Opinion THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 2010 WWW.KANSAN.COM FREE FOR ALL To contribute to Free for All, visit Kansan.com or call (785) 864-0500. Snuck fuggies. There's nothing like coming home from work at six in the morning to find out your roommate didn't come home. No pants party! I just one-upped myself. Forget driving 80 mph in the fog being a head rush, the true experience is driving 100 mph in the dark while it is far-reaching. Dear K-State, here is a new clever slogan: SHEAR the REFARD! I like big boobs and fat butts First time at the Hawk last night. It must be an acronym for "Here Are White I've got a freezer full of stolen ice cream from Mrs. E's. Yep. That was a good movie. Do you know what else you good movie? The one your mom and I made last night! Beer is my main source of calories on the weekends. I should take vitamins or something I had better friends in middle school than I do now. Dear Boyfriend: Mizzou was a bad choice. --parking pass. --parking pass. How sad is this? I'm 20 and I technically just went to my first college party. Do some of you guys want to meet up some time? We could play poker or something? --parking pass. I'll meet up with your mom and poke her. Screw my birthday. --parking pass. PAGE 9A Made out with three girls and four guys. My night was a My girlfriend is like a genie; rub her magic lamp and she'll do anything you want. --parking pass. Game day! Nothing tastes as good as being skinny. Why does Lawrence smell like cat peen? --parking pass. City's snow removal policy unfair to citizens EDITORIAL BOARD The snowdrifts may have melted,but frustration regarding the city's snow removal policy remains. Lawrence residents can receive a $75 ticket if they do not—or cannot—remove the snow on the sidewalk in front of their house. This fine is unfair and the city should change its policy. Aaron Cromwell, Lawrence city commissioner, said the tickets were implemented after the city noticed citizens were not removing the snow on their own. While this may save some money for the city, which has plowed through its snow removal budget for the year, it is unfair to citizens. A lot of KU students were not in town during the holidays when Lawrence received a staggering amount of snow, and this made it nearly impossible for them to adhere to the city's policy. Also, heart attacks from shoveling snow are common this time of year. This makes it not only difficult, but dangerous for elderly citizens to take care of the sidewalks in front of their homes. Sidewalks are public property. When they aren't covered in snow citizens can't do whatever they want on them. It is unfair of the city to require citizens to take care of something the city owns. The city's policy is not only unfair, it is ineffective. Warm weather, not the city's snowplows or the citizens' shovels, finally cleared the roads and sidewalks. Snow removal issues are also prevalent on campus. Anyone who tried to park on campus the first few weeks of school surely noticed some problems. Mounds of snow could be found all over campus and though they were fun to climb, they took up parking spaces that could have been used by students and faculty who had paid for a We haven't even made it through January, and Lawrence is sure to receive more snow before winter is over; according to Weather. com we may even see snow Thursday. Both the city and University should work to improve their snow removal policies. Hopefully we won't have to rely on Mother Nature to clear the streets for us after the next big snowstorm. Andrew Hammond for the Editorial Board EDITORIAL CARTOON THIS LATE NIGHT TV SHAKEUP STORY IS SO DISTURBING! ...CAN YOU THINK OF ANYTHING HALF AS EARTHSHATTERING? NICHOLAS SAMBALUK HUMOR In the war over'Late Night', I'm with Coco Growing up in the Central Time Zone (CTZ) was rather rough. Sometimes it seemed like the whole world didn't acknowledge our quaint little region. For example, the start time of television shows would often be listed in Eastern Standard Time. This would force me to subtract a whole hour in order to figure out when the show actually started. One simple miscalculation and I'd risk tuning in only to discover the show I was so eager to see had already ended. Heartbreak would ensue. O'Brien was the only person on national television who gave the CTZ its due every New Year's. "Late Night's" CTZ countdown helped ring in the new year in typically adored fashion. One memorable year, the show marked the occasion by lowering an Asian man in a Speedo onto O'Brien's announcer Joel Goddard as the clock struck midnight. Difficulties of living in the CTZ were not just math-related. New Year's Eve seemed to exclude me, too. Every year, they'd show the ball drop in Time Square - at 11 p.m. We in the CTZ were left with an hour of half-hearted, anticlimactic partying until we could ring in our own year with whatever noise-makers we could scrouge from around the house. It was as though Dick Clark had raised an eternally youthful middle finger to the entire Midwest. No one cared about us. No one, that is, except for Conan O'Brien. That's just one of the many reasons I have thrown my full support behind O'Brien during the recent "Late Night" fiasco. Last Friday was his last "Tonight Show" after seven months and a whole bunch of poor decision-making on the part of NBC executives. O'Brien cared about CTZ-ers. He cared about me. He didn't just Perhaps the earlier time slot just wasn't for O'Brien; it rendered the CTZ countdown impossible and caused him to tone down the surreality that was his trademark on "Late Night". appeal to Middle America; he was there for Middle America in its anual time of need. BY ALEX NICHOLS anichols@kantan.com Still, he was no less enjoyable or funny in those scant few months than he was in the 16 years during which he established himself as a powerful influence in the world of comedy. He showed me that it is important to take risks – in both comedy and in life. If a bit didn't work or a joke landed flat, it was OK. O'Brien simply moved on to the next bit, the next joke or the next opportunity to make people laugh. In life, failure is not only an option, it's an inevitability. What matters is to keep trying. O'Brien did that in 1993 when reviews were bad, ratings were low and the network was renewing him 13 weeks at a time. Without that perseverance, he