I met a guy named Gregory “Jake” Starsiak, a wild but awesome dude, who can invent games in the blink of an eye and loves sharing them with others. Some of these games are just weird or crazy, but some of them are just down right awesome to play.  He invented and told me about two sports that can be played around campus or elsewhere during the winter season, which is quickly approaching. Trust me, these games really sounded fun when I heard it from Jake and I can’t wait to give them a try this winter with my friends. So here are the two sports Jake told me about:

Hillball
H-i-l-l-b-a-l-l, Hillball! This game can be played in two ways: either free for all if you have less than 10 people, or with two teams if you have more than 10 people. The game starts off with any kind of ball being placed on top of a hill while everyone stays at the bottom of the hill. The goal, if it’s free for all, is to be the first to get the ball from the top and then run/roll/whatever down to the bottom of the hill without being tackled. If you do get tackled (since you’re playing during the winter, the snow will make it less painful) or are unable to move then you must say “disperse” so that the people on you will get off of you and then you must throw the ball back up to the top of the hill and anyone, except you, will have the chance to try and get the ball down the hill. It’s alright to drop the ball, but you can’t throw the ball down the hill. Now, if you’re playing with teams, the same rules apply except you’ll have help and unlimited passing, unlike football where you can only pass once. One more thing, before everyone runs up the hill, everyone must count to three and shout “HILLBALL”, you know, just to make it all epic, and then run as fast as you can up the hill. And that is Hillball 101 for you.

Snumo
Don’t worry, were not going to shout “Snumo!” when we play this game. The game is pretty simple and played with three to four people. You start by making a circle in fresh powder snow and having all the players stand outside of it. Then at the count of three everyone jumps in the circle, feet first (not face first! you don’t want to do that, trust me).  After all the players are in the circle they must stand straight and then bow to each other with their hands together like what sumo wrestlers do before a match. The goal of this game is to be the last man in the circle, so basically it’s like the WWE Royal Rumble where you throw, toss or push a guy out of the ring to be eliminated. One important rule in this game is that you cannot punch, kick or do whatever ninja moves you got in you, you can only push your opponents outside the circle.

These two sports are some sports you can play on or off campus during the winter (or potentially all year). They may be out of the ordinary, but it’s fun to try something new, like Hillball or Snumo.  Just a reminder, play safe and have epic fun playing these sports. Not only should you try out these two epic sports, but you can come up with your own sports too. All it takes is some imagination. It doesn’t matter what season it is, coming up with new sports is fun all year ‘round. Go ahead, tell your friends about these two sports and pretty soon your new sport creation might be featured here. GO!

Fencing
I don’t know about you, but learning how to fight with swords sounds like an amazing use of my time (especially compared to checking facebook every hour and watching online TV). It’s about time you took that inspiration you got from watching The Princess Bride, Rob Roy, or Pirates of the Caribbean and did something with it. Here at the U, not only do we have a fencing club that teaches you the sport, but a competition team that travels to intercollegiate events.

Now, you should know that fencing is not the “grab whatever weapon you have and go for it” fight that you see in the movies, but it isn’t tame either. There are three different weapons that are used in the sport: Foil, Épée, and Sabre. Each of these weapons varies in weight, shape, and flexibility. Also, each type of weapon has specific parts of the body you can score on. For example, in épée you can score by hitting any part of your opponent’s body, but in sabre you can only score above the waist. There are other rules and particulars, but you will learn those when you go to your three free practices.

That’s right! Unlike some other sports clubs where you have to make a monetary commitment right away, fencing allows everyone three free sessions to test the waters and see if it’s a good fit for them. Practices are on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights in Cooke Hall which can be accessed through the Rec Center, with a possibility for Wednesday night practices too.

For more information and practice times, go to: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~fencing/

Breakdancing
You know you want to. You’ve seen bboys and bgirls dancing on the streets and at campus events and you’ve been envious. You’ve always wanted to learn how to breakdance but never taken the initiative. Well, here’s your chance, just don’t go into it with the “I want to do head spins and flares right now” mentality.

The U of M Breakdancing Club is a perfect environment for those that just want to session, know the basics and want to learn more, or are completely new to the style. “Practices,” if you can call them that, are not so much structured lessons as they are open sessions. Music will be playing and people will be dancing, but everyone there is willing to teach you whatever you want to know. The club officers will break down the basics for you and get you to a level where you are comfortable dancing and mixing moves to the beat. From there, they can show you new moves and variations, or, if you see someone else do a move that you like, all you have to do is ask them to show it to you. That’s what hip hop and breakdancing are all about, being a community.

Don’t think of yourself as much of dancer? Try it anyways. While you may have been taught through bad TV or movie representations that breakdancing is all about power moves (windmills, flares, etc.), it’s more about originality and style—and everyone has their own style.

For more information and practice times, email breakdnc@umn.edu

Ballroom Dancing
When you started college, was “learn to ballroom dance” on your checklist of things to accomplish? I doubt it, but college is all about new experiences. Personally, I was walking around campus one day last fall and saw a poster for free dance lessons from the U of M Ballroom Dance Club. I had always wanted to learn these styles of dance and I thought it couldn’t be a bad way to meet girls. The next thing I knew I had 8 different styles of dance on lock and was going out to dance nights all around Minneapolis.

Have you ever been to a salsa or swing night and wished you could dance like the seasoned pros there? Well you can. The ballroom dance club teaches both of these styles as well as tango, waltz, foxtrot, hustle, rumba, cha cha, and others. You switch partners every couple minutes so don’t worry, you won’t get stuck with a weirdo and that girl or guy you’ve got your eye on will make it back to you during the lesson. If you’re hesitant, your first lesson is free so you can test it out without commitment. They have beginner lessons from 6:45 to 7:30 every Tuesday and Thursday in the Bierman Gym basketball court. Then there is general dancing from 7:30 to 8:30 so you can test out your brand new skills. Out of everything I’ve learned in college so far, I can confidently say that dance has helped me out the most.

Here’s a good idea, go learn some new ballroom moves that you can showcase at the Yule Ball! (See below.)

For more information, go to: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~bdc/

Quidditch
This is a dream come true for a lot of people, the chance to play the ultimate sport from their all-time-favorite books. While the U of M Quidditch team is immensely popular, this is a giant school and many of you probably didn’t even know we have a team, much less that there are teams on college campuses across that country.

This “muggle” quidditch (that’s non-wizarding folk, for you n00bs) has a few differences from the kind portrayed in the Harry Potter books. First, there is no flying, but players still hold brooms between their legs. Second, the bludgers have become dodgeballs. Third, according to president Luke Zak, “the snitch turned from a small flying ball into a full grown athlete, adorned in golden, tight, sparkly spandex.” Currently, the league has about 170 active participants, twice as many as their inaugural year. There is even a competition team that will play in the first ever Midwest Regionals (October 8th and 9th) and the prestigious Quidditch World Cup held in New York City (November 12th and 13th).

Whether your hands are shaking with excitement from all of this or you’ve never read the Harry Potter books and have no idea what I’m talking about, you can all experience it for yourselves. The teams play every Sunday, except October 9th, at 1 p.m. on the East River Flats. Also, the league is hosting a Yule Ball in early December as a fundraiser. Yes, you head me right, a YULE BALL. Everyone who loves Harry Potter can freak out now. It will be held at the DQ Club in TCF Bank Stadium and only 800 tickets will be sold, so you know it will sell out.

As for the future of quidditch, Zak had this to say: “Not only is it here to stay, but it is continuing to grow exponentially on campus and around the world.”

For more information about quidditch and the Yule Ball, go to: http://www.facebook.com/umnquidditch

Change is never easy, particularly when it involves factoring a massive construction effort into your daily commute for the next three years. Such are growing pains, and the Twin Cities are certainly growing—by a half million residents in the metro area over the past fifteen years, actually.

Let’s be sure to properly categorize Light Rail detractors into their two camps: on the right are those who categorically reject public transit on principle—people like the head of the MN House committee on transportation, Representative Mike Beard–who get elected with cute one-liners like stopping the Southwest Corridor Light Rail project “dead in its tracks;” on the left are those who support alternative transit, probably even the Central Corridor (CCLRT) itself, whose concerns directly or indirectly come down to NIMBY, or not-in-my-back-yard.

Minneapolis and St. Paul used to be connected by a series of rail cars until they were paved over in 1953—a victim, like in many other American cities, of automobile based urban renewal efforts. Like many of its spatially endowed Midwest counterparts, the Twin Cities was built for sprawl, evolving into an economy comprised of a miniature central business sector reliant upon the suburban nodes dotted along its over-sized highway system.

Metro Transit now ranks seventh among eleven peer cities in transit investment per capita, with most of that money going to airports or roadway infrastructure (hard to believe given the condition of city roads). The Minnesota Department of Transportation just came out with figures placing our freeway’s congestion rate at the same rate it was when 35W was closed, while a recent study by the Texas Transportation Institute ranked our traffic congestion as some of the highest in the nation. According to their study, the average driver here spends 43 hours and burns 37 gallons of fuel in traffic jams annually. At $3.50 a gallon, that’s serious money evaporating in the waiting line.

In a future of declining liquid fuels—a fact now supported by a long overdue admission from the US Department of Energy—simply expanding our roadway infrastructure isn’t just short-sighted planning, it’s economic suicide. Not even the best public fleet of gas guzzling buses can change the fate of roadway transportation. There is already an imperative for investment in an electrically powered transportation infrastructure, to mention nothing of that whole climate change/carbon emission problem.

In light of a sizable influx of federal money to support the movement towards electrically powered transportation, some pretty undisputed numbers regarding overall economic benefit to the state, plus the fact that the CCLRT is barely shy of complete funding and approval, protests from the NIMBY crowd tend to ring hallow; the halfhearted lawsuits from the University of Minnesota and MPR merely sought to establish leverage with which to bargain for future compensation. The same could said of the lawsuit brought forth by the St. Paul NAACP’s coalition of concerned neighbors, the difference being that they will receive special attention through grants and government commissions dedicated specifically to help mitigate housing displacement or lost business revenues.

Aspects of gentrification associated with the CCLRT are unavoidable—that’s why the same people suing the project are simultaneously begging for a stop near their restaurant. Would business have been disrupted by some other, less socially beneficially construction effort? Yes, such are the hazards of building along a major road. Would losing 85 percent of parking spaces in one of the most parking-lot dense sectors of the metro be an overwhelmingly better use of space? Yes.

For students, the light at the end of the tunnel is a car-free Washington Ave, the way the Board of Regents recommended it be a century ago; that’s three stops on campus, plus a B-line to St. Paul. Nationwide, ridership on electric rails, including our own Hiawatha Light Rail, have exceeded expectations. Minnesota faces a long game of catch up and there’s not a moment to lose. CCLRT is a key victory for advocates of the 21st century infrastructure, currently under fire by politicians like Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker; completion of the CCLRT will be crucial to the funding of its suburban extensions and this context must not be overlooked.

Minnesota has a prided history of effective citizen participation and this sort of discourse and dissent should generally be encouraged; there is a point, however, when frivolous lawsuits, obstructionism and party fictionalization undercut the long-term well-being of our state.

More information on the Light Rail construction at www.stpaul.gov or ww.hamlinemidwaycoalition.org

No one could argue that the Light Rail will not eventually be useful, but eventually is the key word. It’s too late to beg for an underground transit system, and there is no way to derail the current plans for the new Light Rail. But why are we blocking one of the only main roads between Minneapolis and St. Paul for god knows how many years just so the people of St. Paul have easier access to Twins games? The current route of the CCLRT follows University Avenue all the way to downtown St. Paul; this forces anyone who doesn’t want to be stuck going 20 miles an hour on a one-lane road (yes University Ave will be trimmed down to one lane) to try and brave the traffic of highway 94 or take a ridiculous detour through the bro-mansions of Como Avenue. The city has already put up signs on Snelling Avenue reminding drivers to “Support University Avenue Businesses,” and the construction hasn’t even gotten that far yet.

Instead of hurting local businesses in the name of public infrastructure, why not choose a route that goes through neighborhoods that are in need of this kind of accessibility? The Midtown Greenway offers an already flattened area of land that stretches from Uptown to the river, and a light rail following the bike trail would prevent many of the muggings that take place each year on the Greenway bike path. The 35W bridge was built with enough room to accommodate light rail transit, so why not run the train over the bridge and through the below ground train tracks (again, already flattened and ready for use) through Dinkytown? A route like this would also open up space for a future route directed towards Northeast, another Minneapolis area in need of public transit.

No one is arguing against more public transit here. The Hiawatha Light Rail’s initial revenue was three times more than what was expected, and has probably helped Metro Transit from hiking rates even more. But the Hiawatha Light Rail had a lot more going for it—the epic Mall of America and the Airport on one end and the Twins stadium and downtown Minneapolis on the other. What do we have for the Central Corridor? The same Twins stadium at the starting point, and the Science Museum at the end. Will the Central Corridor help skyrocket Omnitheater sales? Only time will tell.

The Central Corridor Light Rail is an 11-mile transit line that will connect downtown Minneapolis to downtown Saint Paul, providing access to the University of Minnesota, the Midway District and the Capital Neighborhood. Running along University Avenue and Washington Avenue, the project includes 18 new stations and 31 new trains, and will connect to the Hiawatha Light Rail and the new North Star Line. The projected cost is $957 million. Construction is slated to continue through 2013 with the Light Rail open in 2014. More information at www.centralcorridor.org.

Owners of all clam-shell phones, bricks, slide-keyboards and pay-as-you-go burners, lend me your ear! 2010 was not a good year for we, the disconnected masses. It seemed like every week a new touch-screen enabled, 4g wonder-machine landed on shelves and tried to muscle us into irrelevancy. But we stood strong! For we are the dumbphone users, and like cockroaches, we shall be the last creatures texting on this earth. The humble dumbphone (a term applicable to any device that missed the wireless internet bandwagon) has remained popular largely due to the skyrocketing subscription costs for smartphone plans from the major service providers. A $200 price tag on the new Droid X (and that’s after the $100 mail-in rebate) quickly stacks up when you add in the $300 some dollars for a 2-year service plan and an extra $75 a month for the compulsory data packages. What it amounts to is a whole heap of money to have a phone that fulfills some of the functions that old laptop of yours has been providing for years now. While the Aughts were certainly the decade of the multifunctional super-gadget, Lady Liberty’s fallen on hard times lately, and we dumphoners would rather save the money by letting our phones remain just that: phones.

Worst Munchie-Bummer of 2010: The Great Chipotle Purge

Noticed a severe drop in the burrito-quality index at your local Chipotle over the last month? No, you’re not crazy, you’re merely witnessing part of the fallout of the company’s recent purge of nearly 80 workers statewide after the Immigration and Customs service conducted an I-9 audit, white-collar crackdown on Chipotle’s restaurants in Minnesota. Coming right before the Christmas bonuses went out in early December, the hatchet job mostly affected the company’s Latino staff, including some who had been employed with Chipotle for over five years. While it’s certainly unfortunate that the local working class had to take a hit because of the Nation’s mounting border insecurity, the real tragedy here is the useless honkies the company hired to replace them. We Chipotle fanatics have high standards for our massive calorie bombs; cold spots, botched orders and dripping burritos will not be tolerated. So when college-boy breaks his third tortilla in a row on your next burrito run, save your rage for La Migra and learn how to use a fork.

