On The Mall

It's like an M.C. Escher drawing with stores in it!

The transition from Salem to Portland has been a pleasant one, but there have been plenty of culture shocks as I experience things in Portland that Salem outright lacked – viable public transportation, an abundance of locally owned restaurants, culture, Burgerville, Democrats, parks, etc. However, what has been most arresting about my time in the big city has been the malls. Oh, the fabulous, fabulous malls!

Sure, there were large spaces in Salem that could be referred to as malls. In downtown Salem we had the Salem Center, which consisted of a few large department stores joined by skybridges, along with a food court and the requisite Hot Topic and Honeybaked Ham Store, entities which are seemingly incapable of existing outside of a mall.* It was quaint, really, in a very Salem sort of way – as though some entrepreneurs had seen a mall on TV and attempted to recreate it on a smaller scale. There were overweight security guards and warring tribes of punkish 8th graders, sure, but it was more like a Hasbro mall playset than a real mall. For a long time, I thought that was what malls were like.

*Also, the Excalibur Cutlery Shoppe – I’ve seen a lot of those places in my life, and they’ve always been in malls. Why is that? If you’re going to buy a replica samurai sword, why is it that you can only do so within walking distance of an indoor fountain and an Orange Julius?

Eugene prepared me a little, but not much. Students at the University of Oregon have two options for malls – Valley River Center, a mall near the highway that is somewhat larger and somewhat classier than Salem Center, and Gateway Mall, a mall near the Interstate that has been known to cause unborn children to weep tears of blood. Valley River Center has upscale shops (like, for example, Excalibur) and wide open hallways. Gateway Mall, on the other hand, is all of the worst things that a mall can be.

Approaching the front door of Gateway Mall, one must contend with a mob of sullen faced teenagers who have come to the mall in search of something to do and found that fun is yet another product not sold there. Muscling through the crowd and entering the building, you’re assaulted by a cheap second run movie theater on the right and a food court on the left, which is dominated by a large and vaguely sinister circus type ride wherein kids are strapped into a compartment that looks like a smiling frog, hoisted up about two stories, and then jerked up and down a bit. The deeper you go into the mall the more confounding things you’ll see – a cushioned pen filled with screaming, mostly unattended toddlers, a vending machine that sells glow in the dark crosses, and a sports bar targeted at NASCAR fans. No, I’m serious – the bar is part of some chain of NASCAR oriented eateries, and what’s worse, it’s smack dab in the middle of the mall. If you can think of anything more depressing than going to the run down mall by the Interstate to get drunk and watch NASCAR, then I’m pretty sure you should go to work writing for 24.

So this was my training before I got up to Portland – quaint little malls, some better than others, some white trashier than others. However, two days ago I visited Clackamas Town Center for the first time in my life, and it rocked me in a manner best befitting a hurricane.

The Girlfriend and I have had little luck finding jobs in our immediate neighborhood, so on Friday we packed up a bunch of resumes and went to Clackamas Town Center, the nearest mall, assuming that it would be a veritable whirlpool of potential employment. I had known that Clackamas Town Center would be a bigger mall than I’d been to before, but I didn’t truly appreciate how big until I saw that the parking garage outside was taller than 90% of the buildings in Salem. Even more interesting was the fact that they even needed a parking garage, seeing as the parking lot itself was large enough to occupy two time zones.

We entered the mall at about its midsection, and when The Girlfriend explained that that the mall extended “basically forever” in either direction, I felt kind of overwhelmed by all the choices. Which way to go – left, or right? Should we start at the top and work our way down, or start at the bottom and work our way up? Did we have enough food and water for the entire trip? Was there a store where we could buy donkeys to ride from one end of the mall to the other? Imagine my shock when I found out that there was still the entire “West Village” to explore; a plaza filled with expensive restaurants and tonier stores (including – you guessed it – Excalibur Cutlery Shoppe), as well as The Promenade, another complex across the street that in and of itself is larger than Salem Center, as well as perhaps the very city of Salem.

To walk through Clackamas Town Center is to have the very spirit of capitalism knock you down with a sledgehammer and then dangle its balls in your face. There are stores on either side of the hall and kiosks in the middle of it, where employees scrape together what little remaining enthusiasm they have to anxiously ask how you’re doing and if you’d maybe like to buy a new iPod shell today. Wall space not occupied by stores is occupied instead by giant advertisements that go above and beyond the call of duty, such as the wall-spanning Aquafina ad that included an Aquafina vending machine built right into the wall, or the ad in the food court for a home remodeling superstore which included two glassed in examples of the finest bathtubs money could buy.*

*I’ve decided, by the way, that if I ever want to kill someone I’m going to stick them in one of those bathtub exhibits, trapped behind a pane of glass, forced to slowly starve to death while watching crowds of overweight children devour Carl’s Jr. a few feet away.

And the pretzels! My God, the pretzels! What is it about the mall experience that makes people crave pretzels? During my time in Clackamas Town Center I could’ve sworn I saw at least two Auntie Annie’s pretzel shops, as well as some mysterious competing pretzel shop (Creepy Uncle Monty’s, featuring their signature “Thanksgiving 1998” pretzel, which shows up late smelling like alcohol and cheap cigars). What about walking through miles of climate controlled economic splendor makes a person want a piece of dough wrapped up in a crazy way and covered in cinnamon?

Maybe it’s the screaming kids – of course, if that’s the case, then they’d do well to start selling liquor at pretzel stands.* Children truly have the run of Clackmas Town Center – they move in packs, devoid of supervision, eager to get underfoot. At one point, I rode an elevator up to the second story. When it arrived, I was all ready to leave the elevator when the doors opened and a literal tidal wave of children stormed in. As they did, several of them glared at me, as if to say “What the hell are you doing? This is our elevator.”

*Of course, at Creepy Uncle Monty’s, you can get your Thanksgiving 1998 Special with a 32-ounce Peppermint Schnapps in a commemorative Burger King cup, along with a side of Marlboros.

If any of the managers to whom I handed applications at the mall are reading this, please don’t take my cynicism toward mall culture as a sign that I’m a bad worker. All I’m saying is, if I ever go missing after my shift, check the trunk of Creepy Uncle Monty’s car.

Truman Capps could not quite bring himself to apply for a job in the food court.

Rejected (Now With Boobs!)

