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Campus Quotes
Homosexuality
A Feast for the Eyes
Football
Should homosexuals have the right to marry?
The Catholic Church and Homosexuality.
Check out the photo spread from Thursday’s Thanksgiving dinner.
Highs and lows of the Bedlam bash.
NOV. 30, 2010 uco360.com twitter.com/uco360
THE VISTA
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL OKLAHOMA’S student voice since 1903.
EDITOR’S SENSE, AUTHOR’S PRIDE By Cody Bromley / Staff Writer Behind every great writer is a great editor, or so the saying goes. Recently, 1,100 pages of manuscripts by the English romance novelist Jane Austen have found their way to the Internet. Analysis of these manuscripts led Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland to suggest that the author was not as perfect as literary scholars might have wanted to believe. In an interview with the Associated Press, Sutherland said that manuscripts show Austen as a
PHOTO BY GARETT FISBECK
Literature
messy writer. “We see blots, crossings out, messiness; we see creation as it happens; and in Austen’s case, we discover a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing. She broke most of the rules for writing good English,” Sutherland said. The secret behind the polishing of Austen’s works may not be a female writer after all, but a man. Sutherland said that letters between Austen and poet William Gifford suggest that he, at least for some
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Elizabeth Zablatnik feeds her son, Yelko, Thanksgiving dinner that was provided by the Edmond Hope Center and surrounding churches. See more photos on page 5.
THANKSGIVING AT UCO By Garett Fisbeck / Photo Editor
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ore than 1,000 people were fed at 29th annual Edmond Community Thanksgiving dinner that was held in the University Ballrooms on Nov. 25. The dinner, which fed those in the Metro area community in need, provided a meal of turkey, potatoes, vegetables and dessert. “The event went fabulously,” Mike Laska,
director of the Edmond Community Thanksgiving Dinner, said. “We can’t thank UCO enough for letting us use the facility. We look forward to being back next year.” Approximately 1,200 meals were left over after the event. Leftover prepared meals were giving to the Jesus House and non-prepared foods were distributed to Edmond Hope Center, Samaritan House and Meals on Wheels.
Green for Green
GREEN SCHEME NETS STUDENTS GREENBACKS Student, faculty and staff could be looking at $5,000 in grant money to implement a green idea on campus. Campus Green Scene has put together a “green” video contest in which participants make a video and post it on their site for a chance to win grant money to put their idea into action on their college campus. According to campusgreenscene. com, they are looking for the most innovative, impactful and creative submissions. Tim Tillman, Central’s Alternative
Transportation coordinator said, “Have fun with it, be creative…these are your peers that are going to be evaluating it…we want the project to have some merit, but what you’re really doing, is you’re putting forth your most creative ideas.” Tillman recently attended the Creativity World Forum and mentioned that many of the presenters he heard that day are just like the students we have here on campus. A lot of them were young, innovative thinkers. “We have that same level of cre-
ativity all over campus, and your generation tends to be very sustainability oriented, you just think that way, you were raised with it, you were immersed in it, so it’s not a new or evolutionary to your generation,” he said. UCO is known for being a “green” campus, as well as other universities in the state. “We are on the cutting edge, nationally. Every school in the state has something interesting and innovative going on,” he said. Tillman mentioned that Okla-
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PANEL SHINES LIGHT ON SEX
homa State University has an incredible public transit system that they own, and that the University of Oklahoma has great bicycle and pedestrian facilities. One thing that Tillman has helped to change in the ways of UCO and transportation is the CityLink buses that run around Edmond and to Oklahoma City. Before these buses were implemented, students had the option of taking the “Eddie.” Tillman said that the “Eddie” averaged 42 riders per month. Last month, the CityLink buses that just
run the route that serves campus reached 3,000 riders. “The word sustainability means just that…we tend to link it to green initiatives…but we have to, as a society, focus on building things and creating things that can be sustained, that will last,” he said. “We can’t just continue to, as a race…continue to burn through our natural resources without any sort of thought of what’s going to happen 100 years from now, or 500 years from now, and we’re ap-
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PHOTO BY CODY BROMLE Y
By Emily Davis / Contributing Writer
By Cody Bromley / Staff Writer
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DID YOU KNOW? There are more nerve cells in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way.
“Any more questions?” Mallory Varner asked, as she walked up and down the dark aisles of the Pegasus Theatre. On the Thursday before Thanksgiving, the UCO chapter of the National Organization for Women held a panel discussion called “Sex in the Dark.” “We do a panel every semester, and this time we just voted on doing a sex-ed panel because it’s a topic that needs to be discussed,” Varner, senior humanities geography major and the president of N.O.W. at UCO, said. Varner was collecting notecards with questions on them. Audience members who wanted to ask questions could write them on a notecard and have their questions read and answered without being embarrassed or identified. On stage, the only two lights illuminating the auditorium were shining right down on center stage. There sat two health professionals with a table full of prophylactics and pamphlets. The “two amazing sexperts,” as Varner described them, were Cynthia McGough, an eight-year employee of the state health department, and Jean Kriesky, a former employee in the health department STD clinic, as well as a current registered
Panelists Cynthia McGough (left) and Jean Kriesky (right) answered questions about sex at Pegasus Theatre on Nov. 18. The event was organized by the National Organization for Women.
nurse and former graduate of UCO. The questions for the panel addressed myths, mis-educations, and some questions that seemed just for giggles. For example, Kriesky dispelled a myth about the possibility of getting pregnant during “that time of the month.” She said that it is possible for a woman to become pregnant during her period, as women ovulate at different times, and some women can ovulate and grow an egg during their period. A topic that was the center of several questions was anal sex. Both panelists cautioned that the sexual activity has risks. “It’s considered risky behavior,” Kriesky said. The reasoning for the status of risky behavior is that the muscle controlling the sphincter can be-
come weakened over time, resulting in a loss of bowel control or hemorrhoids. A recurring piece of advice given by the panelists was condoms. Both panelists said that condoms are one of the best ways to prevent infection of a sexually transmitted disease. “Birth control pills, spermicides, none of these protect against sexually transmitted diseases,” Kriesky said. A recent and unlikely advocate that came out for that position a little over week ago was Pope Benedict XVI who said that condom use might be acceptable, or at least morally logical, to be used to prevent the spreading of HIV/AIDS. The head of the Catholic Church was not suggesting that the
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