Best New Place to get your Hipster Cred Up: Angry Catfish Bike and Coffee Bar

Looking to garner a few scene points around the Twin Cities? Steer clear of Northeast, that’s so 2009, and you can forget about Uptown while you’re at it, the yuppies are buying up those new condos faster than their organic tomatoes at The Wedge. For the truly hip and cutting edge, the new “it” neighborhood in Minneapolis will be the formerly bucolic Standish by Lake Hiawatha, at least if the effortlessly cool staff at the Angry Catfish have anything to say about it. You can gaze longingly at the boutique track bikes gilding the shop’s walls whilst sipping a shot of Intelligentsia Espresso lovingly hand-drawn by a fetchingly mustachioed young Barista. The café has all the snazzy Java gadgets one could desire, from Chemex to French Press, and even Vaccum-Pot. Feel free to bring your old beater road bike along too, as the Angry Catfish keeps a full-time mechanic on staff to service repairs. While you wait, enjoy a delicious pastry from the neighborhood’s other, decidedly less hip institution: A Baker’s Wife.

Lamest 2010 Moment for Minors: Eclipse Records Closes

It gets harder every year to make a living selling music, especially if your band isn’t even old enough to buy a lottery ticket, and that’s why all-ages venues seem to be dropping like flies these days. Eclipse Records was forced to shutter its doors in September, another casualty of a recession that has shown little mercy to record stores and venues alike in 2010. It’s a real shame, too, because Eclipse was a great store with a strong stock of records and a knowledgeable staff. The shop opened its location on St. Paul’s University Avenue in 2006 and finished the work on it’s small venue space in the back in 2008, which quickly became a haven for the local all-ages Punk scene. Despite a barebones sound setup, shows at the Eclipse were always intimate and rarely much of a strain on the wallet. The venue even managed to attract some bigger name local acts, such as The Soviettes, much to the all-ages scene’s delight. The record store portion’s used bins always seemed to contain a few cheap gems to reward diligent diggers, in addition to the latest releases. Eclipse even housed an awesome collection of vintage Pinball machines and arcade games for the kids to waste away the hours on; their Galaga machine will be sorely missed. 2010 might have been an awesome year for the Twin Cities music scene, but it certainly had its casualties.

Biggest Minnesota Pride Moment of 2010: Doomtree Snowout

The Doomtree Crew seems to step their game up on their annual First Ave showcase every year, and 2010’s Blowout was certainly no exception, despite this town’s crazy weather. Blowout VI took place at the Main Room on December 11, which, as you may remember, was the day when the sky opened up and unleashed an unholy blizzard upon the unsuspecting city. Something in the vicinity of 19 inches dumped out of the heavens in less than 24 hours leaving cars buried, plows stuck, and general chaos in its wake. But First Avenue was far from empty that night, as the diehard local hip-hop fans dug out their cars, biked, walked and even skied through the whipping winds to pay tribute to their favorite local rap group. The night opened up with sets from the crew’s DJs Lazerbeak and Paper Tiger before POS, Cecil Otter, Dessa, Sims and Mictlan all joined them onstage to help rock the half-capacity crowd. Keeping the crowd warm with awesome Crew tracks like “Drumsticks,” Doomtree also took some time to let each of its members shine. Sims got a chance to promote his new record and Dessa performed some songs off her excellent solo album A Badly Broken Code with backing by Twinkie Jiggles of Heiruspecs fame and Abby Wolf. By the time a beaming Sims sat in front of the audience, as his new video for “Burn it Down” debuted for the crowd, there was a palpable sense of hometown pride in the room. For we are Minnesotans, and neither rain nor snow will keep us from reppin’ those Wings and Teeth!

While the book will inevitably seem discontinuous and unsatisfying plot-wise, the pleasure of reading Wallace is not about juicy plot twists or conventionally satisfying, cathartic conclusions. Instead, it is about the character of his work: the fundamental honesty and consciousness (but not necessarily self-consciousness) that runs through his work, from giant novels about addiction to nonfiction travel pieces about overly decadent cruises in the Caribbean. His occasional use of technical language and complex sentences complete with asides relegated to footnotes may intimidate some readers, but they shouldn’t: he treats the reader as his equal and his companion if that reader is willing to be active, not passive. While I wish there were still more work to come from the best writer of his generation, Wallace’s unfinished work will have to satisfy his readers, or, more appropriately, leave them unsatisfied.

It’s tough to tell exactly how serious the Epic Meal Time people are about these meals. Certainly there is an element of satire and absurdity, but there is also a meaty element of sincerity—after all, the people who cook the obnoxious meals do eat them (though thankfully they are split among a medium-sized group). One wonders how much of the series of videos is an outgrowth of our culture—that we must create a spectacle to draw the attention of others—how much of it is a satire of such spectacles, and how much of it is legitimate boundary-pushing and experimentation. The answer is probably all three in equal parts, just as Epic Meal Time’s epic meals look equally creative, disgusting, and oddly delicious.

It seems like everyone these days is a “poor student” or a “starving artist” (or at least everyone from CLA), but that shouldn’t mean we have to stick to the standard trifecta of cheap Friday nights—studying, partying, and hanging out on the internet. There are tons of cheap things around town, from $3.50 Vietnamese sandwiches on Eat Street to student rush tickets at the Guthrie or Orchestra Hall, from Riverview Theatre ($2 movies on Tuesday nights) to Blue Door’s $2 taps.

But what about living for free? We challenged Alex, our spanking new Cities Editor, to spend a weekend on the town without spending a dime. The rules: no out of pocket expenses (even if daddy’s picking up the tab), no lounging around at home, food at the back of the cupboards is fair game, but there’s no eating out (if it comes with a check) or trips to the grocery store, so pack a lunch.

Free weekends can be done all over the city, not just on the free-food-filled frat row or on campus with help from generous student groups. Art museums all over the city offer free exhibits, regular exhibits at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Weisman are always free, and the Walker offers many special exhibits and events for free as well. Smaller galleries may not have as many exhibits as the big dogs, but they tend to be on the free side, like Burlesque of North America (1101 Stinson Blvd).

During the holidays, many restaurants and venues offer free things in exchange for a non-perishable food item, something all of us college students have tucked away in our kitchen (refried beans, anyone?). Bryant Lake Bowl offers a free game of bowling for an edible donation to the Joyce Uptown Food Shelf, and Punch Pizza recently offered a free meal in exchange for a donation to Second Harvest. Many of these offers are one day only, so it is important to always be on the look out.

Don’t let penny-pinching get in the way of a wonderful weekend. Be spontaneous, live in the moment, and always remember, in the words of R Kelly, “It’s the freakin’ weekend baby, I’m bouts to have me some FUN!”

No Problems Alright

Scott West's STILL painting in progress

There are two things I find troubling about college students. Well, two things in particular. The first is that they complain about being broke but spend all of their hard-earned money (or their parental allowance in a lot of cases) on booze. The second is that they claim there is never anything to do but party, especially on campus. When I tell people that I don’t drink but always have the best weekends ever they either think that I’m rich or that I’m some weirdo. No, I don’t spend my weekends flying to exotic countries. I don’t spend them drinking Mountain Dew and playing World of Warcraft either. To show everyone that there are tons of amazing things to do, none of which include purchasing or consuming alcohol, I decided to document my adventures on the weekend of Nov. 12th. I also vowed not to spend a cent.

Due to my sole class on Friday, I started my no-money, no-problems weekend Thursday night. Earlier in the week I heard that Scott West, one of the live painters from the band Cloud Cult, was exhibiting his work at the local art gallery Tarnish & Gold, and I decided to check it out. After a little research I found that the gallery was less than four miles from campus, and that on Thursday night it was holding a free screening of the new Cloud Cult documentary No One Said It Would Be Easy. After deciding that paying for gas or a bus fare would violate the main rule of the weekend, my bike became my method of transportation. After a rather picturesque night ride, the glowing Minneapolis skyline to my left almost the entire way, I pulled up into the driveway of what looked like a modern two-story garage built in the ’50s. I locked my bike and proceeded to open a door on the first floor, not entirely sure it was the right entrance.

I walked into a warm, welcoming atmosphere where eccentric people were conversing in chairs, waiting for the film to begin, while others gazed at West’s engrossing abstract nature paintings. The funny thing was the people were just as interesting as the art. A moody girl with unkempt dreadlocks poking out of her black beanie had tucked herself into a couch as close to the screen as possible. A skinny, stolid young man with at least 10 facial piercings, three of them in his nose, was glaring at a chatty girl seated in front of him, boring holes in the back of her head. Another lone man sitting near the back, probably the oldest person there, was either homeless or had come from the film Machete 2 where he played Machete’s twin brother. The documentary was exponentially more polished and moving than I expected, definitely worth more than a lot of movies I have paid to see (Enter the Void, anyone?). The gallery owners were even nice enough to make popcorn for everyone who came, topping off the first of three free days.

Sanctuaries of Free Stuff

Friday night I heard about a Tau Kappa Epsilon grill-out from one of my friends. While an evening at a frat house may not appeal to everyone, the basic point was free food. There are so many events on campus that offer free food as an incentive to come—CLA feedback panels, club meetings, religious gatherings—it’s almost a sin not to take advantage of them. So for dinner I had two free hot dogs. I don’t think I had ever truly appreciated hot-off-the-grill food until I ate it in 30-degree weather.

Holly Newsom from Zoo Animal

Then it was off to Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church. Yes, I went to church on a Friday night, but it’s not what you think. Local bands Retribution Gospel Choir, Zoo Animal, and The Starfolk performed, turning the ornate sanctuary into an all-out loud, out-of-control rock venue.

There were no prayers or plugs for people to join the congregation, and people from all walks of life were welcome to partake. It was even better than seeing a show at The Varsity or First Avenue, as most of the musicians were hanging around before and after their performance, talking with people as though they were just there for the show too.

I even got the chance to speak with Holly Newsom, lead singer and guitarist of Zoo Animal. To be completely honest, I was a little apprehensive about seeking her out after she sent her last shrill notes reverberating throughout the hall, threw down her guitar, and strode offstage. Fortunately my apprehension was unfounded and she was incredibly nice.

Saturday could have been a movie-marathon day, with the picturesque snow drifting past the window. I did start the day by watching Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince on TV, for obvious reasons, but I yearned for more. Apart from Harry Potter fever, the snow created an urge within me to bake homemade cookies, but I had to come up with a way to accomplish this without making a trip to the grocery store (and thus, spending money).

First, I raided my kitchen. Second, I substituted random ingredients for ones listed in the recipe that I didn’t have, such as quick oats for flour, peanut butter for butter, and random candies for chocolate chips. These mutant cookies ended up being incredibly delicious, and were quickly devoured. That night I went to a 10-minute play festival put on by the U’s Xperimental Theatre in Rarig. The performances ranged from completely ridiculous, with encouraged audience participation, to grim, with the audience holding its breath. It showcased so much student talent that most outside of the theatre department never get to see.

Unfortunately, Sunday had to be a study day (inherently cost-effective), but I wasn’t sour, as the weekend started early, and I went to some of the most diverse and inspirational events yet this semester without even opening my wallet.

None of this seems to matter to the Obama administration, however. Earlier this year, Congress voted to cut the Constellation program, a NASA project that would have returned United States astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972. Though seen as a mostly symbolic gesture to past exploration at the time, new discoveries of usable materials on the moon, specifically usable water that could support lunar settlements, have made this project all the more necessary.

Professor Roberta Humphreys, a professor at the University of Minnesota for nearly 30 years, says she is frustrated and deeply disappointed with the Obama administration’s take on space missions. The administration has also abandoned the most recent shuttle program, forcing U.S. astronauts to buy seats on other countries’ shuttles, a practice Humphreys calls “disgusting.”

“In most peoples views, NASA “wastes” too much money on manned space flight,” says Humphreys. Robots have become increasingly popular, sent to Mars on numerous missions to gather information about the planet. There are times when humans are still required, however, particularly in situations where a “human decision” is necessary. When robots encounter problems, the controllers on Earth are forced to quickly reprogram the robot and hope that the next time around goes better, a tedious and sometimes ineffective process. Humphreys own service to the Space Telescope Institute Council has added to her opinion on robotic space missions, “Could we have done the servicing mission on the Hubble (Space Telescope) with robots? I don’t think so.”

According to Humphreys, manned space flight is still a worthwhile investment, “Ninety percent of the time a project doesn’t need humans, but when it does, you’re glad they are there.” Another solution to the funding problem is allowing private companies to develop new technology for use by NASA. But this too poses a problem. As Humphreys points out, “The advantage of NASA is that it is a government entity and not for profit. The primary mission is to work safely.” Humphreys worries that private companies allowed to work without the oversight of NASA will be more interested in profit than in the safety of the astronauts using their creations. Implementing NASA oversight would cost a similar of money as maintaining the program proper, however, which makes it an unlikely solution.

With Canada, the European Union, and even China developing new space technology and continuing to fund manned space flight, the United States needs to follow suit or be left in the moon dust.

Earlier this month these galaxy candidates resurfaced when a group of European astronomers successfully measured the distance to the most remote galaxy detected yet. The team of astronomers used the European Southern Observatory’s oh so accurately named Very Large Telescope (VLT) to analyze the faint glow. The light collecting capabilities of VLT were combined with the infrared spectroscopic instrument known as SINFONI. After 16 hours of observation and two months of meticulous data analysis, the team confirmed that it was viewing the galaxy known as UDFy-38135539 13.1 billion years ago when the universe was a mere 600 million years old.

Measuring the distance of galaxies is an extremely difficult process that is done using spectroscopy, which is, in Layman’s terms, quantifiable measurement gathered from the study of wavelengths and frequency. An in depth report on the discovery was published in Nature, the highly acclaimed international journal of science, on Oct. 21st.

Beyond the fact that it is pretty rad to have made the discovery of a galaxy that is, relative to the life span of the universe, “a four-year-old boy in the life span of an adult,” there are also intriguing scientific implications. The universe was not transparent in its earliest stages due to a hydrogen fog that was able to absorb ultraviolet light. This fog was cleared out by the expansion of young galaxies. The measurement of UDFy-38135539 confirms the fact that we are now studying one of the galaxies that was integral to the clearing of the hydrogen fog. The exponential expansion of technology is now allowing us to understand more and more the very beginning of our universe.

Nearly ten years later, on June 18, 2009, the Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) was launched from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas V rocket with the sole mission of finding out once and for all whether or not the moon was actually home to some of that liquid gold, water.

After orbiting the earth for several months, LCROSS swung its way past the moon and shot a rocket into the Cabeus crater before slamming itself down next to it. Back on Earth, amateur astronomers were unimpressed when the dual impact failed to produce a visible debris plume, but scientists observed the crash using spectroscopic telescopes that measure the various properties of light to identify different materials.