In my economics class this year, we “learned” about how banks supposedly create money. I put the word “learned” in quotation marks because I quite honestly can’t tell you how they make money; I just seem to remember our GTF interrupting my Tetris game for long enough to tell us that the process of depositing money in a bank puts into motion a series of coincidences and magical tomfoolery that, in one way or another, creates $10,000 where there once was only $1000. I’m sure at least one of my readers actually knows how this works and will want to share it with me in the comments section, but be forewarned that if it involves any math at all, I’m not going to read it. In fact, I can almost guarantee you I won’t read it unless it involves a car chase, so, y’know, try and work around that.

What economics did teach me is that the Internet is a lot like a bank, in that it creates humor out of images that would otherwise not be funny. For example, someone could deposit a seemingly innocuous picture such as this one…

…And within months, the result would be this:


Same cat, more comedy. In fact, this cat was more or less the Patient Zero of the lolcat epidemic, which began years ago in the dark recesses of the 4chan message boards, where a favorite pastime is the search for obscure and disgusting pornography, and has now been watered down into the Hallmark Channel of the Internet. It’s like if the Sex Pistols turned around and did the soundtrack for the next Shrek movie.

The point is, the Internet routinely brings out the humor in otherwise forgettable images. However, I have recently found what is simultaneously the funniest and the saddest image on the Internet, all without the help of diligent photo manipulators or cutely misspelled text. It contains hope, despair, chivalry, dismissal, and Megan Fox in a low cut dress.



For the purposes of the blog, I’ve doctored up the picture like so:



1) Let’s not mock this guy. Let’s not ask how old he is, or question whether he actually thinks this will work, or speculate as to just how long and lonely the night following this moment was. Because, gentlemen, we were all this guy once. When the first Transformers movie came out, I’ll bet you anything that every man watching Megan Fox flounce around the screen in her little outfits would have grabbed the nearest rose and done exactly this same thing had they found out that she was in the vicinity. Of course, a lot of us got over it, but hey – maybe this guy didn’t. And I mean, there’s nothing explicitly wrong with that. Furthermore, we’ve got to keep in mind that this picture captures this poor fellow’s realization that what he had hoped would be the happiest moment in his life would in fact be the saddest. And I can safely say that we’ve all been there too – fortunately, when I had that moment at my senior prom, there was nobody there to take a picture of it.

2) Is it just me, or does Megan Fox stand out even more when she’s surrounded by normal people? I wish I could know if her face looks like that because she’s in the middle of saying something, because of multiple plastic surgeries,* or because she’s wearing her game face (the game in this case being Completely Ruin One Of Your Fans’ Lives). Really, though – how hard would it be to just take the rose and smile at him? I mean, look, she’s only got like four million bodyguards who could hold it for her. Hell, even take the rose and set fire to it in front of him, but don’t just leave him there holding the damn thing!

*Speaking of plastic surgery, she appears to have recently done a little transforming of her own in the whole boobs region. Like, her boobs transformed into silicone monstrosities. Because they were in disguise earlier, as… Normal boobs. All I’m saying is, insofar as Megan Fox’s knockers, there’s more than meets the eye. **

**I’m really sorry, Jenna.

3) Sure, it’s just three hands, but look at everything it says about the moment. The bodyguard in back is fully prepared to karate chop this kid out of the way, while the bodyguard out of frame appears to be physically dragging Megan Fox to the nearest helicopter, from whence they’ll call in an air strike on the entire area, just to be sure they won’t have any more trouble with that flower-toting ruffian.

4) Despite his seeming intent to elbow the poor little guy out of the way, you’ll notice that this bodyguard isn’t even looking at kid (the red line represents his eyeline, not a laser being fired from his eyes*). Not only is Megan Fox ignoring this guy, but so is her hired help, even when they’re elbowing him down into the gutter with all the other plebians.

*Even though this would make him a much more competent bodyguard.

5) I have a gut feeling that this woman in the background, beaming ever so brightly, is in fact the kid’s mother, who had perhaps given him a ride here and was eagerly watching to see just how well his master plan went. From the glee in her eyes I assume she can’t tell that this is not the life-enriching experience she’d thought it would be. Soon she will realize that it’s going to be a very long and awkward ride home.
6) What are you doing here!? What part of the entourage are you?

7) I don’t really get the point of this tattoo. Does she look at it and ask herself “What Would Marilyn Do?” If so, would the answer be “Throw on your ice-queen face and brush that kid aside?” I don’t think so. I think it’d be more along the lines of, “Go fuck Kennedy again.”

8) Is the towel for wiping away the splattered remains of this kid’s dignity, or perhaps to absorb her own tears when she realizes what she’s become?

This picture is, in its own way, a work of art. If it could be rendered in oils, I’d damn well hang it on my wall – it’s sort of symbolic of the celebrity’s distance from their audience, or how callously they regard them, in spite of MySpace pages and Twitter accounts that try so hard to reach out to us.

It’s also probably not going to do the floristry industry any good.

Truman Capps had damn well better get some hits after posting a blog with the words “Megan Fox” and “boobs” in it. Maybe if he adds “Megan Fox lesbian kiss” he’ll get even more traffic.

Rejected

Half the fun of having this blog is finding out what Google Images returns for my searches. For the record, these happy people represent "employment." Don't search for "rejected" unless you want to see a picture of a woman with three boobs and a picture of a French lady with a tumor growing in her nose that... Look, just never use the Internet.

If ever you’re in a screwball comedy movie and you’re being chased, I highly recommend that you jump over a fence into the nearest backyard/junkyard. Yes, there will be a Rottweiler and it will probably want to eat your face, but never fear: It’ll start running toward you and go as fast as it can with every intention of eating your face, but at the last second its chain will go taut and it’ll get yanked back right before it can do any damage. I’ve seen this in, like, at least three movies.

I felt sort of like a movie Rottweiler when I went down to Carl’s (the local burger joint where I spent all of last summer making milkshakes) two days ago. I had gone in over spring break to ensure that I’d be able to get my old job back once school was out for summer, and my old supervisor assured me that, yes, all I had to do was come in once I got back to Portland and they’d put me back on the schedule. So, when I went two days ago, I had every intention of eating the face of continued summer employment. I was running as fast as I could, figuratively speaking.

So when my supervisor told me matter-of-factly that they’d already hired a bunch of people for the summer and they weren’t sure if they were going to have room for me, yeah, it was sort of like the whole chain thing. With one hearty jerk, all of your plans for the immediate future are gone, and you realize you’re back to square one. Namely, I’m in the same place I was at the beginning of last summer – I need a job. Only last summer, I’d known in advance that I’d need a job, so I’d canvassed my neighborhood ten weeks ahead of time during spring break. Also, no global economic meltdown. God, that Rottweiler has it easy.

