FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2000 A day late and a dollar short wjg Ben Kundman began its life as a cynical look at American politics. Unfortunately, I ran out of metaphors and colorful anecdotes at the 400 hundred-word mark. It wasn’ out of lack of material, (I think even a half-wit such as myself could write thousands of words on just ONE of the Presidential candidates) I just started to realize I was too stressed out about school to focus my anger at anything besides my professors (for giving home work like their class is the only one I have) and myself (for putting off all of this homework until the last possible second). At work today I realized that I am not the only one stressed beyond belief. Everyone: Engineers, English majors, Business majors, Frisbee majors, all have tons of work to do. Finals are approach ing, late drop will be over by the time this is printed, and I (hopefully) will know if Em on the five year plan or not. I think what we, overworked, under laid, overcharged, students of Behrend need to do is stop for a moment and think about all the good things in life. In order to help all (both?) of my loyal readers get started on some of the better things in life, I decided to compile a list of a few things that make me happy, and maybe make other people happy too. 1. Puppies - Actually, I think puppies are really annoying, but most people seem to think that they are the cutest things on earth. Puppies make me smile for about two seconds until they start barking and peeing all over the place. 2. Movie Popcorn - Although consum ing a large buttered popcorn at Tinseltown is the fat and caloric equiva lent of munching on a ball of lard for two hours straight and washing it all down with pints of Guiness, there’s something special about munching on some greasy movie popcorn while watching a flick. Plus, you can always pull “the popcorn trick” on unsuspecting dates. 3. Keggers - There’s something to be said about paying $3 for unlimited (albeit cheap) beer and hanging out with your friends till the wee hours of the morning. 4. Finding money - There’s nothing quite like finding money. Almost as exciting as knowing that you’re twenty dollars richer is knowing that someone else is twenty dollars poorer. A side note to “finding money” is being under charged for something. Today at work, I put my fifty cents into the pop machine, pressed “Pepsi,” and out popped my can of pop. After that, the coin return starting spitting nickels at me. I thought I was in Las Vegas! 5. Sunsets - Erie might have lousy weather nine months out of the year, a complete and utter lack of social activi ties, and a ban on full nudity strip joints within city limits, but man, oh, man, do we have some beautiful sunsets. 6. Sleeping Late - Not having to worry about your parents finding out you slept until 4 p.m. the fourth consecutive Saturday in a row makes going away to college worthwhile. 7. Having someone let you ahead of him or her in line at the bathroom at a party when you really have to pee. Self explanatory 8. Pizza - Breakfast, lunch, or dinner, Pizza is the Swiss Army Knife of foods. 9. Watching any movie Kevin Smith directed - An ex-mallrat/agnostic such as myself with more relationship problems than a season’s worth of As the World Turns can find solace in watching Clerks, Mallrats, Dogma, or Chasing Amy any day of the week. 10. A big, cleanly caught frontside flip - (If you have to ask, you couldn’t possibly understand) Everyone has at least one thing they are truly passionate about, whether it’s athletic, intellectual or other. What is important is to find that passion, embrace it, and keep the fire alive. Kundman ’.v column appears every three E'uaT columnist This column Tell us what you think! Send a letter to the Editor! Send all letters to: behrcoll2@aol.com Al Gore’s presidency, on a silver platter I felt rather strange sitting in my political science class this past week, talking about the voting procedures in Florida and all across this country of ours. It sort of felt as if I was in a classroom from the 18 lh century, the way we were discussing paper ballots and punch cards as a way to count votes. We are in an age where technology is booming. Everything is electronic, from shopping carts to pet dogs’ We can talk to friends through a computer, watch television clips through the Internet, and give people heart transplants from the organs of a dead man or woman. For God sakes, we can clone goats! Yet, we can’t accurately tally votes. I’m sure this past week has been a complete roller coaster ride of interest for everyone in the political scene; from not much interest before Election Day, to an election night of being “glued to the tube,” to extreme anger with the Florida situation, to just plain embarrassment for living in a country with 18 lh century techniques of counting votes. Let me give a quick briefing. We have had an Election Day vote. We have counted the votes, recounted the votes and then re recounted the votes in the four most Democratic counties in Florida. But before you even start to think that this is over...let me tell you what will happen next. There will be a lawsuit from whichever party ends up losing the recount of the first recount of the original count of the original election. That losing party will request another count of the four most Republican or Democratic counties in Florida (pending the party) as well as a recount of the overseas Shut up and drive! Last week 1 was almost hit by an idiot on the road. Now, many of you may have a theory on who this “idiot” is. Some men might say that it was a woman (and I’ll admit it, women ARE dumber drivers than men are), And some of you might say that it was someone either a) trying to shave (face, legs or underarms) or b) trying to apply makeup in the car, in either case leaning precariously over the wheel in order to see themselves in the rearview mirror. No, that is not the answer, either. It is the idiot who was talking on their cell phone that