By November, the LCROSS team was able to confirm that there was indeed water on the moon. This October, LCROSS also confirmed the presence of several other compounds in the plumes, which suggest that the Cabeus crater is actually the site of a comet impact.

“These days we are finding water in a number of interesting places in the solar system, heretofore thought to be devoid of interesting material,” said University of Minnesota Professor, Dr. Charles Woodward, part of the ground-based observation team working on the LCROSS project.

Woodward said the implications of finding water on the moon are interesting in more than one way. According to Woodward, the findings of the LCROSS project suggest that in the future astronauts may be able to build permanent self-sustaining lunar habitats. In addition, LCROSS members found an abundance of other materials in the plume that suggest that the moon may actually go through some sort of active water cycle. If this is true, it is not too much of a stretch to assume that the same processes are taking place on other moons in our galaxy, like on Jupiter and Saturn’s moons, Europa and Enceladus respectively. This theory opens up several new areas of research and exploration.

Ultimately, if able to understand the different processes and environments that allow water to form in space, scientists can plan for far larger space missions in the near future. In turn, the moon, which previously served no other purpose than to adorn the night sky, may very well become the stepping stone to a new age of space exploration.

In the wake of the recession, millions remain jobless, homeless, and destitute. Our state government is no exception. with a $5 billion deficit, gubernatorial candidates are hotly debating tax reform policies this election season. Currently, two of the candidates have proposed an increase in the sales tax and a decrease of income tax; this will encourage the wealthy to stay in the state and bring in more revenue. This could not be a more dire situation to many residents of the state. With rising food costs increasing grocery store prices, the poorest citizens of this state would be the most affected. That is why I propose the abolition of sales tax and the creation of a rich only tax. This would be the easiest way to balance the budget and rid ourselves of the selfish citizens of this state unwilling to help.

People make money for one reason: to live. However, there are many who make money simply to make money. They spend money and somehow make money off of this, and then spend more money. These are the people who get up from their seats in the waiting area of the airport when the clerks announce boarding for “business class” while the rest of us get ready to be hearded through the cattle pen that is economy. These are the people driving their fancy cars made after 2005, while the rest of us cruise around in our 1992 Geos. It couldn’t hurt for them to have a little less money in order to help others.

To those who say a higher income tax will send residents to other states, I say good riddince. These people are no better than the poor that these same rich people accuse of abusing the welfare system, namely using services without giving enough back.

Sales
Adam Friedman

A politician not railing against the current incomprehensible tax system of the United States is hard to find. There is of course, as simplification is the objective, a perfectly simple response. The US should abolish the income tax and switch entirely to a fairly high sales tax.

The reasons are fairly simple. Let’s look at the effects of such a change in taxation policy. People without a sufficient income to contribute much to our current graduated income tax would see their income tax expenses drop from little to less, while their tax expenses on their consumption- and poor people pretty much only consume since they can’t afford to save- would skyrocket. However, according to an economist at the Brookings Institute, the richest one percent of the US would see their taxes drop by an average of about $75,000 as a result of only having, say, a 23% sales tax in the US.

Now, for many readers, it won’t be self-evident that this is a good thing. The standard argument goes that we have some sort of humanitarian obligation towards the useless members of our society, even though they aren’t doing and largely can’t do anything particularly useful. The wealthy can afford to spend a bit more in taxes. If you see this line of reasoning for the nonsense that it is you presumably don’t need to keep reading, but for the rest of the bleeding hearts let me explain.

Let’s talk about what poor people do. They are the dregs of culture. They don’t invest, don’t contribute to innovation or capital for new businesses promising greater efficiency, they don’t increase demand for the latest technology because they can’t afford it. But they can afford time to watch TV, which, since it has a captive market, has become a huge industry and a cesspool of talent in the US. Just think about the fact that reality shows exist. They watch the news but since these are people who’ve found that a GED has been sufficient to allow them to buy a house, they don’t value thinking about things, and so they contribute to the growth of FOX News and the decay of standards for intelligence in the American public.

The truth is, the argument that freeing up money for the rich to invest with, to donate, is well rehearsed and obviously legitimate. But so few people see the merits of denying money to the poor, an equally valid undertaking. The beauty of the sales tax is that, under the mantra of simplifying a complex US system and abolishing the much-hated income tax, we can rally enthusiasm and political capital for doing what this country really needs: taking from the poor to give to the rich.

In the final months of our lease in the summer of this year, we subsisted mostly on food from the local food bank (supplemented by raids on the Bruegger’s dumpster and produce from an organic farm where I occasionally worked). And we ate a wholesome and tasty, if often repetitive diet. We didn’t sign up for the weekly grocery bags they offered, though we were well within the economic qualifications. There was no incentive to sign up for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) either, even though most of us would have qualified for that as well. Instead we made frequent trips to the front room of the food bank, where anyone could pick up perishables donated by local grocery stores immediately after reaching their arbitrary sell-by dates.

It all struck me as strangely and excitingly easy. I was hopping from job to job, deciding whether 11th graders in Virginia would pass high school as a standardized test grader one month, counting heads for Uncle Sam the next. I was living comfortably on $300 a month. Naturally I began to wonder what anybody had to complain about. Even the dumpster at the food bank was full of good finds. It certainly seemed like it would be hard to starve in modern America.

It’s evident by the continuing rise of co-ops and farmers markets, and even the availability of organic produce at Wal-Mart, that the food system in the United States is in flux. Many of its juiciest ironies have been pointed out: the poor used to eat brown bread, while the rich ate bread made with refined flour — the poor now eat dirt-cheap, puffy, bleached Wonderbread, while the wealthy eat whole-wheat bread with an ever-expanding array of exotic grains mixed in or sprinkled on top. But it seems to me the biggest difference between our food system today and those of old is the sheer amount of waste.

In a 2009 study, researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, found that food waste in the United States had increased approximately 54% from 1974 to 2003. The study compared food production data for the U.S. from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, with the amount of food needed to sustain the U.S. population, calculated with metabolic models. Despite accounting for rising obesity and the attendant increase in per capita calorie consumption, the authors concluded that the number of calories wasted per person, per day, had increased from 900 kcal in 1974 to 1400 kcal in 2003.

And yet, in a massive 430-page report issued this year by the hunger-relief charity Feeding America, formerly known as America’s Second Harvest, the organization found that hunger continues to increase in America. Among the highlights of the study were that the number of people served by the charity increased 46% since 2005, and of its clients, 39% reported being in the position of having to choose between food and other necessities, such as rent — up from 35% five years ago.

There are organizations attempting to bridge the gap between wasted food and hungry people. On September 30th, I rode along with Sister’s Camelot, a local 501(c3) that distributes produce deemed imperfect from organic warehouses to unannounced locations around town in a repurposed schoolbus. Eric the Busdriver (who was reluctant to give a last name, citing the collective nature of the organization) explained that the warehouses had taken some convincing, but eventually an arrangement was worked out whereby Sister’s Camelot would pick up a busload of produce that would otherwise go to waste twice a week. At one point, one of the warehouses, “tried to sell it for pennies on the pound to hog farmers,” but after some convincing, dropped the plan.

On the Tuesday I rode along, Sister’s Camelot was distributing fresh grapes, daikon radishes, dill, cauliflower, bananas, and bread. After tossing a bag of grapes out the window to a man on the street, the rest of the food was delivered to a children’s art program and the Calgary food shelf. Food shelves, in my naive experience, seemed like an obvious and elegant solution the problem of hungry people and wasted food. But, as Eric explained, it’s often difficult for them to carry the healthiest foods, like fresh produce, because their short shelf life makes it difficult. Not to mention the fact that Sister’s Camelot gets all their produce from the smaller warehouses. “I can only imagine what goes on at Cub,” Eric said. Most of the larger chain grocery stores like Cub Foods and Rainbow use Star Wars-style trash compactors behind their stores to dispose of past-peak produce and expired food.

As Tristram Stuart notes in Waste, his exhaustive global study of wasted food,”if the rich world cut its food losses to 20 percent, the annual savings would be equivalent to at least 100 million tonnes of grain, which would be enough to satisfy the hunger of all the malnourishd people in the world nearly four times over.”

At 1400 calories per person per day wasted in the United States, it should be well within the realm of possibility to feed every homeless or poor person, with plenty to spare for the lazy, middle-class post-college roustabouts.

Face the Static is a newly formed student group here at the U of M. The group is working to raise awareness of issues surrounding our community by organizing concerts, panels, and other events that will grab people’s attention. FTS is also collaborating with local non-profit organizations and other student groups. Their goal is to not only promote awareness of social issues, but to also provide options for students to get involved and do something about them. Although only weeks from conception, this newly planted seed has its roots placed firmly in the ground with nowhere to go but up. The FTS team is composed of motivated, like-minded individuals that are determined to make noise in the Golden Gopher community.

The first FTS event will be in the loft at Barfly on October 22. The concert includes Toki Wright of Rhymesayers Ent., Mike Mictlan of Doomtree, The Obtuse Crew, Duenday, Niles Miller, and more. The theme of the concert will be “VOTE!” Artists and fans will gather around fresh hip-hop, live art, and breakdancing, urging members of the community to educate themselves and vote in the upcoming state elections on November 2, 2010. At the door, tickets will be $8 for those 21+ folk and 10$ for those over 18. Snag a flyer and present it at the doors to receive $2 off the price of admission or email Jacob.nostatic@gmail with your full name to receive the $2 discount.

As an integral member of the local hip-hop collective Doomtree, Mike Mictlan has been spreading his voice throughout the Twin Cities independent hip-hop scene for several years now. Though lacking a national following, Mictlan’s music as well as his presence embodies a love of hip-hop as an art form. The grassroots, do-it-yourself means of production, distribution, and exhibition are represented in his lyrical content and also add a spark to his live performances that ignite the audience and will surely set the loft ablaze.

Headlining artist, Toki Wright, is no stranger to social activism. Wright has worked in many non-profit sectors ranging from youth organizing in North Minneapolis to working with war-affected children in Northern Uganda. Music seems to be simply another canvas on which Wright can work toward the betterment of the world. This September, Wright performed at Face Forward’s Eyes Open show at First Ave. The concert’s proceeds benefited the Global Fund for Women, a non-profit foundation that works to advance the rights of women worldwide. Wright also recently released a non-profit music video, a remake of Public Enemy’s “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” in response to the new Arizona immigration laws. This Rhymesayers veteran is sure to illuminate the stage with his socially conscious lyrics backed by the kind of passion that seems to be lacking amongst today’s mainstream egocentric hip-hop stars. The performance will leave the audience with the rare feeling of being simultaneously entertained and informed.

Get Up Minnesota will also have a presence at the show. GUM is another U of M student group that is focused on promoting voter education and high voting turnout rates. With chapters dispersed amongst many colleges throughout Minnesota, Get Up has been covering a lot of territory and making noise for years now. The organization works not to sway students left or right, but to encourage active participation in the U.S. democracy by our youth, who account for a good chunk of the population of the United States. Get Up Minnesota serves as a rallying cry assembling students all across the state in order to make our values and opinions a political reality.

With football games, frat parties, and nomadic Dinkytown wandering hogging the social spotlight here at the U, Face the Static is organizing events that provide a productive escape from the drunken redundancy of college. On October 22 come out to Barfly and gravitate towards good music, good people, and a good cause. Don’t change the channel. Don’t adjust your needle and play a happy tune. Don’t turn away. Face the Static.

So why is U of M Biology, Science, and Environment major and local/organic food activist David Rittenhouse dissatisfied?

The answer is that it’s all PR spin. Rittenhouse says the university supports a few sustainability programs, and then “cleverly words” PR copy to make it appear far more representative of the school as a whole. “If we want to see change, we’ll first have to expose all the lies, and then offer solutions for how to change that. You have to offer solutions and show examples.”

Rittenhouse has been working hard to offer those solutions. He said that he and several friends realized that there weren’t any sustainable or local food options on campus for the average student, and decided to try to solve the problem.

They knew that students at other colleges had been successful in organizing small organic/local food operations. At Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, students had managed to open a local/organic mobile cart outside their student union, selling soup at reasonable and competitive prices. Rittenhouse and his fellow activists determined that it would be nearly impossible to open a stand in Coffman, and almost as challenging to have a cart outside. “There’s too much red tape to try to sell anything here,” Rittenhouse said.

The University has a contract with Aramark Food Services that stipulates that 90 percent of food distributed on campus must come from Aramark, with other major food corporations such as Starbucks and Panda Express occupying the other 10 percent. Rittenhouse and his friends realized that simply opening a small soup stand would require changing the entire process by which food is distributed on campus. They haven’t given up, and are hoping to lobby the right people to change the contract with Aramark when it comes up for renewal, or to switch to a more sustainable vendor altogether. Still, these institutional barriers to students who want alternatives to corporate food on campus call into question the University’s commitment to sustainable alternatives.

There is one place on campus that sells local, organic food: the Campus Club, located atop Coffman Union. While the Campus Club’s web site purports to offer a “common, informal gathering place for broad community interaction,” the $189 annual dues for student, faculty or staff membership that is required to eat there places is squarely in the realm of a rich, fancy boutique restaurant that “real folks” can’t afford to eat at. Ironically, some of the produce served here originates at the university’s student-run organic farm. In an almost perfect microcosm of the university’s underlying attitude toward sustainability, the product of the hard work and organizing of forward thinking students is ultimately appropriated to nourish the elite alumni and administrators that place so many barriers in the way of sustainable progress. The farm is locked into this relationship, because there simply are no other places to sell their product on campus.

Rittenhouse is involved with the student-run organic farm, called Cornercopia. Located on the St. Paul campus, it was started to provide students interested in sustainable agriculture with hands-on farming opportunities. There is even a semester-long course for students to learn about planning, financing, and operating an organic farm. UDS purchased 450 pounds of produce from Cornercopia in 2009. According to a Minnesota Daily article published April 22, Cornercopia coordinator Courtney Tchida is in open conversation with UDS executive chef Gil Junge and UDS director Karen DeVet about expanding sustainable options on campus.

Still, that 450 pounds is less then 1 percent of the local produce that UDS purchases, meaning there is the potential to increase production at the farm to meet existing demand. Rittenhouse believes there is enough interest among the student body to increase the scale of the farm, but there simply isn’t enough support from the University. “We’re struggling to stay afloat. Most of our funding comes from grants, comes from outside sources. Individuals are very supportive, but it seems like the institution as a whole makes it extremely difficult to get new environmental initiatives going.”

So if there is already demand for product and student interest, why hasn’t the organic farm been properly funded and scaled up to provide organic, local, healthy food for all students?

The answer, according to Rittenhouse, is all around him when he thrusts his shovel into the dirt at Cornercopia. The organic farm sits on a meager 1.25 acres, surrounded on all sides by soybeans genetically modified for the easy application of industrial pesticide Roundup, found in studies to cause genetic damage, increase crop susceptibility to disease, and to damage bacteria necessary for soil health. It is produced by Monsanto, an agribusiness giant also responsible for the development of Agent Orange, the poisonous defoliant used during the Vietnam war that has resulted in 400,000 deaths and 500,000 children born with birth defects, according to the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “I even doubt the credibility of our organic farm, because of the drift from the fields all around us,” says Rittenhouse.

