the paper, volume XXXVIII, issue viii

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Write to us! the paper c/o Office of Student Leadership and Community Development Fordham University Bronx, NY 10458 paper.fordham@gmail.com the paper, Fordham University’s student journal of news, analysis, comment, and review, is a product solely of the students. No part of the publication may be reproduced without written consent of the editors. the paper is produced using Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, and the incredibly hard work of the people to the right. Photos are “borrowed” from Internet sites like: www.google.com, www.imdb.com, www.nambla.org, www.rollingstone. com, www.cnn.com. Sorry mom, subscriptions are not available. Ad rates are unreasonable – don’t ask. Open staff meetings are held Tuesdays at 8PM near our office, McGinley B-57, in The Ramskellar, located in the basement of McGinley.

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the paper is Fordham University’s student journal of news, analysis, comment, and review. Our aim is to give the Fordham community fresh insights on old issues, new thoughts on new issues, and information that other campus publications may not be able to report. We do not claim to be a newspaper of record – facts, figures, and dates. Instead, we focus on the Fordham student perspective, on thoughtful analysis, and on the comprehension of the full scope of events, rather than staggered and straight news coverage. In short, our emphasis is on the obvious and active role of the student writer in his or her work. We also aim to provide Fordham students a less fettered venue for expression, something they may not be able to find at other student publications.

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“Halloween Costumes” Editor-in-Chief Kate “Present Day Lindsay Lohan” Murphy Executive Editor Bobby “Earl Grey” Cardos Assistant Executive Editor Chris “Zombie Ron Jeremy” Sprindis News Editors Alex “Joel Osteen” Orf Max “Sexy Bo Peep” Siegal Arts Editors Joe “Senator Joseph McCarthy” McCarthy Sam “Sexy Killdozer” Wadhams Features & List Editor Alex “Sexy Kim Jong-il” Gibbons Earwax Editor Lenny “Baroque Obama” Raney Chief Copy Editor Rosalind “Bobby Cardos” Foltz Copy Staff Mickie “Sour Patch Kid” Meinhardt Sean “Noted Theologian” Kelly Sean “Balloon Boy” Bandfield Kaitlin “Invisibility Cloak” Campbell Marisa “Sheet with two holes” Carroll Elena “Bono” Lightbourn Contributors Rudyard Crippling, Charles Hailer, Nancy from the caf (again), Sarah Madges, Caroline Egan, not take home midterms, Jonathan Jacoby, wine-flavored vodka, Lindsay Kaufman, Dan Lopreto, Sean A.W. Lemerise, Nicole Marchand, Lauren Spears, Irene Wei, Heineken keg, John O’Neill, taco Friday, Lauren Duca, Keeran Murphy, Nick Murray, Kyle Alexander, Dickabod Crane

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by Kaitlin Campbell STAFF BRONX ADVOCATE “Who’s Armory? OUR Armory!” cried hundreds of passionate Northwest Bronx residents as they marched down University Avenue on Sunday afternoon. Holding signs—“Say no way to poverty pay”—and their fists in the air, the group made way toward the Kingsbridge Armory from St. Nicholas Church on University and Fordham, where community organizations had gathered to demand community-beneficial development of the Armory from local politicians and City Council members.

The Kingsbridge Armory was built in 1917 and is the world’s largest armory—a ninestory red-brick building that covers the entire block from Kingsbridge Road and 195th Street to Reservoir and Jerome Avenues with interior space roughly equivalent to 4 football fields. It was designated a city landmark in 1974, and the state gave the title to the armory and its property to New York City in 1996. Currently, the Armory is occupied by sectors of the National Guard, but now, The Related Companies, the mega-developer that built the Time Warner Center and Union Square, wants to develop a mall within the Armory. This proposal was met with strong protests from community groups, especially the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition and the Kingsbridge Redevelopment Alliance (KARA), who demand that Related Companies sign a Community Benefits agreement before any development begins.

This Sunday the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition invited congressmen, state senators, city council members, and other elected officials to a forum, “Blueprint for the Bronx,” in the St. Nicholas

school gymnasium to hear the jobs for local residents at a livspecific requests of the commu- ing wage of at least $10/hour nity concerning the Armory, im- and prevents the creation of a migration reform, and housing “poverty wage center” of 1,200 part-time, low benefit jobs that foreclosure issues.

Among them, Bronx Bur- the Shops at the Armory mall rough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. would give. It demands that Remade a powerful speech to the lated Companies does not bring packed audience that focused any commercial retail space into solely on the Armory Redevel- the armory that will displace the hundreds of local businesses in opment issue.

“Telling ‘no’ to powerful the area, and it demands that 4 millionaires is not an easy thing.

The Ruben Diaz, Jr. rallies pressure is the community. hard,” said Diaz. A woman amidst the packed crowd yelled, “We got your back!”

“Right,” he continued, “and that’s why I know we are doing the right thing.”

Diaz, who is partnered with the NWBCCC, small schools be constructed on laid out the facts on the issue— the north side of the Armory to that the Armory is worth $25 assuage overcrowding in Bronx million, that the city plans to schools.

Bill Thompson, Democratic sell it to Related Companies for $5 million, and that the mega- candidate for mayor, spoke out developer will get $17 million to the crowd, “Is this a city of in tax breaks, affording Related New Yorkers or a city of the rich?” Backed by uproar from Companies a huge profit.

“I want to do business in the the crowd, he pointed his finger Bronx; I want developments. at City Hall. The Bronx has the But it’s not radical to say to highest poverty rate in the counRelated that if you’re going to try, with 37.8% of families in develop you need to a) consider the Bronx living below the povthe affect on the local business- erty level.

“Mike Bloomberg has taken es and b) give people good jobs, full-time, with benefits!” Diaz care of his developer friends continued, assuring the cheer- and ignored the needs of the ing crowd that he will continue community. If the developers to “say no” to the development are making so much money, we of the Armory until they sign should have jobs!” he continues.

The Related Companies is the Community Benefits agreeone of the top three mega-develment.

The Community Benefits opers in New York City. Chairagreement demands that Re- man & CEO Stephen M. Ross, lated ensures unionized paying owner of the Miami dolphins

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Though Related Companies “wants to see a project that will uplift the community while making money for the developers at the same time,” there have been no intentions of creating any full-time positions. This would “further entrench the poverty cycle in the community,” according to KARA representatives.

Addressing the need for more schools in the Bronx, 17-year-old Miguel Rodriguez and other youth leaders from Sisters and Brothers United spoke out, saying, “We shouldn’t have classes in the hallways and cafeterias.” With a ratio of 35 students to each teacher, schools are overcrowded in the Bronx. The Department of Education has justified this with a 2005 statistic, asserting that they only expected that 1/3 of these children will get to the 12th grade and that they will therefore build enough space for this 36% of students.

High school students from SBU dressed in graduation gowns and formed a line in front of the stage holding signs saying “What about me?” and “I’m not in the 36%,” while their peers at the podium urged members of the audience to sign letters imploring Ernesto Padron of the Muller Local Redevelopment Authority to move the National Guard out of the Armory so that much-needed schools will be built in that space.

After more cheers of, “Sí se

puede!” and, “2,4,6,8, Related must negotiate!” ceased, Pastor Catrina Foster, representing the community, directly addressed City Council Majority Leader Joel Rivera, asking him if he will write to council members to ensure that Related will not be allowed to develop until they sign the Community Benefits agreement. He responded yes, pointing to the crowd, “Because for 30 years it has not been Bloomberg or big developers that have had developing ideas for this Armory, it has been all of you!”

The energy of the room and the strength of the crowd’s cheers that filled the space were then carried onto the streets for the ! mile walk and protest to the Armory.

Fr. Jim Sheehan, a campus minister at Bronx Community College who was sitting in the audience, explained that “any time people aren’t afforded good jobs and schools aren’t developed well, the only institution here is the prison industry—and the Armory is in a way a symbol of that. The prison industry is a step-child of gentrification and unplanned developments—we don’t need another cheap development.”

Sheehan attended the forum along with hundreds of his fellow residents because they “believed in social justice,” and, specifically, “wanted the community’s voice to be heard.”

Fordham students can get involved by contacting anyone in Dr. Jeanine Fletcher’s Service Learning Course focused on KARA (specifically Mike Haskins at mhaskins@fordham. edu). Additional information is available online at ourarmory. org. There will be a City Council hearing on November 12th that will decide whether or not to approve Related Companies plan - the last chance for voices to be heard.

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by Charles Hailer STAFF DEADITOR

Recently, the Obama White House has seemingly “declared war” on FOX News, with staffers ranging from Communications Director Anita Dunn to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and even Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel taking rhetorical pot shots at the media giant. This war went nuclear on October 23rd when FOX correspondent Major Garrett was denied an interview with White House pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. After a terrific little storm erupted, the situation was cleared up and FOX got their interview with the man just like everyone else, but a rotten taste had clearly been left in some peoples’ mouths.

As per usual in the past nine months, much mouth-breathing rage and paranoia has been spent discussing the White House’s so-called “War on FOX News.” Here’s some Real Talk: FOX News is a disgrace to journalism, a poisonous presence in the media landscape and shameless in its lowbrow nature, and I personally condone this “war,” which will prove to be both a smart move politically for Obama and represents the sort of frank openness and honesty promised in Obama’s presidential campaign.

These skirmishes have come at the tail end of a ludicrous summer where FOX News openly peddled baseless conspiracy theories and outright lies while offering itself up as a powerful promoter of the woefully stupid T.E.A. Parties. The inherent bias in FOX News may have always been readily apparent, but at no point in the network’s thirteenyear history has it found itself so openly meddling in politics at the beck and call of the Republican Party.

A number of analysts and thinkers have come out opposing the pushback on ethical terms. Notably, the venerable Helen Thomas has warned the Obama Administration to back off, which is troubling to say the least. Thomas has the experience, fortitude and moral compass to make her word gospel in most cases. Unsurprisingly, on the other side of the coin, Karl Rove (who’s now moonlighting as a FOX News political analyst) has declared the FOX pushback “Nixonian,”

with scores of conservative “thinkers” following suit. Toby Harnden, a columnist for the UK Telegraph, wrote that the sparring is indicative of a presidency stuck in campaign mode, placing importance in rhetoric and media presence rather than

wald helpfully pointed out, vocally criticizing your media opponents is a far cry from the sort of Carnivalesque skullduggery that the Bush White House freely engaged in to keep the dumb press quiet. Calling FOX out for being what it is and doing what it does in press conferences bears little ethical resemblance to Bush’s CIA wiretapping of CBS, ABC, the New York Times and the Washington Post as a pushback from their reports on secret prisons abroad.

Rhetorical barbs have nothing on the When they say “fair and balanced,” sheer barbarism of the Bush they’re referring to White House’s their checkbooks, detaining of Al really.

Jazeera camera man Sami al-Haj taking on pressing issues of for six years, or the detention of state. Others, like The Huffing- the Pulitzer Prize-winning war ton Post’s Jason Linkins, have photographer Bilal Hussein on argued that while they agree bogus charges after his pictures with the substance of the tactic, showed a different reality than they foresee negative political what Bush officials were artfully constructing. fallout from the attacks.

The petty political reality of Given the obvious importance of an autonomous press in the situation is that the decision American democracy, the eye- to lean on FOX hard is a move brow-raising across the board designed to fire up the liberal is superficially understandable. base by whipping the hapless But as Salon’s Glenn Green- boobs on the Right into a con-

spiracy theory-fueled frenzy and letting all the world be once again reminded of their lunacy.

While Glenn Beck (of all people) fired back with irreverent humor, playing up wartime imagery by putting a red telephone on his desk that the White House can call whenever he spouts an inaccuracy; others, like media wash-up Tucker Carlson, are all too willing to play the hyperbole card. Carlson whined about the rest of the media cow towing to the pushback, bizarrely ignoring the overwhelming slew of critics from everywhere in the media spectrum. It’s very obvious that the White House won’t destroy or discredit FOX News—if anything, this gives them another whiney talking point to harp on for the next three years, playing into their newfound conservative-whitefolks-as-victim shtick, and FOX does a wonderful job of discrediting itself on its own. What it does do is cause people like Senator Lamar Alexander (RTenn.) to shout about invisible “enemies lists” in Congress and talking heads/demagogues and conservative bloggers to inevitably continue spouting absurd Holocaust/Stalin/Nixon comparisons, all of which make for entertaining lunacy for the quiet majority of America.

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by Sean Kelly STAFF RENT CONTROL The words “rent control” tend to have somewhat of a nostalgic connotation for New York residents. Many longtime and native inhabitants remember this term as a remnant of a bygone era, when New York’s middle and working class could still live in a variety of neighborhoods and areas throughout the five boroughs for a reasonable price (by New York standards). With the onset of rezoning projects and widespread gentrification in the postGiuliani years and with the arbitrary reassigning of formerly middle-class areas as “hip” or “up-and-coming,” rent control is looking more and more like an artifact from the past, remembered by many but experienced by very few. However, with the help of a recent ruling, the New York Court of Appeals may just be the bureaucratic Jesus that the rent control Lazarus needs to spring forth from the rocks and walk once again.

On Thursday, October 22nd, the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court made a landmark ruling against the Tishman-Speyer partnership regarding their holdings at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, two of the na-

tion’s largest apartment com- taking place at their Manhattan plexes. The partnership, con- properties, all the while selling sisting of Tishman-Speyer units at market rate, decontrolProperties and BlackRock Real ling units and raising rents for Estate, along with the com- long-time residents by up to a plex’s former owner, Metro- thousand dollars per month to politan Life, was found in a 4-2 defer the cost of renovations decision by the court to be liable and to change the demographic for an estimated $200 million in of its tenants. rent overcharges and damages Though the decision was to tenants of 4,352 units in both welcomed by many tenants, who Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.

The rent overcharges in question were, according to the ruling, a direct violation Super-fake photo of New York’s J-51 rendering, just like housing program, the ones Fordham which was created to has around the encourage building construction site renovation and improvement in NYC apartments.

According to the provisions of the J-51 housing program, a landlord may be eligible for over the past few year have seen partial tax exemptions and their rents raised astronomicalabatement benefits provided ly, real estate industry profesthat the landlord or building sionals are lamenting the court’s owner does decontrol the rent ruling as potentially crippling to of or charge market price for the industry as a whole. Landthe apartments being renovated. lords and building owners all The Tishman-Speyer partner- over the New York metropolitan ship had been collecting ben- area fear that the paradigm shift efits and enjoying an estimated (that is, the increased regula$24 million in tax breaks since tion of NYC rents) represented 1992 as a result of the major by the decision would drive renovations and refurbishments many buildings currently under

renovation into bankruptcy and foreclosure, thereby having a retroactive effect on New York real estate for owners and tenants alike.

Many owners and investors have used the J-51 housing program as a means of refurbishing apartments and complexes to meet the rapidly growing demand for luxury housing in New York, and have hiked their tenants’ rents and taken out numerous loans to diffuse the cost of these renovations.

This is especially true for the Tishman-Speyer Partnership, whose financial reserves, kept to pay the gap between rent revenues, have dwindled down to only $24 million within the last several years. If the rent overcharge and damages reparations are paid to tenants according to the court decision, then the partnership is expected to default as early as December of this year.

Though the financial implications of this decision are certainly vast, the social implications cannot be ignored.

This court’s ruling stands as the first major attack on gentrification and unchecked rent rising in New York. Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village stand

as near-perfect examples of the far-reaching ramifications of recent New York gentrification.

Built for returning WWII veterans in the late 1940s (rents at the time ranged from $51 to $90 a month for one and five bedroom units, respectively), these complexes have since been regarded as a vestige of New York’s urban middle class. The complexes have housed everyone from FDNY firefighters to immigrant families and nearly everyone in between. However, since the Tishman-Speyer Partnership took over the properties, these residents have been systematically squeezed out by absurd rent hikes in order to make way for a younger generation with more disposable income and an eye for pretentious aesthetics (many of the recent renovations ape the minimalistic style of failed Williamsburg condominium projects and employ glass walls, white plastic and imitation Keith Harring artwork). Though the ruling against Tishman-Speyer may indeed create financial woes for investors and landlords around the city, it nonetheless represents an institutionalized recognition of the problems inherent in the practice of gentrification, and a possible step toward mitigating its effects on New York’s middle class.

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NY State Senator Convicted (Slightly) on Domestic Abuse Charges

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Chris Brown Reportedly Excited to Have New Cellmate in Hell

by Marisa Carroll STAFF GETS OFF EASY (?)

Funny story: Balloon boy was in his garage the whole time! Not-so-Funny story: Your New York State Senator, Hiram Monserrate, was just convicted on domestic abuse charges for stabbing his girlfriend in the face.

Last December Monserrate’s girlfriend, Karla Giraldo, appeared at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center battered, bleeding, and distraught. She told hospital workers that Monserrate had attacked her in their Queens apartment, slashing her across the face with a piece of broken glass. Twenty stitches criss-crossing around her left eye later, Giraldo left the medical center. As the press has repeatedly pointed out, she seems to have left her story there, too.

As required by New York law, Monserrate was arrested and charged after Giraldo’s appearance at the hospital. Once Giraldo learned of Monserrate’s arrest, reported lead prosecutor Scott Kessler, she changed her story. “I’ve always said this was an accident,” Giraldo said in an interview with the New York Daily News. She reiterated this testimony in court, vehemently supporting Monserrate’s claim

that he clumsily tripped and bedroom door and the victim the not-at-all-suspicious bro- (the only witness) testified in ken glass he was holding ac- favor of the defendant. The jury cidentally tore into her flesh. acquitted Monserrate of the felShe continued to testify as such ony charges, conviction on any despite condemning testimo- of which would have ripped him nies from multiple Long Island from office and rushed him to a Medical Center staffers and a seven-year prison sentence. The surveillance video revealing MonThe face of innocence? serrate dragging Hardly. a clearly injured Giraldo through their apartment building’s lobby.

Giraldo’s testimony was particularly important, as the evidence protecting Monserrate was shaky and Clue-like at best, a prime example being Giraldo’s bloody fingerprint on the bedroom light switch. state senator was found guilty Monserrate’s lawyer Joseph of only the sixth count: a misTacopina argued that the lights demeanor for the violence witwere off prior to the incident nessed in the surveillance tape. and “you don’t commit domes- “She’s injured and bruised, tic abuse in a pitch black room” black and blue marks. There’s (a phrase I nominate as the new skin tearing. There are already “you don’t wear white after la- injuries and a lot of blood,” the judge described, adding “the bor day”).

However weakly the de- state has clearly proven he did fense’s arguments came across, indeed cause injury to Karla the facts remained that the inci- Giraldo without a reasonable dent occurred behind a closed doubt.”

With the court-ordered restraining order between the couple lifted and Monserrate headed back to his senate seat, the outcome of the case is unsettling. It can be hard to grasp why someone so clearly victimized could support the source of twenty stitches, a bruised arm, and the humiliation of a public trial. However, what is proving more unsettling is the gossip-rag quality debate over Giraldo’s decisions. The headlines have been spinning particularly out of control since she expressed her hopes to marry Monserrate in the near future. Giraldo has been labeled an idiot, an embarrassment, and a liar. Most (least) tastefully, Joanna Molloy of the New York Daily News called Giraldo “another member of the Rihanna Denial Club.”

