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Wednesday, 2009- The Michigan Dail

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ABOUT CAMPUS

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QUOTES OF THE WEEK
Are you ready to get on
the Purim party bus?"
- SAADYA NOTIK, a 25-year-old rabbi from
the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, shouting to
women from Mount Holyoke College to join
in a mobile celebration of the Jewish holiday
Purim. In an effort to get students involved in
the celebration, Notik and other rabbis drove
to five Massachusetts colleges on a bus that
featured costumes, food and dancing

"I used an iron bar about
that long and about as thick
as my big toe."
- HIM HUY, a 53-year-old Cambodian man on
trial for his role in the Khmer Rouge killings from
1975 to 1979, explaining his duties as a guard
and executioner at the Tuol Sleng Torture facility
in Cambodia. Under the threat of death, he was
forced to swing an iron bar at the back of kneeling
prisoners' heads, prompting them to fall forward
dead into the mass graves


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ILL..TRATION. BY JOHN O.UIT

I drunk I'm not
swear, Proseffor
Buzzed in class: a time-
honored St. Pat's tradition
Almost every year, there is a push
to move the celebration of St. Pat-
rick's Day to the weekend, eliminat-
ing the inherent conflict between
"workday" and "drunk all day".
Last year, the Irish Catholic
Church switched the date of St. Pat-
rick's Day to Saturday, March 15 so
that the national saint day wouldn't
interfere with the first day of Holy
Week. The injunction manifested
on campus as two separate, equally
riotous holidays.
It goes to show that you can't
move St. Patrick's Day - for many
students, the Saturday before a
weekday St. Pat's is only St. Practice
Day.
This, of course, leads to the issue
of how to treat the school day. Some
students just decide to blow off
class. But others think, why take
an absence just for being a little
sauced? And besides, that pitcher of
green beer from Charlie's might be
just what they need to finally pon-
tificate their thoughts in discussion.
It's perhaps not the best idea, but
evidently a popular one.
Business school senior Brandon,
who asked that only his first name
be used, said that he and his friends
would probably hit the bars around
8 a.m.this Tuesday and thensplitup
to P- n eac .HPaid ~anin. rdrunk

to class hasbeen an annual tradition
that started his first year on cam-
pus.
"It was a Friday," Brandon said of
St. Patrick's Day his freshman year.
"Half the class was drunk. I mean
they were wearingbeads, they were
wearing St. Patrick's Day stuff. You
could just tell when someone was
drunk. They weren't sober - I'll tell
you that much. Teachers expect it,
though, so it's not that big a deal."
Whether lecturers expect it or
not is questionable. Most instruc-
tors interviewed for this article said
that they never notice a difference in
their students or that all they notice
is a dip in attendance.
But an LSA lecturer, who asked
for anonymity because he is up for
review, had an experience on St.
Patrick's Day two years ago that he
couldn't ignore. One student in his
8:30 a.m. American Culture seminar
drunk dialed him - duringthe class
- and told him to bring the other
students to Ashley's to meet her.
Weekday St. Patrick's Day cel-
ebrations are generally more dis-
creetthan theirboisterous weekend
counterparts. And considering
some of last Saturday's St. Practice
Day festivities, that's sure to be the
case last year.
Anyone who walked past many
of the University's fraternity hous-
es on Saturday likely saw the entire
brotherhood, along with their many
friends, keeping the green-adorned
pseudo-holiday in full throttle
- like Chi Psi, which roasted a
luo-nmind nip ;+n ts nA 'c frn+t

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TALKING
POINTS
Three things you can talk about this week:
1. American International Group
2. Negotiations with the Taliban
3. The Forbes drug lord

"He was almost speaking metaphorically."
- CLIFFORD RUSSELL, a spokesman for Detroit mayoral candidate Dave Bing, defending Bing's
recent admission that he lied about having attained an MBA. Russell said that Bing felt as if he had
earned the degree based on his knowledge of business and the "hard knocks" he has endured

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And three things you can't:
1. Earmarks
2. Twitter-esque Facebook
3. "American Idol" being fixed