I can understand if things were a bit unclear for the people at Carl’s – I mean, all I’d done was go in ahead of time and confirm that I’d still have a job, and they said yes, and then I asked if hiring was slower because of the economy, and they said no, things are about the same, and I said great. I mean, sure, they did basically guarantee that I’d have a job waiting for me and dissuade me from putting out applications elsewhere, but of course, they could’ve just been playing Punk’d: Home Edition. It’s a lot like regular Punk’d on TV, only instead of celebrities it’s honest and hardworking (yet still beautiful) people, and while on the show everything is okay afterwards, in this version they’re basically stuffing a dead skunk with dogshit and throwing it through the victim’s window while he sleeps. And then nailing all the doors to his house shut and setting it on fire, and shooting anyone who leaves the house. And then giving Terminator: Salvation a high rating on IMDb.

Not okay, Carl’s. Not. Okay. I swear to God, I would boycott you if your food wasn’t so fucking delicious.

Yes, those of you who know me will point out that I’m a spoiled bastard who doesn’t have to pay for his own education, so why should I even worry about having a job? The fact of the matter is, money is money, and it’s always good to have more of it. Also, without a job, what the hell am I going to do this summer? I already beat Gears of War 2, so there’s that off my list. Also, I can’t spend the entire summer sleeping and watching TV, because I don’t have anybody to feed me grapes while I do it. I suppose I could hire somebody to do that, but to be able to afford it I’d need to have a job, so once again I’m back to square one.

The very nature of job hunting feels somewhat unnatural – you’re basically going around asking people to deprive you of free time and potentially make you miserable. Of course, until they think of a better way to keep people from starving to death, it’s probably the only option. The Girlfriend has been looking for a job herself recently, and out of lack of anything else to do (like work, for instance) I’ve been tagging along. Most places she goes into, the proprietor is very polite about telling her that they have already hired their summer staff – this does not bode well for me, because if she, who is far more pleasant and hygienic than I am, can’t get a job, what are my chances?

The sad fact of the matter is that private school kids – namely those scoundrels from the nearby Reed College – get out a good month before all of us state college slackers, and thus have a jump on the job market. Seeing as their fancy-pants, prestigious education is going to put them significantly ahead of the rest of us after college, the least they could do is back the hell off and let us have a shot at the crappy summer jobs. Of course, if this economy holds up, being significantly ahead of the rest of us for post-college job opportunities means landing a second interview at Goodwill while everybody else doesn’t get a call back.

Time and again, “Don’t Know What You Got ‘Till It’s Gone” seems to be the 80s power ballad that best encapsulates my feelings. Last summer I had two jobs that kept me working seven days a week, both of them within three blocks of my house, during a time when I thought that the economy was bad. Now I’m looking at the Subway across the street and wondering if I have what it takes to stand on the other side of the sneeze guard.

Maybe I’ll try to beat Gears of War 2 again.

Truman Capps hopes any potential employers reading this know that he is, in fact, a hardworking individual who is never sarcastic on the clock.

On Journalism

I want to be this kind of journalist. I'll never be this kind of journalist.

So, I’m not going to work at the Oregon Daily Emerald next year.

I’d be lying if I said that working at the Emerald has come into conflict with my lifetime goal of being universally liked by everyone, forever. To be honest, I never expected to get a lot of hate mail to begin with, being as I generally advocated moderation, but apparently the University of Oregon has a pretty strong “fuck moderation” movement going on. It could also be because my fact checking was, at times, spotty, which is apparently not okay in journalism. My bad!

The problem with writing about campus life is that you’re basically shitting in your own pool every week. A guy who writes about international politics isn’t quite as much in the hot seat, because if he says Kim Jong Il is a prick he isn’t going to get a nasty letter about it from the man in the tracksuit himself. However, when I write that I think the Pacifica Forum is a hate group, their collective response is to fill up the comments section after my article with posts about how they’re not a hate group and how much they hate me (and also, for old time’s sake, the Jews).

What I found out pretty quickly was that the stakes in this game are significantly higher than I had initially expected. When I applied at the Daily Emerald, I turned in a couple of old blogs of mine, my reasoning being that they’d discern that I generally wrote opinionless drivel and would hire me if that’s what they were looking for. So I guess I was sort of surprised when I found out that I had to come up with a new opinion every week in my job as an opinion writer.

So, yeah, that was definitely my first mistake – applying for a job I felt unqualified for. I would recommend against that one in the future, kids.

I’m used to writing a blog that something like 90 people read, most of whom are my friends, relatives, or students at my old high school. If I make a generalization on here about where a person can and can’t carry a gun that is (charitably speaking) inaccurate, my uncle might have the wherewithal to do the research and point out the error, but that’s about the end of it. When I did that very thing in the Emerald, I drew the ire of people from across the campus and the country and got a royal bitch slap from the drunken libertarians down at the Oregon Commentator.* All because I was blatantly wrong about one fact.

*If any of the Commentator folks are reading this, it’s been a real honor pissing you guys off this year. Your blog is top drawer and your print edition makes excellent use of that picture of the guy with puke coming out his nose.

That’s just the thing though – when you’re writing for a paper, you can’t be blatantly wrong about one fact. It’s not okay, and then you aren’t a good journalist, which looks pretty bad when you’re a journalism major. Of course, I’ve never wanted to be a journalist, so it’s okay for me to be bad at it – but as a matter of common courtesy, I should probably quit stinking up a legitimate newspaper with my attempts at comedy. I suppose if there was a comedy newspaper on campus I could write for that, but unfortunately all we’ve got is The Comic Press, which has about as professional a layout as my middle school paper but with considerably less talented writers.

It’s not that I don’t want to be factual (although I do want to write fiction, which is the opposite of fact), it’s just that I would rather be factual on my terms. At the Emerald I had to find something pertaining to campus life every week that I had an opinion on, whether I was particularly interested in it or not, and then write about it. The more I did it, the less I liked it, and the less effort I wanted to put into it, and it’s never a good idea to cut corners on fact checking when you’re putting your writing out in front of a pretty damn large community full of many devoted gun owners. If I’m going to write something and toss it out to the wolves like that, I want to be writing about something I care about, something that I’ll want to do meticulous work on, something that I have time to seriously refine. Yes, I imagine one day I’ll author quite the treatise on why they shouldn’t have cancelled Firefly.