As was true in the case of Rihanna, the villainization of Giraldo is not justified. Giraldo is, like one in four women, a victim of the cycle of domestic abuse. While she claimed being dragged through the lobby

was the first time she had experienced Monserrate’s anger, neighbors reported that they had often heard she and Monserrate fighting. This suggests that if violence hadn’t already broken out, at the very least an unhealthy dynamic had wormed its way into their relationship.

So why would she return to Monserrate or commit herself to marrying him? Because abusers are manipulative assholes. Studies have show that it takes the average woman 4-7 tries to leave her abusive partner, and of those who do leave only about one quarter ever report violence to the police (see: the Onion News Network’s “Domestic Abuse No Longer A Problem, Say Bruised Female Researchers”). With this in mind, consider the terrifying task that faced Giraldo.

Not only would she have to find the incredible internal strength needed to leave her abusive partner, but she would need to do so on a national scale for the Overall Good of Women. I can’t imagine the fear one would have to overcome or the healing one would have to undergo to become such an advocate. I believe Giraldo has the power to one day find that strength— I just hope she doesn’t ask me where to begin looking for it.

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by Sarah Madges STAFF ROBIN HOOD

Despite the 18th century’s dearth of deer in New York State, deer have made a huge comeback over the last 15 years, according to senior conservation ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Eric Sanderson.

During the harsh winters in the Revolutionary era, the lumber industry grew in tandem with the cities, putting deer populations at risk. In the ongoing battle of Bambi versus woodlands, it seems now that the tables have turned. While deer have been sighted in Alley Pond Park in Queens, Inwood Hill Park in Manhattan and wooded areas in both the Bronx and on Staten Island, trees younger than 20 years old have not. Conservationists in the area worry that there will be no forests to speak of in 50 years, as deer quite literally eat up their resources and habitats upstate, leaving voids termed “browselines.” These herds of hinds are marching to the big city by land and by sea—via parkways, greenways, and waterways. And with this infiltration, comes indignation.

Towns, villages, and counties in the region have dispatched bowhunters and sometimes sharpshooters to cull the herds.

Now Westchester County, one

of the largest local jurisdictions, is jumping on the deer death docket, approving the cull in its parkland, towns, and villages.

These areas represent among the most densely populated regions to authorize culling, and therefore prefer the supposedly safer method of bowhunting.

Because a typical arrow’s range reaches no farther than 30 yards (compared to a bullet’s 200 yards) and usually heads downwards, harming innocents (well, innocent nondeer, at least) is less likely.

For three years now the county has been mulling methods over, and it seems they’ve reached their conclusion in a recent invite.

Sixty-five hunters RSVPed to municipal orders that read something like: “You’re Invited! What: A cull!

Where: August county, specifically Muscoot Farm and Lasdon Parks When: Early November until the year’s end. Compensation: As much venison as you want!!” Yep, these hunters aren’t killing does for dough— they will only be paid in endless meat and gloating rights, with

whatever they leave ending up in food banks. Following the WC’s move for hunting with $1,000 fiberglass-or-carbonconstructed bows and aluminum arrows, three Hudson-side suburbs are considering slaughtering strategies as well. Hastingson-Hudson, Dobbs Ferry, and Irvington of the Town of Greenburgh, as well as Rockland across the Hudson, are weigh-

highway rubbernecking, threaten the survival of species like the wood thrush and Kentucky warbler (which need the lowrise forests that deer are eating for nesting), endanger people with Lyme disease, and don’t use an “s” when pluralized (what the hell is up with that?)

On the other hand, while bowhunting might be safer, it is far crueler. An arrow doesn’t kill the deer immediately, File photo from the short-lived causing tremendous “Adopt-a-Deer”program. suffering. Moreover, it’s not as if a humane alternative doesn’t exist. As Dr. Patricia Cohn suggested in Valley Forge of Pennsylvania, porcine zona pellucid (or PZP), an immunocontraceptive, can be successfully used to limit deer populations, as it already is used by the federal ing the pros and cons of con- government on wild mares and trolled gun and bow hunts. As has reduced deer herds at the Naa member of the deer task force tional Institute of Standards and (yes, that exists) of Greenburgh Technology in Maryland and at solemnly commented on the Fire Island National Seashore. deer-lemma, “Nobody wants to Coupled with contraception, eliminate Bambi. We just need eating areas could be fenced off to manage the numbers.” so that deer don’t gobble too On this pro-“management” much ground-level vegetation side, deer ruin suburban land- and saplings, and as Priscilla scaping, splatter-paint SUVs Feral, president of the Darien, with their blood, encourage Connecticut-based Friends of

Animals, perhaps herds don’t need thinning at all. She blames humans’ “reckless overdevelopment” for pushing deer to the suburbs, and humans’ reckless hunting for pushing them to flee to the highways. In lieu of dartgunning birth control pills, she suggests body checks for ticks to prevent Lyme disease and a simple fencing mechanism.

You may write such protests off as biased animal lovers, but members of the Audobon Society actually argue that the real cruelty would be not enforcing a deer cull. Mr. Johansson, the naturalist at the Bedford Audobon Society claimed that with depleted forests come depleted food sources, and the deer are starving. He has found mature adults weighing only 60 pounds, a fate worse than either arrow or bullet. Whatever the method, other officials believe deer culling won’t work at all, arguing that the herd will work to survive, by breeding earlier or giving birth to more deer at a time, ultimately producing more deer than before. This theory, however, hasn’t been extensively proven. What is clear, though, is that with roughly 63 deer per square mile (in contrast to the preferred 10) in some parts of Westchester, for the flora’s sake, the fawns have to go…somewhere.

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by Max Siegal, Sean Patrick Kelly, and Sean Bandfield STAFF LIARS BRONX, NY ~ In response to the ongoing surge in crime and public disturbances in the greater Belmont neighborhood, noted theologian and President of Fordham Univeristy Fr. Joseph M. McShane, S.J.*, announced a new security initiative, the Jesuit Escort with Students (“JEWS”) program. Still in its pilot stages, the JEWS program aims to pair groups of students traipsing about the Tri-bar with an elderly Jesuit from the on-campus geriatric communities, resulting in mutual benefits. “The presence of aged men in collars,” Fr. McShane explained, “will hopefully discourage any perpetrators planning to harass Fordham students. Additionally, our Jesuits will enjoy the company, what with someone to finally tell their stories to besides bored nurse’s aides and stuffed teddy bears.” Fordham Administration did not comment, though, about the potential for the JEWS program to inhibit the instances of co-habitation, as boners are scientifically proven to occur up to 72% less when in the presence of clergymen.

-M.S. WASHINGTON, D.C. ~ In a report released Saturday by the Department of the Interior in conjunction with Biblical scholars from Harvard School of Divinity, officials stated that, after careful examination of scriptural texts, scholars have determined that Willem Dafoe is in fact the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.

Eclipsed throughout history by his four more famous counterparts Conquest, War, Famine, and Death, Dafoe was confirmed to be, in fact, the sparsely described and oft-forgotten Horseman of Minor Inconvenience and Mundane Frustration. “With the release of my latest film, Antichrist, I thought that now would be the most appropriate time to reveal my identity,” said Dafoe to eager reporters in a press conference after the report’s release to the public. Dafoe stated that after a short promotional tour for his latest film, he will return to his ancestral home of the City of Dis (located in Hell’s scenic 5th Circle) to prepare for his next return in 2012.

-S.P.K. BALTIMORE, MD ~ The famous poet Edgar Allen Poe was buried this month for the third time in 160 years. Poe enthusiasts and literary scholars gathered in Baltimore to honor the grim master of the macabre 200 years after his birth, and to compensate for the sorry funeral he received the first time he died.

In 1849, Poe was discovered babbling in drunken incoherence outside of a Baltimore tavern; several days later he exited his mortal shell, returning nevermore. Poe was initially buried in an unremarkable patch of churchyard, but in October of 1875 he was reburied with a more elaborate headstone and full service.

That apparently wasn’t good enough for Amon Tillado, president of the Baltimore Poe Society and organizer of Poe’s third burial.

“The ceremony was a testament to the indelible legacy of one of America’s finest poets,” Tillado stated. “Hundreds of people gathered to pay their final respects—and when I say ‘final,’ I really mean ‘final’ this time. Seriously, I mean it.” Tillado also explained that the ceremony didn’t go quite as planned: “Well, at first it was just going to be a funeral service, but then we just kind of felt like digging him up and burying him again. You know, just one more for old time’s sake.”

Not to be outdone, the estates of authors Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway stated that they would similarly rebury their respective corpses. The body of Virginia Woolf will be unearthed and re-drowned, and Ernest Hemingway’s remains will be recovered and re-shot in the head.

-S.B.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McShane

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by Mickie Meinhardt STAFF BIRDWATCHER Last week, in an unprecedented display of stupidity, the Heene family of Fort Collins, Colorado, proved that Americans really will do almost anything to get on television when they pretended to have “accidentally” launched their 6 year old son in a giant silver weather balloon, leading a two-hour wild media helicopter chase that was eventually found to be a hoax when the empty balloon landed and the country sheriff found the son in a cardboard box in the attic. Yeah, seriously.

The Heene’s family consists of husband Richard, wife Mayumi, and their three sons, Bradford, 10, Ryo, 8, and Falcon, 6. They first appeared on TV on an episode of Wife Swap, described as “a family of storm-chasers who devote their time to scientific experiments that include looking for extraterrestrials and building a research-gathering flying saucer to send in the eye of the storm”.

That may sound cool, but in reality the family has no associations with any sort of scientific research programs; Richard Heene has a high school education and is now a self-employed tile layer and the family is essentially nothing more than a bundle of science nerds who post weather videos on their blog. Seemingly harmless--until you give them their 15 minutes of fame and it inflates their head at such a rapid rate it eventually explodes, spewing lies all over the national news. On October 15, calls were put in to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), local TV station KUSATV (from which they requested a helicopter to film the balloons progress), and then, finally, emergency services, where they expressed concern that their son was in the balloon. Richard Heene described the balloon as a prototype for futuristic mode of transportation where one could fly above cars at low levels; this is laughable not only because it’s an utterly ridiculous concept, but also because the “balloon” was made of plastic sheets covered in aluminum foil and the “basket” that Falcon had supposedly been hiding in was merely thin plywood and cardboard held together with string

checks on Richard and Mayumi revealed they met at a Hollywood acting school; Richard was a failed actor/stand-up comedian, and both the sheriff and Richard’s associates described him as obsessed with self-promotion and television. If that isn’t enough to indicate fraud…

THEY FOUND THE BOY IN THE ATTIC. The Heene family avidly denied it was a hoax, but the overwhelming evidence eventually forced Mayumi to admit that they had lied to authorities and the incident was, in fact, fabricated; the affadavit stated: “The motive for the fabricated story was to make the Heene family more marketable for future media interest.”

Richard had had plans for a documentary science show he dubbed Assholes. The Science Detectives, which entailed storm-chasing and pursuits of extraterrestrial life. He pitched the show to TLC months before, and it was (not surprisingly) rejected. The October incident appeared to be nothing more than a fanatical attempt to garner enough media attention for their own show. The sad thing is, had they not done so they would have gotThe balloon is empty. Turns out ten their wish – the producer this Falcon wasn’t flying - soon of Wife Swap stated that prior after, the boy was found hiding to the “Balloon Boy Incident” in the cardboard box in the fam- there had been a show about the ily’s attic. This inevitably raised Heenes in the works (the type the idea that the entire thing had of show was not mentioned) but been a publicity stunt, and the following the publicity stunt the Larimer County Sheriff’s of- idea was immediately dropped.

Currently the parents are fice began investigating the incident. Suspicions were raised facing numerous charges, ineven more several days later cluding conspiracy to commit a when the family was featured crime, contributing to the delinon Larry King Live and Falcon, quency of a minor, and filing a upon asked why he didn’t come false report with authorities, as out when his name was called, well as a federal investigation turned to his parents and said, from the FAA, not to mention “You guys said we did this for the fact that the commissioned the show”. Owned. The fol- Coast Guard helicopters that lowing day, when the family followed the balloon cost thouwas featured on Good Morning sands of dollars. The Heenes America and the Today show, are pleading not guilty and no Falcon actually vomited during charges have officially been both shows when asked about filed yet, but it’s safe to assume his comment AND when his some form of action will be father was asked about it. Not taken against them. I’m not reat all suspicious. Investigations ally sure what the lesson is here. into the balloon by the Colo- Your 6-year-old will rat you out rado State University physics via projectile vomit? Aluminum staff also revealed that the bal- and tape do not a spaceship loon could not have held the 50 make? Wife Swap is corrupting pound boy – it had a maximum America? Whatever it is, the capacity of 37 lbs, and even with Heenes family can undoubtedly that likely wouldn’t have been we used as an example of what able to take off. Background NOT to do. and duct tape. Yeah, definitely what I’m going to trade my car in for. To also put Heene’s mental state in perspective, he reported that the balloon had a “high voltage timer” which was switched on and “would emit one million volts every five minutes for one minute”. From aluminum foil and tape? False, Richie Heene. False.

So TV stations everywhere follow this balloon for 50 miles, across three counties, before it lands outside of Denver International Airport. Planes were rerouted, the Colorado Coast Guard was called, and surprise!

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by Max Siegal NEWS CO-EDITOR There’s something about the weather when political figures come to Fordham’s campus.

Last year, when Newt Gingrich came to speak, the weather was dark, stormy, ominous. The sky was much the same Thursday the 15th when former Vermont governor and DNC chairman Howard Dean came to speak.

His talk was short. His questionand-answer round was long. His haircut and suit were befitting of a politician.

But first, a personal reflection. I am always taken aback and how these kinds of events bring out everyone’s unsolicited opinions. It’s a bit ugly, to be honest. Political events will always attract the politicallyminded, regardless of alignment, allegiance, or competence for that matter. I’m all for student participation, especially when it brings together groups of students who wouldn’t normally be in the same room together. But here’s the deal, douche bag always sitting behind me who feels the need to comment on the conversation I’m having with my friend: I don’t really give a shit, and in fact, no one really gives a shit, what your politics are - unless they ask. So keep your opinion to yourself and don’t try to shove it down my throat.

Digression over. The impression that I was left from Dean’s talk was that it was a sort of next-generation pep rally, one in which the older generation, slowly acclimating to the fact that a changing of the guard is coming soon, was imparting what advice it could onto the next generation, but in a good

way. Dean, in a grandfatherly way, took us students up on his knee and gave us some wisdom.

We are the world. The children are the future. So on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera. Insert statistics about young kids today and riff on those numbers.

Dean’s most effective rhetorical tool was a contrast between his generation and ours.

His peers were ready to go to throw down in fisticuffs about damn near every political issue, while we, he noted, are much more bipartisan and willing to communicate and compromise.

And if we aren’t willing to see eye-to-eye, we don’t fight, we blog. He touted us for our involvement in the election of Obama, but stressed the importance of continued engagement, phrasing it, “This is your president. Don’t blow it.” I agree with this, because if my time at Fordham has taught me anything, it’s that nothing gets done when students are apathetic.

Dean’s call to arms of sorts was one that stressed the responsibility that we have to participate in the political process, even if it’s just voting in an election or being informed about the ongoings of our government.

Another smart point that Dean brought up was the need to not forget about the outgoing generation, but not in the way I was expecting. I thought that he was going to talk about some duty that we have to take care of our elders, but he instead turned it around, noting that older Americans are much more concerned about us and what they can do to make our future better. Because of this, he urged us to make sure to include the older generation in the decision-

making process, as they see us ing of employer-based healthas what needs to be taken care care, given that everyone in of the most. It’s a really roman- America is losing their jobs. tic vision of America, to be honAll in all, though, Dean kept est, a place where young people talk with the old about growing concerns and new developments in the world that the older generation might not understand and indeed very well might not be around to see, but still care about because they want us to have the very best.

Up through this point, Dean did not address what A young Howard Dean. the College The Love Doctor, Democrats Dr. McDreamy, ostensibly Dr. McSteamy?! brought him Dr. Oh, I’ll shut up now. to campus to speak about: healthcare.

A number of their advertisements pushed on it short. He prefaced his talk the hot button issue du jour and with this point, stating a desire Dean apparently wanted to keep to have more time to answer us all in suspense. However, it questions from the audience. was in his discussion of health- I kept a tally, and eight of the care reform that Dean really eleven questions asked were became animated. He reiter- about healthcare reform, so apated the need for a revision of parently the crowd just couldn’t the system, at the very least, but get enough. However, it was raised his voice and pounded his here that Dean rattled off a list fist at the need for the American of theoretical health expenses public to have choices with their that a college student might healthcare. The one undeniable necessitate, and the first on his fault, he pointed out, is the fail- list was, and I quote verbatim,

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a “yearly pap smear.” Moving along, Dean also answered with good humor a question about his 2004 bid for the presidential nomination, giving the audience a few restrained, but still meaty “byah” shouts.

And that brings me to my broader reflections about the event. First of all, I thought Dean did a much better job toward the end of his talk, when he actually got all fired up, as well as during the Q and A. It would seem in comparison to the Newt, if I may compare political figures that come here to speak, that Dean is the weaker one in terms of scripted speech delivery. But accordingly, Dean seemed much more colloquial, warmer, and eager to connect, brief as it may have been, with the little people. However, I was ashamed at the Fordham community for not reciprocating. A good part of the crowd, only about 400 or so strong, left at the end of Dean’s short talk and did not stay for the question and answers. Chalk that up to it being a Thursday, chalk it up to the weather, chalk it up to the College Dems doing a worse job advertising than the College Republicans, but it was still less than half of the people who showed up to see the Newt. But Newt didn’t say anything about running for president, which is why everyone went to see him. Dean, on the other hand, shouted “byah!” to the crowd, and received an understanding and appreciative applause in return.

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by Rudyard Crippling STAFF HERBOLOGIST America’s Tokin’ Black President made waves in the drug community last week when he announced a new federal policy in our country’s war on drugs. The federal government will cease persecution of people using marijuana for medical purposes by their state’s law.

Currently, 14 states have some medical marijuana law on the books: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Another seven, Connecticut, New York, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Ohio, have some sort of “do not go directly to jail” decriminalization law. Why, here in New York, any amount less than 25 grams will earn you a $100 citation (That’s about what you’d get for jumping a subway turnstile or peeing on the icebox at Castillo). New York marijuana law is especially interesting because there’s no criminal penalty un-

less the pot is in “plain view.”

The police, however, will often intimate to suspects that turning the pot over will make things better, and then arrest them for it being in plain view.

Of all the states with some degree of marijuana medical legalization / decriminalization, California stands at the forefront of our national collective consciousness for a variety of reasons. Cali is our largest state and they have arguably the laxest statewide pot laws of the nation. Up until 2008 in Mendocino County anyone with a medical marijuana card could legally possess up to 25 plants and two pounds of sticky greens with no state penalties.

Furthermore, all over California marijuana dispensaries—basically stores that sell pot to people with medical cards—have opened all over the state. Herein lies the rub: while it is within state laws to grow marijuana as a licensed caregiver or patient, it’s still illegal under federal law to do either of those things, and especially to open a store like Hollyweed and Kush Mart (both real places).

