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Wednesday, December 8 - .
QUOTES OF THE WEEK
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ABOUT CAMPUS
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN OQUIST
I IT if - I1 ! L! L IMMEMEM
He was bum-rushed by
200 people. They took the
doors off the hinges."
- JIMMY OVERBY, an employee at a Wal-
Mart in Long Island, describing the stampede
of shoppers that killed one ofhis coworkers on
"Black Friday." In the same rush, a woman mis-
carried her child because of the pressure
the crowds exerted on her
"I just want to comment
on how it's become like a
common thing in the NHL
for guys to fall in love with
my sloppy seconds."
- SEAN AVERY, a player for the NHLs Dallas
Stars, referring to ex-girlfriends who are now dating
other NHL players, actresses Elisha Cuthbert and
Rachel Hunter. Avery has been suspended for the
comment, which he gave after the soliciting the
attention of a news camera after practice
The X-rated Daily
Donkey punching, pizza
delivery sex and Google
Like many companies with a
stake in online revenue, The Michi-
gan Daily turned to Google Ana-
lytics to see what keywords bring
search engine users to our website.
A lot of the results from the last
semester are predictable - "sam
mcguffie," "michiganvs toledo" and
variations of "michigan daily" dom-
inate our top ten keywords.
But further down the list, just
a little lower than a certain Daily
staff writer who must have Googled
himself hourlyto land the 14th spot,
things get decidedly more X-rated.
It starts with the 20th keyword,
"playboy magazine," which makes
some sense, because we covered the
audition for Playboy's Girls of the
Big 10 issue just a few months ago.
But it's a little suspicious that the
average time that people who used
this search term spent on michigan-
daily.com was seven seconds.
Something tells us these viewers
didn't care to read what School of
Nursing senior Renee Alison had to
say about modeling for the issue.
The same can be said for people
searching for "naked run" (number
26) and "naked mile run" (number
73). These viewers managed to stick
around the site a little longer, aver-
aging about half a minute, but ulti-
mately they left years of the Daily's
Naked Mile coverage disappointed.
It's true - when we wrote about the
demise of the campus tradition in
2002 we didn'tinclude nude photos.
We apologize.
Of course, Playboy and the Naked
Mile are relatively innocent in the
greater scope of dirty searches. We
might even feel bad for all the soft-
core pleasure seekers our website
has misled. That is, we would if it
wasn't for all the really nasty stuff
that leads people to our site.
At number 32 on the Daily's key-
words list is"18 sex," and variations
of searches for sex and 18-year-olds
has attracted 382 visits to the web-
site. Trying to find some hot barely-
legal action, these errant onanists
followed links to articles like "Sur-
vey links drugs to sex toys."
Searches using the words
"babies" and "porn" - including
"angelina jolie babies porn," "hav-
ing babies porn" and "fiery babies
porn" - accounted for 130 visits.
People searching for vagina cos-
tumes visited the site 163 times.
Searches containing "donkey punch
sex" led to 252 visits, while combi-
nations of "pizza," "delivery" and
"sex" garnered 89 visits.
Foiled in their quests for flesh,
these viewers consistently fled from
our site in three seconds or less. I
won't conjecture why they made
the mistake of following a link to a
Daily page in the first place, except
to say that reading probably wasn't
their priority at the time.
The one exception to the click-
and-run rule were two visits
brought by the search "making a
vagina costume" that lasted for an
average time of almost seven min-
utes. These visitors or visitor must
have been intrigued by our coverage
of the suspension of a student who
wore a homemade vagina costume
to Community High School.
To be fair, there are reasons why
links to our articles appear relative-
ly high up in the Google results for
some of these search terms.
Searching for "pizza delivery
sex," a Daily article appears as the
third result. The 2002 article -
"Sex, drugs and pizza: A night with
a pizza delivery guy" - details a
Daily writer's ride-along with a
local deliveryman. There is no sex
in the article, and no drugs eithers.
Daily editors just have a penchant
for using cheap pop culture refer-
ences in headlines. For this we owe
pizza delivery fetishists an apology.