I’m going to miss the Emerald. The offices were on the third floor of the student union, in a cramped space with small windows which faced the setting sun, and when I’d go in to edit in the evenings in spring the windows would be open and the whole room would be bathed in golden light. The people were friendly, helpful, and amicable, and when I’d sit there among them on those evenings, watching them bustle around as they prepared the next day’s paper, I could practically taste the journalism.

I loved that, but I don’t deserve it, because I’m not willing to earn it. I had a great time sitting around up there, palling around with the Emerald staff and pretending like I was a real journalist, but at the end of the day I was the guy who dreaded his deadlines and always looked for the quick, easy, less-controversial topics to write on. That’s the kind of journalism that allowed our last president and his cronies to go to war and get rich on our dime while people on Wall Street played Monopoly with real houses – I don’t want to be that guy. Hell, I don’t even want that guy to exist.

Journalism needs better people than me. Say what you will about the Oregon Daily Emerald, but having spent a year with them I can tell you that those people seriously give a shit about journalism. They’re committed and they work hard. I signed on because I wanted a larger audience to whom I could make dick jokes.

I’m still a journalism major because I think that there’s still a place in that world for me; namely in magazines, the newspaper’s cooler and glossier cousin who drives a Porsche and gets laid all the time. Doing feature stories or writing about movies is right up my alley, and David Sedaris does for The New Yorker basically the same thing that I do here, only he has a large audience, he’s talented, and he has sex with men.

My time at the Emerald was valuable – it taught me that I didn’t want to be an opinion columnist. Arguably the most important thing I’ve learned in college so far, and it didn’t cost me a dime.

Truman Capps will miss that sweet $60 a month…

El Fin De Espanol

Well, not anymore!

The nightmare is finally over.

After four years – good lord, was it really four? – of nonconsecutive Spanish torture, I’m finally done. No more conjugating, no more oral presentations, no more staring blankly at the diet pill ads on WordReference.com as my brain shuts down in the preparations for an examen. No more tildes over the lower case Ns, no more accents over the I but not the E. No more watching Spanish language short films, catching every third word and attempting to discern the plot through observing the characters’ actions instead of trying to understand their words. No more going to class and looking at the clock for fifty minutes, only to find that the clock will teach you very little about Spanish, and even less about patience.

I used to have the high minded idea that, once I’d completed the two years of a foreign language that are mandatory for Bachelor of Arts students, I would continue in my study of the Spanish language. As I saw it, there couldn’t be anything wrong with speaking a second language, and it could be a real character (and, more importantly, resume) building experience. As a journalist who could also speak Spanish, I figured that there’d be loads of opportunities available to me on Telemundo! if I couldn’t find any English speaking jobs. Of course, the more Telemundo! I watch, the more I doubt that even Spanish speakers can understand what the hell is going on there.

Let me just say this: If it were possible to speak a second language without having to do a whole bunch of extra work, I would totally do it. But that’s the thing – it really isn’t. They’ve basically got a different word for everything. So honestly, when you hear that I’m now giving up on Spanish, know that it isn’t because of any failure on my part, but rather a failure on the part of the Spanish language to be endlessly accessible, interesting, and easy. I mean, come on – there’s like sixteen different conjugations! Don’t you think that’s overdoing it just a little bit?

Building my Spanish vocabulary was a lot like my attempts to build grand LEGO fortresses as a kid – my plans were lofty and well intentioned, but in the end I would get distracted and things wound up half-completed and forgotten, and then maybe the dog would eat a couple pieces too. With each new term of Spanish this year, I came into class resolving to finally start reading every night and doing all my homework. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t take me long to realize that I could get by just cramming for the tests and keeping my fingers crossed on the pop quizzes. And then, at that point, Spanish became challenging for me not in the sense of “what can I do to learn this language” but rather “how little of this language can I learn while still getting a grade that convinces the school that I’ve learned this language?”

The answer, it turns out, is “very little.” In terms of learning a new language, I’m not so great, but when it comes to finding new and innovative ways to cheat the system and avoid learning a new language, I am basically the Mozart of sloth. As much as I hate math, I used a little of it and quickly figured out that even if I got a D on the majority of our 15 point pop quizzes I could still easily pull a B in the class if I scored high enough on our exams, projects, and presentations, which were scattered through the term like lumps in the viscous gravy of optional homework and neglected reading. Also, every term in the 200 level Spanish sequence this year followed the same syllabus, so by the end I had mastered the course curriculum.

Of our three essay-based examenes, I would usually do really well on the first, as it was still early enough in the term for me to think I was actually going to try. By the second one, I’d be so cocky about my good score on the first that I’d let the work slide and score lower in the B range, which would lead me to resolve to study very hard for the third exam. However, by the time the third exam rolled around in dead week, I’d be so burnt out that I’d study even less for it than for the first two. And yet, Bs.

I wrote a column for the Emerald about grade inflation which pissed off quite a few students and earned the praise of a few administrators. To the students who thought I was blowing the whistle on their meal ticket – trust me, I ride the curve just as much as anyone else. To the administrators who may find it hypocritical that I’m gleefully recounting my experiences exploiting a system that I’d said was in need of change – this doesn’t alter my opinion at all; I’m just enjoying the free ride while I can.

Apparently Spanish isn’t that difficult to learn compared to English, so keep that in mind before you judge me as lazy – I learned to speak English, one of the hardest languages, when I was a toddler, and I didn’t have the benefit of textbooks or dictionaries. I learned the whole thing by ear, such was my passion for language, and I think I deserve due recognition for that. Don’t ask me for an encore presentation, because that’s not how I work – David Blaine only levitates like once per episode, remember? It’s very stressful.

I am a lot of things – verbose, right-handed, tall, hungry – but bilingual is not one of them. My priorities, I guess, lie elsewhere. Residents of Latin American countries (about which I now know quite a lot, thanks to the cultura section in my textbook) and all speakers of Spanish, please don’t take this personally – it’s not you, it’s me.

Truman Capps still can translate “Feliz Navidad!” if you ask him nicely.

A Fight Better Left Unfought

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

I don’t know if you’ve heard the news, but currently America is at its least religious. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, released earlier this year, a record 15% of Americans claim to have no religion at all. Now, people with no religion make up a greater percentage of the US population than any other religious group save for Catholics or Baptists. Across the board, nearly all religious denominations have been facing decreasing membership, to the point that New England, once a Catholic stronghold, has now even eclipsed the Pacific Northwest in terms of the percentage of its residents who don’t subscribe to any particular religion.

