I The Behrend Beacon
Don't touch that remote
By Kyle Zaffino
contributing writer
It's a well-known fact that there are television
shows created for the sole purpose of selling prod
ucts. Shows such as Power Rangers and Pokemon
have always hooked children and made them beg
for $39.99 toys (batteries not included), which
break while you try to remove the industrial-grade
Twist-ties that hold the toys to the cubic acre of
packing foam they are entombed in.
What few people realize, though, is that this is the
point of all of television programs. The Super Bowl
draws in a billion viewers each year, and each of
those viewers heads out to the marketplace to buy
things sometimes. Desperate Housewives is not
actually a primer on revenge, or even a particularly
good opportunity to stare at Eva Longoria.
(Google, friends, Google.) Even the TV Guide
Channel does more than provide you with a sched
ule of the day's ocular pleasures.
The sales pitch just becomes more subtle as the
target audience ages. Children beg for cereals and
toys marketed with bright colors and obnoxiously
chipper little brats enjoying the product. Cell
phones, iPods and other electronics are marketed as
Top five of the week...
By Brad Kovalcik
Staff writer
Everyone has had the experience of
receiving a bad gift. You don't want
to be the giver of what someone
remembers as their worst. Just use
common sense and stay away from
my list of the worst gifts I ever
received and I'm sure you and your
friends will have a great holiday sea
son. This is the...
5 Worst Gifts I've Received
5. A shower clock What
good is a shower clock any
way? It comes in handy...
never
4. Out of fashion clothing
one worn by Napoleon Dynamite; however it was three years before the movie eve
came out
3. Lottery Tickets Nothing says have no idea what to get you," like a lottery tick
et. Plus they have that added bonus of making you feel like a loser everytime.
2. Gift cards to places that don't exist I don't even know how this happens
received them two or three times from relatives in Florida, and I'm pretty sure they're
laughing at me everytime they send them.
1. Weird things My grandparents got me a statue of a coyote and an eagle fighting
over a dead weasel. I was five. It freaked me the heck out. I couldn't sleep for weeks
because I always saw these creepy things staring at me from the other side of the room
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I once received a wolf shirt that was exactly the same a
is finally being recognized
OCD
though every house in the United States is infested
with them, making it difficult for teenagers to
thwart peer pressure that doesn't actually exist.
Vehicles are marketed as being spunky, highbrow.
or hip, even though, in a decade, they'll all he in
trailer parks.
Sports franchises are the worst, hawking anything
and everything to add an eighth course to the team
owner's evening meal, or keep a new Lamborghini
in the star quarterback's garage (which, I'm sure,
my family's entire house would comfortably fit
into). Many soccer teams and all race cars sell
space on their uniforms--like 2006 Nextel Cup
Champion Jimmy Johnson's Chevy Monte Carlo. It
looks like someone vomited a Taco Bell meal onto
it, the hood and A-pillars streaked with taco-beef
brown, lettuce-green numerals emblazoned on the
sides, and salsa-chunk ads splattered across the
fenders.
There's no escape from this constant molestation.
The tube has become a syringe, which injects an
irrational desire for accumulation of wealth into
anyone unfortunate enough to cross its path. The
time has come to shut it off and enjoy the fun our
forefathers did—baseball, Mom, and apple pie.
Well, may be not now ...Everybody Loves
Raymond is on.
- r -
7"
I heart peanut butter
By Rebecca Andrusky
The United States is one of the few countries in
the world that markets peanut butter. Why this is
I can't begin to guess because a life without
peanut butter (as any typical American would
agree) is a sad life indeed. The smell of peanut
butter alone is completely intoxicating. And
because it takes so long to swallow due to the
excessive stickiness and (delectable taste), it is
excellent for keeping small children, animals and
irritating neighbors busy for hours. Not only does
peanut butter taste great, but also because it's rel
atively cheap and filling, it could feed the entire
country of Ethiopia if enough jars were collected.
Unfortunately, no one in their right mind would
be able to give up their jars of peanut butter to
other countries in the world. This is probably
what has caused the massive influx of immigrants
into the country; they just can't resist the peanut
butter.
Peanut butter has many purposes, than just a fix
for hunger. A large peanut butter sandwich can he
a wonderful method for getting someone to shut
up. Is the person next to you talking your ear off?