His eyes just scream “mother FUCK you.”

by Sean Kelly STAFF 1st AMMENDMENT With the Obama administration constantly under heavy scrutiny from America’s conservative right, the last things that the fledgling government needs are accusations of flip-flopping (as opponents of John Kerry so lovingly called it) or hypocrisy.

Even the slightest change of stance on an issue could potentially provide hours upon hours of fodder for conservative windbags and talking heads all over the 24-hour news circuit. However, in a recent move regarding legislation to protect journalists, President Obama has pulled a hundred and eighty degree turn egregious enough to send Rush Limbaugh into a laughing fit that sends a geyser of expensive whisky and Oxycontin spewing out of his nose at Sunday dinner with the in-laws.

The legislation in question is the Free Flow of Information

Act of 2007, which was passed in the House of Representatives on October 16th of this year, and was subsequently placed on the Senate calendar two days later.

If passed, this bill would prevent the practice of compelled disclosure, and would provide for a federal Shield Law for journalists and other writers (state Shield Laws already exist in 37 states; however, the issue has not yet been addressed on the national level). Essentially, a Shield Law protects journalists from being subpoenaed to provide testimony as to the sources of information that they obtained during the course of their professional investigative process. Not only does a Shield Law protect the journalists who obtain the information, but also the sources of that information that, for some reason or another, choose to remain anonymous about what they shared with the journalist in question.

“GIT - R - DONE.”

Unfortunately, the legal marijuana industry cross-pollinated with the regular ole’ marijuana industry, which led to an increase in pressure on pot growers as a group. This, combined with the Bush-era war on drugs fronted by chronic public masturbator John Ashcroft, led to a number of federal (read: DEA) raids on (state) legal dispensaries. This was, aside from a flagrant 10th Amendment violation, a real disappointment for all California marijuana users.

President Obama’s call to end such raids was a move widely hailed by marijuana advocates as bringing things like “sensible discussion” and “rational discourse” to America’s confusing relationship with drugs. One person in America is arrested for marijuana-related crimes on an average of every thirty-eight seconds. Half of all drug arrests are for marijuana-1.7 million people were arrested in 2007 and 2008. In New York City, 80% of people arrested for marijuana-related crimes are minorities. Finally, twelve billion dollars is spent each year to prosecute offenders. That’s money that’s not going towards improving inner-city schools or protecting us from threats abroad or curing cancer; it’s being spent to put Tommy Chong

behind bars. The high cost of the “War on Drugs,” combined with the growth of violent Mexican cartels who derive their income from running drugs means that the federal anti-drug budget is stretched further than ever.

Now, with both pot-happy California and the rest of the nation facing skyrocketing deficits, the idea of spending billions of dollars to aggressively and violently deny sick people medicine seems to make little sense. God, John Ashcroft was an asshole.

Obviously, this move has been met with some criticism: right-wing newsmonger Matt Drudge ran the headline (in green) as “High Times,” and featured a photo of Obama surrounded by children. The former spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Policy Bob Weiner (ha!) released a press release saying, “There is a real danger that if marijuana is made essentially a prescription drug, its abuse and usage explosion could parallel other prescription drugs over the last decade, such as OxyContin, which have tripled na-

Naturally, the bill contains provisions for exceptional cases, such as instances in which national security is threatened or when something like a professional or trade secret is revealed. However, according to President Obama, who initially supported the bill ardently during his campaign, these exceptional provisions and contingency clauses are not enough.

Since the bill’s introduction to the Senate calendar, Obama has proposed a number of amendments that would not only weaken the Shield Law significantly, but are also essentially contrary to the purpose of the legislation. Under the original text of the bill, judges would be given discretionary privileges for individual cases in which a journalist is requested to reveal his or her sources on a particular matter--that is, it would be up to the judge of the case to decide whether or not the security issues related to particular information being revealed take precedent over the public’s right to know. With the amendments proposed by the president, judges can be stripped of their discretionary privilege when the federal government decides that a particular source should be revealed, or decides that the case constitutes a matter of national security.

There are several problems with the proposed amendments, which, in addition to eschewing the efficacy of the bill, have also mired the legislation in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Primarily, the criteria for exactly what types of information constitutes a threat to national security would be left entirely up to the government. This would essentially make the process of judiciary discretion useless, since in any case it could be stripped away and the decision overthrown if the federal government sees it fit.

This government privilege holds the possibility for gross distortion and rampant abuse.

Historically, the federal government has used the guise of national security to censor and block information that portrays the U.S. government in an unfavorable light or reveals something embarrassing. A perfect example of this is the famous Pentagon Papers case of 1971.

In this case, journalist Daniel Ellsberg obtained an extensive report on U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, and subsequently leaked these papers to the New York Times.

Upon hearing of the leak, the federal government immediately attempted to censor the publication of all articles written on the subject, claiming that

tionally and quintupled in many locations because of the ease of availability.” And hell, to some extent they’re right. Drugs can fuck people up, and the White House decriminalizing medical marijuana might be a step towards reversing seventy years of demonizing and race baiting as a national drug policy. This may even cause a kid to take a hit of grass. However, a sensible marijuana policy would remove the restriction-free black market that makes marijuana both available to children and makes other drugs available to marijuana users. While a hands-off federal policy regarding medical marijuana is a boon to all civil libertarians, we still have a ways to go to defeat a racially motivated cog in the prisonindustrial complex. It was none other than Harry J. Anslinger, the first drug czar in the United States, who reminded us, “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” A sensible drug policy has been a long time coming, but we may finally be near a sensible time.

!"#$%&'()*'+,' -./'0)1'2"3456"' 74,63$// the reports contained sensitive information that may compromise the security of U.S. troops stationed in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. In reality, the reports were primarily historical in nature, and contained no military intelligence of value to the enemy. Rather, the reports revealed that several presidential administrations had intentionally misled the public about U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, thereby portraying the federal government and military negatively. In the end, however, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the journalists, saying that the actions of the government violated the first amendment.

As the Pentagon Papers case demonstrates, the power for the federal government to decide what can and cannot be revealed is a dangerous privilege when left unchecked. If the amendments proposed by the president are applied to the Free Flow of Information Act, then cases like this may become commonplace.

Without an effective and fair federal Shield Law, future journalists will have little protection as to the confidentiality of their sources, and their work and mission will suffer greatly. Not only would this harm the journalism industry, but it would pose an impediment to creating an informed public.

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by Caroline Egan STAFF BETTY FRIEDAN

Like most Fordham students do, I pass numerous fliers during the day promoting campus events or clubs and ignore them. But this past Tuesday I came across three startling and offensive (not to mention deceptive) advertisements from Fordham’s Respect for Life Club promoting their next meeting. Although I inherently disagree with Respect for Life’s anti-choice views, it is not their mission I have a problem with but rather their tactless advertizing tactics.

The first has a cartoon image reminiscent of the Virgin Mary with a woman crying into a handkerchief above the statement “1/2 of patients that enter an abortion clinic will never make it out.” At first, this statistic struck me as suspect. If such a thing were true wouldn’t this be more well known?

Then I realized— in my pro-choice mind the patient is the woman. But for some pro-lifers, it’s the woman and the fetus. Naturally, if you think that life begins at the moment of conception, half the patients do die. Clearly Respect for Life knows many people will automatically assume the patient is just the woman and thus such a statement is extraordinarily misleading. This angered me, but I reminded myself that I attend a Catholic university where many of my peers adhere to more conservative stances, so I did not let the topic and the outright deceit get to me so much.

This feeling changed as I walked down to the ground level of Jogues where I saw a large yellow poster with colorful bubble letters asking “Who Loves Abortions?” Um… no one?

Why would someone love abortions? What a ridiculous question to pose. The poster offered three possible answers: Women, Babies or Irresponsible Men, all with a little box to check the right answer: irresponsible men.

Without realizing people were around me I blurted out “That is so offensive!” and reread it, wondering how such an offensive statement would

be approved by OSL & CD? This poster is purely offensive to both men and women. First of all, it implies that the choice of having an abortion is in the hands of a man, not the pregnant woman. This is not altogether surprising, as this anti-choice group, like so many others, is headed by a man. And what the hell constitutes an irresponsible man? Is he irresponsible for having sex (probably pre-marital, because obviously the only people who have accidentally impregnated someone are unmarried miscreants)? Is he irresponsible because he did not use protection (we will ignore the

small chance that contraception fails)? It is the responsibility of both the man and the woman to use protection when engaging in sex for pleasure. Both sexes need to be held accountable for the use of contraception, whether that be women using birth control, or choosing not to have sex because neither of you have a condom. It is a woman’s and a man’s responsibility to have safe sex. Does Respect for Life think women are incapable of making sure all their sexual experiences are done safely and with contraception (if the act requires it)? I would hope in this day and age women can be blamed for being irresponsible just as men are. It takes two to have sex and both involved should be expected to act responsibly.

The third sign I saw uses the commandment “Thou Shall Not Kill” (Oh, Catholic guilt!) with a picture of a sonogram.

Now I’m not an OBGYN, but even I know that the fetus pictured in the photo is clearly in

its third trimester. In case Respect for Life forgot to research when abortions are performed, 60.5 % are performed within the first eight weeks of gestation and 88.5 % within the first twelve weeks. The only time an abortion would occur during the stage depicted in the photo would be if the woman’s life was in danger (it would be a forced c-section).

We are in the 21st century and 79% of college students have had or are having sex. So, pre-marital sex can stop being such a taboo, Respect for Life; times are changing and sex is not just for procreation anymore. In addition to the deceptive and offensive nature of Respect for Life’s promotional fliers, I’m flabbergasted by the fact that the Office of Student Life & Community Development would approve such misleading and offensive club fliers. The moment I encounter any of Respect for Life’s fliers or events (especially their spring event where they have flags representing all the dead ‘babies’ out in front of Alpha House), I feel I’m being shamed for my personal views. There is no compassion for or recognition of women’s necessity for the option of safe and legal abortions and no discussion of how the lack of comprehensive sex-education results in the need for abortions. Has Respect for Life asked Fordham to challenge their backward sexual health policies and provide condoms to the student body? That would probably be a more effective way of decreasing the number of unwanted pregnancies on campus.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these fliers is that Respect for Life is looking for people who agree with these signs. It terrifies me to think some one would read the yellow poster saying irresponsible men love abortions and think, “Hey! That’s so true! Irresponsible men are the reason why abortions happen, those helpless women! Those victims of impurity!” and then proceed to take an interest in the club and attend the meetings.

I may not agree with Respect for Life’s mission and I do not agree with many of the opinions on this campus but it seems they are the only club who uses hate speech and deceptiveness to promote their club’s mission.

the paper’s view october 28, 2009 We Want to be Used!

J

ust a few weeks ago, in our first issue of the semester, we at the paper hypothesized that, as the people who bankroll this institution, students hold a lot of power. In this 800-word power trip, we encouraged all students to do something to make a positive change on our campus, starting with the cuts in the Walsh library’s hours. Well, as many of you may have heard, USG has announced that the library will now be open until 2AM. While the 24-hour study section of the library has not been restored, we think this is still a big deal, and here’s why: Individually, we’re all pretty much powerless against any bureaucracy, including Fordham. When we organize, however, we can have immense influence. This extension of the library’s hours proves that if enough of us organize, if enough of us whine and yell and demand change…Fordham listens to us.

United Student Government (USG) and Progressive Students for Justice (PSJ) have spent a lot of time and energy to organize student efforts to get the library’s 24-hour section reopened, and they continue to work toward this end.

We won’t lie; we at the paper were worried the student support for and interest in their campaigns would dwindle as weeks went by, midterms passed, and the 24-hour section remained closed. But we had a good feeling when we participated in PSJ’s study-in last week (10/21/09), in which nearly 150 students showed up to study until they got kicked out at midnight. Hey, maybe the 900+ members of the Facebook group “Reopening the Overnight Section of the Walsh Library” didn’t all feel the need to show up to convey the message that the space is in fact used, but at least we weren’t the only ones who were still pissed about it.

In a statement released on Thursday, October 22, USG President and all-around cool dude John Gordon announced the extension of library hours.

(Damn, right after the paper finished our last non-midterm week midterm.) USG met with Dr. Stephen Freedman, head of the Office of Academic Affairs, the office responsible for the library hour cuts due to budget woes. Gordon explained that the extension of hours, “was made possible by the gener-

ous and considerate support of Fordham College and the College of Business Administration, who will be allocating some of the funding from their discretionary budgets to offset the costs of keeping the library open.” This stuck out to us. In our article covering the closing of the all-night study zone (9/23/09) we explained what administrators had told us: Fordham has many separate budgets, meaning that the money to keep the library open and the money spent on, say, McGinley’s renovations or late night programming, come from different budget pools. While we understood the concept, we found it hard to believe that someone in a position of power couldn’t put his or her foot down and reallocate funds for an important cause, such as keeping the library open. Apparently we were right! Fordham College and CBA generously reallocated some of their budgets to keep the library open later, which is great, but at the same time we wish the reallocated funds could have come from departments less vital to the student body.

We’re sure that PSJ, USG, and many other student organizations (including yours truly) will continue to bitch and moan until the 24-hour section is restored in its full glory. And we encourage all those groups to pressure for a seat at the table when these decisions are made, to seek budget transparency, and to pursue an open dialogue between Fordham students and administrators. However, we think it’s important to acknowledge what a big deal these two extra hours are. They are proof that if we all care about something passionately, Fordham has to care about it too.

Like we mentioned before, the paper loves power trips.

Our newfound confidence in the power of the student body got us thinking…What should be the next issues Fordham students organize around? Contraception at the health center? A free speech space on campus?

Reasonable dormitory sign-in policies? The possibilities are as endless as the change you want to see on campus, so we ask you to write to us (whether it be a letter to the editor or a full-blown article) about what you care about. We want to be a mouthpiece for the student body, so use us.

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A Public Fun Message from GBA

by Jonathan Jacoby, Lindsay Kaufman, Shawn Lemerise, Nicole Marchand, Lauren Spears, Irene Wei STAFF NEUTRAL

How would you feel if Fordham University committed to being carbon neutral by 2020? Think about how proud you would be to be a part of the Fordham community.

We are a group of six Fordham Graduate Business Administration students who chose to undertake a semester-long project of building consensus amongst students, faculty, administrators, and alumni that Fordham University will achieve a zero carbon footprint by 2020. Little did we know this fall when we began our Management Sustainability seminar, “Getting Green Done,” that we were embarking on a journey, a journey to make Fordham an environmental leader.

Since we began the course, we have spent countless hours in class and outside exploring issues related to sustainability, particularly in business: what it means for the environment, how sustainability can be achieved, and the repercussions of continuing down the same path we are currently on as a society.

We have also considered how we as a group can best effect change on a scale that is meaningful both to us personally and to an entity that is larger than ourselves. With the support and encouragement of the two other teams in our class, we concluded that we should focus our energy on building a consensus to support carbon neutrality for Fordham.

As we researched this topic, we studied what other universities are doing as they lead the charge toward carbon neutrality. We compared their efforts to Fordham’s current sustainability efforts. What we have learned is that there is a university Sustainability Committee that has been and continues to exert significant effort to raise awareness within the Fordham community, engages in projects that reduce the university’s carbon footprint, and promotes sustainability in general. This committee was instrumental in having Fordham commit to reducing its carbon footprint by 30 percent by 2017. However, this past year our dear institution had been graded a C- by greenreportcard.org, an organization that aims to promote sustainability in colleges and universities by evaluating the sustainability efforts of institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada. Very recently we were raised to a C+, a grade that is still one of the low scores amongst the participating universities in New York City.

Fordham’s commitment to

reducing its carbon footprint by 30 percent by 2017 is certainly noble, but it is certainly not enough. 30 percent is a number that is easy to achieve; most colleges and universities can do 30 percent without much creativity and only moderate campus enthusiasm. Achieving a zero carbon footprint is hard.

If something is not hard, is it really worth doing at all? We are not suggesting the university abandon its current commitment; only suggesting that the Fordham community should expand upon this commitment and significantly so.

We strongly believe that as a community we must do better.

We also believe that, as a community, we have an opportunity and a duty to make this great institution even greater. We urge Fordham to sign the American College and University President’s Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) with a bold promise to become carbon neutral by 2020. The ACUPCC doctrine represents a pledge by universities to address climate change by eliminating their campuses’ greenhouse gases over time.

To date, 657 colleges and universities have signed the commitment. If you read through the list of institutions that have signed the document (www. presidentsclimatecommitment. org), you’ll notice that many great institutions have pledged to rid their campuses of greenhouse gases. Now is the time for our university to add its name to this list and to go well beyond the level of commitment of other universities. Now is the moment for Fordham to become a global leader in the most important challenge of our life time.

At this point, we hope you are asking yourself what you can do to support the cause and become a part of the consensus. The answer is fairly simple: talk about it. Spread the word. Speak to your friends, colleagues, professors, parents, alumni, and other members of the Fordham community and let them know that you are supportive of the university committing to being carbon neutral by 2020.

Ask those with whom you speak to tell others. Ask them, “how would you feel if Fordham University committed to being carbon neutral by 2020?” It always makes for a great conversation!

If you are a part of the consensus for Fordham University to commit to being carbon neutral by 2020, we also ask that you simply join our Facebook group page, Fordham University Carbon Neutral by 2020.

There you will find links to information that we hope you’ll find interesting, as well as a discussion board. You can also reach us at fucarbonby2020@ gmail.com. We encourage everyone to join us on our journey.

by Mickie Meinhardt STAFF CAVITY We Americans are fantastic at divesting original reasons for celebration from holidays and turning them into commercialized, over-decorated excuses for eating and drinking.

Halloween is no different. As most probably know, October 31st festivities were initially a commemoration of the dead, dubbed “All Hallows Eve.” It was believed that on this day the souls of the departed returned to Earth, and various cultures developed different traditions to welcome these ghosts, including large bonfires with dancing, singing, storytelling, and offerings of food for their deceased ancestors. The varying customs amalgamated when imported to America by our wealth of immigrants. The early pagan rites of old became celebrations of the harvest and of autumn in general, and the flood of Irish and English immigrants in the late 19th century introduced the ideas of costumed celebrations and going door to door asking for money or food. It became a national holiday of community, and at the turn of the century there were movements to remove “frightening” and “grotesque” elements. Thus the modern Halloween was born: more candy, less tradition, and a big focus on entertaining the young. In the 1950s the baby boomers made trick-or-treating what it is today as a cheap way to celebrate community and to quell the vandalism that had become as much a part of the holiday as the other traditions. Parents could prevent “tricks” by bribing their greedy spawn with sugar – welcome, new American consumerism tradition!

Now Americans spend about $6.9 billion a year on Halloween–only behind Christmas in ridiculously excessive celebratory spending.

Though we definitely have our faults, the one thing we Americans do very well is eat, and our penchant for sugar is the biggest on Earth – 96% of Americans have a regular urge for a sweet, and 2 out of 5 admit to having a “sweet tooth”. As of 2002, we consumed 7.1 billion pounds of sugary goodness annually: that’s $22 million worth.

Currently Americans eat about a half a pound of candy (not including baked goods) a week.