YOUTUBE
VIDEO OF
THE WEEK
Creative dissent
With nearly 1.4 million viewers
and a story about it on the front page
of The New York Times, this video
about the mythical grass-mud horse
in China has made some big waves.
With a joyful chorus of children
singing in the background, the video
tells the seemingly innocuous story
of the grass-mud horses, which
resemble alpacas, and their quest to
defend their grassland from the dan-
gerous river crabs. The grass-mud
horses eventually triumph and their
grassland is saved from destruction.
Harmless enough, right?
Well, not exactly. As the captions
on the screen inform us, some of the
words or phrases in the video sound
very much like obscenities in Chi-
nese. For example, grass-mud horse
sounds like "fuck your mother". The
grassland, Ma Le Desert, sounds an
awful lot like "your mother's vagina".
And "river crabs" sounds like both
"censorship" and "harmony".
With this translation, the story
reads a bit differently: "Fuck your
mother" has defeated "censorship"
and "harmony" in order to preserve
"your mother's vagina".
Given its new meaning, the video
becomes a direct rebuke of the Chi-
nese government's repressive cen-
sorship. Constraints foster creativity,
right?

lawn on State Street.
Tuesday, meanwhile, revolved
around bars like Mitch's, Charley's
and Ashley's that opened extraearly
to accommodate the college crowd
before classes began. For many stu-
dents, it was the one day of the year
to get up early - they made sure to
have time to catch a good buzz so
they could spend the rest of the day
in a celebratory haze, decked all in
green and skating through class
happily and imperceptibly drunk.
Ofcourse,eachyear, some aren't
so inconspicuous.
When he was an LSA junior,

Vinny, a law student who asked not
to be identified, made a scene in his
English class - and not just because
he came in wearing green glow
sticks.
"My phone was on ringer, which
I didn't know, and in front of my
15-person discussion, it was just
going off and I had no clue that it
was my phone," he said. "I kept
looking around. The girl next to me
kept like kicking me and looking at
me. Finally, I realized that it was my
phone."
Vinny tried to play it off
like he hadn't been celebrating

ILLUSTRATION BY LAURA GARAVOGLIA
before class. It was unsuccessful.
"I used the word convoluted - it's
a good English word whenever you
have nothing to say - and the GSI
quickly passed over me," he said,
Perhaps LSA senior Chris Orrhas
a better approach. Like Vinny, Orr
started drinking early and took a
few Nalgene bottles filled with Kil-
lian's Irish Red to class just to "keep
the buzz going." Orr gets regularly
bored in class on St. Patrick's Day.
"Generally most of the classes
on St. Patrick's Day I leave half-
way through," Orr said. "Once I
was leaving and the teacher made a
point out of it because I was wear-
ing green."
Orr suslgts that the lecturer's
comment alluded to more than
just his festive clothes.
"I may have been wobbling a
little bit," he said.
In response, Orr just laughed
and walked out of the auditorium.
"I was in no condition to say
anything smart or have a retort
ready so I just admitted that I was
pretty much pegged - she pretty
much pegged me," he said.
-DANIEL STRAUSS

BY THE NUMBERS

Cost, in dollars, of a VIP ticket to one of Michael Jackson's
SO final concerts
Total number of tickets sold for the concerts
Number of hours it took for all the concerts to sell out
Source: CNN

THEME PARTY SUGGESTION
St. Patrick's Day detox - It's no surprise that
you're still hung over from yesterday. After all, you
probably spent all day drinking green beer and tak-
ing shots of Bailey's and Irish whiskey, Instead of sit-
ting through lecture with a throbbing headache, go
back home and relax. Put on pajamas, make a cup
of tea and and get in bed. Drink lots of water. After
replenishing, try to drift off to sleep. Then remem-
ber that you have a paper due the next day.
Throwing this party? Let us know. TheStatement@umich.edu
STUDY OF THE WEEK
Obese people as likely as heavy smokers to die early
People who are obese at age 18 are just as likely as heavy smokers to
die by age 60, according to a study recently published in the British Med-
ical Journal led by Martin Neovius, a postdoctoral fellow at the Karolin-
ska Institute in Stockholm.
In the study, the researchers charted the mortality rates of 45,920
Swedish men over age 38. They discovered that men who were over-
weight when they joined the Swedish Army in 1969 and 1970 were more
than twice as likely to die by age 60 than recruits who had a normal
weight. This risk increase is about the same as that of people of normal
weight who smoke half a pack of cigarettes a day or more, according to
the researchers.
The study found that overweight recruits who did not smoke were
one-third more likely to die by age 60, which is about the same risk
increase as that for normal-weight men who smoked as many as 10 ciga-
rettes a day.
- BRIAN TENGEL