Dear Editor:
Students living on the south side of campus share something in common besides the location: the agony of fire alarms. If one were to look at South Side long enough, expect to see students drudging out in the cold at four in the morning, clothed only in pajamas. Fire alarms can happen at any time. They can happen twice during one night. And they happen because students can't cook.
"The alarms going off are typically a result of students not cooking properly or being neglectful," said Director of Housing and Dining Julie Weber.
Barring the question of why students are cooking at four in the morning anyway, is it just really that hard to watch your popcorn while it pops? There's a sign in the lounge of every floor saying, "Please do not leave stoves/microwaves unattended." Yet apparently the signs must have been written in Swahali because no one has been observing them.
Besides being generally annoying, multiple fire alarms have the worse effect of desensitizing students to them. I witnessed two students not evacuating the building because they had to get their iPods first to jam to some music during the wait. According to Krisitine Miller, a junior and RA of 6-South in Letts, students have told her they have accidentally slept through the fire alarms. Don't think that you will get mercy when explaining a fire alarm to your professor either.
"Students are still held academically responsible," said Weber. As to why fire alarms go off in south side and not north, who knows? Letts suffered from a power outage and a fire alarm in the same day. Maybe the "L" in Letts really stands for "lucky us."
So let's just forget posting rules about fire safety everywhere, AU should be offering cooking safety courses instead. Here's what it could teach: Remove stickers from the bottom of frying pans before you use them. Don't put metal objects in a microwave. Forget the old adage that a watched pot never boils: park your butt down in a chair and watch it. Friends don't let friends leave their cooking unattended. I'd have more to say but right now I'm locked out of my room waiting on another fire alarm.
Khai Ha Freshman, SOC Eagle Contributing Writer
Dear Editor:
My dad sent me another stupid lowbrow e-mail bashing Kerry. I fear he has become a cog in the machine. Neither of the candidates should be president. One is vain enough to have botox injections and bows to political pressure as if it was a burning bush. The other is unable to respond to complex questions without falling back on stagy political rhetoric that does not succeed in answering the interrogatives. Where the hell are today's Jefferson, Lincoln, Madison, Monroe, Truman, the Roosevelts or George Washington? I want a leader whose extemporaneous speech is eloquent and rich with ideas, who leads by example not for political reasons but because that's who he is, and who understands the true complexity of the current American situation from exposure to a multitude of views and takes those in and comes up with his own answers. The jokes are tired, mean, pointless. How about some serious debate of real issues? Who is going to get the mentally ill homeless off the streets and into caring environments? Who is going to have the established moral high ground to bring other nations into line without dropping TNT on scattered third world villages, to speak and be heard and understood in no uncertain terms to have the best interests of the entire human race at heart? The jokes don't make me laugh; they depress me, because you see how thinly the debate has run. Show me the thickness of the blood of one of these two men, the sweat from his brow, the contemplative measure of his eyes when he looks at a problem, and I will vote for him. Send out the clowns.
Charles Beckwith Second-year graduate student MFA program for Film and Electronic Media