A similar situation occurs for the
Google search "donkey punch sex,"
which lists michigandaily.com as
the seventh result. Donkey punch-
ing is a lewd sexual act that won't be
described in these pages, but Don-
key Punch was also a ska band that
played in Ann Arbor in the 1990s.
The trick is that back in the days of
the annual joke issue, the Daily ran
a fake article about Donkey Punch
returning to the campus scene with
a sex video. Donkey + punch + sex +
video = pissed off perverts.
It's less clear what exactly
brought the baby porn pedophiles
to our pages, but the Daily's own
online search does offer 15 results
for the words "babies" and "porn."
The evident explanation is that
"baby" is common in album and
song titles and our Arts editors are
endlessly amused by pornjokes.
Many of the articles that attract
sexual deviants were published in
the early 2000s. Daily alumni might
be proud to know their articles are
getting hits after all these years,
even if their naivet6 about Google
search terms helped to attract view-
ers for the wrong reasons.
On the other hand, maybe they
were on to something. As the with-
ering publications industry has
shown, the only way to make money
online is to offer something X-rated.
Maybe the Daily should go hard-
core. Or maybe we'll just start lit-
tering our articles with dirty words
to increase Internet traffic.
Hand job. Boobs. Spanking. Rake.
Sticky. Gorillas. This article should
attract some dirty-minded Google
users. And when it does, I hope
some of them glean what it is about.
That's right. We know you're out
there, we know what you're think-
ing and we're disgusted. For shame,
perverts. For shame!
-JESSICA VOSGERCHIAN
An international
Thanksgiving
The holiday for students
who never dressed aspil-
grims
A certain group of people
remained on campus after the
Thanksgiving exodus: the Univer-
sity's sizeable body of international
students.
When most students went back
to their hometowns last week to
indulge in food, beverages and the
shopping frenzy of Black Friday,
their foreign peers remained on the
nearly abandoned campus over the
holiday.
The University arranged a
Thanksgiving lunch at the Hill
Dining Center Thursday to cater to
those who stayed in Ann Arbor. But.
for many of the almost 300 people
who attended the meal, Thanks-
giving was a peculiar event. While
grasping that Thanksgiving is a
major part of American culture,
international students often don't
know or don't understand the tra-
dition's back story of pilgrims and
Native Americans.
Ujin Kim, a South Korean gradu-
ate student, wasn't aware of the
story of the pilgrims at the first
Thanksgiving, but knew that the
holiday had significance.
"I really think Thanksgiving cel-
ebration is a major sort of an element
of American culture," Kim said.
Kim wasn't all that impressed by
the lunch, saying the food - which
included -traditional roast turkey
- was only "slightly better" than
usual. The dinner that some class-
mates invited him to last year was
much better. Kim said it had been
a "supposedly typical Thanksgiv-
ing party, dinner. Lots of food, some
drinking, some game, playing cards.
A lot of talking."
Acoupleoftablesdown,Universi-
ty of Wisconsin freshman Hanning
Bi was eating with LSA freshman
Zhengyao Wang. Bi said she was in
Ann Arbor to visit her friend over
Thanksgiving. Bi and Wang were
classmates back in their hometown
of Suzhou, China.
Wang said he eats atthe Hill Din-
ing Center "almost every day" and
that he found the food "a little bit
better than usual."
Neither Wang nor Bi seemed
particularly troubled by the fact
that their American classmates had
abandoned campus.
"Thanksgiving is not part of our
culture so we don't think it really
matters," Bi said.
Theplannersbehind the Thanks-
giving lunch knew to balance the
Thanksgiving fare with items to
please diners who hadn't grown
up celebrating the holiday - along
roast turkey and gravy sided the
dining hall served food like waffles
and spring rolls. Although the fea-
tured entrees had a more festive
style than usual, an outside observ-
er would probably have missed the
fact that the lunch took place on one
of America's most important holi-
days.
LSA sophomore Suny Kim and
Engineering sophomore Meejung
Kim, both from Korea, said they
knew what to expect of Thanksgiv-
ing this year.
Suny Kim had first encountered
the tradition through her church.
"I've had church dinner, they
served all the traditional Thanks-
giving food there," she said.
Meejung Kim said she did not
really care about the tradition in it
self.
