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Tuesday, January 20, 1987 / University Daily Kansan
Sledders must accept risk
The University of Kansas cannot be held responsible for injuries resulting from risky acts, such as sledding, that students perform on its property.
This was the verdict handed down recently by Shawnee County District Judge James Macnish in dismissing a $5 million lawsuit by a KU student against the University of Kansas, the Kansas Board of Regents and the state of Kansas.
Gregory S. Boaldin, Derby sophomore, sued for injuries he received in a sledding accident on University property.
Bouldin had attempted to sled between two trees on a hill east of Ellsworth Hall in February 1985. He lost control of his saucer-shaped sled and hit a tree.
Maenish dismissed the case using the Kansas Tort Claims Act, which states that the
University is not liable for injuries that occur in publicly owned recreational areas unless evidence of gross negligence is found.
The University was not negligent in this case. Students will continue to sled, regardless of the danger. The University can do very little to discourage them.
The University cannot regulate or control how all its property is used. Sledding on University hills is fun, but dangerous. Students must decide whether their actions are too risky. Then they must take responsibility for their actions.
Keeping the city rolling
Boaldin plans to appeal his case to the state Court of Appeals. The accident was sad and unfortunate, but the University and the state cannot take the blame on this one.
Macnish's decision should stand.
Although the heavy snow this weekend slowed driving and was responsible for many traffic accidents in Lawrence, serious injuries were avoided. This was due, in part, to the efforts of the street crews of the city and the University of Kansas.
clear streets for fans at Saturday's basketball game and routed traffic away from large hills.
Don Farrier, a supervisor in the Lawrence Public Works Department, said city street crews were working 12-hour shifts over the weekend to clear the streets. In addition, the city contracted with outside companies for the use of six road graders to work on residential streets Sunday night, he said.
Farrier said that despite the efforts of the street crews, he had received complaints, but few compliments. He said the complaints were handled as soon as possible, but main streets still had the highest priority.
University crews worked to
Lawrence drivers should remember the long hours of work that crews have put into attempting to keep traffic moving the next time they feel like complaining about the conditions of the road. Removing tons of snow from miles of streets takes time and a lot of effort.
Secret Service out of line
Objections to the Secret Service to the treatment of John Hinckley Jr by hospital administrators demonstrate an instance of discrepancies in judgment among the branches of the federal government.
Last month, Hinckley, the would-be presidential assassin, was released from St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington for a 12-hour gathering with his family in Virginia. The decision to grant the release was made by hospital administrators based on Hinckley's current medical status. Similar decision methods are followed in assigning holiday passes to other patients at the institution.
Hinckley has been confined at the hospital since 1981, when
Correction
the courts found him not guilty of shooting President Reagan by reason of insanity. At that time, a federal statute placed the decisions for treatment, including release periods, at the discretion of the hospital administrators.
Despite the clear judgment made by the court to defer responsibility to the hospital, Secret Service personnel continue to redress such hospital decisions.
An editorial that appeared Friday made an inaccurate comparison between tuition for in-state students at the University of Kansas and a proposed tuition fee for
Whether correctly or incorrectly, the courts have found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity. Congress has deemed the hospital administrators competent to make further judgments on those who act unlawfully because of mental illness, and Hinckley should be no exception.
Haskell Indian Junior College.
The proposed Haskell fee is $850 a year. The yearly tuition fee at the University of Kansas is $1,290.
News staff
Frank Hansel . Editor
Jennifer Benjamin . Managing author
Juli Warren . News editor
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Effects of Iran arms scandal hit home
This whole Iranian arms deal is driving conservatives crazy. In fact, the crumbling of Reagan's administration is going beyond politics, affecting the actions of people in their daily lives.
Gil Chavez Columnist
For instance, I went home for Christmas and discovered many of the residents of Arizona to be in very bad moods in general.
The people of Arizona, for the most part, have long been staunchly conservative and have never gotten over Barry Goldwater's humiliating loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1960. So when Ronald Reagan came along, many residents thought he was the hottest thing since jalapenos.