Not that this is a bad thing at all. I am the last person to condemn National Eat-Free-Candy Day. It is well known that I have a ludicrously overdeveloped sweet tooth; I’ve shown up at the bar with penny candy watermelons in my purse, used my car’s glove compartment

to store Cherry Ring Pops, and have brought enormous bags of candy to the paper’s print shop. Probably addicted. And while nutritionists the world over would have you think this is a veritable death sentence, 10 years ago the Harvard School of Public Health published a study showing that people who regularly eat candy live longer than those who don’t. Heyyyy, that’s

candies my ancient next-door neighbor used to give me. I beelined to the gummy section for a 5lb bag (actual size) of gummy teeth, my favorite but sadly fairly hard to find confection. I also picked up a couple boxes of candy cigarettes to fool my friends (never smoked a cigg in my life, bitches), and some candy necklaces, you know, to jazz up my Friday night outfit. I re-

My Diabetic Coma Fantasy awesome, I will outlive all of you (provided I don’t first contract diabetes). Plus, my overkill consumption has led to a very extensive knowledge of most types of candy and baked goods and their respective city vendors. So to celebrate our wonderful commercial holiday this Friday, I trekked to the Nirvana of candy stores I had long heard of but never visited – Economy Candy, on Rivington and Essex in the Lower East Side.

New York Magazine described Economy as “a candy variety & abundance that would leave Willy Wonka weeping in his cocoa”. Opened in 1937, it has almost every candy ever made; old-fashioned candy, chocolates, nuts, dried fruits, name-brand candy, and sugar free candy (for when I do actually get diabetes!). I had a mild stroke upon entering; the relatively small store has confections cramming literally every inch of its space. It took me almost a half hour just to browse, and if there weren’t at least 4 other people with equally as wide eyes and slack jaws as me, the salespeople probably would have asked questions. The oldfashioned section regurgitated the best of my childhood with candy buttons, wax fangs, NikL-Nip wax bottles, candy Legos, and those weird strawberry

ally wanted some of their chocolate covered dried fruit – they had mangos, papaya, and pineapple, among others – but it was only available in large quantities and I had to save my money for rare Irish licorice and giant dark chocolate pretzels. They even had their own Asian rice cracker trail mix. They sell almost anything in enormous bulk bags too, making it decidedly more affordable than, say, Dylan’s “Iwill-deplete-your-life-savings” Candy Bar. Though pretty far out of the way, it’s definitely worth the journey. I now have enough supplies to at least make it through next weekend, the amount that would probably last a normal person a month.

Halloween, though stupidly hyped up and massmarketed, is a fantastic holiday.

When else do you have an excuse to dress up as anything you want and eat candy until you puke (although likely you’ll be vomiting Skittle flavored vodka, not the actual confection).

So head to the Bowery for a popcorn ball and Bit O’Honey at Economy and leave some Snickers on the doorstep for dead Grandma this All Hallows Eve. Or embrace your inner pagan and dance with skulls around a bonfire to ancestral chants while drinking ale and roasting pigs. Either/or.

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by Sean Kelly STAFF PAGAN *Disclaimer: This happened.

As I approached the corner of 42nd Street and 47th Avenue, I noticed that there were several sets of park benches, not a single one as I originally expected.

The instructions I had received from the Lodge Master were unequivocally clear: I was to wait on the park benches facing the street near the corner of 42nd and 47th for fifteen minutes, at which time I would be retrieved by and led to the temple for the ritual. Due to the peremptory and cryptically secretive nature of the instructions, I wanted to make absolutely sure I was in the exact right place at the proper time, lest I be denied access to the temple. However, this was my first time in this particular area of Queens, and the rough set of directions that the Lodge Master had emailed to me was the only idea of the area that I had before getting off the 7 train. Unable to decide which set of benches to sit myself down and wait on, I took a gamble and sat down on a bench next to a dreadlocked woman with a nose piercing and a pentagram ring (she stood somewhat out in the relatively quiet residential area near Queens Boulevard), hoping that she too was waiting for the Lodge Master to retrieve her.

Turns out my intuition guided me well this time. After about 20 minutes on the bench and two nervously smoked cigarettes, a tall, stocky bald man with a large goatee emerged from an alley across the street, surveyed the benches and walked over towards where I was sitting.

He addressed the dreadlocked less meandering landed me at woman and myself, introduc- waningmoon.com, the self-deing himself as Frater Oz, Lodge scribed “NYC Pagan Resource Master of the Tahuti Lodge Guide.” I began to peruse the OTO, the local Thelemite tem- member organizations of the ple. He led myself and four site and stumbled upon the Taother guests though the gate to huti Lodge. A quick tour of their the alley from which he had just website revealed that they were come, into the basement side adherents of the pseudo-religion door of an apartment building, of Thelema. Thelema is a faith through a laundry room and invented by British author and into the antechamber: a small noted occultist Aleister Crowbasement apartment decorated ley, and is based on the central with various Egyptian imagery, dictum “Do what thou wilt shall Gnostic Christian symbolism be the whole of the law…Love and even a clock face bear- is the law, law under will.” Theing the image of Baphomet. lema borrows on rituals, imagAt the edge “Me? Well, I really like to vibrate the of the room Middle Pillar, if you know what I mean.” was a set of black velvet curtains, and through the small gap between them I could make out a dimly lit black-walled room, with a checkerboard pattern alter at the front.

It was then that I realized that I was beyond ery and traditions from ancient confused, and slightly terrified religions and mystic traditions to be in a basement apartment such as Kaballah, Gnostic (temple?) with five strangers, Christianity and the Egyptian surrounded by ancient pantheis- pantheon, and follows the traditional Left-Hand Path model tic imagery.

So why exactly did I decide of classical Satanism. Basically, to make this foray into obscure Thelema is the equivalent of ocpaganism in Queens? Well, dear cult chop suey.

After exploring the Lodge’s reader, I have no clue. However, I can tell you how I got there. background and beliefs, I found Due to the exceptionally slow a page called ‘open events’, and nature of my campus job in promptly began to slaver like a the past few weeks, I had been wild hyena coming upon a deexploring some of the more composing zebra carcass. I imdarkened and poorly-preserved mediately looked at the calentrails that the magic internet dar, and saw that on Saturday, has to offer. One particular aim- October 17th, an open ritual

was to take place. Its description read, “Come join Frater Oz as we visualize and vibrate the Middle Pillar together.” I was gloriously bewildered by what this could possibly mean, and contacted the Lodge Master about signing up as a guest. After a brief correspondence with Frater Oz (which yielded the aforementioned bizarre directions), it was confirmed that I would indeed be a guest at the Tahuti Lodge’s Middle Pillar Ritual.

So there I sat, surrounded

by Frater Oz and four other guests in a basement apartment in Queens, about to begin a ritual about which I knew next to nothing. After a brief introduction and explanation of the ritual, Frater Oz took myself and the other guests through the black curtains and into the temple space proper. We were told to each find a corner, and meditate silently to clear our mind for five minutes. Frater Oz then proceeded with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, during which he purified the temple space with incantations, invocations of various deities, incense burning and, finally, making the sign of the pentagram in each of the four cardinal directions.

He then performed a similar purification ritual involving the hexagram, and then instructed us to form a circle in the middle of the temple space. He explained that we were to run down all of the energy spheres that ran down the center of the

body and thus comprised the middle pillar. Led by Frater Oz, who gave a short description of each sphere to help the group visualize them, we meditated silently for several minutes before chanting the Hebrew name three times. We proceeded to do this for all of the spheres from the head (Kether region) all the way down to the feet (Malkuth Chakra), and ended off with a breathing exercise and another five minutes of silent meditation.

While the ritual itself was certainly rather esoteric and bizarre, this was not what struck me most of all about the whole situation. Rather, it was Frater Oz’s steadfast adherence to the gods of antiquity and a seemingly arbitrary amalgamation of ancient pantheons that stuck in my mind. Seeing an impromptu temple space constructed in a basement in Queens, and hearing Frater Oz chant in dead languages while busses backfired on the other side of paper-thin walls created a juxtaposition that, at its core, was more saddening than amusing or bewildering. Though the Tahuti Lodge is a rather unorthodox and confusing institution, the mystique and novelty can only carry it so far. When the confusion and novelty are stripped away, you’re left only with a makeshift alter and some hand painted Satanic imagery adorning the walls of a stuffy basement apartment off Queens Boulevard; something Aleister Crowley probably did not foresee when he composed Thelema’s doctrine and pantheon in rural English castle.

kept sealed in a jar would not produce maggots. If Redi failed, and spontaneous generation was still an acceptable theory, everyone would think that Beer must have been the spawn of beer, he was the perfect embodiment of everything malty and fermented. Anyways, he looked like an idiot and he died in two days.

I failed at beer when I kind of killed Beer by making him live in a wine jug. He was a great and peaceful addition to the apartment, and I was hoping to become more serene with an “I’m going to live my life through you, Beer” attitude towards the fish. R.I.P. Beer.

The second time I failed at beer was in preparing for this article. These past few weeks I slept happily knowing that the local stores were stocked with many types of Oktoberfest beer (I remember trying at least six Oktoberfest beers from different brewers), and I planned on writing this article about the different types that could be purchased in the area. When it

lection is consistently great (their Bigfoot Ale Barleywine is a punch in the face in terms of mix of violent flavors and 9.6% alcohol), it has always been Dogfish Head Brewery that I come to time and time again on the shelf. With a motto like “off-centered ales for off-centered people,” it’s not surprising that they manage to turn even a normal beer into something extreme. Rather than a standard India Pale Ale, they continuously hop their IPAs for the duration of the boil, creating beers that ruin your taste buds in the best way possible.

With higher than average percents of alcohol and some “you will never forget me” flavors, their IPAs make their way into my fridge pretty often, but it has to be their Fall seasonal I’d choose to be my desert island beer, provided the island always had Fall weather. For those who like pumpkin pie, or are just moderately sane, their Punkin Ale will turn Fall from an already spectacularly beauti-

ful season into something heavenly. Punkin Ale is a fairly dark brown ale made with pumpkin (the little extra bit of sugar from the pumpkin gives it a little more alcohol too) and all the spices you’d find in a pumpkin pie.

Take advantage of what the stores have, it might not always be there. To Beer and beer everywhere, I apologize for ever letting you down, or killing you, but at least there’s always something worth drinking lurking on the shelves. Give them all a try.

Mixing Beer and Wine

by Chris Sprindis ASSISTANT EXECUTIVE EDITOR I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’ve failed at beer. Worse, I’ve done it more than once.

The first time I let beer down was when I bought a goldfish, named it Beer, and watched helplessly as it died in its Carlo Rossi wine jug two days later. For some reason I thought keeping a fish named Beer in a wine jug was hilarious, and I’ll admit to still seeing something comedic in it. More comedic than Beer’s name and place of residence, however, was definitely his face. Being a Celestial Goldfish, he had eyes that bulged almost completely out of his head that looked up in two amazingly noticeable directions and he was missing a dorsal fin. Luckily for science, in 1668 Francesco Redi disproved spontaneous generation (the idea that living things can come from inanimate objects) by showing that meat

came time to do my research, however, there was only one type left, the Sam Adams Oktoberfest. Oktoberfest beer, or Märzenbier, is typically a German style lager that is brewed in the Spring to prepare it for the Fall, and it is generally a very balanced beer of prominent malt flavors and present but not too present hops. Despite my failure, I’ll try to run over some of my favorite beers that have popped up recently and seem to be sticking around.

If you’re ever in the mood to turn your hungover poops following that morning breath of fresh fart blacker than Satan’s, give Sierra Nevada’s Porter a shot. Unlike their Stout, which has a more severe coffee undertone, the Porter is much softer, with something reminiscent of chocolate that runs straight from the first smell through the swallow. This is heavy beer, and more for enjoying than getting drunk off of, but anything’s possible.

While Sierra Nevada’s se-

In Memoriam.

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by Alex Gibbons FEATURES AND LIST EDITOR This is the worst hangover ever. There is an electric pain right behind my eyes, and, halfasleep, ripping them from their sockets seems like it would yield satisfaction. Probably not a good idea, says a voice behind my eyes that only intensifies the pain. I succeed in escaping back to sleep and relish one last dream before I roll out of bed.

A familiar specter visits my bed, promising nothing but a few moments of dreamtime perversion, but as my hand slides across the sheets it feels and wraps around the warm body of a female. Thinking my specter has made itself present in my waking life, I pull her close, unable to explain the phenomenon but too groggy to care. Then I notice the fur. And the smell.

My eyes open to see that I am tightly hugging dog ass. I think about it, debate the hygienic problems of hugging dog ass, decide that I’m probably dirtier than her anyways, and resume my butt hugging. This morning, a big heap of dog ass is actually comforting.

The female body that lays writhing in my bed next to me

is, in fact, a dog. She’s a black and white pit-bull terrier and, as far as I’m concerned, still fertile. She was found by the girlfriend of one of my roommates, tied to a tree at the Edgar Allen Poe Park near Kingsbridge. The plan, at least what I thought was the plan, was to take the dog in until we found a suitable owner. Our apartment would have a dog running around it for a little while, a source of constant entertainment, and we’d gain the benefit of having done something charitable: an intoxicating feeling of righteousness. Win-Win. Several months later, because of laxity or laziness or a combination of the two, the dog has established herself as an inhabitant of the apartment. Some efforts were made to find a new owner, but they were never really persued.

I try to reason why the dog is still around, but I know it’s really just because I like her and I enjoy her company. In an apartment dominated by four college age men, filth and detritus scat-

tered about, unknown diseases culturing in the bathroom, she provides a female’s touch.

Sometimes that touch comes in the form of dog shit, carefully placed at the bathroom door, as

require responsible people to look after them, and shit, I’m a filthy disgusting slob who regularly has a mountain of dirty clothing gathering somewhere in my room. But even while negligence threatens her very existence, “dog ass” she’s adorably happy to be around, a smiling, jumping, tailwagging being to greet me at the door when I come home that makes me forget about my failing Spanish grade, about my longing for New England, about the inexorably stressful state of my life.

If I’m sitting down, she climbs into my laps and sits staring at my face with a simpleton’s gaze. Before I met her, I was sure if, while defecating inside, she that pit-bulls were wretched, took into account our ape-man violent, and dangerous animals. traditions. Or maybe a pile of When she first began climbing dirty clothes will be peed on, into my lap like this, at the beor the keyboard of my laptop ginning of our relationship, I plastered with black fur after imagined she was sizing up my she rubs her head on it, trying to gullet, prepared to rip my larlie in my lap. All of these stem ynx from its current residence. from my initial reason of want- Instead, she places her front ing to find a new owner. Dogs legs on my shoulders and rests

her head on mine, an eerily human gesture that implies some emotion or understanding. But I’m reminded constantly of her ability to kill, of her muscular body that was designed to run, tear, and rip. There’s some primordial nerve deep inside of her that makes her bark at foreign voices, or growl at the door when she hears it being jostled by some intruder outside. But when she stares at my face I’m calmed by the knowledge that she sees me as a protector.

But in the same eyes there is contained something that pulls and tugs at my insides. Something that transports me back in time to days when I gazed into a different canine face that I swore never to betray. My Dog. And now I feel guilty. My Dog still warm in the ground, dead two years, and I find myself giving attention to this new bitch, sharing my bed with her, writing foolishly sentimental articles about dogs. I entertain the idea that dogs share something universal, and that with the new girl I can honor my Dog’s existence. But then I remember the jealousy of dogs, and feel guilty again. At least it’s not a cat, I tell myself.

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by John O’Neill STAFF REMEMBER YOUR ROOTS I am a student at Fordham University, and I hail from the city of Milwaukee. I am an oddity here for several reasons, but the one I’d like to touch on is that of my origin. When people meet at Fordham, they generally go through the routine back and forth about what they’re thinking about majoring in, where they live, and eventually where they come from. I’ve received a number of reactions when I announce that I am from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Generally the announcement is meet with some degree of excitement or interest, but this article is for the others of you. For every positive reaction I’ve received to my being from Milwaukee, I’ve heard “oh I’m sorry”, “where’s that?”, “Oh, the city of cheese and beer”, and “Isn’t it cold there?”

I quickly answer in an attempt to dispel any misconceptions, and likely go on to give any person who continues to stand near me a laundry list of why I love my hometown and home state.

But now that I am sober, and have the ability to edit and lay out my argument, here is why I love my hometown of Milwaukee. To address the criticisms; yes, it does get cold; yes, I did go to school at 35th and Wisconsin, across the street from the Miller Brewery; and yes, cheese

is a thing we enjoy eating. To those with a more in-depth knowledge of the city and its issues, yes, we do suffer issues of segregation; yes, the city deals with a severe budget deficit; yes, the city schools are largely inadequate in graduating pupils; yes, over one in five city residents live in poverty; and yes, one in two black men in the city are unemployed. Yes it’s all true, the city has its faults, I admit it, and that’s why I am here at Fordham.

Cities and urban issues have been an interest of mine since the early years of my childhood, evolving from drawing buildings, to taking photos, to actually beginning to grasp the issues of urban development. As I grew older, I began to learn the issues which affected my city as a whole. Though my neighborhood and my existence was rarely exposed to these problems, I grew to learn that the problems of some are the problems of all in a tight knit community like Milwaukee. Doing service work through my high school and going on weekly neighborhood explorations and photography tours with my father helped me begin to understand the vast contrasts which plagued the city. Where better to learn how to fix these ills than at a social justice minded university in the world’s greatest city?

Perhaps you’ve made up

your mind about Milwaukee in these last three paragraphs.

Wow, what a horrible place you must be thinking; well I plead with you to continue on.

I genuinely believe that my efforts are not wasted on a dying rust-belt city, but rather are

delightful church and lakefront summer festivals, community pools, viaducts, and innovative universities and medical centers.

Milwaukee once had a mayor by the name of Daniel Hoan who posed the question, “What Not Fair

logical ones fueled with passion for the rebirth of a magnificent, already thriving, and under appreciated Midwestern city. Milwaukee is a place of beautiful sandy beaches, Frederick Law Olmsted parks filled with century old oak trees, shady bike paths, stately Tudor mansions, a trendy loft district comprised of renovated factories, quirky ethnic restaurants, densely populated ethnic neighborhoods of old frame houses and apartment blocks, tree lined sidewalks,

is a city without its citizens?”

Milwaukee might be nice homes and some cool bridges, but it’s primarily an atmosphere, a community. It’s about Kaycie Bong, the little girl at the daycare I grew to love, it’s about Mr. Cavanaugh, the English teacher who taught me to love reading, it’s about Charlie Wendelberger and the nights out riding bikes together, it’s about James Stoffel and I shutting down the neighborhood pool at dusk after ignoring the pool

for the entirety of our two hour shift, it’s about walking over to get a corned beef sandwich at Benji’s with James Hagner, it’s about cracking open a couple of beers with Sarah, Will, Michael, and Christy out in the parking lot of Miller Park and listening to Bob Uecker announce the Brewer game; it’s about Susan Meier, the neighbor who came over with plate after plate of exquisite pies and cookies just because she‘s a kind woman, it’s about the funerals that everyone on the block comes out to attend when a beloved elderly neighbor passes away, it’s about the sandwiches, spiced rum, and lively conversation which occur after the burial, it’s about playing Spyro in a basement with my second grade cousin Erin after a night summer night barb-que, it‘s about sports crazed dads who take a son totally disinterested in sports out to take photos while the Badgers play Ohio State, it‘s about moms with just one child who let their sons go away and adventure the world despite their immense fears. That is Milwaukee, that is my home. To all of you reading this, you have a home, be it Milwaukee, Cleveland, Miami, or San Diego. So from now on, when someone asks you where you’re from, remember the stories, the people, and speak up with pride and passion and tell them about the place that made you.

