Thursday, February 25, 1993 Behtterid's uncontrollable urge to blow money by Matt Duddy The coilegian was talking to one of my friends die other day about an odd joke that he had bean!. It seems as though he was sitting in the . Gorge eating when he overheard some students talking. They were discussing bow much money it cases just to launch the space shuttle into orbit. MI of a sudden, we of them inoclaimed ..:it's an undisputed law of nature that tornadoes search for trailers to touch loudly something like, "Wowl That costs almost as much as the stair tower!" The other panics involved laughed uncontrollably, and left my friend in a stupor. Upon further investigation, we discovered that the stair tower cost an astounding $1.5 million to construct,. After we heard that, we laughed uncontrollably at the Joke. When I actually thought about that outlandish figure. I began to ponder the reasons as to why we needed such an expensive fixture. At first, I thought perhaps it was merely a necessary structure to PT,Xide easy access to the /tam and apartinents. Then rtsiliThd by Dave Barry Syndicated Coinminist As the more than 34 billion regular readers of this column are well aware, I pride myself on my accuracy. I do not report idle speculation or gossip. Let's say I happen to hear a rumor that Vice President Gore likes to relax by putting live spotted owls through a Salad Shooter. I am not going to just haul off and write a statement like that in the newspaper. I am going to follow the procedure used by top journalism professionals, which is to write: "Vice President Gore REPORTEDLY likes to put live spotted owls through a Salad Shooter." That way you, the reader, will have "just the facts" and can draw your own conclusions about this issue, and decide whether or not it might also involve baby pandas. The point is that I have high journalism standards, and that is why today I am so upset that I am tempted to commit suicide by drinking vending-machine coffee. Because it turns out that some of my recent columns contained FACTUAL ERRORS. Yes. These errors were spotted by vigiliant readers who took time out from their busy schedules to write letters, that a stairway doesn't have to ten that mock As a Matter o f fact, a pair of escalators enclosed under a roof would not only be cheaper, but faster, More importantly, though, is that people might actually use an escalator instead of walking down the hill behind it like they do currently. Second, I thought it was an attempt to make the campus more modern and glorious. I then observed that that couldn't be the case; after all, if the college wanted to have a modern and glorious campus, we wouldn't have trailers all over the place. From what I understand, some,have been around for over ten years. Third, my friend and I considered the possibility that the tower is actually a top-secret nuclear missile silo. We concluded that this is the most logical case, since anything costing that much money must involve the government. Furthermore, we decided that the missile was probably pointing at a rival university, most likely Pitt. Since the university has an affection for malign. perbaPs we should buy more. Maybe we could even attempt to ordain the world's first office trailer court. Since there's a ms-pool forming I am not Rush Limbaugh and so today I want to "set the record straight" on certain matters. 1. MONTANA IS NOT NORTH OF CANADA. Actually, I never said that Montana is DEFINITELY north of Canada. What I said, in a column about a trip to Montana, is that it is "possibly" north of Canada. This resulted in a stern letter from reader Lena Anderson, who states: "You must be one of the uneducated young that never cracked a geography." She sent me TWO maps of the United States, and I am embarrassed to say that they clearly show that Montana is not north of Canada at all. It is north of Iceland. So I owe an apology to Ms. Anderson, as well as to a number of Canadian readers who were greatly angered by another column I wrote recently in which I identified Canada as "a nation located near Buffalo, N.Y." As anybody who has ever cracked a geography will tell you, what I SHOULD have said was, "a moose preserve located near Buffalo, N.Y." Sorry! 2. MILITARY FOOD TASTES GOOD. You may recall the column I wrote after my wife and son and dogs and I conducted a taste test ()pinion beside .cu of them,think they should. have built a stair.tuwer - s_awar,e4matnicult-plant. Even i f Me university didn't like the escalator idea, I'm surprized they hadnl thought of the escarrailer idea. It would look like an ordinary trailer sitting at the bottom of the cliff, but upon entering, it would transform into a trailer tower, and would hoist th Nobody has to point out that rni not a Penn State accountant. l'in just wondering exactly who decides what to do with the nktiey around here. Is it being sPdnt wisely? There's no question that the suites, the stair tower, the new librarY, and the soon to-come >plastics lab art involving the Meal Ready to Eat (MRE), a U.S. Army tactical food concept. Our conclusion was that the