Unfortunately, Reagan's image as a straight-talking, straight-shooting
cowboy was dashed when he was caught holding hands with Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini. The sad part is that it made a lot of people really irritable even though it was Christmas.
I know it's hard to believe, but I really think that in an area that is predominantly conservative, the church just ruined everyone's Christmas.
When I arrived at home, the FBI was cracking down on some local residents — a bunch of white supremacists called the "Arizona Patriots" — who planned to blow up an IRS office in Utah.
Like all white supremacist groups, what was supreme about these guys was their stupidity. They actually believed that the Chinese and North Koreans were across the border in Mexico, massing for an invasion of the United States.
other than themselves.
I thought it was a good idea that these guys be rounded up before they went out and actually hurt someone
However, many of my fellow residents were angered by what they saw as the federal government's intrusion into local affairs. The arrest of such fine Americans by the FBI was further proof of a liberal conspiracy.
This dark Christmas mood carried over into the newspapers. Instead of the usual editorials spouting good will toward men and peace on earth, there was an abundance of mean-spirited columns. One column, for no apparent reason, was filled with a variety of stereotypical slurs against American Indians. Another advocated allowing anyone to carry a concealed weapon as a way to reduce crime. It ignored that such a law would be likely to reduce the population even more.
The Scooge outlook afflicted many people even in seemingly simple matters. A friend of mine had to punch out two construction foremen before they would give him his paycheck. What set my friend off wasn't
Why would two men pick a fight with a guy who could so easily break their noses? Well, as I said, I think it had to do with Reagan.
Even the homeless failed to escape the ravages of the Scrooge atmosphere. A few days before Christmas, a company that owned a dry riverbed in Bexhill asked the police to arrest the homeless living there for trespassing.
that the two men didn't want to pay him for his work, but what they had said about his Christmas plans for his wife and children.
After all this misery-making, I'm convinced that it was the arms scandal that was putting everyone on the edge of retirement conservative, but they aren't inhumane.
What worries me is that I don't see anyone's mood improving back home. There's an "Impeach Ronald Reagan" rally planned for Wednesday here at KU. If word of that gets to Arizona, it will make going home really unpleasant. Maybe I'll just stay here for spring break
Poindexter similar to Nixon aide
WASHINGTON — Deep within the dense pose of Vice Adm. John Poindexter's 1863 memorandum to President Reagan was a sentence that, after translation, provided an insight of startling clarity into U.S. foreign policy as formulated in the White House basement.
Arnold Sawislak UPI Senior Editor
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
Pointerdex, then National Security Council director, argued in the memo that sending military equipment to Iran for use in its long war with Iraq would strengthen "moderate elements" in Tehran. They, in turn, could help keep the Soviet Union from gaining influence in Iran, a key concern of U.S. foreign policy, the admiral suggested.
This was the nub of the justification given by Reagan for the arms sales when the transactions became public. That idea — to help those you want to be your friends
"Further, once the exchange relationship has commenced, a
But having made his point, the admiral didn't rest his case. He continued with this remarkable sentence:
— was endorsed in principle by a number of people, including some whose objections were aimed at the "other shoe" — the use of profits from the Iran arms to help the anti-Sandinista rebels.
dependency would be established on those who are providing the requisite resources, thus allowing the providers to coercively influence near-term events."
The first observation that might be made is that the country was fortunate that this admiral was commanding a detaining machine rather than an aircraft carrier in action. By the time the pilots figured out what his battle orders meant, the enemy probably would have bombed the carrier and returned to base.
But the Poindexter sentence
does mean something. In fact, the proposition it states has an earie resonance dating back to the Nixon on administration.
It was the redubutable Charles Colson, who in another context, declared, "When you've got them by the (specific part of the anatomy), their hearts and minds will follow." Colson left the White House and went to jail — not for his epigrams — but for his analysis of the way to get things done obviously didn't leave with him.