Still, this barely scratches the surface of the University’s close involvement with Big Agriculture. To really see what the University’s priorities are, we need look no further then its relationship with another major agricultural giant: Cargill. According to a U of M press release, in September 1999, Cargill donated $10 million to “expand the university’s work in the field of microbial and plant genomics.” The result was the creation of the Microbial and Plant Genomics institute, funded partially by public money, and the construction of the Cargill Building for Microbial and Plant Genomics. Located less then two blocks from the Cornercopia organic farm, it is the U.S.’s first university building exclusively dedicated to plant genomics, according to the web site of construction company Shaw Lundquist Inc.

Cargill is the largest privately held corporation in the United States, and ,as such, has much lower requirements for transparency in its operations then publicly traded corporations. A full analysis of Cargill’s shady dealings is beyond the scope of this article, but the company has had been implicated in scandals as varied as knowingly contaminating groundwater near its production plants, price fixing, Amazon Rainforest deforestation, selling mercury-tainted grains, and child labor in periphery nations.

Described in a Star Tribune article as a “looming, silent giant,” Cargill also controls a staggering portion of the food supply of the United States. As a mid-level supplier involved in processing and distributing agricultural supplies and commodities, Cargill has unparalleled power to influence agricultural markets, right down to the price consumers pay for a hot dog. Its $120 million in annual revenues makes it larger economically then two-thirds of the world’s countries. According to a Financial Times article, every egg used in a McDonald’s restaurant passes through a Cargill plant.

The University’s involvement with companies like Monsanto and Cargill exposes its important role in the industrial agricultural complex. These corporations’ mode of operation is to monopolize control of the food supply, choking out alternatives while making astronomical profits at the expense of the health of people and the environment. What better way to increase that profit margin then to offload in-house research to publicly funded universities? The sheer hypocrisy of the PR narrative that the University of Minnesota is an institution dedicated to a sustainable, green future is impossible to ignore.

Every day, individuals like David Rittenhouse, small groups, and even departments and institutes at the U of M are doing real research, taking real action, and making real strides toward the goal of a more sustainable future. In contrast, institutionally, as a whole, the University has yet to make any deep changes to the way it operates. It co-opts, for marketing purposes, the work of forward-thinking activists, researchers, and other community members, while still maintaining close involvement and ties with the companies that embody the very problems that these dedicated people are trying to overcome: the destruction of the environment, the centralization of power and control in our food supply, the production of potentially unhealthy and unsafe foods to bolster corporate profits, and the application and release of pesticides into our environment.

Ultimately, as long as the University continues to accept money from and name buildings after corporations like Cargill, the university’s sustainability PR line must be seen for what it actually is: window-dressing to obscure the university’s role in the destructive and soulless economic structure of Big Ag.

Photo by John Hooper

Starting in a few weeks University of Minnesota Libraries will open Wilson Library for 24-hour service.

Not really. But that’d be nice wouldn’t it?

Any university with over 50,000 students and claiming to be research-oriented shouldn’t leave their students with limited access to the libraries we pay for. Out of this number of students, surely there are a few left who are not simply dotting their x’s with Bachelors Degree in Whatever and actually care about reading and the investment they’re making in their own personal growth. It is these students that recognize the value of the constant library.

A 24-hour Library would most likely be used for study binges. Ideally, it would serve as the antithesis for the bourgeois construct stating that nighttime is for sleeping. In defense, the library would proclaim, “No! The night is for discussion! For knowledge! And so is the day!”

But we shouldn’t run away with ideals quite yet, they’re some matters I’m sure the regants board would like to discuss first.

One of the overlooked aspects of operating a 24-hour library is the increased expenses: electricty for the lights running through the night, wages for a staff of insomniac book keepers, reshelvers, security gaurds and maintainence crew.

If University officials are really concerned about increases in operating costs, they should first ask themselves why they’re calling the U of M a research institution without a single full-time library. The aforementioned costs need not be drastic expenditures with the right amount of planning.

Lighting in our 24-hour library should be carefully constructed; exteriors of the building should largely be left in darkness: only interiors and select study areas should be lit. Besides, the students who are navigating the cooridors of Wilson Library at 3 a.m. on a Wednesday probably have a sixth sense as to where that book is that they need.

As for staffing – let’s be honest – when was the last time anyone has spoken to a library worker? They’re more introverted and useless than patrons stalking the engineering shelves. Ever since the University adopted the machinery for checking out your own books with the swipe of a card – the “Self Checkout Service” – the need for anyone’s help but our own has been abolished.

Slap someone at the reserves desk to dig into the archives for whichever random audio CD a patron might request, a person to sit at the desk near the main exit to look like he or she matters, a security gaurd or two to comfort the ailing, neurotic mind of suburban, white library patrons and someone to reshelve in an overly energetic fashion and you already have what I would call an overstaffed library.
All we really need from the University is a couple lights and open doors.

In all honesty though, I would argue that every library with a staff is overstaffed. Sure, most of our peers will never step foot in a library after they graduate to some mediocre job with their $40,000 dollar degree, but guess what – I bet they’ll still remember that B comes before E and 553 before 988. In fact, I’d go as far to bet they knew that before they were dignified sheep. We don’t need anyone to help us find books. We don’t need some snotty, lazy employee go to the ‘secret’ archive stacks to retrieve our books! All we really need from the University is a couple lights and open doors. Go ahead and keep the heat low; it keeps us awake.

What’s keeping the University from a 24-hour library? Many universities set up 24-hour libraries on a trial basis. The duration of the trials have been anywhere from three weeks to two years. Regardless, it’s an effective way to directly assess the costs of operating the libraries as well as the demand and use of the facilities overnight. Harvard’s undergraduate library, Lamont, undertook a two-year assessment period several years ago and continues to operate their 24-hour library five days a week.

But wait. Didn’t the University do something like that a few years ago? In 2007 the U kept its doors open for the second half of the year, starting in May. Unfortunately the libraries saw virtually no use during their overnight headcounts.

Whoops. I guess I was wrong about our student body. Oh wait? Which library was kept open? The Bio-Medical Library? Where the fuck is that? Do I look like I care about science? I want literature and art goddamn it. Did the University ever think perhaps they opened the wrong library for 24-hour service? Open WILSON.

The Powerpuff Girls, a show on Cartoon Network from 1998 to 2005, appears on the surface to be a simple child’s show about three super-powered little girls, fighting crime and the forces of evil. However, beneath its bright veneer lies a biting deconstruction of life in the United States back in the 1950s.

The Powerpuff Girls are three little girls, created accidentally in a lab by Professor Utonium. The Professor’s original intention was to create the perfect little girl, using sugar, spice, and everything nice. However, a mishap caused Chemical X to be added to the mixture, and thus, the Powerpuff Girls were born.

The town they live in is unmistakably set in the 50s. The people are always nice to one another, and happy to be living in their idyllic city of Townsville. Blossom, Bubble and Buttercup are the perfect little super-powered girls, representing everything that is good. When a rampaging monster shows up, the girls arrive and defeat them without asking any questions, and use excessive force to subdue the enemy. At the end, the villains are defeated, and suffering from overwhelming blood and teeth loss. Massive collateral damage is done to the city, but the citizens look up from the ruins and happily thank the Powerpuff Girls. When it comes to evil, the ends justify the means.

In the 1950’s, life was simple. The Soviets and their Communist ideology were evil, and we were good. Therefore, it was perfectly fine to blacklist people based on rumors of sympathizing with Socialists, and to destroy the lives of perfectly honest people. This was the McCarthyism era after all.

In 1953, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, based on false intelligence that Mossadegh was going to turn Iran into a friend and ally of the U.S.S.R. To prevent Iran (and tons of Iranian oil) from becoming Soviet property, the CIA overthrew Mossadegh and planted a U.S-friendly dictator to rule Iran. The Powerpuff Girls demonstrate a similar form of totalitarian justice against their “evil” enemies.

Let’s take Fuzzy Lumpkins for example. He’s a villain who has anger issues. In one episode, he chased a squirrel from his property in the hills and into Townsville, merely because he didn’t want anyone, even a squirrel, on his property. In Townsville, he gets hit by a bus, and loses his corncob pipe, hat and gun. When the nice citizens of Townsville tried to give those items back, Fuzzy Lumpkins went on a rampage because they were touching his property. After attacking those nice people, Fuzzy Lumpkins went back to his cabin in the hills.

The Powerpuff Girls, following the squirrel who instigated the entire incident, went to Fuzzy Lumpkin’s cabin, broke into his house, and calmed Fuzzy by threatening to destroy his banjo. Once close enough, Buttercup smashed his banjo over his head, knocking him out.

Was the day really saved? Fuzzy Lumpkins appears five more times in the show after this episode, always as an antagonist. Maybe what Fuzzy Lumpkins really needed was some therapy and pills to control his anger and ownership issues. Instead of whacking him on the head with his favorite banjo, the girls should have gotten Fuzzy Lumpkins some professional help.

Another villain who could have been rehabilitated after her first act of villainy is Princess Morbucks. She was a girl in the same class at school as the Powerpuff Girls. Being a spoiled rich brat, she wanted to become a Powerpuff Girl, but vowed to destroy them instead when the Powerpuff Girls wouldn’t let her because she had no super powers. After defeating her, the Powerpuff Girls threw her in jail. In jail, she met other villains, such as Mojo Jojo, and gave them access to her vast fortune, for purposes of evil. She reappeared six more times in the show, always as a villain.

There’s also the Gangreen Gang. They’re a group of five lower-income, teenaged hoodlums, who cause trouble. And, yet again, the Powerpuff Girls beat them mercilessly every time and throw them into jail. As all troubled teens, they just needed a strong adult role model to lead them in the right direction. Yet they were repeatedly thrown into jail, where they associated with hardened criminals.

It’s not just the villains who are example of 1950’s deconstruction on the show. Look at the Professor. He’s the perfect father, who teaches the Powerpuff Girls valuable lessons, like the father in the 1950’s TV show “Father Knows Best.” Even the shape of his body has no curved lines on it.

However, in a few episodes, we see that he is not as perfect as he seems. In one episode, the villain Sedusa seduced the Professor, so that he would enforce a curfew on the Powerpuff Girls while she robbed Townsville freely. In another episode, the Professor realizes that all of his successful scientific creations, like the Powerpuff Girls, were created by accident, and never by his designs.

Miss Sarah Bellum, the Mayor of Townsville’s secretary, is modeled after the sexualized secretaries of the 1950’s. She’s long-legged, large breasted, and is considered to be beautiful by all the other characters. However, she is not the typical 1950’s secretary. She is the brain behind the Mayor’s operations, who is a dimwit, and takes care of all his duties. Once, three criminals found out that they could get away with committing crimes by dressing up as the Powerpuff Girls. When the real Powerpuff Girls were falsely thrown in jail, only Ms. Bellum knew the difference. So she was quite more than just a
pretty set of legs.

The Powerpuff Girls is a show with hidden layers. Beneath the “cute” and retro tendencies, there lies a sharp mockery of the idyllic times of the 1950’s. So the next time you skip by a cartoon on TV, watch closely. Even serious topics can come in pretty packages.

That doesn’t stop some…interesting people from running, considering running or even pretending to run for political office. Here at the Wake, we received an interesting letter from a contributor who simply calls himself Smudge. According to Smudge, he wants to run for governor this November on “a tall and grassy platform.” The rest of the piece is similar in tone and weird campaign promises. However, Smudge’s pitch to the people can be used as an example of what issues are affecting the governor’s office, as well as a primer on how not to sell your image to a crowd of voters. The following is an analysis of Smudge’s open letter, as well as an explanation of what issues potential gubernatorial candidates will have to contend with come November.

S:My name is Smudge, and I want to be your governor. I want to play the game and roll the dice and throw my cards on the table and my hat in the ring. I want to lead you into a sparkling future, bereft of care and worry. I want to heal your ailments and fund your businesses and make it so you don’t have to struggle to survive anymore. I want to make life easy for you. With you, I want to share my dream. Remember, my name is Smudge and this is a chariot and this will set you free.

TM: Smudge’s opening paragraph is well written, filled with good rhetorical devices such as his promise to make it so the public doesn’t have to “struggle to survive.” His brief mentions of health care and the job economy, the issues that are widely seen as the most concerning to American citizens currently, sets a good tone for campaign promises he might make later. Unfortunately, Smudge makes a few awkward statements, especially the metaphor he uses about his campaign which will set people free.

S: My platform is a simple platform; my stance is an open stance. I will strike out at everything you despise. I will attack your ghosts and skeletons. My left hand is nicknamed Mr. Clean and my right hand is nicknamed Sir Gerhard Von Kreig, Champion of Sound! I will clap these hands together and I will bring down the rain. I will grow the corn the cattle eat. I will grow the cattle the cattle eat. I will grow the people the cattle eat, because the cattle do eat the people, technically, in a very roundabout way of things. I will feed the people! To cattle, I will feed the people!

TM: This paragraph is the beginning of Smudge’s downfall as a viable political candidate. Modern science doesn’t support Smudge’s claims that he can summon rain by clapping his hands together. His claims to feed people to livestock would also turn off most, if not all, potential voters.

S: My platform is a hopeful platform; my tongue is a necktie knot. I want you to have a favorite television show. I want you to be able to watch your favorite television show at the same time each week! I want to share with you messages from my associates while you watch your show. They have many things they wish for you to have; my associates feel as though they can make your life better. They can make your life better, you just have to allow my associates to do their work as you do your work, unhindered and unfettered and free of bother and concern. I want you to have emotional connections to the people you watch on your television screens. I want you to cry when they cry and laugh when they laugh. My associates and I feel that you would be much happier involved in the lives of the characters on the television screen than trying to repair your own life and your failing relationship and your lack of work and your own lack of worth and just sit right down and watch your television screen.

My platform is a tall and grassy platform. I will paint my tongue and teeth and toenails green for you! I will make responsible decisions regarding our future. I will make sure we keep regarding our future. I will always put the future first! I will invest in new breeds of corn and flowers that grow big red blossoms out of the bodies that we put in the cornfields to rot. I will reuse every plastic bag. I will ban the production, import, and distribution of plastic bags! I will revolutionize the shipping industry with the first cargo ship that burns no fuel! We will row it, Minnesota! We will row that great, grey ocean liner! There will be hundreds of us working together in the belly of a rusty whale. We will all row that boat together, because that boat is being rowed for all of us. And we will name it after Marilyn Monroe! We will resurrect the corpse of Duluth and make a modern ghost. We will be the bones and we will be the muscles and we will row the boat together! We must ignite Duluth, we must set it ablaze!

