THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THURSDAY,FEBRUARY 17,2011
PAGE 5A
opinion
Pay heed, all who drive today:
BEWARE OF THE FOG!!
Why does the UDK need to make a bad pun on the front page every freaking day?
I know people smoke a bunch at KU, but did you really need to hotbox Lawrence as a whole? I can't see anything.
apps.facebook.com/dailykansan
Taking a pushup bra off a girl is like opening a christmas present and realizing you just got a pair of socks.
Men and women can agree on at least one point: Do not send a hand to do a tongue's job.
Attention, boobs are awesome no matter what shape or size. That is all.
Don't text your mom a message about being pregnant when she's on the treadmill. That could have ended terribly.
Weather prediction for Thursday: 90 percent chance of frat guys wearing brightly colored shorts.
Phog Allen is pissed. Look outside.
Can't we all just go back to collectively hating Missouri?
I think I'd try to find a hook up on Craigslist before FFA...
I am the Charlie Sheen, Hank Moody, Vinny Chase and Nucky Thompson of KU. I slay all the females, do copious amounts of drugs and have duffle bags full of money I use at the Wheel.
My roommate and I just shared a bowl of popcorn and watched "The Bachelor". We are two straight men.
I swear I could write a book with all the golden, excusable, no slip required excuses for missing class
Kansas perfected basketball, K-State perfected the sleeveless hunting tee
This is a dog-eat-dog library. You cannot, CANNOT sit down at my table without asking me if I'm saving it for someone.
Will douchebags ever stop using bad acoustic gutatrs and dogs to pick up chicks? Probably not because it works on dumb girls daily.
Pushup bras are lame as hell. Sure, they make what you have look better. But pushup bras give you two cup sizes. That's like false advertising.
Dear KU, Please fix the potholes on the road between the rec center parking lot and Naismith. It's getting dangerous.
At first i was really upset about our loss to KSU, but after seeing the commemorative DVDs and statuses saying, "best day ever" I feel bad for them. We get that excited about National Championships.
EDITORIAL
In recent years, colleges and universities across the nation have started to offer benefits to domestic partners of employees.
University should provide health care for domestic partners
Such changes have occurred at the University of Kansas as recent last summer when the Provost approved the revision of the University's bereavement leave policy to include domestic partners.
While this demonstrates a positive step toward equality, the University still falls short when it comes to the most basic of human rights; health care.
The University does not offer health insurance to domestic partners of employees because it currently uses the state's definition to define a partner as a man or woman in marriage.
University officials should reevaluate this and seek equality by
providing heath insurance to domestic partners as well as married spouses of University employees.
According to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, in 2007 the Human Rights Campaign identified 305 higher education institutions in the U.S. that offer domestic partner benefits. While the overall number of universities that offer these benefits is low, the University of Kansas should take a stand as a progressive institution and ensure equality because it is the right thing to do.
The most important reason to support this recommendation rests on the grounds of basic fairness, equality and nondiscrimination. In fact, by not extending health insurance, the University goes against its own non-discrimination policy, which prohibits
discrimination "on the basis of sexual orientation, marital status, parental status, gender identity and gender expression."
Students, staff and faculty should support extending health insurance to domestic partners of university employees for several reasons. One reason is retention and recruitment. The University is in competition for the best and brightest employees and offering health insurance to domestic partners of those employees will help to recruit and retain high quality faculty and staff.
One argument against extending health insurance is cost. In today's economic climate the University cannot and should not spend its money carelessly, but at the same time equality should not be ieopardized.
The University could look into
paying for the extension of health insurance with private funds or reallocating funds from elsewhere in the budget. Furthermore, should all faculty members have access to health insurance for their partners, they will be more likely to stay at the University, saving the University costly recruitment efforts in the future.
Employees with domestic partners deserve the same compensation as married employees. By extending health insurance to domestic partners of University employees, the University can continue taking steps toward equality and uphold the basic value of fairness.
Erin Brown for The Kansan Editorial Board.
HUMAN RIGHTS
Consequences of drug trafficking shared by both users and dealers
What do thousands of kidnappings, murders, spring break, drugs, topless women and great tequila all have in common?
Brazil? Ibiza? No...
Our popular southern spring break destination has for decades been the epicenter for everything from that pot you are probably going to smoke after class, to the hundreds of thousands of pounds of cocaine and other hard narcotics.
This problem is nothing new, with a lax and easily bought out government and an underfunded acting army working in place of a local or state police force, cartel gangs have been able to get by with little to no legal opposition.
able to get by with little to no right of position. In past decades the violence and politics of the Mexican drug dilemma has not seeped outside of Mexico like its product. The only evidence of its presence: the steady flow of drugs into the United States and the occasional disappearance or murder of someone who is usually tied to an opposing distributor or manufacturer.
