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ABOUT CAMPUS
From Page 2B
Lowenstein said he has encoun-
tered some customers who've been
put back by the concept of the can-
tina.
Common issues, he said, are
people who try to buy alcohol after
2 a.m. or who buy several drinks at
last call only to have them thrown
out by BTB employees at 2:15 a.m.
"At 1:45 a.m., if they want to buy
10 drinks and have 8 of them taken,
that's their prerogative," he said.
Lowenstein said complaints
about the cantina's limited bar
partly stem from people's unfamil-
iarity with tequila. It's a foreign
L - -m
notion for students who associ-
ate the alcohol with Spring Break
blunders and licking salt off their
arms, but top-shelf tequilas are
meant to be sipped and savored.
Tequila has only become a
gourmet alcohol in the last 20
years, when new aging and mixing
techniques brought about a wide
breadth of tequila flavors, Lowen-
stein said.
Two of those tequilas are 1800
Coleccion, priced on the cantina's
menu at $230 for a shot, and Gran
Patron Bordeos, priced at $85 per
shot.
A few customers have tried the
Gran Patron Bordeos, atequilathat were used to age Bordeaux wines,
absorbs flavor from barrels that but the cantina is still waiting on a
bottle of the rare 1800 Coleccion.
tSo a svA e AT7 er O When the order finally comes in,
) FREE C the cantina will be the only res-
taurant in Michigan to offer the
PRACTICE tequila, Lowenstein said.
A distinguished liquor shelf
EST might put the cantina above the
F 6typical college dive, but it hasn't
e igelHa, quite mastered the Dominick's-
LSAT:10O0AM-AUDA --
GMAT : A -AUD C
**AiSACCESSIBILITY
From Page 4B
the accessibility of campus, the
disability-rights discussion stalls
when it comes to any sort of bot-
tom-up movement. Students are
especially uninterested and often
times ignorant on even the most
basic disability issues or courte-
sies.
"People don't know a lot about
what it means to be a wheelchair
user," said Rackham graduate
so that every row, column student Jolene Pemberton, who
ins the igits 1 jto9. is a wheelchair user.
t di tO 9.i Although there are fledgling
signs of improvement in student
g or math involved, groups, there is concern that
the attention span of groups on
k dcampus is too short to affect any
5 change.
Pemberton said that the Uni-
versity's Paratransit service,
6 t which offers free door-to-door
transportation for students, fac-
ulty or staff with disabilities, has
"been great," that the office of
Services for Students with Dis-
abilities was very helpful when
she first arrived on campus and
that most of the buildings have
9 4 7 accessibility. But other students,
she said, are often unsure of how
15 8 to act around her.
Since Pemberton is a wheel-
113 5 chair user she needs the acces-
sible stall when using the
6 9 bathroom. But students who
have taken the stall in front of
6 1 7 her have at times made her wait
as long as 10 minutes. Similarly,
students love to take the elevator,
which is not a problem unless she
is in an older building with only
R %1,15 Eli.
Ve
slip g
qk
--- - --- - -------
QUOTES OF THE WEEK
"Um, Medved--Medvedova,
whatever."
- HILLARY CLINTON, when asked by Tim
Russert of NBC News, after her Feb. 25 debate
with Barack Obama in Cleveland, to name
Vladimir Putin's probable successor to the pres-
idency of Russia. Dmitri A. Medvedev won the
presidency on Sunday in a landslide victory.
"No one likes them."
"It's not like it's supposed
to mean anything. It's
not like I was making out
with him or something."
- CHELSEA BRANHAM, a 14-year-old student
at Shepherd Junior High School in Mesa, Ariz.,
challenging the school's policy that bans hugs
longer than two seconds. The school has always
had a "no-hugging" rule, but officials recently
began cracking down in response to complaints
about hugging and kissing in school hallways
style dine and drink experience.
LSA sophomore Kelsey Bensch
regrets taking her mother there
for lunch a few weeks ago.
* "There was no one there, but
the music was disproportionately
loud. And bad," Bensch said.
She said the blaring 90's pop
that assaulted her and her mother
made her think the cantina doesn't
easily transition from night to day.
one elevator that students over-
crowd, forcing her to wait. While
these are just inconveniences, they
reflect students' obliviousness to
the needs of their peers with dis-
abilities.
Teddy Dorsette, who is a deaf
student and the co-chair of the
Michigan Student Assembly's Dis-
abilities Committee, expressed
similar concerns.
"People have the misconception
that we can understand exactly
everything that is going on," he
said.
There is a simple solution, he
said: Include everyone in a cohe-
sive conversation.
After MSA's president resigned
in disgrace in December follow-
ing revelations that he had created
a Facebook group mocking a rep-
resentative and making reference
to his Aspberger's syndrome, the
assembly re-formed its disabilities
committee. The committee had
been inactive.
Undoubtedly, the resurrection
of the MSA Disabilities Commit-
tee suggests the potential to turn
the negative attention into posi-
tive action. Dorsette and co-chair
Elson Lu seem committed to the
task at hand. They also recog-
nize that focusing on short-term
projects and education, instead
of pledging to make campus fully
accessible overnight, is a wiser
strategy.