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by Lenny Raney FEARWAX EDITOR In a classic Realer than Fact revelation, Kirk Cameron, the actor best known as Mike Seaver on 80’s sitcom Growing Pains, is still around and apparently completely insane.

He, along with some Australian douche named Ray Comfort, are the hosts of a television series called Way of the Master and co-founders of an evangelical fundamentalist organization called Ministry of Living Waters. You may have seen snippets of the series on the internet, the most popular of which involves Comfort explaining to Cameron that the existence of the banana disproves evolution.

Wait, I’ll give you a second to let that set in. Okay, ready for the explanation? Well, Comfort says that the way the banana perfectly fits a human hand and peels so readily is compelling evidence for intelligent design.

He fails to mention that many wild bananas are round, littered with seeds, and particularly foul tasting and more importantly, that the curved yellow bananas we all consume and enjoy are the product of several thousands of years of cultivation and forced evolution. Yes, that’s right: evolution is exactly the reason why bananas are so awesome. As offensively ridiculous as this is, it gets even worse.

In “honor” of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Ministry of Living Waters is currently in the process of publishing and handing out upwards of 200,000 copies of the seminal work, but with a twist. It will feature a 50 page introduction by Comfort that, amongst other things, states Darwinian evolution is a purely a theory on macroevolution (it’s not), cites that one Einstein quote where he speaks positively about the existence of God (despite the many in which he doesn’t), and relates Darwin’s theory to Hitler and the Holocaust (really?).

I don’t want to turn this into a tirade about fundamentalism or evangelism just as much as I don’t want to turn this into a militaristic antitheistic diatribe.

I’d much rather focus on the consummate hilarity of seeing grownup Mike Seaver anywhere, let alone as a hardcore insane Christian preacher. I’d

highly suggest Googling him.

He looks exactly like he did when he was 17 but now has a slowly receding hairline and the most eerie of pedosmiles. In celebration of this monumentally hilarious turn of events, the rest of this article will consist of a short fanfic about how Mike Seaver found Jesus: Ben walks into Mike’s room with a baseball and glove under his arm and a large glass of milk in his left hand. “Mike, come play baseball with me!” Ben says, jumping on Mike’s bed, disrupting him from doing what is seemingly homework and spilling a little bit of milk on the page he was working on.

“BEN! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU DWEEB? You just ruined my letter! I am going to KILL YOU!” Mike shouts.

Ben, having dropped the glove and ball, runs out of the room and down the stairs yelling “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to mess up your homework!”

“Or else what? I’m friends with Julie Lautner who’s friends with Charlie Brauning who’s friends with Adam Grady’s sister Cara who’s best friends with Allie Samuels who says that you have a crush on her. She says she catches you staring at her in English class all the time and knows you were the one who left that love note in her locker two weeks ago. Next time you write an anonymous love note, try to do it in somebody else’s handwriting or at the least not write in your own when you tag your name on the basketballs in gym,” explains Carol. The audience laughs harder.

“Mike has a girlfriend! Mike has a girlfriend!” Ben says, mocking Mike. Then, a mischievous look appears on his face and he sneaks away mysteriously, heading for Mike’s bedroom.

Redfaced, Mike replies, “Whatever, Carol, I don’t have a girlfriend and I don’t have a crush on Allie and “I AM A BANANA! Samuels!” he stomps off, I PROVE THAT GOD IS REAL!” clearly upset. End scene.

The next day at school, Allie Samuels and several of her friends are standing in a tight circle around something of interest laughing hysterically. “Allie, I love you so much that sometimes I just don’t know what to do with myself!” she reads desperately trying to hold back her laughing. Her friends laugh even harder. “Hey, what is this white stain here?” she asks, noticing the milk Ben spilled on the page.

Mike darts down the stairs after him.

“It’s not homework, Ben…” says Carol mysteriously, who is sitting on the couch watching television while the chase is occuring. Ben and Mike stop dead in their tracks.

“What are you talking about?” they inquire in unison.

“Well…” begins Carol, “I heard through the grapevine that Mikey has a little crush at school.” The audience coos.

Mike immediately retorts, “SHUT IT CAROL. You don’t know anything!”

“Tell me! Tell me!” interjects Ben. The audience laughs.

“DON’T TELL HIM OR ELSE.” responds Mike.

“Well, I guess he does know what do with himself when he thinks about you, Al,” Cara Grady smarmily replies.

“OH MY GOD, EW!” shrieks Allie as she drops the page and runs towards the bathroom, knocking over who else but a clearly flustered and literally floored Mike Seaver. Awkward silence ensues as a look of pure loathing blankets Allie’s face. She steps right over Mike, hands him his letter, opens the door to the bathroom, and in the most cold and calloused tone possible, says “Michael Seaver, you need Jesus.”

Mike, I don’t think this is what Allie meant.

by Lauren Duca STAFF LIKES THIS For the internet predator, we have this prototypical image of a pale middle-aged white man with a comb over and motheaten sweater wearing oversized glasses, staring hungrily at a computer screen. Our generation is becoming that ChrisHansen-hunted man; we’re all fucking creepy. Advancements in technology and new forms of communication have changed the way we interact with and stalk each other. Facebook has presented us with an array of questions that sociology will take years to answer. It is easy to friend someone; to look at their 642 pictures; to find out their birthday, siblings’ names, hometown, political views, religious views, interests, favorite movies, and favorite books, but what is not easy is the face time that comes after Facebook activity.

You just sent Matt from your Spanish class a friend request.

You think he’s kind of cute. He has a goatee, and he wears a lot of flannel, and the other day you saw that he was listening to that song you love by Belle & Sebastian; he’s edgy but sensitive, and that’s sexy. There’s a lot of other guys that look like him on campus, actually when you were jogging without contacts on Thursday, you ran faster cause you thought you were about to pass him (but didn’t) like seven times. Anyways, you’re mutual friends with someone on Facebook, and after just two minutes of hesitation, you hit submit and send him an invitation to be your 875th friend. He accepts, you get notified, and the creeping begins.

You start clicking through his pictures, and SHIT, you really lost track of time, because he’s wearing a Christmas sweater in the last one he was tagged in, how many months did you just click through? Oh, well, you’ll get back to studying, right after you update your music info. You liked The Moldy Peaches before you knew he did, just forgot to add them in there.

It’s 8:29 on Tuesday, you have an 8:30 and you’re only halfway to Dealy. Goddamnit, you can be such a dilly-dallier sometimes. You duck into class, kick past a hideous and cumbersome Vera Bradley bag, and slip into a seat. You catch a bit of facial hair in your peripheral vision. Could it be? It is. You are within a foot of the only subject you studied last night, of the face you watched smirking in photo booth sessions,

grinning at grandma’s birthday party, concentrating in game after game of beer pong. You are sitting next to Matt. He notices you looking his way, turns in your direction, and engages you in full eye contact. You don’t react. Showing no recognition, you start looking through your bag for a pen. Crap. You have now reached stalker status.

You have literally looked at pictures of this kid in his house, in his dorm, in his boxers, at Tinkers, at Mugz’s, at his little sister’s piano recital, on his best friend’s boat, on vacation, and on something he snorted in the same album, and you are not going to even acknowledge him.

It’s ridiculous, it’s absurd, it’s awkward, and we all do it, basically on a daily basis.

Half a decade ago, if someone said, “So, I was looking at some photos of her from two summers back. She went to this barbeque at his aunt’s house, and anyways, I don’t think she’s always been a vegan.”

You probably would have run to alert the poor actually-animaleating girl that she was being preyed upon. Now, you’re looking at those same pictures and sometimes even clicking away to her aunt’s profile.

There are a million uncomfortable moments we encounter in the day-to-day. You are guaranteed a certain allotment of awkward. You will have to make small talk with your teacher, because you happened to be walking past the library at the same time. Your drunken hook-up is going to be on campus probably 93% of the days you are. And there’s no real way to get out of saying hi to the girl who lives next door more than once in the morning, especially if you both end up going back to the bathroom to brush your teeth after showering. But it is easy to dodge the disgusting feeling of ignoring someone that you know all too well from the internet, because you have yet to meet them in the real world.

So, stop. Deal with the awkward you have to, and avoid the awkward you don’t. When you’re on your laptop, write your essay, take your obligatory Under The Influence alcohol tutorial, pirate some music, harvest your fucking avocados on Farmville, do just about anything but spend your time as a internet predator.

I would not “like” our generation’s stalker status.

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“When I Looked at His Eyes I Saw Three Letters: KBO”

by Keeran Murphy STAFF DEADITOR With their victory in game six, the SK Wyverns have forced the Kia Tigers to play game seven for the KBO Championship.

I am talking, of course, about Korean baseball and the Korean Baseball Organization, a subject both fascinating and pertinent.

To start, notice that the two team names mentioned above bear no reference to their respective locations. (If you are wondering, the SK Wyverns are located in Incheon and the Kia Tigers are based in Gwangju. Another interesting tidbit: Out of the KBO’s eight teams, three are located in Seoul. Put another way, 37.5% of the country’s teams are located in one city.) Instead of bearing the name of the city in which they are located, KBO teams are identified by the companies that own them. The American reader will be familiar with Kia; SK is the third-largest conglomerate in South Korea, composed of 92 subsidiary and affiliate companies. Sure, the Cincinnati Reds play in Great American Ballpark, but they’re still the Cincinnati Reds. Also, notice that the team names are all written in English. There is a lot going on here, even just in the names of the teams.

Busan, Korea’s second largest city, is home to the Lotte Giants. And before they were knocked out of this season’s playoffs, I attended a home game against the Woori Heroes (formerly the, get this, Hyundai Unicorns). The ballpark fare is worth mentioning, as it was the first thing I experienced at the game. Going in, I didn’t know what to expect in terms of grub; I only assumed, correctly, that hot dogs and Cracker Jack would be conspicuously absent.

First I bought a bag of some little doughnuttish things molded to look like mini corns-on-thecob. Said snack is produced by a greasy machine that squirts a set amount of something best described as “goo” into little metal corn molds on a sort of assembly line. The goo hardens in the molds as they circle towards the end of the line, where they are ejected into a heat lamp-warmed tray and wait to be stuffed into a paper bag and served to the customer. The outside of the

snack is cakey, but the inside is stuffed with a viscous filling that’s much like the cream of a custard doughnut, except the cream is more glutinous and less sweet. What’s most unsettling about these snacks is that I think the inside is actually just the goo that didn’t finish cooking. They were probably one of the unhealthiest things I’ve ever consumed. And they

“whoooooooaaaa”s like it’s a near-home-run.

There were certain similarities between the Korean and the American baseball stadium experience. Just like in America, there was a “Kiss Cam.” Also, a man proposed to his girlfriend; she said yes ; ). But there was plenty that was different. The Lotte Giants do not have batboys; they have batgirls. They

weren’t good, per se, but I still ate a gross number of them.

After the game had started and the sight of the soggy machinemade snacks was starting to make me queasy, I bought some squid from a vendor—head and tentacles both. Not much to say about this, except I think they were fried in butter and were delicious.

The stadium was packed to full capacity and the crowd was wonderfully raucous. Interestingly, one of the crowd’s favorite players was the Mexican Karim Garcia, the only player with facial hair, whose name under a Korean tongue becomes something like “Gah(l/r)eu-see-uh.” For all you sports fans out there, this is the same Karim Garcia who played for various MLB teams (including the New York Mets and the New York Yankees) until 2004.

And according to his Wikipedia page, in 2004, he and teammate Shane Spencer “were involved in a parking lot encounter with a pizza deliverman, but no charges were filed.” This makes sense, as he’s a stocky galoot with a significantly substandard batting average. But when he makes contact the ball soars; he’s your run-of-the-mill slugger, a Gashouse Gorillas (see: Looney Tunes, “Baseball Bugs,” 1946). My impression, though, is that such players are few and far between in Korean baseball, and so the crowd loves it. Even when Garcia hits a pop fly that is clearly going to land gently in the glove of the centerfielder, the crowd stands up and

wear white skirts, orange tank tops, pink baseball caps, and pigtails. Make of this what you will. And there is no seventh-inning stretch, but there is a sixth.

The cheering is definitely the most exciting part of the game. They whole crowd is electric, and they have a different cheer or song for every single player, usually incanted when that player comes to bat. One fun Giants idiosyncrasy is that fans bring newspaper sto the game and ,through a system of tearing and twisting, make their own pompoms.

In the eighth inning, I was puzzled as to why stadium personnel were walking around tossing bright orange plastic bags into the crowd. At first I thought it was a sort of “pick up your own trash” policy, but the crowd seemed too eager. The bags are in fact for everyone to make ridiculous looking hats. They are tied so that they’re full of air, and the two loop handles are wrapped around the ears, with the bright orange plastic sac of air on top of the head. Gazing out upon

the capacity crowd, it looked like a swarm of bright orange jellyfish has descended upon the stadium.

Also, there are cheerleaders.

They are on a stage set up in the right field seats, and the majority of the time they do cutesy coordinated dance numbers.

They are dressed similarly to the batgirls: white skirts and orange tops, but for some reason in the eighth inning they change into super short jean shorts and tee shirts that say “DIVA.” The reason for this metamorphosis is unclear. I can’t remember if it coincided with the distribution of the plastic bags. The cheerleaders alternate on stage with a more literal “cheer-leader”— a man in a Giants uniform and white gloves (and in the first inning he had some kind of white cape or flowy outergarment, making him look very much like a relatively lame superhero, but the cape/flowy outergarment was jettisoned after the first inning), capering and gamboling across the stage, gesticulating in sharp, precise motions, looking like he’s trying to give semaphore code sans-flags or trying to direct an airplane on a tarmac. He’s always either shouting cheers into a microphone or blowing sharply into a whistle. He’s darn good at his job, and he really gets the crowd going. Through the entire game there’s not a quiet moment, and

the cheering almost never stops.

Returning to team names, the Giants are the “Lotte” Giants, not the Busan Giants. Lotte is a megalithic Asian conglomerate that, according to its Wikipedia page, “consists of over 60 business units. . .engaged in such diverse industries as candy manu-

facturing, beverages, hotels, fast food, retail, financial services, heavy chemicals, electronics, IT, construction, publishing, and entertainment.” Many of the Giants cheers consist of only the word “Lotte,” chanted repeatedly. I don’t know if there is really a true equivalent to Lotte in America, but imagine a crowd at a baseball stadium cheering for their team by chanting “GE! GE! Gooooooo GE!” It would be something like that.

Even more bizarre to imagine are the cheers that must come at Woori Heroes home games, when you consider that Woori is the nationalized Tobacco company. But despite this unabashedly postmodern integration of corporate ownership and team (Lotte Department Store is even spray-painted on the field, in Korean), I’ve never seen a more energetic and supportive crowd.

Here, advertising, the machine which makes sport on such a massive spectatorial level possible, is not just posted on a jersey, as is the case in English Premier League soccer; the at-home viewer is not just reminded that today’s presentation is “brought to you by…” In the KBO, advertising is truly in a Frederic Jamesonianly postmodern sense “incorporated into the very substance” of the sport. And not only is the viewer or crowd beaten over the head with this advertising, but when the stadium crowd chants for its team, it is the crowd that wields the beating stick. But for KBO fans, this seems not to matter. There is something academically scary about this; it seems like brainwashing—the unwitting manipulation of the individual and subjugation to the corporate machine, the assimilation of man-as-cog into that machine under the convenient ruse of “sport.” But I’m not sure how much it really matters in praxis when weighed against the simple joy and enthusiasm of the fans. For them, it seems, that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and that which we call a business conglomerate might as well be a baseball team.

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by Sean Bandfield STAFF HARDCOREBEQUE Dahvie Vanity is a shadow character and an all right guy. Dressed in black lace and spiked platform boots, with red-flare hair, he could only front the techno-scream project known as Blood On The Dance Floor. His band scorches earth with brokenCYDE on the Crunk Kids Tour, which cuts and burns across our nation as these words are put to paper. I recently sat him down to talk about the crucial things: vanity, virtue, Crunkcore, cookies.

Let’s talk about your birth certificate. If we were to look at that document, what would the name be on it?

Dahvie Vanity: Well, my real name is Jesús David Torres.

And what year?

1984. I’m twenty-five.

So why the name Dahvie Vanity?

Well, “Dahvie” is “David” in Spanish - “David” is my middle name…“Vanity” kind of came through my obsession with mirrors. Everywhere I’d go, I’d always look at my own reflection.

I’d like you to talk about your image and where vanity fits into that.

Other people express their art form through music or literature or things like that. I express my art form through visual, you know…I’m really huge into Visual Kei and Harajuku and Gothic Lolita and things like that, so that’s where a lot of my image came from. I’m obsessed with Japanese magazines and the 80’s and things like that… and vampires.

When I see someone who has a very stark image or is very stand-out, part of me has to wonder – is it all about attention?

No, it’s about the music.

I’ve always been like this. I’ve always been obsessed with Edward Scissorhands and things like that. I kind of became my obsession with things like that.

“Crunkcore” is a young term – groups have started to combine the throat shredding vocals of screamo with the electronic beats and subject matter of crunk. brokenCYDE is the notorious archetype of this embryonic pattern. While Blood On The Dance Floor isn’t as overtly crunked as some other groups, the strong parallels between them and others in the movement allows the band to be included alongside the category.

Would you identify [Crunkcore] as a movement or a scene?

It’s a movement, because there’s a bunch of people, it’s not just a trend.

People really live their lives like this.

What’s the lifestyle?

The Crunk movement is more like, “We just want to party and have a good time” and things like that. But I don’t like to put myself in a trend or a category. I’m super universal.

How do you think you fit into this?

Well, of course we’ve got the techno dance beats going on, but I do a little bit of hip-hop. We’re kind of like the random Goth kids of this tour - but we’re not Goth.

Opponents of Crunkcore have been notably vocal about their disdain. Buddy Nielson, frontman of the popular and scene respected posthardcore band Senses Fail, took time out of his shows to lambast brokenCYDE, who, without Buddy’s consent, were put on tour with his band. I ask Dahvie about the backlash.

I think people just need to grow up and be mature about it.

They’re making it worse…I sing in one of my songs, “Haters make you famous.” Whether it’s good publicity or bad publicity…it’s advertising. Let them hate.

Well why do you think they’re hating in the first

place?

It could be jealousy. Seeing a band that’s getting that successful so fast…

What about Buddy from Senses Fail? Would you say that he’s jealous?

I think there’s a lot of unnecessary hate. I’m not here to bash Senses Fail…I like those guys…but it’s like…let’s just all get along.

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One of the common complaints about Crunkcore is the superficiality of its lyrics. Dahvie explains that his message to listeners is, “Live it up, love it up…just party on.” I ask him if such a message is virtuous.

Just be safe.

You’ve got to be smart.

The one song you didn’t perform tonight was “Bitches Get Stitches.”

Lyrically, you say, “Stop the hate, congratulate,” and, “You can talk your shit, you’re only making me famous.” Who are you talking to?

I’m talking to all the haters.