Nor is the Colson-Poindexter method of getting things done
confined to government. For example, it is said that many entrepreneurial chemical merchandisers, as Pointeaux might have it, do pusher ships, in Colonial usage, would give school books to students; these were addicted and would do anything for the money to buy drugs.
Perhaps a kinder interpretation of the Poindexter statement can be found, but it certainly does seem that he is saying. "Let's get the iranians hooked on U.S. weapons and then we can make them do what we want."
Experts take mystery out of special gift
Mike Royko on vacation. While he is away, we are reprinting some of his favorite columns The following first appeared on Aug 9, 1971.
The first time Slats Grobnik cracked one of his knuckles, dogs all over the neighborhood began barking, and a squad car came by to see who had been shot. Slats knew then that he had a special gift.
Mike Royko Columnist
He could get two resounding cracks out of each finger — one from the knuckle and one from the middle joint. And he could get one out of each of his thumbs. That made 18 of them, and when he did it fast, it was like a string of Zebra firecrackers.
It worried his mother for a while. She thought there might be something wrong with him, so she took him to the doctor who had an office upstairs over the drugstore to have him examined. The doctor told her that Slats had real loud knuckles and charged her $10. As they walked home Slats said: "I would have told
you that for a quarter.
The sound bothered some people. In school he cracked them during tests because he liked to see the teacher jump. She finally made him wear heavy fleece-lined gloves to muff the sound. It was more peaceful, but by the time everybody else was reading at the seventh-grade level, Slats was still trying to get his first book opened.
He liked cracking his knuckles in the movies best, especially during the romantic scenes. When Charles Boyer was kissing Bette Davis, Slats would clasp his hands and race through all 18 knuckles. The audience thought Bette Davis' teeth were breaking. Who knows what they would think during romantic scenes in today's movies?
As he got older, his knuckles grew even louder. Every summer Slats was given the job as starter at the alderman's neighborhood olympics. For a while, the alderman had used a regular starter who fired a blank pistol, but instead of running the race, most of the neighborhood youths put their hands in the air or emptied their pockets. So they let Slats crack his big knuckles, which was louder anyway.
During the winter, when the softball season was over, Slats was sponsored by Crazy AI's Tavern to crack his knuckles in competition with other taverns.
He lost only one match out of hundreds. And that loss surprisingly, was to Ruby Peak, an elderly widow who lived above the war surplus store and represented Bruno's Tap. Peak had a left knee that cracked like a rifle shot. It took her almost four hours of steady cracking to beat Slats that one time, but after that Peak walked funny.
People who couldn't crack their knuckles loud, or at all, were always asking Slats how he did it.
Like most great natural athletes, he was modest about his talent. He'd say things like: "I guess somebody up there likes to hear my knuckles pop." Or: "I could never have done it without my mother and father, who both got big hands."
He once appeared on the Morris B, Sachs Radio Amateur Hour, cracking his knuckles in time to "Lady of Spain I Adore You." He did well, too, finishing in the judging behind a boy who clicked his teeth to "Lady of Spain I Adore You" and a girl who toe-danced while playing "Lady of
Spain I Adore You" on her accorption.
Somebody once asked Slats why his knuckles, or anybody else's knuckles
or fingers, are noisy. Noise Slats, who could be philosophical,
said. "What else are they good for?"
Spain I Adore You" on her accoridion
But now scientists, who can't leave anything alone, claim to have found the reason for the cracking sound that knuckles make.
Some British researchers did it by using special knuckle-cracking machines, X-rays and other measuring devices on a team of volunteers.
They have found this answer: There is fluid in the knuckle joints. When people stretch these joints, tiny gas bubbles form in the fluid. When you bend your fingers forward, the gas bubbles come back and the gas goes back into the fluid and if you wait awhile, you can repeat the process.
Big deal Now that they have figured that out, they'll probably start working on the question of why some people can wiggle their ears and others can't.
Slats could really wiggle his. For a while, he even thought he had solved the mystery of flight. But that's another story.
BLOOM COUNTY
by Berke Breathed