almost crashed into me on 1-90 East last week. Yes, that annoying, desperate loser who sits and yaks away on their little compact cordless, oblivious to the cautious drivers that swerve desperately out of the way in order to avoid them. And it just might be you that’s doing the talking. Ok, so maybe you have an ‘emeirgency’ (note: an emergency does not constitute catching up on the day’s gossip) and that ’emergency’ just happens to be, for example, strange sounds coming from the hood of your car. Well, guess what, people? THIS IS WHY CONSTRUCTION WORKERS BUILD THAT SHOULDER ON THE ROAD SO YOU CAN FREAKING PULL OVER! Pull over for the two minutes that it takes to complete your call to whomever you wish, and then proceed to hang up and drive away. And the benefits also come in e special double feature: You have also saved an EDITORIAL isentee ballots that /ere probably —■ counted by machines that only could officially count the ballots that were marked in #2 pencils. The butterfly ballots that confused the old, incompetent voters of Palm Beach will then be recounted, giving the votes that went to Pat Buchanan to Al Gore because, apparently, everyone that accidentally marked their ballots wrong were Gore supporters. But all the ballots in the Republican areas of Florida were counted accurately because Bush supporters must know how to read and follow instructions better. That should tell you a little bit about the Florida voters that are currently deciding the fate of our country. Well, when more lawsuits are filed, the decision will be made by the Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris to have second graders from Georgia assist in the revote of all the counties in Florida that use the unreadable and unbelievably confusing butterfly ballot. Second graders? Exactly.. .the 74 second grade experts on the butterfly ballot who all accurately punched in the hole for their favorite Disney character the way they wanted to. These genius students will supervise as our elderly voters from Palm Beach attempt to make out which hole is for which candidate. tn license; you got to drive whenever you ctM ' 1 * wanted, wherever you wanted. And you kept CgyS* J?pn JjtV a c ' ean record, didn’t get into accidents, et Weindorf eea assistant photn editor Ml innocent life by taking into consideration that you are not able to drive while talking on the phone. Simply put, the human race will never master talking on the phone and driving at the same time. We can’t even evolve into a superspecies that can do two complex things at one time - why? Because humans are easily distracted. Our attention is constantly being diverted - ever try to listen intently to a speaker for more than ten minutes? It’s hard, isn’t it? And that same type of concentration is needed to drive a car safely and alertly. Talking on the phone is a diversion of that concentration. Let’s take something into consideration here. When you were sixteen years old, you learned how to drive a car. It was hard, wasn’t it? (This does not include the idiots who had high school seniors for best buddies and hit the road at fourteen years of age - you do not count.) Anyway, you started out at the bottom of the pile - no license, no experience, no nothing. You were the freshman of drivers. And the years passed by. You got your ht in the der ’web on Snyder Now sure, this is all out deception from a George W. Bush fan. But this is also from a fan of the laws of our land. I believe that laws were not made to be broken. They were made to be enforced and upheld throughout a process. If there are laws going into an election, as unfair as they might be, they must be enforced throughout and until the very end of that election. If laws have been unfair for years before this election, then they could have been fixed by our Vice President himself, before the process even began. The bottom line is that both candidates will do whatever it takes to win this election invention of the cell phone. And you got one because it’s only $3O a month with all the fixings: email, internet access, free nights and weekends, four hundred free minutes per month, voice mail, everything. So now you can talk whenever you want - at home, at the grocery store, at the restaurant, at the movie theaters... oh the places you’ll go with that thing! But as soon as you enter your car, the one thing that took you years to master - driving - will virtually disappear. Because talking on the phone takes away just enough concentration for you to “forget” about that red light, and you run it. Sometimes it’s a fluke - the alert driver sees you, and you don’t get run over. But sometimes there is an accident. And maybe you’ll be the one who gets charged with manslaughter of the three-year old child that was killed on impact. How about getting charged with just more than a misdemeanor? At least those are easier to get wiped off your record than a felony. Say goodbye to your license for thirty days... ninety days... hell, let’s just say goodbye forever to the license you earned when you were sixteen. All because of a cell phone at your ear. ‘The Hot Debate of The Week Round 'em up, count 'em down... Is the manual recount n’t With four mainly Democratic counties in Florida in questionable situations. Vice President A 1 Gore is requesting a recount in those counties. So far, in Volusia County, Gore has received an additional 90 votes and 4 additional votes in Broward County. This brings Governor George W. Bush to a small lead of around 300 votes. In this election, it has bei ints. There/ allow; compi in the A Bush supporter, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, set a deadline for 5 p.m. on Tuesday, November 14, to bring manual recounts to a halt. This could prohibit many Democratic votes from being counted. Another judge said, “the Secretary of State may ignore such late filed returns but may not do so arbitrarily; rather only by the proper exercise of discretion after consideration of all appropriate facts and circumstances.” So, according