That song is to make people feel good about themselves… to let everyone know that, if someone is going to hate you, fuck ‘em.

If someone makes you famous by talking hate about you, is that a good kind of fame? Is that the kind of fame that you want?

I don’t necessarily want fame, it kind of just happens…

But it’s the old saying - every publicity is good publicity.

Couldn’t I say the same thing about Hitler? Hitler’s really famous. He’s really famous for being really bad.

But I think most of my fame is not from me being bad. I didn’t kill six million Jews.

That’s true. And forgive the allusion.

I think I saved a thousand kids. I think I made a thousand

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kids feel good about themselves.

When you’re writing a song and when you release something, are you making an effort to give the fans what they want?

Yeah. I really try to push my music to where I don’t completely change, but I’m giving what the fans want.

What the fans want – is that what’s best for them?

When you were a kid and you wanted to eat cookies for dinner, and your parents wouldn’t let you…if your parents, you know, were there to do what you wanted and to give you what you were looking for, then you would’ve eaten cookies for dinner.

But then cookies would get old! It would be the same old damn cookies!

But the principle is… is what the fans want what’s best for them?

Totally.

Really?

The thing is, I’m always evolving…I think every Blood On The Dance Floor record has progressively changed and even gotten better. So, you know, we are going to change. But, like, we’re not going to change to where they can’t recognize us.

Where do you see this scene going?

I think it is going to get bigger. It is going to change…It’s still new, it’s still young, and it’s still developing, so I think it still has a longevity… You don’t want to just be a trend. What you want to do is you want to become a timeless act…You want to be remembered.

Do you think you’re going to be remembered?

Of course. Absolutely.

Whether the fetal entity that is Crunkcore will become a legendary revolution or a forgotten accident is long from determined. It combines the most grating elements of Screamo with the most abject traits of Crunk, birthing a devil child that is therefore twice as base as either - for it to survive its criticism would be a feat alone.

However, despite the current gauntlet, these bands are selling tickets. But unless they want to join Disco in its shamed crypt, the Crunk Kids will have to hone their sound and deepen their message. As it is, their grave has already been marked, and whether they know it or not, they’re the fastest ones digging.

To hear the full interview, check out fupaper.wordpress.com

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by Nick Murray STAFF ‘MERKIN

Halloween around these parts can be dangerous. the paper is no feardozer, no--we’d love to personally install a kitten shower (that’s a shower head that pelts kittens) in each of your residences so that you could hide from the cold, unmerciful realities of the outdoors. But goshdarnit, Fordham, there comes a time when kitten showers just don’t do justice to the Truth. Because there are so few kitten showers in the world. I’ve gone off on a tangent about kitten showers, but what I’m really trying to say is that … when a kitten is flying towards your naked unwashed trunk, you don’t have time to think about things like, “hmm, I wonder whether gang initiation week is a hoax…”

I’m not sure if it is. But you might as well play it safe.

Here are some ideas on how to

Still Have Fun Even Without Getting Stabbed This Halloween…

542 West 27th Street New York NY, 10001 Blood Manor can make your Texas Chainsaw Massacre dreams come true without leaving the Empire State. Located at W 27th and 10th Ave, the haunted house is chock-a-block with hanging corpses, escaped mental patients, and zombie strippers eager to chase you down the weaving black halls. While the sights and sounds may cause you to scream, cry, and pee your pants (we won’t tell anyone), you definitely won’t get stabbed at Blood Manor because, as was so helpfully described by “ftwizz” on Yahoo Answers, “people could get majorly injured and that would lead to lawsuits.” Tickets are 25$ at bloodmanor. com.

7% chance of getting stabbed 6th Avenue South of Spring Street & above Canal Interested in witnessing tens of thousands of people parade down Sixth Ave in crazy costumes or would you yourself like to parade down Sixth Ave in a crazy costume? Then head to the 36th Annual Village Halloween Parade this Saturday evening.

In addition to the costumes, the parade’s two million spectators are treated to: Dozens of live bands! Troupes of dancers and circus performers! A fleet of giant rod puppets! Hell, it was named “Greatest Event on Earth” by Festivals International for October 31. Fun and, ever importantly, free, the Village Parade should be your choice for public lewdness this Halloween.

35% chance of getting stabbed

210 North Broadway, Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591 I know everybody wants to dress up like the Mario Bros. or some sort of “sexy” something-or-rather and go out and get completely sham-wowed, but if you’re at all interested in any sort of traditional festive activity, head over just a few miles northwest to Sleepy Hollow in Westchester country Friday, October 30th, for their annual haunted hayride. Learn about the history of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman on a three hour tour of the beautiful lower Hudson Valley. Gates open at 6PM at Sleepy Hollow High School and the ride will be from 7PM until 10PM. However—Freshmen be warned—you have to be at least 10 to ride by yourself, and I’m not sure whether they’re talking about actual age or mental age. the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of you getting stabbed.

In the thirty-seventh of the eighty-three photographs that comprise Robert Frank’s 1958 book The Americans, the photographer stands in front of a screen door in McClellanville, South Carolina. His figure, camera raised, blocks the incoming sun, and through his silhouette we can see into the room behind the door. It’s an empty barbershop. Are those liquor bottles or hair products sitting on the windowsill?

A less subtle photographer w o u l d have begun or e n d e d his book with this picture, ham-fistedly acknowledging its symbolism, but Frank places it in the middle of the collection.

Here, it conjures up a range of emotions. Although the door’s reflection makes the image fairly complex, one is struck by its sparseness, all the while trying to assemble the sections into a coherent image. The chair is empty, the house behind does not look very inviting, and the closest thing to a person is the photographer’s black shadow.

Twelve pictures later, Frank shows us an equally lonely photograph of a Detroit assembly line. The picture’s many workers fill the gaps left between machines, wires, and raw material. The grain of the photograph has the same distorting effect as the screen door in the McClellanville picture. Not one worker’s face is visible. In this sense, it is fitting that the title is not “Workers on an Assembly Line,” but, sardonically, simply “Assembly Line.”

The short version of the story behind The Americans is this: in early 1955, Robert Frank, with recommendations from respected photographers, including Walker Evans, Edward Steichen, and Alexey Brodovitch, won a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation to travel across the country taking photographs of “what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere.” He started the journey’s first leg almost immediately, driving from his home in New York City to

Detroit. Soon after returning, he set out again, this time down to Savannah. Later that year, Frank embarked on his longest run. Beginning in Indianapolis he traveled west, making it as far north as Butte, before traveling down to San Francisco and along the Pacific coast. When he reached Los Angeles, he turned back and headed toward perhaps the most American city in the country—Las Vegas—then made his way to his conclusion

in Florida.

Earlier this year, the National Gallery of Art organized an exhibition chronicling this trip, and at present the exhibit resides at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans compiles not only vintage prints of

all the photographs, but also ephemera, including the Guggenheim application rough drafts he wrote with Evans, contact sheets, and working prints.

The contact sheets reveal much about Frank’s method and versatility. At times he was studious, at one point circling a covered car in Long Beach trying to find the angle that would reveal the subject’s poignancy, while other shots came from a more freewheeling style, pictures often taken regardless of the viewfinder. The book’s most famous image, a segregated trolley car

in New Orleans, came this way, the car running opposite his prior subjects.

Ultimately, this exhibition, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the publishing of The Americans, is not just about photography but about history—how we write it, what it means, and what it says about us today. In one sense, the pictures seem to come from a different world. The clothes, the cars, and just about everything seems dated, and even the idea of a crosscountry attempt to find the essence of America has become played out, partly due to the perfection Frank and Kerouac achieved in their trips. On the other hand, Frank took these pictures only fifty years ago. Does time really march this fast? Apparently, it does; although, as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Somehow, Frank captured this.

He shows a society moving forward—new buildings, new machines, new cars—but not necessarily progressing, as the wide-eyed black man looking out from that trolley window reminds us.

And then, what does The Americans mean today, after 9/11? For better or for worse, that event lies in the back of our minds as we make our way through these eighty-three photographs.

Considering this, is it okay to feel nostalgic for these photographs? Surely, Frank does not give us much to feel nostalgic about or anything even close to sentimental, but there is still something beautiful about many of the images. Perhaps this feeing does not come from a longing to rekindle the bygone era but the desire to go back to it and do the last fifty years right.

No Vietnam, no assassinations, no George W. Bush, but better conditions and wages for the workers on that Detroit assembly line and true equality for the man in the trolley. When you look at Frank’s pictures, you want these things so badly it almost hurts. Hopefully, they will be here to welcome the book’s one-hundredth anniversary, at which point a new generation will again marvel at this wonderful work.

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by Mickie Meinhardt STAFF I THINK I LOVE YOU In 1963, Maurice Sendak summed up our childhoods in 10 sentences with his book, Where the Wild Things Are. The fantastic illustrations and sense of adventure appealed to any child who has ever dreamed of being ruler of an imaginary land, and the book has been beloved by millions ever since.

The big question was, would Spike Jonze, with his Octoberreleased movie adaptation, single handedly crush what Sendak so wonderfully built?

Everyone’s inner child can

sailing through treacherous waters to the land of the Wild Things. As in the book, Max faces down the Wild Things with his boundless child’s courage and is appointed their king.

However, his stay on the island lasts several days, rather than just a night, and through the lengthy period of time the Wild Things are shown to have their own very real problems – problems that seem to embody Max’s own levels of confusion, fear, and sorrow. In the end, Max’s anger at his family melts into homesickness, and he returns to his worried mother and a slice of chocolate cake, leav-

per and deep feelings. The music, too, seamlessly intertwines the magical with the emotional; Jonze commissioned Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to do the entire soundtrack, and the result is a light-hearted, folky mix full of humming, cheering, and whistling, complimented with purely instrumental, heartfelt tracks. The backup (the band is formally titled “Karen O and the Kids”) is comprised of members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Liars, Deerhunter, and the Raconteurs, as well as a chorus of children: a fantastic collection of indie, punk, and electronic rock artists that, combined, pro-

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Summer was pretty sweet, huh? But now the leaves are browning, withering, and dying, and there’s a chill blowing across your neighborhood. People who think they have more class than they actually do will break out their peacoats and scarves, myself included. All in all, you’re gonna feel pretty collegiate for a couple of weeks, before winter jams its horrible, icy finger into you and leaves you unable to do even the most basic things, like walk alllllll the way to FMH when it’s like, totally thirty below out. You better stay in and get caught up on Melrose Place. But maybe, just maybe, you realize that this is the last couple of weeks when you can trek all the way down to the city, rage your face off, and not freeze your little knickers getting there, only to sweat profusely when you arrive. So, if I were you, here’s what I’d hit up -SW Who: Dethklok, Mastodon When: Thursday, October 29th @ 6:30 p.m.

Where: Hammerstein Ballroom How Much: $35 Why: Dethklok may be the product of a late night Cartoon Network cartoon, but Mastodon is widely respected as being one of the best metal bands to come up in our generation, and Dethklok isn’t as shitty as them being a cartoon would make them sound.

Sometimes you just want to bang your head.

breathe a sigh of relief. No, Jonze did not butcher the heartfelt memories of millions. He succeeded where so many have failed and produced a bookturned-movie that I could not find a single fault with. Not an exaggeration. Where the Wild Things Are without a doubt lived up to its hype and fulfilled the anticipation that increased a bit more each time the trailer was played.

Jonze stuck to the plot – not hard to do when the book only has 10 sentences – but did inevitably have to add some background. Max remains just Max, a disgruntled young boy with no last name. But we find out that his parents are recently divorced and his mother is a working mom, absent during most of the day and with a new boyfriend at night. Max has a sister named Claire just on the brink of teenage-dom and thus feels herself too old to “play with” her younger brother. The combined lack of sympathy leaves Max in hurt, confusion, and loneliness, and he lashes out and runs away, finding a boat in the woods and

ing the entire audience in tears.

The film is a far cry from the Disney/Pixar animations that dominate children’s films, which is part of why it’s so unbelievably moving. Kids will love it for the same reasons they love the book – who, as a six year old, wouldn’t have wanted to be king of the wild things?

But adults will appreciate it for the artful approach to such dark undertones: the pangs of loneliness and pure adolescent sorrow that drive Max to flee his home.

The ideas of divorce or a distant older sibling are ones most of us can identify with, and the pain both Max and the Wild Things experience in looking for a friend and finding no one there is heartwrenching: one of the first questions posed of the new king is, “Can you keep out all the sadness?” to which Max replies, “I’ve got a sadness shield that will keep out all the loneliness.” Each of the Wild Things has a distinct personality representing Max’s varying internal problems, with Carol, the central Wild Thing, most closely representing Max’s quick tem-

duce a whimsically beautiful soundtrack that perfectly compliments the film.

Though told from a child’s simplistic outlook, the film is by no means emotionally juvenile. Yet somehow it is this aspect, which would appear to be nothing but praise-worthy, that has caused criticism. Though it is a PG-rated children’s movie, many have been asking if it was, in fact, made for kids; it is in all actuality less a kid’s movie than a movie about being a kid, about kids’ angst and adventure and imagination all bundled into a wolf suit with a crown on top.

It’s definitely child-appropriate, though perhaps a bit scary at times, but the main concepts are fully adult – poignantly regressing each of us to what it’s like to be a kid. I find any criticism to be nothing short of condescending; fantastically woven, from costumes and setting to animation and soundtrack, it’s a film that finally lives up to it’s expectations. As Max wonderfully and simply puts it, “Let the wild rumpus start!”

Who: Justice (DJ Set) When: Thursday, October 29th @ 10 p.m.

Where: Webster Hall How Much: $40 Why: Forty bucks is pricey, but the French house duo of Justice is simply amazing. They are strong recording artists, and Cross was a good album, but Justice’s real strength is in remixing other peoples tunes (listen to their remix of “Electric Feel”)and should put on a killer DJ set. I’ll see you there.

Who: Deer Tick (as the Sex Pistols) When: Halloween @ 9 p.m.

Where: Brooklyn Bowl How Much: $5 Why: People either like or dislike the band Deer Tick, people either like or dislike punk rock. If you like Deer Tick and punk rock, you’ll probably love this show. If you dislike both Deer Tick and punk rock, you’ll probably hate this show. I dunno, it’s five dollars, decide if you want it more than a chicken roll.

Who: Weezer, Matt & Kim, PT Walkley When: Halloween @ 6:30 p.m.

Where: Hammerstein Ballroom How Much: $38 Why: Matt & Kim have been described as a darling indie duo so many times I believe it’s on their business cards, but they are fantastic, and, I mean, Weezer’s brand of poppy nerd-rock is pretty damned infectious. Why not dress up and go out?

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!"#$%&#'(%)#*#+ For Fordham students who tire of travelling an hour plus south to enjoy the city outside the Bronx, the northernmost tip of Manhattan above Harlem is a neglected treasure. Inwood, Fort George / Fort Tyron, and Washington Heights offer quirkily winding streets; soaring hills of San Francisco proportions; classic, original New York architecture; a healthy dose of nature; and an expansive diversity, making for an eclectic mish mash of retail and cuisine.

In a paltry 20 minutes, the Bx12 select will take you over the University Heights Bridge to 207th (a Fordham Road-esque retail fiasco) and Broadway, in Inwood. You can walk north on Broadway into the Marble Hill section of the Bronx over the Broadway Bridge, a futuristic drawbridge which offers comfortable pedestrian access and gritty, hodge-podge views over the narrow Harlem River.

Mosey back down Broadway to the 215th Street Steps, one of several massive sets of concrete stairs leading to the higher-elevated (and at times, wealthier) terrace of northwest Manhattan. If you’re willing to make the hike up, take a stroll on the quaint pathways and hidden stairways of Isham Park.

Northern Manhattan contains endless acres of parkland, untainted woods that stubbornly resist urban infringement, spilling foliage and ivy over stone walls and brick buildings. The manicured lawns of Parks Central, Prospect, McCarren, etc., pale in comparison.

Nearby, the beautiful, old single homes of red brick on 217th Street appear bizarrely plucked from a small Western European town. Prance back down those stairs for truly exceptional carrot cake at Carrot Top Pastries on 214th and Broadway. A tangle of Irish pubs await you to the south.

Below Inwood is the Fort George / Fort Tyron area. Cross commercial Dyckman Street to near the Cloisters, the Met’s satellite enclave of Medieval European art and architecture on Fort Tyron Park.

Creeping up to the top of Washington Heights, tackle another epic staircase west of Broadway on 187th, and be rewarded at Vicky’s Coffee Shop, a classic, small-town America diner. Walk all the way west to enjoy sweeping, picturesque views of the Hudson and the GW. Enjoying the area’s intense concentration of gorgeous Art Deco architecture, navigate all the way east to Yeshiva University between 186th and 182nd. Marvel at the ornate façade of the Jewish university’s regal Zysman Hall and perhaps meet up with a student or so for some interreligious dialogue!

181st will take care of any inexpensive retail needs. There, you’ll find another point of access to the Bronx at the Washington Bridge, but rather than bus it, walk. The Old Croton Aqueduct Trail, which traces the old aqueduct from Westchester to midtown, crosses into Manhattan here. The High Bridge, the trail’s majestic pedestrian walkway across the Harlem River, is closed, but you can use the this route instead. The trail provides a lovely path between Fordham Road (entry just west of the 4 train) and Manhattan.

by Lindy Foltz CHIEF COPY EDITOR

A pathway under Isham Park offers views of these curvaceous old apartments.

Flocks of rooftop pigeons pepper the sky in Inwood.

This stylish mom and pop shop across from Vicky’s carries all the necessities of life.

Plunges in elevation in northern Manhattan make for grand street vistas.

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Marissa Caroll STAFF SPELLBOUND I believe in telling stories.

The quietest member of a Big Loud Irish Family, I’ve been raised on tales in which the point isn’t who won the fight but how his eyes were bullets, how the bar floor stuck to my best Sunday shoes, how my heart shook like the old apartment next to the train tracks. As someone who can hardly verbalize what I ate for lunch without speaking in circles, getting distracted, and completely losing my audience, the ability to lasso a crowd with words is a skill I not only appreciate but also deeply admire.

So when I stumbled upon The Moth Story Slams about a year ago, I was hooked.

The Moth is a non-profit that hosts live storytelling events, originally in NYC and now in major cities around the U.S. Poet and novelist George Dawes Green founded the Moth “to recreate in New York the feeling of sultry summer evenings in his native Georgia where he and a small circle of friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales on his friend Wanda’s porch.”

Basically, he wanted to recreate the loveliest of things in a town hardly known for its loveliness.

Green began inviting friends over to his apartment to tell stories, and a following quickly developed, pushing the Moth

By Sean Kelly STAFF SUITCASE OF BLOW Something referred to by such a cryptic and indistinct title as ‘The Mexican Suitcase’ may conjure up images of a tattered suitcase full of cocaine, guns or some other type of delightful contraband. However, in the case of a package delivered to Manhattan’s ICP (International Center of Photography, not Insane Clown Posse) in December of 2007, thinking this would just make you a culturally insensitive and vaguely racist (you were totally thinking that, weren’t you? Asshole…). In actuality, the Mexican Suitcase refers to a cache of 126 rolls of film taken by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour during the Spanish Civil war that was delivered to the ICP (founded by Robert Capa’s brother, Cornell) and has been undergoing rigorous restoration for nearly two years. These photos, thought for over half a century to be lost, compliment much of Capa’s revolutionary work during the Spanish Civil War and show an important paradigm shift partially responsible for the current state of modern

out of a cramped apartment and into slightly-less-cramped coffeehouses and bookstores.

