplified, as the rapists practically become saints in their versions. But we can also see it in the way we treat other issues of oppression.
We're afraid to call someone out as racist because that is an "awful" name to call a person—but isn't the racist act that person is doing more awful? We want to
respect the freedom of religion individuals have, even when their religions demonize LGBT persons—but aren't homophobic acts, particularly when they reach outside the bounds of religion and into the secular realm, worse than calling out someone or some group out as homophobic? We don't want to make people feel uncomfortable by telling them that using the word "retarded" is offensive—but aren't people with disabilities going to be even more uncomfortable having to suffer hearing such derogatory language?
homophobic, as a personal attack against our individual identity rather than recognizing it for what it is—calling out the way the "accused" is harming another individual or group of individuals.
Our fear of offense and slandering has inadvertently caused us to often start out on the offense—"how could you dare think that about me!" — rather than confront the fact that we may have said or done something ignorant, hurtful or harmful. We've built up a culture where we sympathize with the accused rather than the victim. We've equated being called, say
This type of reaction only serves to keep systems of oppression in place. If we're trained to fear calling out injustice and to react when we, or our behaviors, or our privileges, are criticized with defensiveness rather than actually listening to why we are being criticized, how can we learn? How can we change the dominant culture?
The answer is we can't. Not unless we start listening to victims of injustice, instead of perpetrators of injustice.
Gwynn is a sophomore majoring in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from Dlatte. Follow her on twitter @AllidosGwynn
STUDY ABROAD
You are going to meet crazy people in foreign countries
So you've got your study abroad applications all turned in, huh? That's great! Now all you'll need to do is buy your plane tickets, pack your suitcases, exchange your greenbacks for brightly-colored Monopoly money at the local bank, and sit back and wait for your boring classes here in Larrytown to wrap up.
Oh, but it might also be a wise idea to talk to some crazy people around town before you go. I speak from experience when I say that it will be beneficial to learn how to deal with weird people here before you try to do it abroad. When you're walking the streets of a foreign town, you never know what kind of lunatics might decide to bug you.
I remember being lost on my bike in a small town in Germany last summer and being yelled at by a tall, lanky man who was standing by the roadside dragging a rake across a patch of gravel. After noticing that I was lost and American, he tried to hold a very weird and disjointed conversation with me in thickly accented English. I'll describe it here, so that you can better spot looiness like this guy when you're out traveling.
After we had established that I was a foreign student, the man asked me. "How do you get the money to stay over here?" I had to think about this one for a bit; he would probably understand about my scholarship money, but how could I get across in simple English that I was using financial aid from my grandpa's Masonic Lodge to supplement it? I panicked a bit and spat out, "From my university and my grandfather."
"Ah, so your grandfather is still alive!" chuckled the man. I didn't know how to respond to this at all, but I didn't have to because my interviewer was
more than happy to fill in the dead air. "You are very lucky to still have a wealthy grandfather who will provide for you."
"Yes, Very lucky," I mumbled.
"You will have a large inheritance, also," the man said with a grin. "Do you look forward to that?"
With as much enthusiasm as you can muster when forced to show excitement about the prospect of your kind old grandpa kicking the bucket, I squeezed out a "Yeah," I guess."
"What kind of work does your grandfather do?" The man leaned forward a bit in anticipation.
"He worked for the IRS"
Silence. A blank stare.
Realizing my error, I rephrased:
"He was a tax collector."
"Oh," replied the man, looking a bit disappointed. He asked me, after a few seconds, "So he doesn't have many friends out in public, then?"
I was a Boy Scout once, but only for a brief time. Still, I figured those few years of tying knots and pitching tents had to count for something, so I said, "Yeah, I was."
Shortly afterward, the man asked me, apropos of nothing, "Are you a Boy Scout?"
"I knew it when I first saw you," the man said proudly, "I knew, 'here is a Boy Scout.'" This struck me as odd, as I was wearing a polo shirt, nice shorts, and a scarf at the time — very unscoutlike attire. The man continued: "At it like being in the
army?"
"I wouldn't know; I've never been in the army before."
"I think it would be like the army."