MRE was the ideal food for certain military situations, mostly involving captured enemy spies ("Perhaps you would like some of this BEEF STEW?" "No! I'll TALK!"). But you wouldn't want to feed it to anybody on your own side. Apparently this column aroused the dander of Capt. Bryan Dion, who is in charge of Army recruiting in southern Oregon. Dion contacted his local newspaper, the Eugene, Ore., Register-Guard, which conducted a taste test of its own, with a six-person Taste Panel. The panelists consumed a variety of MREs; then, using a 10-point rating scale, they all died No, seriously, the panel gave the MREs a rating of 8.1 on the taste scale. This is clearly a scientific result, because it contains a decimal point. Even more convincing is the fact that the Taste Panel included--get ready-- a SCHOOL-DISTRICT FOOD SERVICE DIRECTOR. If anybody would recognize a delicious shelf-stable food substance, it would be the person responsible for the menu architectural marvels, but do they need to be so glamorous? I often wonder how much our tuition would decrease if Penn State would be more miserly toward luxury items. Por some mason, known only to a goose sitting behind a desk somewhere in the Penn State domain, Sehrend College enjoys spending huge amounts of money on unnecessary things. Don't we all remember the Budget Cuts Scare of fall '92? Wasn't University Park ready to take away our allowance? I heard they even wanted to get rid of the full time people that took care of the plants. Maybe it's just me, but I can't imagine firing people who water plants, and then turning around to build a multi-million dollar plastics lab. We could enjoy a regular stair tower instead of a Trump version. We could be happy with a regular new library that doesn't look like the lost city of Atlantis, We could get by with regular snow plows instead of using the kind found on 1-90. Don't misunderstand me. Hike our university conditions very much. Most of the policies here are logical, and try to protect everyone (except for the bookstore that is). The sidewalks are (almost) always clear, class registration is easy, moat programs are flexible, and the options at a public school (Today's Featured Entree: Tuna Remorse). So I am forced to conclude that I, along with several hundred thousand military personnel, have been mistaken about MREs: They taste wonderful, and if the Army happens to have a few extra tons of these culinary treats stacked up in warehouses, it should delvier them, perhaps via large Air Force bombers, to Oregon, which is just north of Montana. 3. THE LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS DOES NOT ENDORSE BULL SCROTUMS. My annual Holiday Gift Guide for 1992 included, among other gift suggestions, a genuine bull scrotum, which looks sort of like a hairy handbag and is sold by Goode Company Barbecue in Houston, Texas (a nation located near Tulsa, Okla.). The Gift Guide included the following statement: "Don't be fooled by cheap imitations. This is the only bull scrotum endorsed by the League of Women Voters and the Rev. Pat Robertson." This is inaccurate. I have here a letter from reader Howard J. Smith, who writes: "Both my wife and I are proud members of the LWV and resent your using facilit)es are wonderful. When it comes to financing and allotting money. however, I think something must be done. Otherwise, our tuition will soon spiral out of control. Nobody has to point out that I'm not qualified to be a Penn State advisor, either, But logic tells me that since it's an undisputed law of nature that tornadoes search for trailers to ...the [stair] tower is actually a top secret nuclear missile silo...pointing at a rival universit touch down on, perhaps it's a bad spending practice to keep putting so many trailers here. Arid as for that missile sib• behind the suites, it's probably being aimed at my house righ now. And the sick thing is, it's the money I spent to buy boo with that is most likely being used to have it done. Whatever. Mau Duddy is a fourth semester science major. His column appears every other week in The Collegian. its name. Bluntly, I find your remarks to be denigrating, uncalled for and insulting. Furthermore, by tactily associating the LWV with Pat Robertson, you have added guilt-by-association to your offenses." So, for the record: The League of Women voters does NOT endorse bull scrotums or engage in any other activity that would detract from its mission, which is the world wide distribution of Amway products. (Incidentally, I did not receive any letters from the Rev. Robertson on this, so we can safely make the journalistic assumption that he does, in fact, endorse this particular bull scrotum.) In conclusion, let me expa ss my gratitude to the readers wio pointed these errors out, an I invite any other reader who finds an error in my columns to please contact me: David Broder, cio The New York Times, 12345 12345th St., Washing ton, D.C. 12345. Thank you, and your fly is down. Dave Barry is a syndicated columnist from the Miami Herald. Page
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