never would have achieved – however briefly – his self-proclaimed dream of hosting the "Tonight Show." It's clear that other people share my sentiments. The "I'm With Coco" page on Facebook has more than 700,000 fans supporting O'Brien. People bought O'Brien shirts and posters, with proceeds going to disaster relief in Haiti. Even pro-O'Brien rallies were held across the country last week. It was absurd to see people protesting over a late night comedian, yet also strangely appropriate. The whole tongue-in-cheek spectacle felt like a sketch O'Brien might have done years ago. I don't mean for this to sound like a eulogy. Although the CTZ countdown that made all Midwestern "Late Night" fans feel included may be dead, O'Brien himself is very much alive. Wherever O'Brien goes from here, those of us who are "With Coco" are sure to follow. It's the least we can do. Nichols is a Stillwell junior in creative writing SCIENTIFIC HEALTH Ancient but not wise The words of our elders and ancestors are often accepted as sacred and unquestionably true. However, when it comes to health, ancient wisdom fails to provide a true benefit. The modern practice of acupuncture is the best example of such an unfortunate appeal to antiquity. Acupuncture, developed thousands of years ago in China, was based on the philosophy that meridians corresponding to the body's "qi", or life energy, run throughout the body. According to acupunctural medicine, when a needle penetrates points along these meridians, the functions of bodily systems and organs can be precisely manipulated. Practitioners of this ideology claim to be able to treat a variety of illnesses this way. Today, there is a clear lack of scientific evidence demonstrating the presence of such meridians, or even "qi" in general. This destroys any scientific plausibility for acupuncture, making its use a leap of faith. Biomedical research has done lengthy evaluations on the function of organs on a cellular, biochemical and even atomic level. In contrast, acupuncture simply rests on an unobserved, unsupported and unlikely phenomenon. The ultimate question is whether acupuncture is truly effective in treating disease. The scientific attempt to answer this question, however, has proven complicated and difficult. Since the practice of acupuncture claims to offer treatment for a huge number of diseases, it is exceedingly challenging to pinpoint a single measure of acupuncture's efficacy as representative of the practice as a whole. Furthermore, the actual procedure of inserting needles is extremely difficult to control. In any clinical study, the Sai the Science Guy BY SAI FOLMSBEE This unfairly biases the data and has allowed for some smaller clinical studies to have falsely positive results, largely due to the placebo effect of the patient being offered a novel treatment. practitioner should not know whether he or she is administering the true treatment or the placebo treatment, known as "blinding." But, in the case of acupuncture, it is very clear to the acupuncturist (and often the patient) if they are asked to perform a sham treatment Despite these limitations, there have been some consistent results in the scientific research behind acupuncture. Particularly during the last few years, the controls for these studies have improved. This includes better sham procedures, more reliable practitioner blinding and larger groups of patients to study. In these well-controlled studies, the gap between the supposed effectiveness of the treatment and the placebo group has shrunk accordingly, leaving the two statistically indistinguishable. When put under scientific scrutiny, acupuncture was shown to be just an ineffective ideology. Considering the recent flux of dependable data, it appears that acupuncture truly has little use in modern medicine today. Its philosophy is ancient, and while some translate that to mean "wise," the truly wise know it to more accurately mean "outdated." Folmsbee is a Topeka senior in neurobiology. Manners Made Easy WHAT'S UP WITH THAT? What's up with oblivious smokers? BY RICHELLE BUSER The Hemline If you were driving in your car and another driver's trash splattered on your windshield you'd be pretty upset. That's how inconsiderate it is when a smoker puffs his cigarette and blows the smoke into someone else's face. Smokers can be oblivious to the annoyance they are causing other people. An oblivious smoker doesn't even think before exhaling toxins in the direction of others. If students choose to partake in a cancer-causing pastime it's really none of my business. But, when I gag on cigarette smoke during an otherwise scenic walk on campus, it becomes my business. If you smoke, please, be courteous of those around you who may not enjoy the after-effects of your habit. BY ALEX ESPOSITO But why do on-campus smokers have to force nonsmokers to inhale their bad habit? I wish there was a designated smokers-only spot on campus, so they can smell each other and the rest of us don't have to. If you must smoke around others, please do it in a stationary position. Smoking while walking and exposing the innocent people walking behind to secondhand smoke is beyond rude. I don't smoke, so why do I have to show up to classes smelling like an ashtray? OK, so I can't force people to quit smoking, although, for their own sake, I really wish they would HOW TO SUBMIT A LETTER TO THE EDITOR LETTER GUIDELINES Send letters to *opinion@ekansan.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. CONTACT US Stephen Montemayor, editor 864-4810 or smontemayor@kansan.com Brianne Pfannenstiel, managing editor 864-4810 or bpfannenstielikansan.com Jennifer Torline, managing editor Lauren Cunningham, kansan com managing editor 864-4810 or lcunninghamkansas.com Emily McCoy, opinion editor 2024 or emccoy@kanisan.com Vicky Lu, KUJH-TV managing editor 864-4810 or vlu@ikansan.com Cassie Gerken, business manager 864-4358 or cgerkenikansan.com Carolyn Battle, sales manager 864-4477 or cbattle@kansan.com Kate Larrabee, editorial editor 864-4924 or klarrabee@kansan.om Malcolm Gibson, general manager and news adviser Jon Schlitt, sales and marketing adviser 864-7666 or jschlitt.kansan.com THE EDITORIAL BOARD Members of the Kansan Editorial Board are Stephen Montenayr, Brianne Phannelstet, Jennifer Tottine, Lauren Cunningham, Vicky Lum McYlcey McKay and Kate Larrabe.