Despite the Pacific Northwest’s reputation as one of the less-religious parts of the country, the University of Oregon is not lacking in terms of religious fervor. Between our stalwart Jesus Guy and various evangelists who make the rounds through campus every year, it’s evident that amid a nationwide decrease in religious adherence there are still plenty of people trying to keep numbers up. The reactions are usually mixed; I don’t often see too many people gobbling up free Bibles or listening to most of the preachers who proselytize by the amphitheater. Some visitors are more tenacious than others; last year, an evangelist followed me up 13th street, asking me if since I didn’t believe in God I also didn’t believe in gravity. Or there were the people who brought a bunch of kids and had them run around offering free scriptures to passers by; serious competition for the Free Hugs people. However, it is Brother Jed – the Michael Jackson of campus evangelism – who always appears to have the greatest effect.

In case you didn’t notice Brother Jed last week, he was the one with a large sign declaring that homosexuals, rebellious women, and Mormons are all on the fast track to Hell. He was also the one surrounded by a thick ring of students, many of them jeering or earnestly debating his claim that the only thing Mexicans contribute to society is burritos. The situation was made even more awkward by the fact that Brother Jed and his crew had set up shop right next to the Planned Parenthood table by the amphitheater; as it turns out, Jed and his crew aren’t too keen on abortion, either.

Say what you will about Brother Jed’s message, the man knows a thing or two about showmanship. He raises his voice, he makes hand gestures, and he has colorful visual aids that make colorful implications about popular elements of our culture (like porn and masturbation). Some say that you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar; Brother Jed seems to have discovered that you attract more flies by throwing shit at them. Sure, the flies will be angry, and they’ll interrupt you and try to outwit you using facts or their own personal interpretation of the Bible, but the flies are still there regardless.

This is no coincidence; Brother Jed refers to his in-your-face style of preaching as “confrontational evangelism,” which has been adopted by other campus evangelists as a means to hold a prolonged discussion of theology and culture while maintaining a large audience. As one of Brother Jed’s contemporaries explained in an interview with the University of Missouri’s awesomely named newspaper The Maneater, a confrontational evangelist can figure out what issues are important to his or her audience based on which inflammatory comments the audience is rebuking, and is thus able to tailor his or her sermon accordingly.

When a female critic during Brother Jed’s recent appearance was unable to answer one of his questions, he reportedly replied, “I don’t know why you can’t answer a simple question. I don’t know if it’s because you’re a woman or because you’re just ignorant.” This is a remarkably close-minded and stupid thing to say, and if I heard an elected official or a widely respected public figure say it, I’d be pretty pissed off. Coming from Brother Jed, though, it doesn’t bother me, because I know that at heart he’s really all about the attention.

Brother Jed is trying to get the word out there any way he can in an America where some feel that religion is dying out. He’ll say whatever it takes to draw a crowd, because at the end of the day Brother Jed is a salesman trying to peddle Jesus as aggressively as possible. If you disagree with his methods, arguing with him is only going to affirm the effectiveness of those same methods by drawing a bigger crowd.

If Brother Jed really offends you, just walk away – it’s the most harmful thing you can do to him.

Oh Danny Boy

Axis of Evil my ass.

Good ‘ol North Korea. Just when things are getting a little too intense what with the worldwide economic crisis and terrorism and whatnot, there’s North Korea to test some nuclear weapons. It keeps us on an even keel – thanks to them, we know that in a world of uncertainty, there will always be one country that is even more openly dickish than the United States.

In case you hadn’t heard, North Korea recently tested a nuclear weapon, much to the consternation of pretty much everyone on Earth who doesn’t live in North Korea. What I love about their most recent act of defiance against the international community is that while most stereotypically evil countries would go about developing their nuclear weapons secretly, behind closed doors, North Korea just doesn’t give a fuck. They conducted their most recent test underground (which has always been a little confusing to me – do they just dig a hole and then kick the nuke in, or…?), and as a result, most people outside of North Korea didn’t know anything had happened. Indeed, the only way we found out was when North Korea announced to the world that they’d done it, much with the same sense of misguided yet quaint pride that a six year old displays when he announces to a room full of people that he knows how babies are made. “Hey, everybody! Aren’t I clever?”

A lot of people in the international community have called out for something to be done about North Korea, how they’ve gotten away with this sort of thing for far too long and how this aggression will not stand, man. To give you my perspective on the matter, I’d like to share two stories that I remember every time I start to feel worried about North Korea.

Story 1

North Korea has a long and illustrious history of doing the kind of shit that would be immature even for the comments section on a YouTube video; namely, they start off strong with something completely brazen, then seemingly realize that it’s them versus the rest of the world, and back right the hell down. A perfect example occurred in 1976, in what came to be known as The Axe Murder Incident. No, the name is not a metaphor – an axe murder became an international incident between North Korea and the United States; take a guess as to who started it.

On August 18th, 1976, a group of American and South Korean soldiers set out to trim up a tree in the Demilitarized Zone which was blocking the South Korean side’s view of North Korea – South Korea likes to keep an eye on the North, y’know, lest they try to start any shit. Although the Americans and South Koreans had permission from North Korea to trim the tree, soon after they arrived a group of North Korean soldiers showed up, argued with the delegation’s commanding officer, and then proceeded to attack the group, killing two officers with a well placed karate chop and, yes, an axe. The United States responded two days later by dispatching a convoy of 23 trucks, attack helicopters, fighter jets, and a crack squad of flaming nuclear alligators [citation needed] to stand guard and be menacing while a large group of soldiers cut the tree down with chainsaws. A few hundred heavily armed North Korean soldiers showed up and watched, evidently lacking their earlier bravado now that they were facing down a bunch of guys with chainsaws. Shortly thereafter, North Korea issued a vague apology in which they accepted no responsibility, and everything went back to the way it was.

Story Beta

When I was in high school, I knew a guy named Dan, who was easily one of the most widely hated and mocked people at the school due to his unquenchable thirst for attention coupled with little to no maturity. One day, he came to school wearing a suit of “armor” made out of old CDs that was intended to resemble armor made of metal scales. Walking down the hall in this flimsy, shining testament to his own indefatigable stupidity, he drew the attention of one of our football players.

“Nice armor, fag.” The football player said.