According to U.S. officials, Mexican drug cartels operate in more than a dozen states. While the so-called "War on Drugs" has made some progress in busting the smaller distributors in the states, these busts are smaller American gangs that are one piece in the distribution map and do not address the problem at large.
In the past few years, however, the violence of Mexico has seeped into the southern United States and now even in the Midwest and more northern states.
The U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center publicized that mid-level and retail drug distribution is carried out by more than 900,000 criminal active gang members representing approximately 20,000 street gangs in more
BY SHAUNA BLACKMON
slackmon@kansan.com
than 2,500 cities. Soon the damage won't be limited to Mexico or to states along the border
When people buy their weekly sack, most don't think about where it is coming from and the political and financial implications of possibly supporting this empire through violence.
limited to Mexico or to states along the border. Americans in the south have already begun to see the consequences of the Mexican drug problem in form of murders and kidnappings, but the rest of the U.S. has for the most part, been ignorant of the recent problems.
This is not to say that every American should give up whatever drugs they are doing (if any). We all know that will never happen. An educated look at where you want your hard earned money to go should be a priority though.
It is hard to know for sure on anything that is so sketchy and underground as drug sales, but as the largest consumers of the product that is supporting violence and ruining a country and a government so close to ours. we should at least be smart about where our money is going.
Blackmon is a junior from Olathe in journalism.
What is the most obnoxious pop lyric on the radio right now?
- Rihanna- "Oh nana, what's my name?"
- B.o.B.- "I got the magic in me."
Bruno Mars- "When I see your face,
there's not a thing that I would change."
KeSha- "Got Jesus
on my necklace."
□ Other
Vote now at KANSAN. COM/POLLS
POP CULTURE
Popular advertisements encourage mindless consumption
In a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, Jesse Eisenberg plays a Columbia student being interviewed by Bill Hader's reoccurring character Herb Welch — a pugnacious veteran field reporter with a violent-mic hand.
The news parody focuses on the recent drug bust at Columbia, where five students were arrested for allegedly selling illicit drugs to finance their education.
The randomness of his entrance is good for a W-T-F laugh, but it's rather appropriate considering Geico employs (and now I'm thinking about the "Can Geico Really Save You 15 percent on car insurance?" commercials) the same type of random humor in their advertisements: comedy that's so incongruous with what precedes it, that it's illogical inclusion makes it memorable.
Halfway through the sketch, a presumably stoned student, played by Andy Samberg, stumbles across the on campus interview, entering with a non sequitur: "It's gecko, not Geico!"
Geico is not the only company to use this type of humor. Old Spice runs commercials with Ray Lewis selling the
BY MATTHEW MARSAGLIA
marsagliakapans.com
The Terry Crews commercials are similarly absurd. One commercial zooms into the retired defensive end's armpit's armpit (Youtube it), and zooms out to him straddling an anthropomorphic, bathroom-dwelling tiger. Such humor isn't confined to television, however; we hear a similar voice in Groupon's daily coupons. A recent Groupon for a three-hour gelato-making class grabs readers' attention with this opening line: "Like magma and dreams, gelato is a semisolid — neither
deodorant with an unexplained third appeal: "Hi, I'm Ray Lewis. Women want me, men want to be me, and animals wanna learn how to talk, so they can hang out with me."
solid enough to build a house nor liquid enough to feed a thirsty sparrow*
What's interesting about these three examples is that before garnering national attention, they originally appealed primarily to the same target audience as The University Daily Kansan.
Now, I understand people of all ages buy Old Spice, Geico Insurance and Groupons, but Old Spice was once the deodorant your grandpa used to wear and is now a Youtube meme generator.
Similarly, before Groupon penetrated the mass' lexicon, the burgeoning company was dependent on young, internet-savvy mavens, similar to their founder, 29-year-old Andrew Mason, to bring the site into the mainstream. But just saying our cohorts are crazy for capricious comedy is an easy way to write us off as attention-deficit dummies.
To gain more exposure, nascent or established businesses struggling for market share often rely on our demographic to take their service or product viral (bloggers to Oprah, Oprah to western Kansas). Oddly enough, an
By spreading these types of advertisements, young people are not promoting uniformed consumer spending (we don't need the details because we can find out for ourselves), but rather promoting certain businesses that understand a more respectable advertising motive is just making consumers aware of their product.
effective way of attracting our attention is through something that's never explained. This doesn't mean that we passively watch commercials just to be entertained. Rather, I think it shows how we unconsciously tune out traditional selling points (that's not sex appeal) for something worth spreading
And that's it.
In a very optimistic sense, I believe that with our penchant for the pointless, we may be empowering other groups of consumers by encouraging advertising that doesn't pose the question, "what's in it for me?" but rather, "what the hell just happened?"
Marsaglia is a junior from Naperville, Ill., in English.
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THE EDITORIAL BOARD Members of the Kansan Editorial Board are Nick Gerik, Michael Holtz, Kelly Stroda, D.M. Scott and Mandy Matney.
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