"I just consider it a little break,"
she said.
The deserted campus and down-
town's closed shops can be annoy-
ing for people who have no reason
to care about Thanksgiving.
"Yeah, it is kind of boring, I
guess," Meejung said.
LSA junior Daniel Judianto, from
Indonesia, met up with his friend
and countrywoman Fransisca Heri-
yanto, a junior at Berkeley, to look
up recipes for dinner on the com-
puters outside the dining area.
See ABOUT CAMPUS, Page 7B
TALKING
POINTS
Three things you can talk about this week:
1. Chaos in Mumbai
2. Robert Gates
3. Nicolas Sarkozy voodoo dolls
And three things you can't:
1. Chaos at Walmart
2. How Bob Nardelli travels
3. Nuclear war
"It's a long ride back to Iowa."
- GREG HESTNESS, police chief at the University of Minnesota, explaining the embarrassment of
an Iowa couple he caught having sex in a handicapped bathroom stall during the Minnesota-Iowa
football game in Minnesota. The woman later said that she didn't know the man
and that she is married with three children
YOUTU BE
VIDEO OF
THE WEEK
A movie-spoiling
marathon
Warning: Don't watch this video
if you're planning to rent a movie
anytime soon.
In the video, the Fine brothers
accomplish an impressive, if incon-
siderate, task: in the course of five
minutes, they spoil the endings of
100 movies.
With an audible "tic-tock" in
the background and a timer on the
screen, the brothers begin their
ambitious movie-ruining odyssey.
Alternating turns to unleash spoil-
ers, they flippantly cycle through
movies one after another, occasion-
ally summing up an entire movie
with a brief phrase like "Jack Dies,"
as is the case in their rendering of
"Titanic."
In "Castaway," Tom Hanks leaves
the island. In "The Italian Job,"
they all get away with it, as they
do in "Ocean's Eleven." In every
"Mighty Ducks" movie, the Ducks
win. In "Shawshank Redemption,"
Tim Robbins escapes from jail.
The brothers also summarize
most of the "Rocky" movies with
either "Rocky wins a fight," or
"Rocky loses a fight."
Are the Fine brothers reducing
some great movies to a few words?
Yes. Is it entertaining? Yes.
-BRIAN TENGEL
See this and other
YouTube videos of the week at
,, tT-o, nmr.o/mrhan . ril,
THEME PARTY SUGGESTION
Holiday greetings - After a seemingly eternal
wait, 'tis finally the season. Thanksgiving is over,
which means your holiday decorations are no longer
premature. Before finals temporarily suspend your
wintry cheer, get some friends and celebrate. Dust
off those candles and holiday sweaters, hang those
multicolored lights and drink some eggnog, Watch
the falling snow with a warm stomach and a hazy
head. Is there any better way to convince yourself
that you'll pass Organic Chemistry?
Throwing this party? Let us know. TheStatement@umich.edu
BY THE NUMBERS
- 7
ILLUSTRATION BY LAURA GARAVOGLIA
)
Amount, in dollars, the Federal Reserve and Treasury provisioned last
week for new lending programs to revive the economy
Amount, in dollars, Congress provisioned in September for the
Treasury's bailout plan
Amount, in dollars, the government has assumed in direct and
indirect financial holdings in the past year. This amounts to half
the size of the country's entire economy.
Source: The New York Times
STUDY OF THE WEEK
Poor minority students have unqualified teachers
Children who are poor and minorities are twice as likely as other stu-
dents to have unqualified teachers who don't understand their subject,
accordingto a report recently released by Education Trust, an advocacy
group for children.
Inthe study, the researchers examined two sets of data from the Edu-
cation Department, reports from state officials and a survey of teachers.
In particular, the researchers focused on teachers who didn't complete
an academic major or official certification for the subject they teach.
In impoverished schools, two out of five math classes are taught by
instructors without a college degree or state certification in math, the
researchers concluded. In addition, they found that in schools with a
majority of black or Latino students, about one out of three classes are
taught by an instructor who also lacks these qualifications.
This problemis particularly severe for childreningrades fifth through
eighth, the researchers found.
- BRIAN TENGEL