i i i S Th '. ' . 3 - . 6O*yDecmbr , 00 0 0 0 Wednesday, December 8 - . QUOTES OF THE WEEK .'m :1i it 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