.: V V V Between the She( Coupling Up s Sex Colurn UHS to practice setting up emergei o infiel, irctr f Uivrs SBy Do ug s winter blows nearer,'people tend to Acouple up. Clubs actually stay with- in their legal capacities and fewer drunks roam the streets. Our friends mys- - " teriously stay in on the weekends, declaring that "it's just too cold to go out." Often they are caught with newfound cuddle-buddies. This phenomenon, I believe, is due to the painfully frigid temperatures and the fes- tivities of winter holidays, both of which are easier to endure with an extra someone. Therefore, if you catch yourself waking up next to different potentials each morning, now is the time to select that one person to consistently keep you warm - and inside the house - for the new semester. The first step to coupling up is seduc- tion. After you have chosen the prospect who offers the best sex, body, personality and sense of humor, you have got to put it on him or her. Regardless of whether you have already slept together, you must plan for one satisfactory night (or day) of alone time. This requires a little preparation. First, propose a date in which you prom- ise an expert massage and a gourmet meal. Hopefully you won't make it to the meal, so don't put too much effort into the food. When Mr. Lucky arrives, have some Usher in the mix; think "Seduction" or "Dot Com." Slowly take off all his superfluous garments and begin a slippery massage complete with kissing, licking, nibbling and sucking (on fingers of course!). Also, don't forget the ears, neck, back and chest areas; toying with the bellybutton is an excellent precursor to hitting the money spot. Once you have made your prey com- pletely relaxed, it is time to go in for the kill. The key to'leaving him or her aston- ished and satisfied is to know (I mean really know) what you are doing. Research or ask around for some exciting new posi- tions, and don't get too hung up on just one. Keep the lovin' reasonably rough, and remember to stay in control; authority can be established by firmly commanding what to do next and by explicitly instruct- ing how to do it. This is your chance to let the inner dominatrix peek out. But don't be too intimidating - leave the leather, whips and chains in the closet. Instead, keep Mr. Lucky encouraged (and unalarmed) by precisely relating your bodily sensation and frequently inquiring about his. Once both of your pinnacle moans have occurred - hopefully at the same time - take a short, energizing nap; you both him recall the wondrous memories of the should need it. Provide a small snack when seduction phase, and this one should be in he wakes up, and the first step to couple- the bag (or in the bed). dom is complete! However, after you have Though you may feel like you have given Mr. Lucky the best nookie in his just won a three-hour game of Monop- recent memory, it is now your obligation oly against a competitive MBA student, to keep him from going to anyone else for you must bear in mind that the situation it. If he is a good boy, he should already is no longer just a game. When you have be yours for the taking. But, if he is a true that special number one in your life, you playboy, it can be quite tricky. Here is have to keep things. fresh in the romance where my friend's trusty philosophy, the department to make it last. Stock up on Golden Dick Theory, comes into play. toys, or even spare the expense by using The playboy is usually the man with household objects such as cameras, ties, multiple women vying for his attention and scarves, showers and washing machines. his golden member. If this sounds anything Get creative and bring a chunk of ice from like Mr. Lucky, there is one way to make outside into the bedroom. Maybe it's final- him change his promiscuous ways. After ly that time to be frisky and risky in the you put it on him in the seduction stage, Grad when no one is looking. Once you you have to stop calling him and avoid all have taken the initiative to capture your his phone calls. You must be that one in a target, always remember to talk dirty, stay million who breaks it off with him. Such innovative and to think of new settings. a smack to his ego will leave him bewil- If you continue to make your own rules dered, and he will pursue you relentlessly in the bedroom, Mr. Lucky could end up out of mere confusion. Though this may being much more to you than just Mr. Sec- sound like a paradox, the Golden Dick ond Semester. Theory always works like magic. After he comes crawling back, begging for your Look for Brooke around campus. She'll attention, simply give that ultimatum: the be the one wearing the mistletoe hat. She groupies or you - no exceptions. Help can be reached at basnyder@umich.edu. Brave New World i;he Michigan Daily: What do you think University Health Services can improve on? Rob Winfield: We have three things we try to do. One is direct patient care and I think we can do :ette at making the experience of coming to the health center easier. I think we can improve our access and improve our wait in the waiting room and improve the efficiency of the service. I think there's always more to do in terms of improv- ing quality. As long as I've been in medicine, I've seen increasing focus in improv- ing quality and safety and we're a part of that. It's not easy to change things that are just part of the sys- tem, but we're working on that. The third area that's important is the issue of campus preparation for things like pandemic flu or avian flu or being prepared for other major illnesses or outbreaks and we're working on that con- tinuously. I think we're one of the universities that's ahead of the curve. TMD: Right now, what do you do to handle an outbreak? BW: Outbreaks are handled according to a variety of vari- ables. One is how contagious is it? How lethal is it? You have to adjust your response to exactly what is going on. We had a case of meningitis that we knew what not terribly contagious, we had to treat the people that were close contacts and hope there were no secondary cases. December 21, we are having a practice drill to set up an emergency hospital that would be used for over- flow of patients if the capacity of the local hospitals was succeeded. That will be at Palmer Commons and it could accommodate 250 beds and the health service and the health sys- tem are working on that. TMD: How closely do you work with the University hospitals? BW: We have a great partnership. Most of our patients who are sick get admitted to the medical center or go to the emergency room if it exceeds our ability. We work closely togeth- er in the areas of psychiatry, work closely together in the issue of infec- tious diseases. I meet at least once a month with an infectious disease specialist and if I have a problem, I'm immediately on the phone with these folks. But we're a separate unit. I report to the Dean of