Lu also told a story that under-
scores the personal rewards work-
ing for progress on disabilities
issues offers. He recalled the time
when he was in an upper-level
engineering class at the Univer-
sity of Arizona and his professor
"It's in limbo between being a
restaurant and a bar," she said.
Bensch is a fan of the bar aspect,
though. As a repeatpatron, she said
she enjoys the cantina's laidback
atmosphere and ample seating.
"The biggest appeal is I can go
there and just sit and talk and not
feel I have to be grinding up on
someone," she said.
-JESSICA VOSGERCHIAN
asked him to be a volunteer note-
taker for another student. He said
he was inspired by "the fact that it
takes so little to help out a student
so much."
Bernard points out some-
thing often overlooked by people
without disabilities: Everyone
benefits from these resources.
No matter if you are riding a
bike, walking a stroller or roll-
ing a wheelchair, more curbcuts
- the places where the sidewalk
slants down into the street,
forming a ramp - benefit every-
one. Elevators benefit everyone.
Widescreen computer monitors
benefit everyone.
"Every single one of us could be
that person tomorrow," said Ber-
nard. "That is a difficult mirror in
which to look."
Rackham student Alison
Whyte, who is involved with a
School of Social Work student
affairs task force on disabilities,
said many student organizations
don't have the patience to fully
research the issues before trying
to act.
"People don't want to be
involved," she said. "They want to
do something now."
on such an issue, which requires
a lot of background research, it's
tough to keep people's attention
because not everyone is on the
same page when it comes to their
views of disabilities.
While disability concerns
are still in our campus's collec-
tive memory - even if the stories
sparking the thought were nega-
tive stories - we must seize this
opportunity to make this the cam-
pus we want it to be.
TALKING
POINTS
Three things you can talk about this week:
1. Public genital-patting in Italy
2. White House aides and their plagiarism
3. Symphonic Diplomacy
And three things you can't:
1. Prince Harry's stint in
Afghanistan
2. The George W. Bush
Presidential library
3. Spring Break tans
- MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, president of Iran, on Americans serving in the coalition forces
in Iraq. The comment came at the conclusion of Ahmadinejad's two-day trip to Iraq, during which
he assailed the United States and lauded his country's stronger relations with Iraq
YOUTUBE
VIDEO OF
THE WEEK
T-shirt cop threatens
skaters with death
If the last couple years have taught
police anything, it's to avoid acts of
brutality when young people with cell
phone cameras are around.
First, in late 2006, campus police
officers at UCLA repeatedly tasered
a student after he refused to leave a
library. Then, about a year later, a stu-
dent at the University of Florida was
tasered after he disrupted a speech by
John Kerry in a campus auditorium.
But Officer Salvatore Rivieri of the
Baltimore Police Department appar-
ently didn't learn his lesson. He was
suspended last month after police saw
a YouTube video of him roughing up
a young skateboarder in Baltimore's
Inner Harbor.
After asking a group of teens to stop
skating, Rivieri gets mad when one of
them calls him "man" and "dude." He
grabs the boy by the neck and throws
him to the ground.
"I'm not 'man,' I'm not 'dude.' I am
Officer Rivieri," he says. "The sooner
you learn that, the longer you're going
to live in this world."
Rivieri must have realized what
could happen to him. At the end of the
video, he asks if he was being record-
ed, and the video ends abruptly.
"You gotthat camera on? Because if
I find myself on -" YouTube. Exactly.
- GABE NELSON
See this and other
YouTube videos of the week at
youtube.com/user/michigandaily
BY THE NUMBERS
Increase in the number of prisoners in the U.S. over the past year
Total number of prisoners in the U.S.
Average cost, in dollars, to incarcerate a prisoner in the U.S. in 2005
Source: Pew Center on the States
THEME PARTY SUGGESTION
Melodic group healing - Last week, the New York
Philharmonic played a concert in Pyongyang in what
many people saw as a thawing of relations between
the U.S. and North Korea. Continuing in this tra-
dition, you should get all your musically-inclined
friends together to mediate any long-standing dis-
putes within the group. Fights over girls, unreturned
calls, cruel gossiping - it all can be solved with
orchestral flourish. Let the overtures begin.
Throwing this party? Let us know. TheStatement@umich.edu
STUDY OF THE WEEK
American teens ignorant of history and literature
Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked general ques-
tions about literature and history could answer them correctly, accord-
ing to a study released by a research group called Common Core.
In conducting the study, researchers contacted 1,200 17-year-olds by
phone in January, asking them 33 multiple-choice questions that were
taken from a test given by the federal government in 1986.
The survey found that fewer than half the students knew when the
Civil War occurred, and one-quarter thought Christopher Columbus
made his journey to the New World after 1750. In addition, only a quar-
ter of students could identify Adolf Hitler as Germany's chancellor dur-
ing the Second World War.
on the literature section, only four out of 10 students could identify
the name of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" after hearing a brief sum-
mary of it. But about 8 in 10 students correctly chose the title of Harper
Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" after hearingthe story's premise.
- BRIAN TENGEL