TM: Smudge’s attempts to destroy Duluth wouldn’t help the state’s economy, contrary to his earlier campaign promises. However, his attempts to highlight alternative fuel research reflects state incentives and initiatives such as the grants provided by the University of Minnesota’s Initiative for Renewable Energy and Environment that research biofuel and bioenergy projects among other things. One of the more interesting projects funded by the U of M is an attempt by University researchers to take large amounts of algae, which can be farmed for their lipids, or natural fats and oils among other molecules, which can then be converted to biodiesel. This project received $290,000 for a three-year project which is scheduled to end by July of this year.

S: I will build trains for you. I will connect each important city with a train. Smaller communities will be given pamphlets on how to cope with the fact that they are not important to Minnesota. We will connect the train to Rochester, and here we will cure your ailments! Oh, Minnesota I want to make you healthy! We will run tests on you. Sometimes we will run fifty tests. Sometimes we will run one hundred tests. But we will always medicate you. Under my leadership, all medical procedures are free. We will inject you for free. We will give you Dialysis for free. We will operate to amend any malformations in your internal and external organs for free. I will kill your children and your children will become corn and flowers and the cattle will eat the corn and we will eat the corn and the cattle and the cattle will eat us and it will all be a wonderful circle of life and I promise you that! But you will be cured! You will be in perfect health. With our help, you will be perfect. The medicine will make you perfect. Perfect. We will make your body the way you wish it were made. I want you to look exactly how you want to look. I want you to be a five foot seven inch Mediterranean woman who fits against every other body like a sheer piece of fabric. I want you to be a Russian man who has eyes that do all the talking for him. I want you to look perfect. I want you to look perfect for free, because everybody deserves to get what they want.

TM: While Smudge’s rants about health care all but ensure his campaign would be dead in the water, other health care plans are currently in the works in the state legislative chambers. The expiring General Assistance Medical Care program and MinnesotaCare program are part of the focal point in the latest political struggle between Governor Tim Pawlenty and a largely DFL-controlled state legislative branch. As of last week, Gov. Pawlenty vetoed a plan which would have maintained the GAMC plan, which covers adults who make less than $8,000 and families that make less than $10,000 annually. Pawlenty had already vetoed funding for the GAMC plan last year, leading to the stripped-down version that both the state House of Representatives and the Senate passed legislation on in February.
Because the GAMC is set to expire on April 1, more than 32,000 people are going to be switched to Minnesota Care this week, a plan which has higher income limits for its participants, as well as access to services like hospice care, pregnancy-related care, physical and occupational and speech therapy. However, Minnesota Care won’t allow participants to have health care provided by employers who pay for at least half of their insurance premium. In other words, it may be more expensive for the low-income families who are currently covered under the expiring GAMC plan. Minnesota Care is only available for permanent residents of the state as well, so homeless people who have GAMC will most likely not have access to hospital care through the Minnesota Care plan.

On top of this, Smudge clearly doesn’t seem to pay attention to state demographics : 729,000 people of color lived in Minnesota as of 2005, according to the State Demographic Center. That population is projected to have increased to 891,000 or almost 20 percent of the population. By claiming that Smudge wants people to be Mediterranean or Russian, he is ignoring much of the civil rights legislation passed over the past 50 years as well as the current demographic trends, which project the state’s population of people of color will grow to more than 1.7 million people by 2035. Of course, actual state demographic data will be put together during this year’s census, and the projected growth of the state’s population will certainly change because of this.

S: I never want to see you working. I always want to see you at work. Everything should be effortless, but you must always be working. You may watch your television shows and enjoy your leisure time, but you must always be working at having a good time. I like leading people who have a strong commitment and a strong work ethic and that means that you should always be working. I want to lead you. I want you to be working all the time. Remember that you should never be doing anything for yourself and you should always do things for other people. This is a simple rule and will be observed as law. If you follow this simple rule, you will never have to struggle with anything else. I will pay for everything. If you give your life to me as constant work, I will give you all the money you need to live. You will never be charged rent because I will pay your rent. You will never go hungry, because I will send you groceries made by several of my associates. I will allow you to do your work from your home. I will deliver all goods and services directly to your door. You will never have to leave your house again. You will never leave your house. You will never have to leave.

TM: Here, Smudge’s ideas on job recovery would in all probability fail if they were ever implemented. However, Smudge can rest easy knowing that the state department of Employment and Economic development is projecting a decrease in job losses and a stabilized job market by the end of 2010, citing an up-and-down job market and a slow recovery as reasons why monthly job losses will decrease in size and job gains will be more and more prevalent. Although the job market won’t rapidly recover in the near future, it’s made enough of an impact to decrease the amount of home foreclosures in Minnesota by 12 percent last year.

S: Now do you see what I want for you? I tried to make myself quite clear. I want you to be happy. I want what is best for you. I want you to live and be happy about your life. I want to put the future first. I want you to give your lives to me. I want to hold them in my hand I use to hold my pens and cigarettes. My name is Smudge and I am a chariot and I will set you free.

TM: Yes, this letter was actually sent to us. No, we didn’t make this person or this letter up. Although it is unlikely that Smudge will make a serious attempt at running for governor(heck, we don’t even know his real name or whether he’ll refine his campaign promises to propose solutions that would be economically and democratically feasible) Smudge’s light-hearted attempts at making the Wakies laugh serve to remind us that running for political office means studying up on the issues. While the election is still early, and there are most definitely hot-button policies that will crop up later in the summer and into the fall, at least Smudge could identify some of the bigger concerns the state has and make proposals based on them. Hopefully, we won’t have to find out whether he could debate in a clear and sane matter with other gubernatorial candidates.

But even before this new nuisance, U students were getting screwed over by Metro Transit: rising U Pass costs, buses that are constantly late or don’t even show up, not to mention the ever-present crazies.

Like most University students, I ride the bus everywhere. The area where I live, like many other areas with high populations of students, has very little parking available. Metro Transit is the only way for many of us to get anywhere, especially during the winter. A large number of Metro Transit bus routes involve the U somehow, or at least intersect with a route that goes to the U. Why then, do U students seem to be lowest on the Metro Transit totem pole?

Currently, during rush hour traffic Minneapolis Metro Transit riders pay the same price as New Yorkers pay to take the subway. While at first $2.25 doesn’t seem unreasonable, the service we receive is in no way as convenient as the New York system. I personally have been abandoned by express buses to the U, as have many other students. A friend of mine was abandoned by her once-per-hour express bus during finals week. Again, this would not be a problem if these buses ran more than once an hour at their peak service time.

Luckily, the U Pass is still available to University students in order to lower the cost of commuting, but even this has become less and less of a value. For $97 per semester students can ride any bus or light rail route as often as they please. For a student who commutes four days a week, this is a 75 percent savings each semester. However, the price of the U pass continues to rise, making it more and more obsolete. When the U pass program began, it was accompanied with federal funding to encourage students to ride the buses and to lower traffic from commuting students. In 2000, when the U pass was created, it cost $50. The price of the U Pass didn’t rise again until 2006, when it crept up to $62. In the past 3 years, the price has gone up over $30. While it is true that the price of fuel and bus fare have gone up, so has the number of students participating in the U pass program. It seems that the raising of prices in no way corresponds to ridership, otherwise it would certainly not be increasing so quickly.

Currently, the light rail is most contested issue for Metro Transit, as well as for the University. The newly approved Central Corridor route will connect downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul by way of University Avenue. Construction is slated to begin this summer and is expected to take three years. The total estimated cost of the project is $957 million, with fifty percent of that money coming from the Federal Government. The Hiawatha Line cost $715 million dollars, and since opening has made over $15 million dollars in revenue each year. While the light rail may initially have high costs, over a relatively small amount of time it will pay for itself.

No one is going to argue that more light rail routes are a bad idea. In theory, the light rail is convenient, quick and brings a huge amount of revenue to Metro Transit, which in turn helps to improve other Metro Transit facilities. The addition of another light rail line will also encourage the use of the new commuter train from the suburbs. In reality, the construction and subsequent trial and error process of traffic routing will disrupt traffic considerably and pedestrians and bikers at the U will have one more hazard to watch out for.

In all of this, Metro Transit is not interested in making this light rail convenient and effective for everyone. Both the U and MPR have filed lawsuits over the effect of vibrations from the trains on sensitive research and recording equipment respectively. From the responses on their website, Metro Transit finds these claims ridiculous and unnecessary, but these problems are far from petty. Specifically for the U, if this expensive research equipment on Washington Avenue needs to be moved, it will cost money. This money is going to have to come from somewhere, and with the already cut down budget from the state, the only place to take from will be students.

Students will also be affected by the lengthy construction period that will most likely shut down the Washington Avenue bridge for at least a few months. Instead of using the space already provided on the 35W bridge, and routing the trains through the already hollowed out, empty space in Dinkytown, Metro Transit plans to spend an extra $30 million to put the light rail through the already clogged main artery of Washington Avenue.

In the end, Metro Transit is just trying to squeeze as much money from the Feds as they can. They aren’t interested in regular ridership, only in ferrying people from park and ride lots to the stadium of their choice. So why don’t we just have the Twins pay for it?

I am one of 200,000 Korean adoptees around the world, and our numbers are still growing. I am not an orphan. My biological mother still lives, and I can see that my smile mirrors her own in a translation of genes. My voice and hers are unidentifiable in all that is similar. When I look in the mirror, I see frustratingly straight hair and lashes that refuse to curl in the way that magazines do. However, when you look at me you might see thick, Asian hair and slanted Asian eyes. This is my reality – a dual identity of non-belonging.

I try not to speak for all adoptees, but the truth of the matter is adoptees face similar situations wherever they grow up. Two-thirds of all Korean adoptees find their way to the United States. Interestingly, 10 percent of all adopted Korean Americans come to Minnesota, meaning that there are approximately 15,000 of us roaming around the state. We make up the majority of all Korean Americans. We are not Koreans by culture although, looking at us, most people can’t tell the difference. And because families don’t come cheap, the majority of adoptees come to middle class or upper-middle class couples. This means that many adoptees end up in generic, homogenously white suburbs and communities that subtly infuse racism in a way that seems integrating and diverse.

Growing up in a suburb of the Twin Cities, I was one of the few people of color in the city. I was often, if not always, the only person of color in the classroom. It was a relief to be able to go to Korean Culture Camp for a week once a year. I giggled with my peers as we sat in the bleachers and watched our parents search in vain for our faces, not being able to rely on identifying us by our black hair or Asian features. Once a year, I felt as if people weren’t picking me out of the crowd.

But that week of Korean kimchi and rice, folk dancing and language classes left me feeling less like a Korean and more like an outsider. I could never be as graceful as the real Korean dancers. No matter how hard I tried, I liked macaroni and cheese more than bulgogi. I knew that this was a vacation and a reprieve from the constant racial consciousness that had been growing since my adoption day.

Before going to school, I had been surrounded by people who loved me, who saw beyond (or failed to see at all) my skin color and accepted me as a part of the family. My adoptive parents, with the best intentions possible, taught me how to be their daughter. But my blond, Norwegian mother couldn’t teach me about being an Asian woman. Neither could my father, for all his well-meaning attempts.

Being an Asian raised by typically white, Scandinavian parents was more difficult than people imagined. The adoption agency had taught them how to love a child as their own – a replacement of the biological child they were incapable of conceiving – but they were not taught how to raise a child that was not their own. It was not a love they lacked, but an understanding of the consequences of reality. In their home, I felt like myself. It was outside that I realized I was different.

In a world where I was just another member of the Hobson family, I didn’t know how to cope with the racist insults that the other kids naively quipped without realizing that I was just about as American as them. Yes, legally, I am only a naturalized citizen, but I have no knowledge of my ethnic background – just like most other American kids. How should I react to a kid screaming, Go back to where you came from, you Communist bitch! I didn’t even have the slightest idea who Kim Jong Il was, or why a Minnesotan girl should care about atomic bombs. Give me a break, I thought that the Axis of Evil had something to do with the losing team in World War II.

Returning “home” to Korea did not provide the answers I had hoped. Adoption agencies, protected by self-created ignorance and preventative measures, would not allow me to look at the Korean documents that had shaped my life for more than a few seconds. My lack of Korean skills frustratingly forced me to realize that no one was ever meant to see these files again, especially not when I was supposed to be assimilated into American culture. I didn’t need to see these papers again.

At the same time, I was constantly mistaken as a Japanese tourist. The Koreans didn’t know what to do with me. I looked Korean, certainly; I even dressed like them. My upbringing demonstrated the loss of what was my birthright: Korean identity. The Korean people did not understand the term ibyang, adoptee, and were furious that I was culturally ignorant as I attempted to explain that I was Korean American.

My biological mother did not know me. She recoiled at my refusal to go to a public bathhouse and cried over my refusal to eat things that still had their head on. I was not Korean anymore and had taken on the more ignorant, cruel aspects of American ideology. But that was what I had gone away for, wasn’t it? To have a better (American) life? Another mistake was in letting her think that I was angry at her for sending me away. Yet, how could I not be? Children belong with their mothers. If she had loved me, societal pressures on an unwed mother should not have mattered. Right? It is unthinkable in the United States that a child born out of wedlock would be sent through international adoption. Yet this is my (and thousands of others’) reality. I know now that she does love me, in the detached way that only a biological mother who has been removed from her daughter for 20 years can.

The dual marginalization of my experiences both in the United States and abroad draws into sharp focus the fact that adoptees truly belong to neither place. While we desperately look at magazines for fashion and make-up tips, Korean adoptees find that the world is not made for them. We can’t make our eyes look European, no matter how hard we try. We can’t blend in. Yet, we are not welcome in our country of birth because we are culturally different.

The adoption agencies fail to address these issues. We are adopted and forgotten. Adoption is what makes them money, not post-adoption services. Adoption agencies only search for biological parents if it will boost their image. As thousands of transnational and trans-racial adoptions occur every year, we must come to question what it truly means for these children and the adults who have already experienced the pain, suffering, loss and confusion of adoption. We are not what meets the eye – Asians in an American world. We experience bits and pieces of different lives – American, Korean, individual lives. It is the responsibility of each citizen to realize that the United States truly is a diverse nation and that even given information can’t be seen just by looking at my face. I am not a Korean by culture. Nor am I a true American. I am ibyang.

But how did this happen? In 1977, the well-intentioned Community Reinvestment Act went into effect. Designed to prohibit discrimination in lending, Wall Street quickly realized its potential for profit.
Bankers realized that they could now make loans to unemployed crack-addicted felons with no income, package those loans with honest debtors who had less chance of default, and sell these packages to investors. Housing prices were on the rise, and interests rates and the cost of lending were low. As long as they stayed this way, underwater lenders could pay off their mortgage by selling their house. Rating agencies signed off on these subprime loan packages, because they were making money off them too.

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies… the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” –Thomas Jefferson

Wall Street also offered “credit default swaps,” essentially insurance on anything. They profited by selling junk loans and then profited again by insuring them. The money they made allowed them to make more inadvisable loans. It was genius. They thought they had it all under control. But they didn’t.

If we truly had a free market, all those banks would have failed. Market evolution would have struck them down to make room for new, more competitive, and more careful institutions that wouldn’t make the same mistakes. But when the feeding frenzy came to an end, Wall Street’s agents in public office orchestrated the biggest heist of public funds in history to keep them afloat.