A decade later, the Moth is a New York Times Style Section worthy phenomenon and a consistent source of NPR features.

I first heard a recording from a Moth show on “This American Life” and since have subscribed to the Moth podcast, which provides me with one free Moth recording per week.

I have heard tales from a Queens cop, a Burning Man enthusiast, a Bollywood star, a Malian reporter, an Iraq vet, and even a Fordham grad who thought the best way to improve his poetry (and, of course, win over a girl) was spending an evening in a NYC prison.

I vowed to attend a live taping of The Moth as soon as I landed here at the end of August. Then I forgot. I vowed to attend before the end of September. I forgot again. Last Thursday, though, I finally got it together enough to hop on the D train and head to Housing Works Bookstore and Café, the Moth’s home the third Thursday of each month. I was familiar with the area around Housing Works (the store is located a block from Broadway and Lafayette on the D) and also with

the awesomeness that is Housing Works (a non-profit chain of bookstores and thrift shops dedicated to fighting AIDS and homelessness) but had never actually stepped foot inside of the bookstore. Arriving at 7:04, only four minutes after doors had opened, I realized I would have at least ten additional minutes to ponder what Housing Works was like as I stood in the

war journalism.

Almost as interesting as the photographs themselves is the convoluted and roundabout journey that they took to New York. The rolls of film contained in the Mexican Suitcase disappeared from Capa’s Paris studio at the beginning of the Second World War and were thought by Capa and his colleagues to be either destroyed or confiscated in the Nazi occupation of France. However, in 1995, Jerald R. Green, a professor at CUNY Queens College, received a letter from a Mexican filmmaker stating that he had come into possession of the mysterious negatives by way of his aunt, who inherited then from her father.

Her father, Gen. Francisco Aguilar Gonzales, was a diplomat stationed in Marseilles during the Spanish Civil War to aid antifascist refugees fleeing the Iberian Peninsula. Through rather nebulous and shifty means, Gen. Gonzales gained possession of the negatives, believed to have been transported from Paris to Marseilles by Capa’s friend and fellow photographer Imre Weisz, and subsequently transported them back to his home in Mexico City.

The film stayed here for nearly

fifty years, until their transportation to the ICP in 2007.

When the staff of the ICP learned of the correspondence between Professor Green and the Mexican filmmaker (who remains anonymous), they im-

half-a-block long line.

The Moth Story Slams cost $7 to attend, a fee very reasonable for almost three hours of unique live performance. I didn’t even feel conflicted as I handed over my five, one, and ten dimes. Instead, I immediately focused on the look of Housing Works: the spiral staircases, the mahogany-paneled balconies, the thousands of books lined up around its cavernous walls. Already the place was packed. The balcony was teeming with well-dressed couples flirting over imported beer and plastic cups of red wine.

mediately contacted the filmmaker, requesting the return of the negatives for restoration, archiving, and exhibition purposes. Though contact was established, matters were left open-ended, and no commitments were made on the part of the Aguilar-Gonzales family relating to the relinquishing of the film. The filmmaker scheduled meetings with ICP representatives that he never attended,

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Each of the hundred-or-so chairs set up in front of the small stage was full, as was each step on the staircase. I resigned myself to the corner next to the coffee bar, my view of the performers surprisingly not obscured by the large column ten feet in front of me and my hearing only slightly damaged by the constant whirring of the espresso machine. I even had a ladder on which to comfortably lean.

The host tapped the microphone and began explaining Housing Works and The Moth to the crowd. She stated that ten audience members, all of whom had entered to perform earlier in the evening, would be drawn randomly from a hat, perform, and be graded “Olympic ice-skating style” by three teams of judges.

The theme of the evening, the host announced, was Destiny. Performers spoke of destiny in disguise—romance novels and taxidermied deer—saving them from drug addiction and 9/11, respectively. Three spoke on the significance of their names defining their destinies and one described learning what was certainly not her destiny: a career in sports. One man told an elaborate, statistics-heavy, fairly offensive story about his destiny to date fat bisexual women, and a woman talked about a four-foot tall grade

school alum she bedded in a North Carolina motel. A powerful looking man shared his tale of beating cancer but acquiring “Depression, a large black crow that swoops down upon my chest and whispers bad thoughts to me in the dark.”

The hands-down winner of the evening, though, was Adam Wade. Wade displayed an armsflailing enthusiasm for storytelling, the phrases shooting out of his mouth like over-eager cannonballs. More than anything, he was human; he made me care that he lost his sixth grade girlfriend because of a juvenile delinquent who wanted to either a) be his girlfriend or b) flush his head in the toilet at all times.

This was his fifteenth Moth win and I’m sure it will soon be documented on adamwade.com, his website displaying video of each of his Moth performances.

I can’t highly enough recommend a trip to the Moth, whether you are content to observe or brave enough to put your name in the hat to perform. Themoth. org lists all opportunities to attend a Story Slam each month and also links you to videos of past performances and where to download the podcast. If you’re looking to check out the Moth and also aren’t going to murder me on the subway, I’ll be headed back to the Slam at the Nuyorican in a couple weeks. Hope to see you there.

and he eventually completely broke off contact for unknown reasons.

The state of the film remained unknown for several years after this mysterious termination of communication between the filmmaker and the ICP. However, when the ICP was organizing a show of both Capa and Taro’s work (including work from the Spanish Civil War era), officials decided to give one final attempt at obtaining the film with the hope that some of the work could be incorporated into the exhibitions. The ICP enlisted the help of scholar Trisha Ziff, a resident of Mexico City, to track down and negotiate with the elusive filmmaker.

After a several weeklong manhunt, Ziff finally located the filmmaker and began what would turn into almost a year’s worth of negotiations and pleading on the behalf of the ICP. Ziff eventually convinced the filmmaker to give the work to the ICP and hand-delivered the packages to New York in December of 2007.

Since their arrival, the negatives have been undergoing a labor intensive and care-

ful restoration under the eyes of conservation experts and are expected to be fit for exhibition in late 2010. In their preliminary appraisals of the work, the restoration experts have come across images of the damage done to Madrid during the war and the mass exodus of antifascist refugees across the Pyrenees to France, as well as images of such notable figures of the era as Ernest Hemingway and Federico Garcia Lorca.

These photographs represent not only an amazing step forward towards a better firsthand understanding of the Spanish Civil War, but also a better understanding of the history of professional photography and photojournalism. The work of Robert Capa revolutionized the way in which military conflict was brought into the public eye.

By embedding himself and his camera in combat alongside Spanish, American, and British soldiers in a number of conflicts (including the D-Day invasions in Normandy), Capa changed war journalism from an observational science to a participatory art. Now, with the arrival of these negatives, Capa’s methods and innovation can be better understood.

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nstead of putting together a features page showcasing essential horror movies to look for this Halloween (anything but Saw VI), we here at the paper decided to give a nod to some of the greatest names to grace the horror genre. The picks, of course, are no surprise. Though Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Hitchcock, and Vincent Price may have never crossed paths (unless you count the several movie adaptations of Poe works Price starred in, like The House of Usher), they have produced some of the greatest works of horror ever.

Each practiced drastically different arts. Poe and Hitchcock are creatively responsible for their works of horror, whereas Price gained notoriety for his unique screen presence as an actor, his performances rife with idiosyncrasies and propelled by his eerie monotone. And, of course, Hitchcock and Price worked behind and in front of the camera respectively, while Poe preceded them both as a nineteenth century author.

The careers of these three men deserve to be explored extensively, but the paper has compiled only some examples of their work. Free from the taint of modern day torture-porn and slasher films, Price, Hitchcock, and Poe represent our obsession with the macabre and our willingness to indulge that obsession.

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#-%'./.%&23'$40'543# by the paper STAFF OF MILLIONS SEVERAL e here at the paper, being a pack of dirty, liberal, environmentalist, tea-drinkin’, scarf wearin’ pinkos, love us some good old controversy. At the moment, right down the road from our own Rose Hill, there is a battle being fought between community members and building contractors over the Kingsbridge Armory, one of New York’s most interesting and unique buildings. Built in the early days of the 20th century, the Armory housed a National Guard regiment and features one of the largest drill halls in the world (180,000 square feet!).

But the Armory will soon receive a massive facelift, in the form of a giant shopping center to be installed within the cavernous citadel. It’s an example of de-urbanization, much like the new Gateway Mall built near Yankee Stadium (David Gonzalez at the Times wrote a great article comparing Gateway to Fordham Road), and has many questioning the practicality of a giant shopping center in an area known for its surplus of shopping outlets. Many folks, including the paper, feel that the Armory could be better used. Here are just a few of our suggestions:

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Off Campus Housing Okay, so how many tens of millions of dollars are we spending on building those new residence halls on the west end of campus? Please. The construction is unsightly, inconvenient, and most likely not going to be finished on time. I’m sure that the questionnaire statistics that the Administration loves to slobber over say that Fordham students want “apartment-style, suite-based” dorm rooms or some shit, but why not just provide them with some subsidized living space off campus? It’s a new step toward Jesuit supremacy in 2016, it’s the saving of a Bronx landmark, it’s a little bit country AND a little bit rock and roll. Walsh Hall, still as ugly as it was when it was built in 1980, has just over 200,000 gross total square feet. The main drill hall alone, as mentioned in our list’s lovely introduction, is almost as big as the largest residence hall on campus. How hard can it be?

Some sheetrock, some plaster, a few hundred sets of dorm room furniture and an alumni benefactor’s name on the front, bada-bing, bada-boom, and we’ve got off-campus housing. The space for amenities is already

there, as our National Guardsmen once enjoyed in-house sports and fitness facilities, as well as a basement shooting gallery. And wasn’t Fordham always lacking in the gun range department? How shameful.

The architecture even seems to fit the post-modern gothic/stone façade look that Fordham tries so hard to achieve. It was really just meant to be.

By MAX SIEGAL NEWS CO-EDITOR

in its cookies interacted with the vaccine, neutralizing the mutative agent.

By DICKABOD CRANE STAFF PEDAGOGUE A Pinkberry Did you know that there are currently 13 Pinkberry franchises in New York City? And not ONE in the Bronx! Look no further for constructive, beneficial use of space, dear armory. wooooooooot

Garrison during zombie outbreak Scenario: A large batch of swine flu vaccine causes a gross neuroreceptor mutation along with heavily increased metabolic rate, turning 95% of all people into super strong super hungry super fast zombies.

It’s the day few things taste as delicious as squandered of the graduahistorical landmarks tion ceremony and everybody is out on Eddie’s Parade for the commencement speech, which is given by none other than Fordham’s own Denzel Washington. What could benefit the Bedford He’s about to give advice to the Park nayb more than an LAclass of 2010 when almost every based luxury frozen yogurteria member of the friends and fami- (nay, not a sexually transmitted lies of the graduating class starts disease, but a purveyor of fine yelling at the top of their lungs frozen yogurt!) with a cult foland passes out. Us Fordham stu- lowing of Coach product-wielddents are in shock, not knowing ing, velour-clad low-fat desert exactly how to react. Slowly, fiends? There is nary a better they all regain consciousness option in sight, I say.

A retailer approved by the in perfect unison. Relieved but still shaken the class of 2010 National Yogurt Association tends to their loved ones, until it would be a blessing for any becomes clear that something is community. According to Pinkvery wrong with them. berry, their product “is packed Their eyes are entirely with live and active cultures” white, and they are breathing and “calcium and protein, which incredibly heavily and contort- helps support a healthy immune ing their body. Suddenly, they system and may help regulate turn on us, grabbing us by the digestion.” Who needs jobs throat and trying to bite into our with a living wage and benefits necks! Most of us pry ourselves and adequate educational spacout of their hands, and over es for youth? Inject some of that the loudspeaker Denzel says, tang-o-licious, frosty goodness “HEAD FOR KEATING!” We into any community, and hello, try to barricade ourselves in but health and prosperity!

Pinkberry products can find out that it’s been locked from the inside. “OKAY,” he be consumed by either straw, shouts, “To the Armory!” We spoon, or sometimes fork, and battle through the streets down the selection of yogurt flavors Fordham Road until we get to and the plethora of toppings Kingsbridge, garrison the tow- can be manipulated into literers in the Armory, and hold out ally thousands of combinations. Talk about options and for weeks.

It turns out one of the sev- flexibility, people. Want a comeral preservatives Sodexo uses munity to consume food con-

scientiously by eating seasonal ingredients? Well, Pinkberry only offers pomegranate frozen yogurt SOME of the time. Aim to minimize carbon emissions from transportations? The new Pinkberry Armory would save Bronx residents that daily 45 minute commute into Manhattan to get their fix of that gelatinous, syrupy ambrosia. Move over roasted nut guy, Pinkberry yogurt is the new snack of choice in the Boogie Down.

By ROSALIND FOLTZ CHIEF COPY EDITOR A Casino The Bronx needs a casino.

The 11 minute car ride or 25 minute subway/ bus ride to Yonkers Raceway to waste away in the company of the smokewithered drunks that make gambling their life is just getting too tedious. The level of anxiety I encounter on that arduous and seemingly infinite ride, thinking about the free coffee (and the look on the women with the tray after I decline to tip her), the cigar-smoking old men who haunt my dreams at night and whose image I’ll certainly grow into one day, the maddening headache I get after only seconds of hearing 8,000 bells dinging at once, the awe in watching the shriveled remains of elderly women blowing 400 dollars a spin at the slot machines, and the thrill of watching tiny men hilariously dragged behind horses like some modern chariot race is just too much to handle. I need something closer.

Turning the old armory into a casino would not only bring endless amounts of money to the area, but it’d be a depraved Xanax to the anxiety of the endless trek to Yonkers. I need someplace local where I can travel with peace of mind and put money into a machine, annoyingly push a button, watch things light up, and stare as my money slips away nickels at a time. I want immediate, walking distance gratification where I can get addicted to gambling and watch awful Jimmy Buffet impersonators at the same time. I’ll be 21 eventually, and the free mini mixed drinks that

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I pine for could now be in my backyard if the Carmory (that’s casino-armory) is built. I’ve got some money right now, and I urge you, Bronx community, give me a place to lose it. A place that looks like a castle.

By CHRIS SPRINDIS ASSISTANT EXECUTIVE EDITOR Bismuth It seems that a number of my fellow paperers have gotten some fiberglass in their nasal spray regarding the potential commercialization of their beloved Armory. Well, I’m still trying to figure out why they don’t actually put armor in the Armory – I’m talking legit shining armor here, with breastplates and chainmail, and maybe even a little Under Armor and Armor All for good measure. But if making sense isn’t anyone’s modus operandi, then it won’t be mine either. What should go in that there Armory? I say Bismuth. Lots and lots of Bismuth.

Bismuth is the 83rd element, and it’s about the coolest thing that could possibly exist. For starters, bismuth looks savagely resplendent. If you don’t know what bismuth looks like, stop reading now, get to a computer, and search for “bismuth” in Google Images – no, really, do it. A rainbow inside-out crystal staircase? SERIOUSLY?! What other element looks like that?

Aesthetics aside, bismuth performs some insanely painfully awesome chemical functions. It’s used in nuclear reactors (bismuth pertains to nuclear stuff; ergo, bismuth is cool), it can be used to make bullets (bismuth = bullets = freedom = Amurika), and it puts the “Bismo” in Pepto Bismol. The bismuth in Pepto Bismol actually mixes with sulphur in your body, forming the compound bismuth sulfide. This compound gives you a dark tongue and black poop. Now, it’s actually not possible to register the superhuman level of awesome contained in that sentence from a single reading, so I will repeat it twice more. This compound gives you a dark tongue and black poop.

This compound gives you a dark tongue and black poop.

So forget the mall – I want bismuth alloys, bismuth emulsions, and bismuth crystals eighty feet high. Nothing else is so stunningly mesmerizingly mind-explodingly magnificent to warrant the Armory’s dedication – especially not that pitiable metal Antimony.

By SEAN BANFIELD STAFF WISENHEIMER

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*+'*,$)%&-.%&//0 So, this Halloween, after you’ve filled your pillowcase with Tootsie Pops and candy corn, after you’ve ground the stench of cheap alcohol and sweat from dancing deep into your sexy maid costume, and after you’ve developed retina burn from all of the flashes from all of the pictures you’re going to see on Facebook the first of November and instantly regret taking, try something different.

Find these albums, put them on your MP3 player, go to a rooftop, and listen to some of the most eerily beautiful music ever made while laying back and staring out into the speckled blanket of infinite possibility.

SCOTT WALKER The Drift

by Charles Hailer

Happy Halloween, Fordham! This issue we have something a little bit different for you, and without further ado, the paper would like to present Fearwax! Instead of regular reviews, the staff selected their favorite spooky, scary, or otherwise Halloweeny albums.

As such, there will be no ratings, as every album here is a perfect five out of five. For your reading pleasure, we have reviews of some chilling music inspired by the Cthulhu universe and the rest of the Lovecraft mythos, Scott Walker’s The Drift, Irish ambient artists Fovea Hex, French Satanist/occultist Moëvöt, UK psychedelic punk rockers The Deviants, and French chamber group Les Fragments de la Nuit. We are also changing up ill-legal downloads to include more Halloween favorites. Enjoy!

AKLO Music of the Lovecraft Mythos

by Elena Lightbourn I can’t quite remember what led me to discover AKLO: Music of the Lovecraft Mythos, but as soon as I took a look at the creepy-ass album art, I knew it had to be good... and by good I mean prime Fearwax material. I couldn’t recall the slightest idea of what exactly the Lovecraft mythos was, but, after a little Facebook chattin’ and Wikipedia research, I learned that it’s an expansive collection of stories written/inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, regarded by many as one of the most influential horror authors of the 20th century.

According to the AKLO website, www.aklo.net, “the ideology of AKLO is that the unexplored sonic potentialities of the Cthulhu Mythos are as limitless as its literary ones.” Hmm… sounds interesting.

Unfortunately, I could only listen to samples from each of the AKLO albums containing moments from several tracks.

They aren’t even available on iTunes (gasp!) but the CDs can be purchased off the AKLO

website for $15 each (or illegally downloaded by means of UTorrent and the like, none of which I have).

The first AKLO album, Beyond Madness, features tracks with names like “Brain Cylinder” and “Swamp Cult.” Most of the sound effects are synthesized but are overall very dark, ominous, and atmospheric. A few moments of listening to this somewhat indescribable music just might make you feel like you’re going insane… which, now that I look back at the title, makes perfect sense. Seriously, though, if I listened to this in the dark, in the right state of mind, it could potentially be terrifying.

The second, “eagerly awaited” AKLO album, Unnamable, seems just as haunting as, if not more than, Beyond Madness, featuring tracks like “Eulogy for Humanity.” From what I can tell from the sample, this album incorporates substantially more discernible instruments into its music than its predecessor.

Dark tribal drumming, dissonant violins, and more echo-y atmospheric sounds dominate the sample for quite some time.

Then, a calm, but haunting, oboe-and-piano duet punctured with bird calls, which probably could make up a track in itself, transitions into what sounds like moaning monstrous beings (not the kind you’d get on your usual haunted house mix… these actually sound like they’re actively seeking out my soul). The sample ends, and I’m left wanting to hear more.