In response, Dan punched the football player in the shoulder (some report that Dan, who was presumably wearing gloves, took one off and slapped the player in the face with it as a challenge, but this is unconfirmed). The football player then had no choice but to sock Dan square in the face, sending him running down the hall, clutching his bloody nose and screaming for help from our school’s security guard.

See, here’s the point: North Korea is the world’s Dan. Nobody likes him, everybody laughs at him, and while I did sometimes worry that the only screw holding Dan together would eventually come loose and he’d show up at school with a pipe bomb or something, I always knew that he’d never have the sack to go through with anything big.

Yes, North Korea has access to fissionable materials, and within the next few years could be able to mount those fissionable materials onto a long range missile. But despite all their bravado, I feel like whoever’s running North Korea at this point (Kim Jong Il hasn’t been seen in public much recently, due either to a stroke or an extended Everybody Loves Raymond marathon) knows that their country is, as bad guys go, obsolete. We should be so lucky to be able to go to war with a small country with a large, somewhat competent military force – these days it’s all about small groups of impossible to find terrorists hiding out in the mountains, disguised as civilians. A war where the bad guys wear uniforms identifying them as such is America’s bread and butter. For North Korea to slap us with its glove would result in the greatest of return punches, and I get the idea that unlike Dan, they understand this.

Underneath that flimsy, CD armored exterior, there’s a country that eventually is going to ditch all this nationalistic bullshit and try to forget it ever happened. However, Dan is reportedly still a prick, so don’t expect it to be anytime soon.

Truman Capps fully expects most of the replies to this update to be from alumni of his high school swapping funny Dan stories.

Mandatory Apple

What the hell? This didn't upload as planned on Wednesday - sorry, folks.

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

My MacBook has been an invaluable educational asset. I do research on it, I use it to communicate, I write my columns on it, I play Tetris on it during class, and on rare occasions I use it to take notes during class. I don’t know where I’d be without my laptop, but I do know that I wouldn’t be nearly as good at Tetris.

However, while I’d strongly recommend a MacBook to any college student who likes stylish design and cute names for applications, several universities have gone even further. The Journalism departments at Eastern Illinois University and the University of Missouri, along with the University of Maine’s College of Education and Human Development have begun to require incoming freshman to purchase MacBooks or, in the case of the University of Missouri, either an iPod Touch or an iPhone. These schools argue that students who own their own computers have easier access to information, that proficiency with newer computer software is essential in the working world, and that as so many students already own their own computers, the new policy will affect relatively few people.

This is all well and good; schools are modernizing to keep up with the information age, which means that they’re attempting to reconfigure their teaching to 21st century standards in order to give students as much bang for their educational buck as possible. Let it be known that I think these schools have all the best intentions in requiring their students to buy laptops.

But seriously, University of Missouri? iPhones?

In response to research suggesting that students are more successful if they can listen to a lecture multiple times, U of M has begun digitally recording lectures and posting them on iTunesU, where students can then go and download last week’s lecture about journalistic ethics free of charge and listen to it over and over again to their heart’s content. Brian Brooks, associate dean at U of M, pointed out that the requirement will not be enforced – if they choose, students can simply listen to the lectures on their computers. The only reason the school will require students to buy iPhones is so it will be included in their financial need estimate for loan purposes. However, if students can just as easily download and listen to lectures on their computer in the first place, it begs the question as to why U of M is even bothering to tell incoming freshmen that they need to spend an additional $229 to buy an iPod Touch from the bookstore.

Eastern Illinois University’s issued statement on their laptop requirement says that the university is merely “attempting to assist students in getting the computer that best serves their academic and professional needs.” I have to say, though, that requiring students to buy a laptop bundle that runs between $1900 and $2700 (and that’s with the $160 discount the school provides) does little to “assist” them in getting the computer that they need; if I were to point a gun at an old lady and force her to cross the street, I wouldn’t be helping her, would I? At least, as I found out, I certainly wouldn’t get a merit badge. If that old lady wanted to cross the street, she’d cross it; if the students wanted and could afford the computer that best served their academic and professional needs, they’d have bought it already. Requiring students to buy a computer effectively targets the students who can’t afford one, and EIU’s statement is vague as to how much financial aid will be available for these purchases, as “A [educational expense] budget increase does not necessarily result in funds to cover the cost.”

College students definitely should be technologically prepared for their education, which in pretty much every case means owning their own laptop. However, it’s simply not possible for all students. I know a few people who have made their way through college using library computers or outdated desktops at home for lack of funds – requiring these students to buy laptops might make their education somewhat easier but it would also make the payment portion much, much harder. I also know students who prefer Windows over Apple; so long as they’re taking care of software compatibility issues on their own, why force them to change?

Students should not be required to drop hundreds if not thousands on new technology on top of the tens of thousands they’re already paying in tuition and fees. If they can afford a laptop, they’ll buy it, if not, they’ll make do one way or another. Forcing students to buy a MacBook is only helping Steve Jobs.

Terminator Salvation Is Not Very Good

This picture is basically a hojillion times better than the movie.

Ah, yes, the Terminator franchise. Yet another series that is generally badass in spite of the fact that it lures the space time continuum into its van, throws it into a dark cellar, and starves it for a few days until it’s thin enough to have its skin cut off and made into a dress. For other examples, see Back to the Future and 90% of anything with the words Star Trek in the title.

I’m always sort of surprised at how many people I see who walk around belting out Disney songs and fondly remembering the plot to movies like The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast, because those movies played a comparatively small role in my childhood. Sure, I watched Disney’s Robin Hood and The Jungle Book a few times as a kid, but by the time I’d reached nine or ten years of age I’d found something far better, thanks to TNT’s willingness to show movies during the day instead of actual television programming.

The movie was called Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and it had the perfect mix of cars, guns, explosions, and robots; four factors that can make or break a movie depending on their quantity. Transformers, for example, is a movie about robots who turn into cars when they aren’t creating explosions or shooting up downtown LA with guns. Hence, awesome. Last Tango In Paris is severely lacking in all of these categories, and it shows.

TNT’s censors had ham-handedly cleaned up the movie for TV audiences, which meant that Mom was more or less okay with me watching it every time it was on – and trust me, I did. I can’t remember all the words to every song from The Lion King (and nobody is impressed that you can – yes, I’m talking to you, every girl I know) but I am a champ at mimicking the brooding keyboard soundtrack we hear every time a Terminator walks purposefully down a hallway, and I have charted every one of the pubescent John Conner’s thousand or so voice cracks throughout the movie.* And at the end of the movie, when the Terminator has Sarah lower him into the steel because he cannot self terminate, and John is begging him not to, and he says, “I know now why you cry. But it is something I can never do.” – I cried every goddamn time. Yes, it was very sad in Titanic when Leonardo DiCapri drowned, but I find it much more arresting when the fatherly, mentoring killer robot has to die to save humanity. Interestingly enough, same director.