Now, those banks are reporting record profits. They’re expanding. They’re handing out huge bonuses. The banks are buying up huge amounts of the debt the government is incurring cleaning up the bank’s mess, again, playing every angle.

Thomas Jefferson once said, “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies…the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” This is exactly what “too big to fail” entails; Wall Street control of the economy. While they reap record profits, the unemployment rate has breached 10 percent and small businesses are starving for cash while financiers roll in it. Small, local banks – the true dynamos of job growth – didn’t get a bail out. They’ve been allowed to fail in record numbers.
Does this piss you off? Because it should.

The distribution of wealth is stacked against the American public. But as a citizen, there are some things you can do to strike back.

MOVE YOUR MONEY! In a capitalist economy, businesses respond to market signals. If you keep your money in big banks, you send the message to them that you’ll continue to patronize them regardless of their behavior. Your money is used as capital to expand corporate and bank power instead of funding jobs and consumer loans. The concept is gaining nationwide momentum. Two of the biggest banks in the United States, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bankcorp, have a heavy presence in Minneapolis. Wells Fargo has an especially bad history of shady business practices. Check out the Independent Community Bankers of America at www.icba.org to find a community bank to move your money into. One excellent option, convenient to campus, is Franklin National bank, which has a branch located at 200 University Ave W. They offer all the services of bigger banks, including online banking and check cards.

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS! As a consumer, you have many legal protections from unethical banking practices that you may be unaware of. For example, you must explicitly tell your bank that you wish them to allow transactions over your credit limit that could lead to fees. Read up on your consumer rights at www.federalreserve.gov/consumerinfo. If your rights have been violated, the Federal Reserve has a complaint system that can be accessed on their website.

SPEAK UP! Use www.leg.state.mn.us/leg/districtfinder.asp to locate and contact your local, state and federal representatives and let them know you support new regulations for banks that will protect consumers and prevent future shenanigans. Sign the Wall Street: Pay Us Back petition at
www.uspirg.org/action/financial-privacy/pay-us-back. Make a sign and stand outside big banks and convince people to move their money. Be heard!

Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Agorapocalypse

Who would’ve thought ANb would put out an album with an average song length of over two minutes? The world’s fastest grind band slows down a little, with mindblowing results. Absolutely fucking insane thrash trades off with insanely heavy riffs, with the best drum programming in human history. This record has the perfect grindcore mood: pissed off and wild and gross, offensive just for the sake of it, and ultimately lighthearted, playful, and carefree. But what matters most is that this band has finally become more about the music than the spectacle, though they’re still further over the top than just about anybody else.

If you had to decide whether or not this is an album you are interested in based on only one track:
“Question of Integrity”

Andrew Bird – Noble Beast

The most peaceful and pastoral record from the Bird, and also his best-produced. Every track is a lush and constantly-shifting mix of layered instrumentation; each verse and chorus of each song is tracked differently, and though the initial draw of the album is the vocal hooks, it is this diversity of instrumentation that draws you back again and again. An intelligent and skillful album—a treat for longtime Bird fans and first-time listeners alike.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Tenuousness”

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

The first AC record to be even in the same ballpark of good as their fans think it is, though it’s not the best album of the decade, or even of the year. The Collective have pulled off a complicated balancing act, creating an album accessible enough to find a wide audience while staying bizarre and complex enough to satisfy their extant fanbase. The album combines organic psychedaelia with partystopping electronics, peppered with field recordings and deep, writhing sounds. This music is thick, wet, and full of life.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“In the Flowers”

Black Moth Super Rainbow – Eating Us

The feel-good album of forever, a huge and bright and primary-colored sound that overwhelms whatever you’re feeling: sublimity by force. The album is sticky and sweet, weapons-grade happiness. Way better than a SAD lamp.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise”

Dälek – Gutter Tactics

Standing on the blacksand beach that is a rap record: beats pound in the ocean like waves beneath which lies a churning underbelly of anxious sound, undulating and nebulous. You can see dimly through the water the shapes of words shimmering like fish. The wave of static breaks, the sky whitewashed with noise.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Gutter Tactics”

Krallice – Dimensional Bleedthrough

No other black metal album is so virtuosic, so guitar-oriented, so consistent. Possessed of both clarity and rawness. Mick Barr’s guitar melodies are catchy without being like anybody else’s. Absolutely mesmerizing, so constant in its energy and speed that it becomes meditative. The record is balls-out no-punches-pulled epic, eschewing the usual gloom and overwrought melancholy of the genre to provide an hour and a quarter of downright ecstatic music, an entire album of huge closing tracks.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
the last two minutes of “The Mountain”

The Mountain Goats – The Life of the World to Come

This record is the first unqualified success of TMG’s hi-fi sound, their first studio-recorded album that is completely unembarrassing in instrumentation and orchestration; the production of this album is spacious and engaging, with huge drums, warm electronics, reverberating piano and subtle violin textures. But as always with this band, the reason to care is the writing. As we’ve come to expect, each song on this record displays beautiful language and emotional subtlety and depth. The record is also a rarity in TMG’s extensive catalog: a well-crafted and coherent unit from the prolific but inconsistent John Darnielle, known for making good songs but not good albums.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Matthew 25:21”

The Paper Chase – Someday This Could All Be Yours, Vol. 1: The Calamities

A deceptive album: totally catchy but genuinely threatening; this is pop music pumped full of infection and disease, accessible hooks with bitterly misanthropic lyrics. Every instrument a little damaged, a little bent. Small touches of violence and discordance throughout every song, a complex patchwork of organic and digital sound. A fluidly-connected collection of sternly epic death marches and barely-controlled cathartics, each one seeping into the next. Producer/frontman John Congleton has come up with brand-new guitar noises, wild and screaming tones twisted out of recognizable shape. This band has a perfect sound, a gold standard for production junkies.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“what should we do with your body (the lightning)”

Ulcerate – Everything is Fire

Witness the percolation of a new style; if this is death metal then all death prior can be considered proto-. This album is beyond new: it is an album from the future. An alien thing come to our planet fully-formed; a melodic system from some other world. Spider-riffs weave webs around each other creating incomprehensible and amorphous rhythms. Many of the record’s best moments are bleak landscapes, but even at its most aggressive the riffing is abstract.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Drown Within”

Zu – Carboniferous

Heavy bass, wild barry sax, pumping electronics and frenetic drumming centered around complex snare rolls. The saxophone used alternatingly for melody, for bassline, for percussion and for insane textures. A unique sound: heavy, intensely polyrhythmic, violent and celebratory, indebted to things like Lightning Bolt and John Zorn without sounding like anything but itself. This is bizarre, surprising, confrontational and meticulously constructed music; an impeccable album for a special breed of listener: those in it for the sound and the rhythm, not for a tune to hum.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Chthonian”

15 Albums that I liked a lot:

Afgrund – Vid Helvetets Grindar
Riff-heavy grindcore from Scandinavia.
Anni Rossi – Rockwell
Newsom-y chirping and viola.
Antigama – Warning
Avant-grind. Interesting drumkit.
Augury – Fragmentary Evidence
Prog/tech/death.
Behemoth – Evangelion
The best Nile album of 2009, by just a smidgen.
Bergraven – Till Makabert Väsen
Weird, abstract, quiet black metal.
John Zorn – Alhambra Love Songs
Continuing Zorn’s listenable streak.
Khanate – Clean Hands Go Foul
Their most subtle, least cheesy; very menacing.
Mochipet – Master P on Atari
Dance music that is also listenable.
Ocean Chief – Den Förste
Best traditional doom since pre-hiatus YOB.
S.K.E.T. – Depleted Uranium Weapons
Excellent powernoise, punishing but danceable.
Shining – VI/Klagopsalmer
A real rocker from the suicidal Swedes.
St. Vincent – Actor
Catchy enough for you, bizarre enough for me.
Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions
Without a doubt the best ever Sunn O))) record.
Why? – Eskimo Snow
The (more) bizarre, poppy(er) flip-side to Alopecia.

5 Albums that other people liked:

Roy Montgomery & Grouper – Split
by Eric Brew

I admit my love for Grouper makes the mention of this album borderline self-serving. I could go either way with the 18-minute track by Roy Montgomery on the split, but Liz Harris’ tracks (playing as Grouper) always captivate me—usually late at night, when I’m on the edge of drowsiness with a small degree of disgust from the day still in my gut. The tracks are (as is most of Harris’ music) brooding, crackling and deep. Her voice, though often indecipherable, is like a drug that, once swallowed, catches onto some part near the inside of your left lung and never leaves—a sort of damage you accept and forever carry.

Akron/Family – Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free
by Pete Noteboom

This album will make you feel like you’re giving birth to magical multi-colored eggs filled with hope, truth, miracles, and everlasting friendship. Akron/Family sounds like a couple indie kids took mushrooms and wandered off into the woods to roast some marshmallows and talk about how seriously intense it is to grow up. On the band’s epic quest to Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free, they wander through the land of dancetastic party plucking and have a gander at the American dream while their collective brain swells with appreciation of The Beauty Inherent In All Things in a breathtaking cacophony of electric light.

The Flaming Lips – Embryonic
by Kevin Tully

It’s hard to believe that the same guys whose last album featured a song called “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” and whose stage show is filled with giant balloons and confetti cannons recorded Embryonic. My first impression of the album was that it sounded like if robots with fuzzy guitars soundtracked a James Bond movie. Then I decided that it sounded more like if robots with fuzzy guitars and an evil wizard soundtracked a James Bond movie where the entire thing was just James Bond panicking for no reason. Then I remembered that it was, in fact, The Flaming Lips.

Nomo – Invisible Cities
by Zach McCormick

Those floating, ethereal, percussive tones that drift mystically throughout Nomo’s music are the product of an amplified Kalimba, an African thumb piano. The Ann Arbor, MI band runs such simple instruments through a slew of effects pedals to craft everything from dulcet marimba chords to searing, distorted guitar lines. Calling Nomo an Afro-Funk group seems a woefully inadequate way to describe the band’s incredibly diverse range of influences: thick, complex horn arrangements recall 70’s funk, while reverb-drenched fuzz guitar gives the album a psychedelic edge. Truly one of the most unique and compelling records of 2009.

Ke$ha – Animal
by Sam Johnston

When Ke$ha was done puking in Paris Hilton’s closet, she turned around and puked into my heart, and I’m not sure if I should thank her or not.

But why is this? Galleries won’t stay afloat on their own – most continue their humble existence on donations and sales of the artwork they feature. Between Minneapolis’s free museums and innumerable art galleries, we’re an art-spoiled crowd – sometimes we need to be reminded of the careful world these galleries exist in.

Franklin Art Works

To your right hang a cluster of old cell phones. Occasionally one will start to buzz, which will grow into a low trembling roar until the entire suspended pile is in a frenzied vibration. But other than that, it’s a bare white room. If you go late enough in the day there might not even be anyone at the reception desk – the whole place might feel abandoned. A slide projector someone forgot to unplug is in a side room with dark wallpaper showing pictures of a woman’s face from various angles, and the pages of a book turning.

Franklin Art Works was built as a silent movie theater in 1916, but eventually served as an adult movie theater, a bicycle shop, and an underground venue before being purchased by Franklin Art Works. The current exposition, primarily of works by Chris Baker (with the exception of Alex Fleming’s projector piece) uses only the main floor, but Baker’s selections are rich enough for his two main works – Murmur Study and Hello World! or How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise – to leave you satisfied. However, on the second floor is a large performance space, unchanged since the building’s debut as a movie theater.

Chris Baker, a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, uses the space excellently, with Murmur Study taking up the bulk of the lobby. Strips of evenly spaced and gracefully hanging printer paper are attached to computers at the roof that feed down into an endless, overwhelming pile of already-printed receipt paper. The computers are programmed to pick up, in real time, tweets from the website Twitter that contain particularly emotional keywords. The result, as in his other piece, is a cacophony of highly personal background noise, in this case beautifully cast into a massive pile of junk on the floor. Hello World! features hundreds of personal video confessions, each tiny and each with an audio track playing. The volume swells but the individual speeches remain indistinguishable. Occasionally an image on one of the individual video squares will catch your attention, but it will quickly change. The works inhabit the bare white space of the gallery well. The small exhibition space packs a lot of interesting material and – being fairly easy to walk through – is an excellent gallery for a quick visit.

Art of This

Like any respectable gallery, Art of This morphs itself to the needs of their featured artist. Within its white walls and behind an unassumingly pale red door, Art of This exists as a small dynamic entity in the midst of an otherwise lackluster region of Minneapolis. The gallery is a small, cryptic presence among the bleak housing and petrol station that draws traffic to this tragic region of Nicollet Ave.

But Art of This’ latest featured artist, Bruce Tapola, has created a barrier between the gallery and its outside world. A lengthy white wall rests between the gallery and its front windows, blocking most of the view the audience has to dull architecture across the street and the delurid glow of passing cars.
Tapola’s work features an eclectic mixture of mediums – from paintings to elaborate structures resembling branches. Photos impaled by smaller bits of wood dangle from the floating structure. It’s a melancholic expression of what the outside world is reticent of. As the audience paces about the space they are subtly reminded of that fateful petrol station outside by a circle hacked out of the white barrier at the front of the gallery. The Au Natural exhibit will be displayed through December 6.

As a non-profit, artist-run space, Art of This depends on art sales, grants, and private donations to continue to feature new media and experimental artwork. The gallery also features unique one-night music shows every other week as part of an Improvised music series.

The Gallery @ Fox Tax

Located along First Ave. in northeast Minneapolis lies a gallery with an identity crisis. Fox Tax, located one block from the bustle of Central Ave., feels just a little hidden. While the name implies it, you might not realize you’re in a tax preparation and advising office when walking into the sleek gallery space.
The Gallery @ Fox Tax is rather business-chic. Its modest sign, huge front windows and minimal furnishings also add to its mystique. White and brick walls frame a collection of black leather couches that look small and ornamental, making the surrounding artwork look even more outrageous.
The current exhibit on display at The Gallery @ Fox Tax is Heavy Petting, a collection of paintings by Rob McBroom that draw on images from the Edward Lear poem, “The Owl and the Pussy Cat.” The pieces each feature a selection of the text incorporated into a vibrant painting of bright, almost garish, colors, along with glitter, plastic jewels, and found objects. The paintings are displayed in sequence, but arguably each portrays a whole story of its own.

Around the corner, another smaller gallery space sits empty, patiently waiting for the next exhibit.
While a small, one-room gallery might not be enough to draw you over to Fox Tax, it might make a nice addition to a day trip to northeast. Neighboring establishments like the Red Stag Supper Club and overwhelmingly cute gift shop I Like You are reason enough to linger around the block and serve as a striking reminder that this part of Minneapolis has threatened for years to become the next Uptown.
At the very least, Fox Tax is quite possibly the most aesthetically pleasing place to have your taxes done. Somehow that alone makes it seem like a good idea.