Students and the Division of Student Affairs. The health system reports to Dr. Kelch, who is the executive vice president of medical affairs. TMD: How do you get your fund- ing? BW: Our funding comes from two main sources. Two-thirds of our money comes from student fees and one-third comes from our fee for service activities, which includes M- Care patients and other faculty and staff that come to us and also our pharmacy revenues and a few other fee-for-service things. We've done some studies to be sure that work we do for faculty and staff actually brings in enough money to subsi- dize the cost of the health service so it's slightly reducing the student fee expense by bringing in enough money to pay for some of our opera- tions. TMD: Are all the doctors at UHS fully licensed and fully certified? BW: All the primary care physi- cians are board certified either in internal medicine or family medi- cine and the nurse practitioners and PAs are certified and licensed. A person has to have one year of internship or residency after medi- cal school to become licensed and they have to pass- an exam. We require more than that. We require that you have additional training so you can pass specialty board certi- fication. TMD: Do you think there's a per- ception that UHS doctors aren't as good as normal doctors? BW: We did a study in 2000 on that and we asked the question about - and this was 2500 students with a 73 percent response rate - and we asked them to make a grade point for their private family doctors and their experience with health service providers and each group got a grade point of 3.42. The data would say we are identically ranked to private practice. I know, though, that students who have a bad expe- rience talk about it a lot and people do have bad experiences. It's inevi- table. Students network a lot, so if you had a good experience - if you A pple - C, A pple - V I Tech Column By Forest Casey X f you were brave enough to venture out into the abyss of mail-in rebates .. and early-bird specials that sur- rounds our true national holiday of The Day After Thanksgiving, I hope you lingered around the electronics section long enough to observe the throng of young kids herding around the XBox 360 display. In the past few years, the child's plea of, "Mommy, can we go look at the toys?" has transformed into "Mommy, can I stay and play games?" Observing the habits of grade schoolers playing video games, I feel like an anthro- pologist stumbling upon an uncharted vil- lage. They fidget and pace until it is their turn, shout advice like their fathers on foot- ball Sunday, all of them gleefully oblivious to the signs reading "Due to product short- ages, XBox 360s are temporarily unavail- able". And all of them, without exception, for the hour that I sat and watched them on this Black Friday, were unmuteable about graphics. Not everyone is as enthused. The same sort of anthropological observation can be done on Internet message boards, though I don't recommend it - it is far less cute than observing kids. If you aren't careful, post- ing on an Internet forum witha message as innocent as, "I'm impressed by, the graphics in this game," is enough to get your head on a spear. There's a growing contingent among oth- erwise "normal" video game fanatics who are far too superior to enjoy games for their graphics. They call themselves New Media Scholars, which means (I guess) that they are very scholarly whilst playing video games and reading blogs. And, although this is a slight generalization, NMSs tend to be pro-Nintendo and fervently opposed to liking games because of their graphics. At first, I regarded these new scholars as a bit of a cute oddity. But they cease to be odd and kitschy when you actually express opinions about games. Do you enjoy beating your friends at "Madden," beating pedestrians up in "Grand Theft Auto" or beating down your room- mates at "Halo?" Well, too bad: Accord- ing to NMSs, these games are all plebeian and immature, lacking in character devel- opment, organic control schemes and any number of a new lexicon of buzzwords born from a need to describe video games. The New Scholars all seem to agree: the best games have already been made - the new games serve up the same plate of leftover genre conventions year after year with only minor graphical improvements and no drive for true innovation. These guys are snobs, right? Though it seems as if I'm confessing a crime, I do like things that are aesthetically pleasing. I don't like playing "Ocarina of Time" because it's just not as beautiful as "Windwalker." But am I that far off? Would NMSs rather date a 4 or 5 with a perfect personality or the same personality in an 8 or 9? And then it hit me. Twice, actually. Over the break, I grew despondent and disillu- sioned about the whole business of video games. Something my dad once said carne back to haunt me. We were at the store rent- ing a game for the weekend and Dad made a comment about there only being three kinds of video games: racing, shooting or adventure. If you were lucky, Dad said, you would get an adventurous shooting game. I couldn't argue with him, but, at least back in grade school, I didn't care: I liked those genres, and they were enough for me. But that was years ago. Since. then, I've collected hundreds of coins, perhaps for some greedy absentee father, sought out dozens of keys for doors I didn't want to open and waded through the River Styx of endless sewer, fire and ice levels. I've raced and I've shot and I've adventured, and I'm bloody sick of it. The second hit was far more pleasant: It was the hit of a bongo drum. You see, Nintendo's "Donkey Kong Jungle Beat" is, from looking only at the screen, a typical platformer with no graphical wizardry to speak of where you guide your ape protago- nist through the jungle collecting bananas, or 'beats.' The clever innovation is that your mode of input isn't a regular controller, it's a pair of bongos. How does it work? Hitting the left or right bongo makes DK run either left or right, clapping collects bananas. This sounds scandalous at first - "What, t-they took my controller away?" but it's fresh enough to return anyone who has abandoned video games safely back to the flock. And you know what, the Scholars were right - after an hour, I didn't care about graphics. After four, I longed for my own set of drums. If changing an ancient gameplay dynamic is as simple as picking up a set of bongos, just imagine when the (Nintendo) Revolution hits. I earnestly hope that an anthropological study of next year's Black Friday shows the kids and the Scholars next to an empty XBox 360 booth, all of them wowed by true innovation instead of shiny graphics. Forest now is not upset he didn't pick up an XBox last week. He can be reached at fcasey@umich.edu. ALI OLSEN/Daily 10B - The Michigan Daily - Thursday, December 1, 2005 The Michigan Daily -