to this judge, the only way these votes can be thrown out is for ample reasoning behind that decision. In conclu sion, in this race that is “too close to call,” votes should not be dismissed due to computer failures. Every vote counts to choose who the next president will be to represent this great country, and having the wrong man in office due to a lack of manual recount would be a travesty to what we call DEMOCRACY. Every week, two editors from the staff will debate a topic that is hot. Students, faculty and staff are encouraged to email suggestions for the hot topic. Send ideas to behrcoll2 @ aol. com The final story will be this: after the recount and re-recount of the original election, we will count and recount, then hand recount the overseas ballots, then revote in the most Democratic counties in Florida, then count and recount those votes under the supervision of the elderly people of the most Democratic counties of Florida. Yes, the same elderly people that were befuddled by the infamous butterfly ballot will be supervising over this process. If Bush still leads, there will then be a law changed that says that there must be a 20- year span before the son of a former president can be elected to the White House. Who knows...it’s probably not Constitutional or by the law now, but what in this entire process has been anyway? This will ensure A 1 Gore’s presidency, which is what most of the people in the most Democratic parts of Florida wanted anyway. And the headlines can finally read accurately, “A 1 Gore’s Presidency, On a Silver Platter.” Until you found the newest This won't be a lecture on what's Constitutional in our country because everything in our Constitution could be argued one way or another. This is a brief point on fairness and the law. The word “law” in our country has slowly gone from being meaningful to being meaningless. The sad thing is that the people that are elected, 01 soon to be elected, to uphold the laws of this land are theories breaking the laws of this land. Laws were rpade to,encourage fairness in our country. The Jaws passed for elections were made for faimess in elections. Whether the laws were passed over 200 y ears ago or passed two days ago, they aie still law s, which should be held in high regard. They are the rules of our nation. Without rules, there is chaos. int of iy occur otes. Case and point: our 200(1 Election. I’uneh card ballots and butterfly ballots were approved by Republicans and Democrats before the election started. They were approved.. .therefore they should be followed. The plan was to count the votes through unbiased machines that don't lean one way or the other. The votes w ere counted, the results were final. Manual recounts are simply a count done by the hands of biased people. It’s not by the rules and it’s not fair. We might as well give the two candidates half of the ballots and have them determine who wins. We need to follow the rules and select our president based on the rules set forth before this process began. No manual recount 1 It's not “fair or accurate” and w ill never be • finalized Gore supporters want laws to be broken courtrooms turned upside down, and every vote counted no matter the rules. Hush fans want unbiased machines counting the votes, and only the ballots counted by those machines to count toward our results. This point should make us look at our candidates a little closer. Gore campaigned with the implication that he was a supporter of the federal machine —a type of government that tells the people how things will run and who will gel what under different legislation. Bush campaigned with the implication that he trusts the American people. We now have Al Gore trusting the people to count votes, and Bush trusting the machines. These candidates didn’t really need, or even want your respect.. they want your vote and they demand this election. No matter who wins the election, it will he tainted. Ironically, the first ordei of business won’t be education, social security. prescription drugs, the environment or tax cuts/increases. It will be election reform, a topic ignored before this election, but overbearing after it There will have to be an abolishment of the Electoral College and a total revamping of our country’s voting methods. Right now. we have seven different types of voting in different counties of different suites all over the U.S. We need one 2T' century ballot that will accurately count the people’s votes in a CONSTITUTIONAL and DEMOCRATIC way. Our Constitution was w ritten to enhance democracy, not to prevent it. Snyder’s column appears every three weeks Don’t think it can happen? I’ve known people on both sides of the story - those who were hit by careless, cell-phone-toting drivers and those who were the careless, cell-phone toting drivers. It happens all the time, not just in New York or in the big cities. It happens in Erie, too. And people are killed, for pity’s sake! Do you know that when you are talking on the phone, you are putting someone’s life in danger? You’re putting a lot of people’s lives in danger - including your own. Cell phones are yet another invention of humankind that has been hailed as the dawn of the Information Age we are living in right now. But like so many other inventions that have been churned out by us. it has also turned against us, because so many people use it abusively, without consideration of other people on the road. Operating a car takes all of one’s concentration - even though we do it every day, you’d be surprised how fast you can run over a mailbox or hit a curb w hen you’re doing something else. While that can be a humorous experience, remember this: running over a child or hitting another car is So, if you were the idiot on the cell phone that almost ran into me last week on the interstate, shut up and drive. Your immediate gratification of talking to a friend is not worth my life - or yours. Weindorf’s column appears every three weeks.
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