Offer him or her a large peanut butter sandwich
and their mouth will be glued shut almost imme
diately. Not only that, but they will never realize
your true motives because they will be too busy
savoring the delightful taste of crushed peanuts
and Wonderßread stuck to the roof of their
mouths. In fact, they will he so involved in tast
ing the peanut butter that by the time they begin
Polar bear in a blizzard, before Labor bay, sitting on goose feathers, eating a
mayonnaise and provolone cheese sandwich on Wonderbread with the crust cut
off, wearing a Clay Aiken t-shirt, listening to Vanilla Ice and drinking milk
There is snow way
By Jerry Pohl
calendar page editor
Late each fall, Behrend students are dismayed by
the prospect of a phenomenon known as "lake effect
weather." Due to the campus' proximity to Lake
Erie, arctic conditions are more prevalent than in
areas further from the lake. While most accept this
as nature's cruel practical joke, some historical
research shows that this climate has not always been
the bane of student's existence.
Decades ago, Behrend was a small junior college,
preparing students for collegiate level education at
the main campus. As the campus grew, the engi
neering department soon began offering majors of
its own, that could be completed without leaving the
small farming community of Erie.
The first student to attempt graduation at Behrend
was Dan McKay. McKay was an engineering stu
dent who didn't want to transfer to main campus
because he was afraid of girls. He decided to com
plete his degree at Behrend, and, in his final semes
ter, had nothing left but a twelve credit senior proj
ect.
McKay had a grand vision for his project; he
planned to raise property values in the area by con
structing a man-made lake to create lake-front real
estate. Along with his fellow engineers, McKay
oversaw the year long project. When it was com
plete McKay named it Lake Erie, after the small vil
lage at the new lake's edge.
The lake was filled with water and property val
ues soared. Industry and commerce flocked to the
area, building it into a city. McKay received an A on
his project and graduated that spring with a degree
in Littoral Engineering.
Over the summer, Erie became a bustling metrop-
staff writer
• •
Friday, December 8, 2006
attempting to unstick their top jaw from the bot
tom, you will he able to make a sneaky getaway,
or rob them blind depending on your morals or
lack thereof...
It has also been discovered that peanut butter
can be used to remove gum from your hair. For
the life of me, though. I can't figure out how this
came to be exposed. My theory is that a very talk
ative person (we'll call her Sue) got gum stuck in
her hair. In an attempt to get Sue to stop talking,
someone offered her a peanut butter sandwich to
try and glue her mouth shut. I assume Sue must
have refused the sandwich and in a moment of
utter frustration, this person lunged forward to
shove the sandwich in her mouth. They missed
her mouth though, and managed to shove it into
her hair instead, removing the gum and thus dis
covering that peanut butter removes gum from
hair. Some might say this is farfetched, but if they
can think of a better explanation for someone
sticking peanut butter in their hair, then they
obviously need a jar themselves because they
have too much time on their hands.
Peanut butter has a number of other uses as
well. They range from spreading it on your dog's
tail to watch him go crazy (a little comic relief at
the end of a long week), plugging holes in your
ceiling, or introducing it to grape jelly or bananas
and putting it on bread. If you're creative enough,
I'm sure you can think of hundreds of other uses
for peanut butter. That said, digging into a jar of
Jif with nothing more than a spoon can be very
rewarding at the end of the day.
olis. In the fall Behrend opened its School of
Business to provide the recent plethora of local
businesses with management material. Erie's future
looked bright and everyone's hopes were up.
Near the end of fall, local residents were sur
prised by unseasonably cold weather and early
snowfall. It was Behrend's lone meteorology pro
fessor that discovered the cause of the problem. The
addition of the large body of water had drastically
altered weather patterns in the region. The lake
drew in cold fronts and threatened to turn the entire
North East into Eastarctica.
McKay came back that spring to fix the problem.
He rounded 'up some dashing, maverick engineers
and they constructed a giant waterfall to drain the
water from the lake into adjacent Lake Ontario.
When completed they named the falls after Niagara
Hall, where McKay had lived.
Residents around Lake Ontario were upset by
Erie's dumping of its unwanted dihydrogen monox
ide into their lake. Taking their revenge, they dug a
crude canal from Lake Huron to Lake Erie, causing
the lake to fill as fast as Niaraga Falls could drain it.
This resulted in the famous Great Lakes War, which
ended when Erie signed a treaty agreeing to shut up
about the weather and deal with it.
Erie turned those lemons into watery, sugar-free
lemonade by building the Peninsula, which attracts
tourists, in the form of hippies, to appreciate its nat
ural variety and ugly marshes, and hillbillies to hunt
its pathetic small game.
Local businesses blamed Behrend for the unfortu
nate situation and moved out of walking distance of
campus to spite the college. This was to punish stu
dents for their first graduate's folly, by cutting them
off from supplies during the now extended winter
months.
By Ben Raymond