*”Dyson – Miles Dyson! SHEIGHe’s gonna blow him awHEIGHey!”

So please know my background and affection for the series when I tell you that Terminator Salvation is like watching a bunch of greedy studio executives punch my childhood right in the dick. The dick, I tell you.

The director is named “McG”. I’m sorry, but since when are we letting fucking hamburgers ruin my childhood memories? You should have seen the opening credits (but, since I’m going to tell you, you won’t have to, now) – all this ominous music and these ordinary Christian names and then, right at the end of the credits, when the music has reached its peak and the onscreen visuals have become the most intense and reached their climax, you get cockslapped with “Directed by McG.” It’s like if you were watching Gladiator, and the entire movie is awesome and intense, but then in the last scene he has to fight a bear wearing a tutu riding a tricycle. It’s like a joke. It’s a cruel joke. The movie is an insult to everyone who likes movies, the script is an insult to everyone who likes writing, and the director’s name is an insult to everyone who has a name. McG? Seriously? You’re not even a rapper. Sit the fuck down and stop making movies.

Yeah, it’s better than Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines*, but that’s not too hard to do given that that insult to my beloved childhood franchise started with the protagonist coming out of a gay bar wearing pink framed star shaped sunglasses. Being better than Terminator 3 isn’t the point of all this. This movie was supposed to kick ass. You saw the trailers! It was supposed to be good! But it wasn’t! It sucked, and if you disagree, you’re wrong, because you didn’t love Terminator 2 the way I did.

*This one time, Alexander’s family got a new dog and they made the mistake of letting him name it, so he named it Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. I’m not kidding.

The script goes beyond bad; it is downright insulting. Whoever wrote this piece of shit assumed that the audience lacked the basic mental capacity to put together cause and effect; for example, when John Connor learns that the machines have targeted for destruction one Kyle Reese, the man Connor is destined to send into the past to protect (and impregnate – weyhey!) his mother, he says something to the effect of, “If they kill Reese, then I won’t exist!” Gee, thanks, movie! I wouldn’t have figured that one out on my own.

Also, the writers saw fit to repeatedly bash into our brains the fact that Marcus, unaware protagonist-Terminator, has a “very strong heart.” The Official Woman in the movie (who, in spite of being an ace fighter pilot in the middle of what appears to be a worse-than-average Apocalypse still has clean, curled hair and straight white teeth) compliments Marcus on his strong heartbeat when she snuggles up against him, and I mean, was that supposed to be subtle? In the future, do people just go around complimenting one another on the superior functionality of their internal organs? “Man, Truman, your pancreas is producing hella insulin up in this piece. Damn!” Later on, a doctor who has examined Marcus reports to Connor that he has “a very strong heart,” just in case we forgot this totally off the wall, otherwise pointless fact. And guess what? When, at the end of the movie, someone’s heart is too weak to sustain his ailing, injured body, guess who steps forward to heroically sacrifice himself and provide a stronger heart? And then, to drive it all home, the voiceover comes in to explain that in the fight against the machines, we will need “heart” to win. At this point, the heart isn’t a metaphor or a symbol anymore, it’s just become downgraded to a Thing That Happens In A Bad Movie. It’s like if at the end of Citizen Kane Orson Welles were to run out and say, “By the way, if you didn’t catch it, the sled represents the one thing he could never buy – happiness. Tip your waitresses, folks!”

And in spite of what people have said, Christian Bale is really not that good in the movie. Nobody is that good in the movie. I’m not trying to degrade the actors; I’m trying to degrade the material they were given. If you heard the clip of Christian Bale yelling at the lighting technician on set a few months ago, that’s basically his character: He’s a guy who yells. He yells at people, he yells at machines, he yells at people using a machine (in this case, a radio), and when he isn’t yelling he’s pouting in such a way to suggest that he’d rather be yelling. Marcus too simmers with generic rage, while the young Kyle Reese is an ambitious yet inexperienced novice who slowly learns from the guys around him. The Official Woman shows up late in the first act and then takes a vacation from the end of the second act until the last scene, yet somewhere in there manages to form a loving bond with Marcus. Also, there’s a little girl who doesn’t talk and is very good at picking things up and handing them to people. I actually found her somewhat appealing because she was spared any of this movie’s terrible dialogue.

And you know what? The action scenes aren’t that great, either. Yeah, there are explosions, cars, guns, and robots. There are motorcycle robots chasing an armored tow truck across a post-apocalyptic highway, and there’s fighter jets in a big canyon, and there’s a giant robot that picks people up and sends them off to robo-concentration camps. But none of this – not one solitary second of it – was of any interest to me whatsoever because I had absolutely no personal investment in any of the characters. They were all stock cutouts with predictable motivation and dialogue worse than what I saw on video game fan fiction message boards when I was in middle school – I’d just as soon see them all get shot in the face as I would see them survive because they were all more or less interchangeable, with no defining characteristics that I could identify with or enjoy.

I can barely ride a bike and I’m wearing a pair of shorts held together with Scotch tape, but I can assure you that I’m vastly more intelligent and talented than the writer(s) of this movie because I fucking understand that all the beautifully choreographed action in the world isn’t worth a damn thing unless the audience cares about the characters and their motivation, and frankly I’ve found pocket lint I’ve cared about more than Christian Bale’s John Connor and his mission to shout at everyone and save the day. If the characters aren’t interesting or likable there’s no tension when they’re in danger because you don’t care if they live or die. The movie would have been equally interesting if every action scene had been replaced with Christian Bale playing solitaire and watching Law and Order reruns in his trailer.

Don’t spend eight dollars to see this movie – don’t do it even if you just want to be “entertained” or see some “eye candy.” That’s completely fine if you just want to be entertained for a few hours; you may have heard of a movie called Star Trek, which I have paid fourteen dollars to see twice in theaters. That movie has eye candy and plenty of entertainment; it also boasts competent direction and masterful scripting. I cared more about Kirk’s green skinned Starfleet floozy who appears in all of one brief scene than I did about anyone in Terminator: Salvation because she displayed more than one emotion, spoke lines that hinted at some form of depth, and had big tits.