After I put my hands in my pockets to warm them up, the man glanced down and asked, "Do you have a phone in your pocket?" I had foolishly left my phone at home, so I answered, "No."
"Good," the man replied firmly. Something about the way he said it unnerved me a bit and made me wish quite badly that I had brought my phone. As he continued to rake, and the handle swung toward me, I jumped a bit; he seemed to pav it no mind.
"I have one last thing to ask you," the man said. "You know the moon landing?"
"Yes."
"Do you think it was real, we really landed on the moon, or do you think it was a lie?" I could barely keep myself from laughing at this point.
"Well, I like to think we landed on the moon," I answered, trying hard not to take a side.
"I do, too, but I think they were making it up. If you look at the film, you see two things. One, there are two different shadows. And, two, the flag doesn't move in the wind. Some people say, 'it can't be real because the flag doesn't move.' Other people say that there is no wind on the moon. And then some people say, 'it was the sun-wind.'
All I could do was shake my head at this lunacy. Only I shook it up and down instead of side to side because I didn't want the authorities to come across my rake-bludgeoned body under a shallow layer of gravel later in the evening.
May is a sophomore majoring in German and journalism from Derby.
TECHNOLOGY
Inventions not as cool was we thought
What happens when you go on spring break to a city where
break to a city where it's 15 degrees outside? Not go to the beach, that's what. Instead, you stay where you can feel your limbs and think about stuff. Here are some things that came to my mind:
I don't think Google Glass will turn out as cool as we thought. The glasses that project the internet and more straight onto your eye will be used for the same things as your smart phone. While some people may really have innovative uses for it — Heads Up Displays for soldiers or even smaller POV cameras for athletes — most people would probably just end up watching SportsCenter Top 10 in their 8 a.m. class like me. I can already do this on my phone, so why switch to Google Glass and have to announce my intentions to the professor with an "Okay Glass . . ." to watch on a smaller screen?
It took the deep-space craft Voyager more than 30 years to reach the edges of Sol's dominion, and it doesn't look like faster-than-light travel will be coming soon. Which means we can say goodbye to any hopes of seeing a Star Trek or Mass Effect-like galaxy full of aliens and adventure. This will greatly limit our ability to explore and colonize even our own tiny little solar system. On another side (I'm not sure if it's the bright side or a dimmer one), we haven't truly solved the problem of deep space radiation killing off astronauts before they've reached their target, so no astronauts will die from that. And also, if we can't figure out faster-than-light travel, neither can any aliens. So be happy, human race, we won't be eaten or enslaved any time soon!
There will never be a Jurassic Park. The lifespan of DNA does not extend back hundreds of millions of years, even in little mosquitoes stuck in amber. At the very most, we might be able to clone some wooly mammoths
found in Russia. But for now, scientists are working on cloning most of the species humanity managed to extinct during the last couple of hundred years.
The rate at which bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotic drugs is getting very dangerous. Most of the miracles of modern medicine are due to some form of antibiotic drug fighting off an infection — whether it's bacteria from an abdominal surgery, inhaling some of the wrong fungus or even a little paper cut that got in the dirt. If bacteria become resistant to our drugs, we can welcome ourselves back to the dark ages. Without antibiotics, that little infection from your even smaller paper cuts may spread through your body and kill you. Bacteria evolve resistance from being exposed to the drugs that are supposed to kill them. Sometimes, a tiny group of bacteria survive just because, and pass down the resistance. Lots of times, people might stop taking their antibiotics a few days early, letting the bacteria get used to the drug. Either way, it's slowly happening. Nobody really knows how much longer we have until infections start killing us in troves again, but it's coming.
Writer's note: Sorry for the depressing updates. When science comes up with something happy like money trees or never ending beer bottles, I'll let you know.
Simpson is a freshman majoring in chemical engineering from Fairway.
CAMPUS CHIRPS BACK
Now that basketball season is over, what are you going to do with all your free time?
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@UDK_Opinion Binge drink until Late
Night in the Phog next season.
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@UDB. Opinion I am going to spend all my free time jimming Michigan. Forever scorned.
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