For a crash course in aggregation, let’s head over to one of the reigning barons of news aggregation: Google News (a.k.a. news.google.com). The place is clean, but not sparse. I can see section links to my left, a pillar of print stories down the middle, and headlines to my right. Links to video are interspersed among the text when available, but print is the brunt of the information presented. Maybe it’s my devotion to Google as a search engine that makes me feel at home here on Google News. Maybe it’s this sensation of being at home that makes me want to leave as quickly as I can.

Google News is one of many news aggregators that offers content but not the zing. The content is there, truckloads of it, but news content on the Internet isn’t worth the fiber-optic filaments that it travels through. We can get our Internet news from anywhere; a major media site, an analyst’s blog, a journalist’s twitter and other, hipper places besides. We can even get off the Internet entirely if we dare to be so contrarian. News is everywhere for the time being and cheap to boot, so while Google News may provide a decent service, the sustainable economic model simply isn’t there. As a tentacle of the greater Google Inc. octopus, Google News gets along fine. However, Google News is unsustainable without the name. Zing is what sells, and Google News has no zing. It’s the dull-looking kid who’s the son of illustrious parents but has few prospects of his own.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, some news aggregators have the necessary zing but not the panopticon scope of a service like Google News. Newsy.com takes one such novel approach. Rewrap coverage of the same story by different news organizations to produce an arguably more balanced piece of journalism in a broadcast format. For instance, the Newsy.com story “GM Opts to Keep Opel” cites six different sources: the BBC, Russia Today, Der Speigel, CBC News, The Wall Street Journal, and Deutsche Welle. The con, however, is the same as the pro in Newsy.com’s case: One three-minute story thoroughly covers each topic. It’s fast and efficient, which Newsy.com founder Jim Spencer touts as a key element for news consumers, but it’s also rigid and fundamentally limited. At its core, it regurgitates the coverage of other news organizations into a headline news format. The site itself looks good while it’s doing this regurgitating, but the site slogan “The News With More Views” simply doesn’t lend itself to a three-minute headline news format. Imagine reading three stories about University of Minnesota campus arrests in three different publications: The Wake, The Minnesota Daily, and the Star Tribune. Each story may have a different perspective and a different way of analyzing the arrests. Will these different perspectives and analyses retain their uniqueness when a website like Newsy.com aggregates them into one mass? The results will be hit and miss, but if the uniqueness disappears, then the novelty of news has disappeared as well, replaced with something akin to the dullest of Associated Press briefs. Note, however, that speed over depth is the purpose of Newsy.com, though not of all aggregators. We in American society are told that people are busy these days, so perhaps speed over depth is marketable. Only time will tell.

Let’s shift the focus to something that offers both the necessary content and the fabled zing, albeit without a shred of the English language for the discerning monolingual American to read. 2424actu.fr has a dark, sports-car sleek design uncommon in most mainstream news sites, perhaps to draw in that younger crowd who’s already getting sick of the black on gray with a little bit of white around the edges style that the reigning French news sites already offer. In addition to the design, though, 2424actu.fr has content—and not just content, but depth of content. Say I want to know more about the story of Michael Jackson’s death. I click on the video link for the story and I’m brought to an AFP (French equivalent of the Associated Press) video news brief. However, I also have the choice of hearing the story through video or radio from ten or fifteen other sources, plus scores of print sources besides. In American terms, this would be the equivalent of being able to see, hear, and read CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, the AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times all in one place.
The problem? The site only streams video for those with a French IP address. But an American version may come someday soon; and the news aggregator landscape may develop yet another wrinkle because of it. After all, entrepreneurship steals from many places.

Aggregators are one more answer to the challenge of making journalism more accessible and more profitable. Everyone in the Internet news biz takes a different approach. Some get as many sources as they can, some simplify as much as they can, and some seek to make their site a one-stop shop for every conceivable development. MSNBC tries for the latter with their “Spectra Visual News Reader.” Imagine a Nintendo Wii game where all you do is read news; that’s what this is. Choose your feeds and watch the stories come and go. As hip and trendy as the Spectra Visual News Reader seeks to be, it’s still a profoundly inelegant piece of software—a Segway in the world of news aggregators. Spectra would make a great screensaver, but to think that anyone would use this thing as their primary news source is unlikely.

The issue with news aggregators overall is this: Whether they have the zing, the content, both or neither, there’s still little demand for them. Aggregators today are a niche product. Who needs ten different sources for the same story? If I want to listen to Fox News coverage of something, by golly, I’ll go to Fox News. If I want to listen to MSNBC coverage of something, by golly, I’ll go to MSNBC. If I want both, I’ll go to both—why should I go to a middleman first?

Speaking not as a student or a consumer of news but as the average hypothetical layman, what does a news aggregator offer me? Not much that I don’t already have. Aggregators may provide varied coverage of an event or offer coverage of something that would otherwise have gone unheard had I gone to a major news site instead, but, for better or worse, these are things that laymen have afforded themselves to lose. Aggregators don’t break the big stories and they don’t nab enough small ones. Some aggregators like Newsy.com and 2424actu.fr are certainly pretty things in pretty packages, but do we need our news to be pretty? Or is news supposed to remain what it is today, whatever it is today? We, the people, whether we realize or not, will decide with our wallets and our habits.

Plans are developing to bring back commuter rail services to Minnesota. On Oct. 14, parts of these plans were unveiled at the Saint Paul depot itself when the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) held its second round of open houses to present new analyses of the state’s rail needs and to get input from citizens. The open house in Saint Paul was one of seven meetings that took place in different parts of the state, including Duluth, Rochester and Saint Cloud. The subsequent step will be to finalize plans and release them by the end of the year. The plans will then be used as a comprehensive framework around which individual projects can be oriented.

MnDOT, working with Cambridge Systematics, prioritized different train line projects according to the amount of usage they’d get. Cambridge consults offices of the U.S. Department of Transportation as well as a variety of other federal and state agencies having to do with transportation, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Transit Administration.

Ridership forecasts for various routes are “certainly the crux” of the decision making, says Marc Cutler, a planner with Cambridge Systematics. Lines that come first on the list of priorities are as follows: a line from the Twin Cities to Saint Cloud and then Moorhead , a line to Duluth, a line to Mankato, and a high-speed line through Red Wing and Winona over to Milwaukee and Chicago. The first phase of the project would give the high-speed line a top speed of 110 miles per hour, and the other lines a top speed of 79 miles per hour. The rails would however be upgradeable to 150 miles per hour speeds, at a significant additional cost.

Planners think the lines would get a lot of use – Cambridge Systems predicts that the Chicago and Saint Cloud lines would see over a million annual trips by 2030, and there could be 400,000 to 600,000 riders on routes to Duluth and Rochester.

Assuming funding for this massive undertaking can be found, the time could be now for a revamp of Midwest transportation infrastructure.

“This is a unique moment in time” for rail transportation in Minnesota, says Cutler. Federal funding “has suddenly appeared before us.”

Federal funding appears in the form of an $8 billion dollar chunk of February’s $787 billion federal stimulus package designated for high-speed rail via projects with the National Environmental Policy Act. To understand how high the competition is for this money, imagine 8 slices of pumpkin pie vied for by 50 pie-craving diners. According to Reuters, 24 states filled out 45 applications for a piece of this $8 billion train pie. The amount of money requested totals $50 billion. Though officials had expected to be able to begin doling out grants this month, they now expect they won’t be writing any checks until later this winter, due to the overwhelming number of applications. The New York Times reports that the only Minnesota project in the White House’s top ten rail priorities list is the track between Chicago and Minneapolis. MnDOT also lists an additional $40 billion in federal funds for the state to potentially glean, mostly in the form of loans, for various -to-city and intercity rail projects.

MnDOT announced its application for $382 million from federal stimulus money in August. This amount would go towards a Saint Cloud extension of the soon-to-open Northstar line from Minneapolis to Big Lake, as well as a high-speed rail system from Chicago to the Twin Cities up to Duluth.

The state has predicted that the project costs for their rail plan would cost about $8.4 billion, or $7.2 billion if the upgrades were done as one system. The projects outlined in the first phase would cost about $5.3 billion.

Cutler cautions that the rail plan is an “incremental, multi-generational task.” He uses the example of the interstate highway system – it didn’t appear overnight, and the early highways were not as good as the later ones. Each train line will be treated as an independent start-up project, meaning there will be different timelines for each project.

Cutler also stressed the importance of learning from other transit systems’ mistakes, referring to the New York City’s Penn Station and Grand Central Station. There is currently no direct connection between these two major transportation hubs. While the original plan for Twin Cities rails would’ve only put a depot in St. Paul, the state has since changed directions to include large commuter train depots in both St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Some lines are certainly coming along more quickly than others. The Northstar commuter rail, for example, is on its way. The line’s grand opening will take place on Nov. 14 of this year, and it will begin regular commuter travel on Monday, Nov. 16. The route will run from downtown Minneapolis out to Big Lake, a bedroom community of the Twin Cities that’s not far from Saint Cloud. The $320 million cost of the project is shared by state and federal governments, as well as by Anoka, Hennepin, and Sherburne counties, the Metropolitan Council, and the Minnesota Twins. It is estimated that 3,400 people a day will use the train on weekdays from the get go.

The Northstar can travel at a maximum speed of 79 miles per hour, and with six stops, the duration of the route will be about 50 minutes. It connects with the Hiawatha light rail by Target field and then goes on to Fridley, Coon Rapids, Anoka, Elk River, and finally Big Lake.

Dave Christianson, the project manager from MnDOT, also says that the train corridor between the Twin Cities and Duluth, dubbed the Northern Lights Express, is also far ahead of most other corridors. He says the project is one step away from final design, and that it has seen full support along the line. While there is the question of funding, he says the route could be in operation by 2015 or 2016. Christianson also alludes to additional rail corridors with grassroots support, such as a line to Eau Claire, Wis.

When looking at the future of the Minnesota railways, it is important to note that there was a time when the Saint Paul Union Depot was truly a bustling transportation hub. At one time there were 18 tracks serving the place, which 282 trains and 20,000 passengers used daily. This fact was brought up at the Question and Answer portion of the Rail Plan meeting on Oct. 14 when an audience member recalled a time in the 1950’s when there were three daily trips from the Saint Paul depot directly to Union Station Chicago that took little more than six hours.

Today, the Amtrak web site lists two daily trips that take eight hours – Google Maps estimates the drive time between Saint Paul and Chicago at 6 hours and 14 minutes. The Amtrak ticket costs $96 if you buy it within a few days of your trip, or $56 if you buy it in advance. The same trip by automobile would cost $47 in a car with a poor fuel efficiency of 20 miles per gallon.

The Union Depot is currently owned by the U.S. Postal Service and private owners. In June 2009, the Ramsey County Board approved the purchase of the depot’s concourse and the 9 miles of land connected to it from the U.S. Postal Service for $49.6 million, and is trying to purchase the Headhouse from private owners for another $8.1 million. The mailmen will be relocating to a space in Eagan in 2010, at which point the county will begin a $237.5 million project to revamp the space to once again be used for its original purpose. Dave Christianson says that Amtrak signed a letter of intent to operate out of the Saint Paul Union Depot in 2012.

Minnesota’s rail plans are in conjunction with a larger Midwestern rail plan which would bring high-speed trains to a number of major Midwestern cities. The Midwest Rail Initiative is proposing 110 mile per hour trains from Chicago to Milwaukee, Green Bay, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinatti, and Saint Louis.

Fortunately, great deals can still be found right here in our own neighborhoods.

If Dinkytown is on the list of daily sights, there are a couple used bookstores that cater to most course needs. The Bookhouse and Cummings Books can be found on 14th Avenue SE. Their proximity to the Minneapolis campus of the U of M make them prime shops for students to sell their books to, creating ample opportunity for future students in the same courses.

Both shops keep a variety of books – fiction, non-fiction, anthologies, recently released, old editions – that cover a wide range of topics, perfect resources for those research papers and midterm essays. Even better, a large portion of the books in The Bookhouse come from professors who have cleaned out their own libraries. One of the employees also noted that older books have better bindings and have an overall better quality than books printed today.

Mayday Books can be found on Cedar Avenue. just off West Bank campus. The books here tend to be politically swayed and can prove useful in CSCL, Politics, Gender Studies, History and Sociology classes. Even if your academic career doesn’t center on progressive banter, the slew of books, periodicals and zines is enough to pique and enhance general, political interest.

Magers and Quinn Booksellers is an absolute must check for used books. This shop is a bibliophile’s heaven. The depths of the store are inconceivable upon entry. Popular fiction and various book club books sit in the front and acts as a gateway to the expansive fiction collection. The back room opens to an array of genres and books written and almost anything you could ever want a book about. There are sections dedicated to Minnesotan authors, local authors, employee selections and popular titles. The trick in Magers and Quinn is once you find the book you are looking for, check to see if there are other copies stuck behind it – they are usually rougher in condition, but cheaper as well.

As for used bookstores in St. Paul, Sixth Chamber Used Books is a neighborhood shop to check out. Just off Grand Avenue., Sixth Chamber has a growing and varied selection of books in great condition. It has a quality guarantee that their books will be in nearly new condition. The store is neatly organized, and if you don’t find exactly what you are looking for, the store will put your name on a list and notify you when a copy of the book surfaces in the store.

Buying books used is not just about the bargain or getting a required book, however. John Sand, a student at the U of M and used bookstore frequenter, said “I like knowing someone else has read the book I buy, and it is great when they’ve written in the margins. I just bought a poetry book and someone had written their own poem in the back.” Journalism student Kara Nesvig also admitted, “Sometimes I don’t find the book I set out to buy, but I still find other books that are interesting to me.” Leaving any of these bookstores WITHOUT making a purchase is nearly impossible.

The wide variety of locations across the Twin Cities provides even more options when searching for course texts in a less antagonizing manner. In fact, the bookstores can make the task of book hunting enjoyable. You might not know exactly what you are walking into, but you certainly will be able to find a book or two that suites your fancy and your budget.

As a student at this University, you will run into a class that relies on WebVista and PDF versions of necessary texts. It’s expensive to print off a 19th century theatre critique when every page contains a picture of a set design or a frowning playwright. So you don’t print them off, and neither does your teacher. Instead you flip, zoom and scroll through the article on a computer screen. Books are going digital incrementally. Since the printing business is too profitable, and the devices are still, well, divisive. The transition into full digital literature is imminent yet progress is sluggish.

E-Ink

There are four major companies involved in the race towards a marketable digital reader: Sony, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple. There are ancillary products such as the Bookeen Cybook and the Interead COOL-ER. Three of the four frontrunners on the market rely on digital paper technology or E-Ink: the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle 2, and the Barnes and Noble Nook.

An M.I.T. scientist named Joseph Jacobson is responsible for developing the E-ink product, Vizplex. This screen is what all three of the aforementioned companies utilize in their readers. The technology involves two transparent electrodes that house millions of hair-sized capsules containing positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles floating in a “clear fluid.” When a site on the electrode becomes positively charged, the black particles move to the surface, creating a piece of a letter or a picture. When a site becomes negatively charged, white particles move to the surface to create the page’s negative space.