If I ever get the chance to, I’d definitely listen to the AKLO albums in full. In fact, it’s probably some of the creepiest music I’ve ever heard and makes me want to pick up one of Lovecraft’s books to understand its inspiration. The AKLO website suggests the use of its music as “an ideal soundtrack

for horror roleplaying” so, if you’re into that kind of thing, it’s a great buy!

Also, if you’re a person who loves setting up haunted houses or freaking yourself out while high, the AKLO albums would be perfect for you.

FOVEA HEX Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent

by Lenny Raney Halloween means many different things to many different people. To some, Halloween is about trick or treating and little children dressed as ghosts. To others, it’s about dressing as revealing as is socially acceptable and getting hammered. To a nerd like me, however, Halloween is about the mysticism and intrigue of its pagan origins.

The history of the holiday is fascinating, and beneath the friendly ghosts, bags full of Willy Wonka products, and jack-olanterns lies the remnants of an ancient Celtic pagan ritualistic celebration of the dead, meant to signify the end of lighter days (summer) and the beginning of darker (winter).

T h u s , instead of gimmicky “Halloween” themed albums, or the ostensibly chilling soundtracks to horror films, I find myself drawn to Celtic and pagan music around this time of year. An interesting recent find of mine is the band Fovea Hex, the otherworldly project of Irish singer/songwriter Clodagh Simonds. Released in 2006, Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent is a collection of three EPs that could be best described as an intersection of Eno-esque am-

biance and pagan/Celtic sentimentality. These kinds of projects tend to be risky; it is far too easy to come across as pedestrian and imitative. Thankfully, Simonds genuinely sounds like a hooded ancient mystic standing atop a pedestal in front of a large triskele carved into the side of a mountain, whispering chanty, minimalistic, and trance-inducing incantations into the tomb of a fallen warrior.

The title track, found on Allure EP, is strictly ambiance in the purest sense, sounding like an outtake from Brian Eno’s Apollo. Quiet synth moans and various found sounds of woodland creatures pepper an ever present and effervescent sound best described as wind discreetly howling in through a cave. Unsurprisingly, both Roger and Brian Eno lended their production talents to this project. In fact, the caliber of the contributors to Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent is outstanding. In addition to the brothers Eno, prog legends Robert Fripp (King Crimson) and Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree) as well as film score composer Carter Burwell (whose most recent projects include In Bruges and Where the Wild Things Are) were involved. One might think that with all of this star power on board, Simonds, who was previously in 80’s folk-rock outfit Mellow Candle, and her creative input might get lost to the process.

Fortunately for the listener, that is not at all the case. For example, in the outrageously beautiful “Long Distance,” also on Allure EP, she is entirely in control. Approximately one minute and forty-five seconds in, Simonds sings “I walk for hours and watch the sunlight play” with a level of profound pathos that could only be found in a very personal and authentic artistic creation.

The story of Scott Walker’s descent from profitable boy band superboner to demon wracked recluse is the stuff of legend. For those not in the know, Scott Walker once had a fan club second only to that of the Beatles, but he had spent his entire cultural capital in the 60’s singing about death, gonnorhea, fascism, and Igmar Bergman films, only to bottom out in the 70’s and emerge from a boozy abyss to define himself as a haunted auteur of tortured wails and creepy clanging. Since reemerging, Walker has released three solo albums since 1983, each one more impenetrable and blood curdling than the last.

His most recent, The Drift, is the single most terrifying album ever recorded; free of teenaged angst or guy-liner melodrama, it’s hard to imagine that the album was even made by a human being.

I once ran an amateur haunted house and scored it with Scott Walker’s The Drift. The album’s symphony of oozing, fleshy sounds reverberated perfectly off of the cotton cobweb covered cement walls, striking maximum terror in the hearts of those brave enough to enter.

After the ghostly gallop of the opening track, “Cossacks Are,” the man’s demons take the reigns and the nearly thirteen minute long “Clara” begins the album’s formidable body count.

With industrial hum and whispered abstractions suddenly giving way to queasy strings, pounding percussion, and an orchestra of detuned guitars, the soul of this album is first revealed. The color of the noise is blood red and pitch black at the same time, perfect for a those down for a more macabre Halloween experience.

Throughout high school and in my early Fordham experience, Scott Walker’s Tilt was the perfect program music to project my emo by way of Eno teenage troubles and nurse my nascent pretension before I gave up on whining and learned to dance (kind of). When The Drift brought Walker’s spooktacular croon back into my life in 2006, I realized that Walker’s jarring sonic juxtapositions and preoccupation with modernist murder

!"#!$%&'()*'(++,' #-%'./.%&' ballad lyrics can be an absolute fucking blast, in the same way a really great horror movie can be. This is the crown jewel of creep-rock (if I can be so glib as to make up a genre), the ultimate Halloween soundtrack this side of those cheap-o effects tapes they used to sell at drug stores and Tubular Bells.

In 2006 director Stephen Kijak made a documentary about the creation of The Drift, giving the world the first filmed interview footage with Mr. Walker since 1983, revealing the man to be a normal looking middle aged American, complete with a baseball hat and male pattern baldness.

Scott Walker might not be the half -dead hunchback living in a haunted house on a hill like that I’d like him to be, but good God he makes some scary sounding music.

THE DEVIANTS 3

by Alexander Gibbons This eerie nugget fell into my lap after my roommate Salvador returned from raiding his grandparent’s basement in Connecticut. The cover features a nun touching a popsicle to her lips in a provocative manner accompanied by a young boy doing the same but collapsed by her feet. Deviants 3 is not a scary album by nature. I don’t think its intentions are to scare, different from some of the other albums on this list, but it sure is spooky. It sure is.

The Deviants were a psychedelic-rock band from the UK. They began as “The Social Deviants,” and later changed to become simply “The Deviants.”

The end of their career came when three of the band’s four members ditched the lead vocalist Mick Farren and formed a new group, “The Pink Faries.”

Deviants 3 was released in 1969

by Sire. I know little about the band’s career or discography.

Deviants 3 is my first and only encounter, and a weird one at that.

The first song, “Billy the Monster,” is a proper example of the creepy overtones that run throughout the album.

It’s a very goofy song, with lyrics like “Watch out Billy, as you walk around/ there’s ugly people living underground” interplayed with a low, raspy voice uttering “Billy” and a high falsetto following with “the monster.” Still, “Billy the Monster” is very, very creepy, reminding me of the 1997 film The Butcher Boy, in which the title character, a young boy, cre-

ates mayhem wherever he goes.

“The People Suite,” the album’s fourth song, features a walking bass line behind a twangy guitar riff that sounds more appropriate to Workingman’s Dead with darker lyrics: “We are the people who creep in the night/We are the people who hide from the light.” It’s an awesome song, confirming the fears of conservatives everywhere and evoking images of boozy wretches ambling through the night, turning girls into sexedup mamas and boys into cackling fiends.

Hence, “The Deviants.”

It’s a little bit Yardbirds, a little bit An American Werewolf in London. Maybe it’s not objectively scary, but for me it sounds like it would go very well with a horror movie, the sort of music that could be played in Buffalo Bill’s lair or something. Basically, yeah, I’m saying that Buffalo Bill would totally vibe off of this album, which brings to mind, perhaps, some similarities between myself and Buffalo Bill, but that’s topic for a different conversation.

Check out this album. Despite its potential to be played in a serial-killer’s lair, it is most definitely a delightful listen.

MOËVÖT Abgzvoryathre

by Sean Patrick Kelly “The horror! The horror!”

-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness This album is horrifying.

Ambient, low guitar; scratchy, guttural vocals; and ethereal chanting all come together in a whirling maelstrom of general discomfort and uneasiness and make for an album that could provide the soundtrack to either a black mass in the French Ardennes or a slow descent into a Lovecraftian madness. Moevot was a one-man dark ambient project from the early 1990’s consisting solely of Vordb Bathor Ecsed, prominent member of Les Legions Noires. Les Legions Noires, a French black metal collective active in the late 80’s and early 90’s in Brittany, produced some of the most terrifying, unsettling, and eerie music ever recorded utilizing very limited resources, lo-fi recording techniques and hand distribution amongst friends and close workers.

For this particular solo project, Vordb Bathor Ecsed explores exactly how terribly unnerving a clean guitar and vocals can be. Though not much information exists relating to the album’s production

or its creator’s life, perhaps that makes it all the more cryptic and frightening.

First off, this album sounds as if it was recorded by a prisoner locked in the keep of a French castle during the Black Plague who somehow got a hold of some reasonably priced analog recording equipment. The music exudes pestilence, death, forest creatures, leprosy, feudalism, capital punishment, coarse black bread, tough stewed mutton, and a veritable cornucopia of other nasty aspects of medieval life. When listening to this music, all happy thoughts dissipate and run for cover like a group of cockroaches when a lamp is turned on. The ambient chanting reaches the ears like the sound of a baby crying after seeing its favorite teddy bear eviscerated by the family dog, and if one listens closely enough, one will tend to behave in a manner similar to the aforementioned tot. Listening to this album makes you scared of things that you did not know could ever be construed as scary, and surprises you in a way akin to going out for a steak dinner and instead being served a plate of feet wrapped in bible pages. This is the sort of music that, if played for infants during gestation, would cause them to be born shrieking with the head of a goat.

Don’t download or buy this album. You will wet your bed and most likely the beds of several others. Also, repent.

LES FRAGMENTS DE LA NUIT Musique du Crépuscule

by Dickabod Crane Chamber music isn’t exactly the genre most frequently associated with Halloween. Normally, when one thinks of chamber music, they immediately think of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schumann. However, there is indeed a very strong contingent of chamber music enthusiasts all around the world keeping the genre alive and well. France’s Les Fragments de la Nuit are certainly part of this crowd, and their 2008 release, Musique du Crépuscule, is one of the better chamber music releases of the last couple of years.

They make wonderfully beautiful violin-driven classical melancholia. It is richly textured and craftily structured.

The majority of the songs are between two and three minutes, never overstaying their welcome. Album opener “Eveil des Fées” features an ethereal harmony between vocals and violins. The atmosphere is very nocturnal, characterized by minor keys and mournful chord progressions. On “La Ronde des Fées,” proceedings are sped up

a bit, but the theme remains the same. Wistfulness and a sort of morose sense of wonder pervade the entire album.

The frantic “ Entre Ciel et Fer” features repetitive staccato piano playing a la Philip Glass overlayed with several violins sawing away intently at arpeggio on top of arpeggio of busy, but all the while melodious, euphony.

The album then settles into “La Chambre des Fées,” a rather lovely acapella song, that sounds something like a pack of female wolves with perfect intonation having choir practice in a haunted house.

The following song, “Soleils Noirs pour Lune Blanche,” is also rather subdued, and is vaguely reminiscent to Chopin’s noc-

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turnes at times. One of the longer songs on the album at 4 minutes, this, as with most chamber music, will certainly reward the patient listener. Nuances in the form of quiet swells and well placed crescendos and decrescendos really make the song’s impact all the more pronounced.

There is an underlying level of mystery to much of this album. The group’s founders, Ombeline Chardes and Michael Villarr, both hold day jobs as film soundtrack composers, and this becomes abundantly clear as the album progresses; there is a certain level of theatrics to this album that one feels must have originated out of a love for the cinema. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this release helps catapult their names and careers across the pond to the big leauges. The emotion and atmosphere invoked in Musique du Crépuscule are vivid, palpable, and incredible.

#-%'./.%&23'"-45565%0/5'7!895!/7'543# DJ JAZZY JEFF & THE FRESH PRINCE “NIGHTMARE ON MY STREET” TALKING HEADS - “PSYCHO KILLER” THE WHO - “BORIS THE SPIDER” ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW “THE TIME WARP” MOGWAI - “1% OF MONSTER” WARREN ZEVON - “WEREWOLVES OF LONDON” CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL “WALKING ON THE WATER” THE MISFITS - “HALLOWEEN” & “HALLOWEEN II” “FIVE LITTLE PUMPKINS” NURSERY RHYME EDGAR WINTER GROUP - “FRANKENSTEIN” ROBERT RICH & B. LUSTMORD - “HIDDEN REFUGE” EDVARD GRIEG - “IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING” MATT POND PA - “HALLOWEEN” KOOL KEITH & TIM DOG - “MAN WITH NO FACE”

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How the NBA Commissioner’s Special Friend is Ruining the NHL

by Eamon Stewart STAFF STEW-ART In his twenty five years as NBA commissioner, David Stern has often been an object of scorn due to his alleged manipulations of professional basketball. Whether facing rumors of fixing the 1985 NBA Draft or having the refs throw the playoffs every year in favor of his favorite team of the moment, Stern has acquired a reputation as a man who uses his power far beyond what is ethically appropriate to satisfy his own personal desires. But it is the role he played in the trajectory of the success of a major league other than his own that has probably been his most curious contribution to the world of professional sports.

Prior to becoming NHL commissioner, Gary Bettman worked in David Stern’s front office for more than a decade.

When he made the jump from NBA to NHL in 1993, hockey’s popularity had been snowballing in the US. A series of events in the prior several seasons, culminating in the 1994 Eastern Conference Final between the Devils and Rangers and the Ranger’s eventual Stanley Cup victory, had caused hockey to be more popular that basketball.

But that didn’t last. The 1995 season was strike-shortened, killing a considerable amount of interest among fans even when play eventually resumed. Although many hoped the league would make a quick recovery, this turned out not to be the case, as the NHL has since lagged behind the other major pro leagues, to the point that it is an afterthought among most casual fans.

I digress back to David Stern for a moment. Gary Bettman’s stupidity and suckiness during his reign as league chief has led some to believe that there were devious reasons behind Stern pushing Bettman to the NHL. The conspiracy goes that Stern, seeing his biggest competition currently beating his league, looked into his office, picked the least capable individual, and lobbied for him to attain that league’s highest position. Doing so would solve the two-pronged problem of getting a dumbass out of his circle and running his rival straight into the ground.

Whether these were Stern’s intentions or he genuinely

my Roenick and Keith Tkachuk and a logo that looked like it had been designed by a crackaddled Picasso. Things were off to a good start, and it looked like the hockey team in the desert just might make it.

This hasn’t exactly happened.

The Coyotes have sucked since the early 2000s, leading the team to sputter financially. The last few years have been highlighted by numerous arena problems, a lack of consistency in general management, and Wayne Gretzky’s completely ruining his credibility as a coach or owner. Periodically, a rumor would float around that some wealthy person wanted to invest Gary Bettman: in the Coyotes, but these ASS would all be squashed based on the reasoning that no rich person, no matter how stupid, was that fucking stupid.

So it came as no surprise when the Coyotes filed for bankruptcy in May of this year. What was a shock was that Phoenix’s ownership had agreed to sell the team to Canadian billionaire Jim Balsillie, who planned to move the team to Hamilton, Canada. Although this was met with tremennever seen snow quickly shoved dous enthusiasm in Canada and prices upward, and the smaller garnered support among Amerimarket Canadian teams of Win- can hockey fans, Bettman hasn’t nipeg and Quebec, despite hav- warmed to the idea. Phoenix’s ing devoted fan bases, were sale to Balsillie was challenged by the NHL on the grounds that forced to move.

And while the move from the league has spent tens of milQuebec to Denver has worked, lions to support the franchise the other transplanted Cana- and therefore has more of a say in ownerdian team, ship and rethe Win- Oh Bubbles, you’re mixed up location denipeg Jets, again. cisions than hasn’t done the owners so well. do. The exInstead of planation moving to for this poa larger city sition has that would appeared to show inbe nothing terest in more than to hockey, the keep a franJets ownerchise out ship instead of Canada. moved to The NHL Phoenix, a Board of second-tier Governors city where also voted people rareagainst Bally see water, sillie’s aplet alone ice. proval as an The team’s early years were reasonably owner, claiming that he lacked financially and competitively good character and integrity. successful, featuring stars Jere- Even if Balsillie has truly terthought Bettman would be a good fit is irrelevant at this point, because he certainly hasn’t been. Among his many moronic decisions as league boss, the most notable has been the expansion and transfer of franchises. One of his primary goals has been to expand hockey’s American fan base beyond the northern states. It’s not a bad idea, but one that Bettman executed horribly. It is unclear if his intentions were to push teams out of Canada, but that’s what happened.

Bettman’s decision to establish teams in places where the residents had

“If he dies, he dies” God, I love violence. I’m sorry. I know in our pacified, neutered society the idea of inflicting pain (or better yet, watching pain be inflicted), is a barbaric reminder of our animal roots and that as a cultured society we should work to progress beyond our vulgar urges. Or, conversely, howabout go fuck yourself? Pro football exists both because of the incredible feats of athleticism performed on the field and because it satisfies our national Barcalounger bloodlust. Golf features tremendous feats of athleticism, but golf is boring to watch. So my Role Model of the Week is Dante Wesley. The Carolina Panthers cornerback straight up exploded Tampa Bay Buccaneer Pro Bowl punt returner Clifton Smith. I mean he murdered that fucker. Go YouTube it, I’ll wait. Wow, that was some shit, huh? I guess full on superman spear-tackling a guy in the neck while the ball is still in the air is “illegal” or something, but goddamn. Wesley ended up getting suspended without pay for the next game, but I think I speak for both of us when I say, “Totally worth it.” There is, however, a downside to all of this. Smith was knocked completely out, and because the hit in question took place with only ten seconds left in the half and was more or less completely meaningless, Wesley putting Smith’s life, health, and career in danger is kind of a “dick move.” Wesley was ejected, and Smith didn’t return in the second half. The hit lead to both teams clearing their benches and coming to near West Side Story levels of gang violence, which was fortunately (tragically?) averted. That’s the other edge of sports violence: you are allowed to hit anyone on the field (aside from the quarterback) as hard as you can, so long as you do it at an approved moment. Wesley may very well have just mistimed a completely clean hit, but he ended up getting ejected and missing a game. It’s a tragedy we pay these guys millions of dollars to inflict blah blah blah… I love violence. I’m sorry. rible character, this is a league that associates with luminaries like Mike Milbury, Claude Lemieux, and Todd Bertuzzi, suggesting that the reasoning given against Balsillie isn’t based on anything relevant to hockey.

It was assumed that this ownership clusterfuck would have been solved before the beginning of the NHL season, but knowing the American legal system and its fine tradition of working speedily, this was not to be the case. It was also assumed that Balsillie had a really good shot at buying the Coyotes, given that his bid to buy the team was about $80 million more than the NHL’s, not including the extra $40 million he said he would pay to buy out the lease on the Glendale Arena, the team’s dilapidated home. Judge

Redfield T. Baum apparently did not see things Balsillie’s way. The court instead ruled last week to reject both bids, which essentially amounts to Balsillie being shoved out while the league maintains its right to decide ownership of a franchise. The Coyotes will stay in Arizona for this season, but their future is uncertain beyond that. What is likely to happen is that Gary Bettman and his board of invalid bloodsuckers will do their damned best to shop this dead-in-the-water franchise until some moron with the money and total lack of brain cells decides that buying a hockey club famous for disorganization and having no fans is an enticing investment. Bettman is likely to succeed, and in doing so he will continue to make a mockery out of the sport’s highest league.