In the ads for their readers, all three companies emphasize the importance of E-Ink in creating a “natural reading experience.” The ad for the Barnes and Noble Nook claims, “It looks just like a printed page. There’s no glare or backlight, so I can read comfortably for hours.”

Comparisons

All of the Sony Readers use the E-Ink technology I have mentioned before. What sets Sony apart is the touch screen, which seems to allow for a more intuitive motion for turning pages. Both the Kindle 2 and the Nook use buttons to turn pages, but the Nook also has a touch screen on the bottom of the device that accesses the menu. The Nook’s menu allows the user to browse the library of dailies and books that s/he owns. It also allows for quick shopping and downloading through AT&T’s 3G network. Kindle 2 also has 3G capabilities but uses a clunky keyboard to search and navigate, while the Sony Reader uses a USB cord to import new content. They are all about the same size (6” diagonally) and all have the same text displaying capabilities (enlarging images, changing fonts, adjusting contrast, storage). Each of the three devices accesses a different online store to purchase titles. This means that a book bought from Sony’s E-Bookstore is not compatible with Kindle 2 formatting.

It is cheaper to buy a digitized book online than to purchase a physical copy, but of course this is without factoring in the cost of buying a device, which is set at $299 for both Kinldle 2 and Sony Reader Touch, while the Nook is priced at $259. Aside from their ad campaigns, not much is different from one device to another. Kindle’s ads target technology-illiterate seniors, the Sony Reader is for cynics who read their e-books in private (“but it’s so convenient”) and Nook is an iPod for books.

But Wait!

It turns out that the iPod touch and iPhone are both iPods for books. Both have “reader” capabilities with the Kindle application. The Kindle application provides the same service and the same library as the Kindle 2, but on a significantly smaller screen. Of course the iPod’s swiss-army knifelike convenience and its compact size will be enough for consumers to stray away from buying another specialized electronic device. The versatility of the Apple products definitely threatens the marketability of the “E-reader” revolution. With the iPod reading looks more like texting, which looks like checking your email, which looks like making a playlist, which looks like playing a video game and less like reading a medical chart from Star Trek. Also, Apple’s version of the Kindle comes with a backlight and a full color touch screen.

The iPod does not use the same E-Ink technology as its competitors, (who aren’t really competitors) so the iPod version of Moby Dick looks less “natural” than the Kindle 2 version (while “unnaturalness” is conceivably one of the top reasons why people show reluctance in investing in E-readers in the first place). The iProducts are also capable of accessing multiple databases, including Stanza, a database that is compatible with Sony Reader containing 1.25 million more books than the Amazon database.

Who Benefits

Princeton University was the first university to use e-readers in the classroom when they adopted the Kindle DX last May. According to an article by Hyung Lee, a Princeton student reporter for the Daily Princetonian, 50 students were given free Kindle DX’s (a bigger version of the Kindle 2 with an axis sensitive screen allowing wide screen viewing for viewing images) as a part of the university’s paper conserving initiative called “Toward Print-Less and Paper-Less Courses: Pilot Amazon Kindle Program” or TPLPLC:PAKP for the 2009-2010 school year. The Kindle got mixed reviews at Princeton where some students complained of the device’s lack of page numbers, its battery life, and primitive annotating capabilities. These problems made studying more difficult for some students, which seemed to outweigh the convenience of having all of their readings on the amiable little plastic tablet.

Am I Still Digital?

The simple answer is yes, but you’re waiting for a product to come, to save your back and your environment from the 569-year war that is analog duplication of the printed word. Yes, the printing business is still a highly wasteful industry, but until we find a sustainable, affordable, and sensible solution to the problem, people are going to continue to buy products that too quickly make their way into the garbage.

Perhaps in the future the “e-reader” will be seen as a failure from its inception. It’s the word. It suggests that something else is doing the reading for me. It’s the device that reads, not me. And I can’t have that. Maybe I’m too territorial about my reading. Ironically, I feel like saying what Amy Sedaris said perfectly at the end of her commercial for the Sony Reader: “When you touch great books, great books touch you back.”

Aside from his middle class financial status, a person may wonder what other factors could possibly limit this gifted student, aspiring publicist and former male model from quickly reaching his full potential.

But Rahman isn’t white (At least that’s not what he listed on his U of M application).

His given ethnicity, “other,” while all but guaranteeing entrance into this racially [self-]conscious university, has, in his opinion, also put him at a great disadvantage upon arriving here: in short, mandatory participation in a one year social program, ironically dubbed “Access to Success.”

Access to Success, or “ATS” for short, is one of those programs that was designed with students’ best interests at heart, but has fallen somewhere south of that position. A catch-all category for many of the underrepresented groups here on campus, individuals selected for this program are forced to endure all or part of its moving pieces: specialized ATS advising, a computer lab, peer-to-peer mentoring and tutoring support are made available to all students. (Sounds terrible, right?) But there’s more: select students are also required to take 6 credits—two semesters’ worth—of ATS’s own breed of College of Liberal Arts classes.

CLA 1005, or “Liberal Arts Learning,” is the first of two courses taken by ATS students at the U of M. (The second is called CLA 2005, or “Introduction to Liberal Education and Responsible Citizenship.”)
In this course, designed to provide a “continuing orientation” to the greater U of M portfolio, they learn study skills, the liberal arts, finances and other life issues, and four-year planning, which are pretty generic, standard things that all students should learn—whether as part of a class or just as life lessons. What’s more interesting, however, is the kind of racist garbage that often works its way into the curriculum.

In a recent talk delivered by ATS Coordinator Andrew Williams and a colleague, one Dr. White from the University of Michigan, students learned about the “Psychology of a Black Male,” strangely racially charged in its intent. A companion video to the lecture, streamed from YouTube, painted whites as an enemy. It said “[a] healthy suspicion of whites” was indispensable to the black man’s strength.

This may all be well and good, if not downright empowering, to a group of Black Power enthusiasts, but what of the less culturally angst-driven? What of the Caucasians and members of other ethnicities also present in the class? (After all, we have an African-American president, the North won, segregation is over, and in many, many other ways the “glass ceilings” around us are continually being broken.) One student interviewed put it this way: “Imagine if someone had written down ‘healthy suspicion of blacks’ as a component of white male success.” (Many of the students interviewed for this story did wish to remain anonymous, either because they feared jeopardizing their full ride, multicultural, ATS-affiliated scholarships or other types of reprisals for speaking out).

Finally, required reading materials for the class, specifically The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind, are not college level books—the latter is written at a ninth grade reading level—and do little to prime students of any race for continued academic success.

“Disparate Impact”? –or “Disparate Intent”?

In the legal world, there are two very different types of racism: one is intentional and the other unconsciously perpetrated. HR professionals working toward EEOC compliance in the corporate environment have for years referred to these as “disparate impact” and “disparate treatment or intent.” Disparate treatment occurs when members of a protected class are treated differently from others, such as when a lecturer speaks to the differences between blacks and whites. Per LawMemo.com, disparate impact “is the idea that some employer practices, as matter of statistics, have a greater impact on one group than on another.”

Ironically, Access to Success has given this high achieving student a one-way, one- year ticket to a deleterious remedial education.

Obviously, the relationship between an employee and his or her employer is different than that of a student at an institution of higher learning; we pay them, instead of the other way around. But the same principle applies here, especially if we think of ourselves as being full-time students. An example of disparate impact is the student makeup of Access to Success. By all accounts, persons that would be considered “white” on a U of M Admissions Application populate less than 10 percent of the class. If disparate impact is fought with statistics, it is safe to say that these discussions and lectures are not representative of the true proportions of students from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds attending this school. This situation would be inherently problematic to any would-be racial auditor.

A Tale of Two People

Rahman is close friends with 18-year-old Hannah Schuelke, a freshman, of Revillo, S.D. Like Rahman, Schuelke was selected for enrollment in the Access to Success program. Schuelke claims that a letter was sent to her, prior to starting school here, which explained she was to be in ATS because of a two-year CLA foreign language requirement that had not been satisfied with her high school transcript.

Unlike Rahman, however, the U of M never followed through on its promise to remediate Schuelke. Rahman, who boasts a higher ACT score and far, far more college credits transferring in, was welcomed with a “College Advisor Approval Hold” on his record and condescension and micromanagement in every single one of his fall semester course choices. And what’s more: He has to take CLA 1005 & 2005, whereas Schuelke does not.

Naturally, Rahman has tried to appeal the decision and will try to appeal it again next semester, but isn’t too hopeful. Instead of learning about his “talents and abilities,” with a side of general liberal arts education, Rahman feels his time (and money) would be much better spent taking upper division classes, or perhaps another trip abroad—both things ATS has made quite literally impossible for him to do this year. Ironically, Access to Success has given this high achieving student a one-way, one-year ticket to a deleterious remedial education—in the hopes that, given the necessary resources, he will thrive in the future.

At the core, Rahman is concerned that because he is originally from the “inner city,” isn’t white ( in fact he’s part Iranian), and isn’t wealthy, he has been singled out, along with every other student that fits and/or closely resembles his description, and has been given this unwarranted-yet-mandatory “special” treatment. This is the opinion, of course, of one man—but many of the people this reporter spoke to in the program shared his sentiments.

In this country, we are told we can be whatever we want to be. The sky’s the limit. But what happens when the [glass] sky breaks, only to reveal another glass sky directly above it? People have alternately crucified and praised programs like Affirmative Action, so it makes sense that a program like Access to Success evokes in us a mixed reaction.

If anything, Access to Success should be opt-in and not something that some people are forced to take in order to reach graduation. Hell, this writer could probably use some of the worthwhile things taught in CLA 1005 and 2005. But it’s complete bunk to think that the people in that class are required to be there, perhaps because of their ethnicity, perhaps because of where they went to school, perhaps just because of their social class, ET CETERA—and some of those individuals have clearly been misplaced!

The Access to Success program should exist, but the disparate impact it has on minority students at this university needs to be addressed. Having the program be opt-in would be better; de-stigmatizing even the idea of receiving help, and then providing those resources to all students who sign up for it would be ideal. This would curb the unconscious tendency our society has toward racial and socioeconomic marginalization, and may actually end up benefiting students. The classes could certainly be more rigorous too: after all, six credits of “A,” no matter what college you’re in, should actually mean something. But this reporter doesn’t want to end up too much of an iconoclast at such a young station in life. We’ll save that one for now.

Let the debate continue.

Somalia has been mired in civil war since 1991, when militant factions and clans overthrew decades’ worth of dictatorial government under the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party; it was granted its independence in the 1960s after decades of semi-colonial control by Europe. Since 1991, infighting between rival factions and widespread panic and fear has left the country in a precarious position among African nations. The U.S. and U.N. have tried multiple times to send food, aid and even troops to the East African nation over the past 18 years, with little results and even less good news received. The biggest news to come from the region before 2004 was the infamous Black Hawk Down incident, where 18 U.S. soldiers were killed during a joint U.S. and U.N. attack on militias in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, in October 1993, which left a lasting impression on the minds of American society.

The Somali community in Minnesota, here since the first refugees and immigrants came in 1993, is the largest population of Somalis and Somali Americans anywhere in the U.S., with population estimates ranging from 60,000 to 80,000. Since that time, there’s been news aplenty about Somali issues, whether it’s Somali cab drivers refusing to serve people who carry alcohol, or the current hot-button issue of Somali youth violence.

“It’s really exposing people to only one side of the story,” says Fadumo Ali, a finance and accounting sophomore at the University of Minnesota. “I feel like people are only seeing the negative aspects of Somali people. There is a lot of positive aspects of Somali culture.”

Those positive aspects can seem hard to find in a 24-hour news cycle. Common perceptions abound that the news only reports on crises, tragedies and breaking scandals. Somali-related news is no exception. The recent spate of news within the Somali community in Minnesota was the September 2008 shooting death of Ahmednur Ali, a 20-year-old Augsburg College student who volunteered at the Brian Coyle Community Center and, unfortunately, was the fifth young Somali man killed in the community over a 12-month span. This unfortunate story illustrating the issues of Somali youth violence in Minneapolis was soon replaced by the stories of Somali piracy off the Gulf of Aden and the news of as many as 20 young Somali men leaving Minnesota to fight in their homeland as part of the Al-Shabab organization, considered by the U.S. to be terrorists with ties to Al-Qaeda.

It is no small wonder to see what happens from here. Stories of Somali piracy, of Somali terrorism connections, and of Somali investigations spread throughout the local media circuit through the summer, with the Star Tribune reporting in July that at least four of the 20 or so young men had died in Somalia during the infighting. Yet the recent tone in news concerning Somalia shows a positive shift as most, if not all, media outlets in the Twin Cities reported on Somalia’s president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, and his recent 3-day tour in Minnesota, meeting with Somali families, elders, and even giving a highly publicized, packed speech at the U of M’s Northrup Auditorium. Ahmed, widely seen as the man who could unite the country in peace, was himself driven out of Somalia just a few years earlier, when as head of the Islamic Courts Union he lost power when Ethiopia invaded Somalia in late 2006 to try and restore order to an Islamic militant-held Mogadishu. Since his inauguration in February, Ahmed’s attempts at a moderate Islamic government have been met with large praise and support, making him the most viable president of Somalia to give it a bit of stability and peace since the beginning of the current conflict.

Other mixed news flows out of the Somali community recently, as The Minnesota Daily reports an increase of youth violence in the past month is causing Cedar-Riverside residents to call for more action in educating newly immigrated-citizens on the use of 911 and reporting crimes as well as educating Minneapolis police on the cultures and practices of the community at large. While the increase in youth crime is worrying, the calls for more understanding by both citizens and police signifies a good, improving climate and a way to shift misguided perceptions about the Somali community, among other communities of color in the area.

Yet the biggest problem is the sporadic attention Somalia receives. Although there is more news coverage now over Somalia’s troubles, the call to pay attention was first brought about by the piracy and terrorism coverage Somalia has received. According to Ali, a group of Japanese students recently came to the U of M in order to learn more about Somalia since the only information they had about the Somali culture was the recent news coverage on Al-Shabab and piracy. “I was really shocked,” Ali says.
Such misunderstandings have been at the forefront of the editorial pages of The Daily recently, as many have commented and debated about a recent opinion column questioning what the author perceived to be certain sexist tendencies by “East African males,” who may or may not practice Islam. This furor only echoes the negative perception Muslims face nationally, as even Ali admits her identity as a Muslim woman wearing a hijab or a burka is challenged more than her identity as a Somali American.

The answers to how the Somali community can garner better attention are beyond the scope of this article. Certainly, more dialogue between the Somali community and outside communities needs to be established. Ali hopes the more positive aspects of Somali culture can be seen, that both the Somali community and the communities in Minnesota can come together to discuss these issues. It will help to see more articles about Somali officials visiting the state, as well as Somali success stories like the New York Times article on Mohamed Aden, a Somali leader who has managed to bring stability and functioning government to about 5,000 square miles of land around Adado in the middle of Somalia. In time, this coverage may help in addressing the critical structural problems inside the Somali government. For now, identifying the problems and opening a dialogue may be the start of an answer.