It’s despicable that they sank this much money and effort into a movie when the script clearly wasn’t there. It’s this year’s Crystal Bullshit Adventure Skull - it clumsily bastardizes a series that was once brilliant and had gracefully run its course, all in the name of making more money. If indeed you do go, I’d urge you to steal the film from the projectionist and then throw those canisters through McG’s bedroom window just to let him know what he’s done.

Terminator: Salvation is a giant, putrid, festering turd of a movie from start to finish; this is not opinion, this is simply the truth.

Truman Capps thinks it’s perfectly acceptable that he’s written about movies two weeks in a row now.

A Peaceful Coexistence

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

This past Sunday, President Barack Obama delivered the commencement address at Notre Dame University, in what is officially one of the most interesting things to ever happen in Indiana. After giving his speech, Obama was awarded an honorary degree. Honestly, I couldn’t be more outraged at the whole affair – I’ve been working my ass off for two years and I’m halfway to getting a degree, whereas all he has to do is give one speech and they just hand him a degree, no strings attached! I’m not the only one who’s outraged, either; however, everyone else is outraged for a considerably more controversial reason.

Pro-Life activists from Notre Dame as well as other cities in the Midwest flocked to the South Bend campus to protest the school’s choice of a Pro-Choice president as a commencement speaker. A contingent of graduating seniors opted to skip the ceremony and instead participate in masses and protests taking place at the same time. The protestors further opted to show their displeasure with the University’s choice of speaker by waving graphic blown up pictures of aborted fetuses, interrupting the president’s speech, and equating his position on abortion to “throwing grenades at infants.”

And that’s fine. Sure, interrupting the president’s speech was a bit of a prick move, but plenty of liberals spent the last eight years doing basically the same thing to members of the Bush Administration whenever they spoke in public, much to my delight, so it would be hypocritical of me to pass judgment. But abortion is an incredibly controversial issue, and like President Obama said in his speech, it’s never going to go away.

What bugs me about the whole situation is that some students and faculty were so incensed by Obama’s position on one single issue that they were willing to skip their own graduation ceremony and miss out on the incredible privilege of attending a commencement address by a sitting president.

I really, really hated President Bush for a wide and diverse variety of reasons. I felt as though he was elected under shady circumstances (the first time), I was convinced that he had lied to the country to gain support for the War in Iraq, I was disgusted by his inattention to Hurricane Katrina, and the dumb bastard didn’t once in eight years figure out how to correctly pronounce the world “nuclear.” And all of that concentrated hatred brought about in me an even stronger sense of curiosity. I wanted to know why he was the way he was. I wanted to hear him in his own words – or, at least, in the words of his speechwriters, which is about as close as one can get.

The point is, no matter how much I reviled his positions and actions on most every matter, I still wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to hear him speak, especially if he was going to be addressing the crowd at my own graduation. I imagine it would have been a supremely educational experience; that is, unless a bunch of protestors came along and tried to interrupt the ceremony. Dicks.

Sure, some of the students at Notre Dame may disagree with the president on moral or religious grounds, but I would hope that God wouldn’t have any problem with them at least listening a speech from someone with a dissenting opinion. Sure, Obama does support the legality of a medical procedure that results in the termination of a pregnancy, but he’s also the first black president in American history and a public speaker of some renown – looking back on your life, would you really want to say you deprived yourself of the opportunity to hear a historical figure speak because you disagreed with one of his policies?

I am a firm believer in the notion that the world would be a much better place if everyone agreed with me all the time – I’d get a lot less hate mail and nobody would make fun of me when I talk about how much I love Styx. However, my dream is impossible and I know that, so I do the next best thing and just try to live my life without demonizing people who disagree with me. Except for people who hate Styx – those guys suck.

What I hope the Notre Dame students who skipped the ceremony learn in life is that you can’t just turn your back on people who disagree with you; you’ve got to learn to coexist. Had the seniors attended commencement, they would have heard President Obama say pretty much the same thing.

To Boldly Go Where No Series Reboot Has Gone Before

No caption.

I can sum up the movie Star Trek in three words:

Fuck yeah! Woohoo!

(Woohoo counts as one word in this case, and even then that’s probably too many as woohoo is less a word and more a sound people make during moments of supreme elation, like when they win the lottery, or watch Star Trek.)

Star Trek features a lot of tried and true science fiction movie hallmarks, as though the writers had gone through some sort of cookbook for making awesome movies and selected all the appropriate ingredients, and then doubled them all. Multiple people are incinerated. Multiple phasers fall off of precarious ledges. Multiple people fall off of precarious ledges. A Vulcan bully gets his ass kicked. Young Kirk drives a classic car off a cliff for no apparent reason. Best of all, the film carries on the gleeful bloodlust of the original series, featuring a joyous and happy ending in spite of the fact that (spoiler alert), seven-eighths of Kirk’s graduating Starfleet class have all died, in addition to some six billion Vulcans.

I hadn’t really been eagerly anticipating the Star Trek movie, which made this whole experience a lot more surprising – ordinarily, when I’m excited about an upcoming movie, the months leading up to its release consist of me scouring the Internet regularly in search of new information while religiously watching the trailer over and over again (for reference, please reference my activities in the 12 months before Watchmen came out). However, not being an avid Trekkie, my skirt failed to be blown up by the teasers, the trailers, the extended trailers, the posters, or the Burger King promotional bobbleheads.*

*Watchmen had no promotional bobbleheads, much to my dismay – I would buy a car right now if I knew that I could have bobblehead Rorschach in the back window in order to take a dump on the emotional complexity of the graphic novel everywhere I went.

So for me to be able to walk into the theater, have my world completely rocked for two hours, and then walk back out again without having to go through the rather arduous anticipation cycle was somewhat akin to the experience of walking downstairs on a sunny Tuesday in July to find a Christmas tree and a living room full of presents, all of them for me, none of them socks.

Star Trek’s irrepressible sense of awesome more than makes up for the four seasons of torture I endured at the hands of Scott Bakula and Star Trek: Enterprise, the heavily derided prequel series that gleefully joyrided through history, forever fucking up the Star Trek series canon and frustrating the living daylights out of the Wikipedia fiends attempting to establish a concrete year of first contact with the Borg. I’ve lain awake many nights trying to figure out how a show like Enterprise, where an entire plotline consisted of the diplomatic ramifications of Captain Archer’s dog whizzing on an alien tree, could run for four seasons when a vastly superior show like Firefly, which features a guy getting kicked into a jet turbine, could get cancelled after one.

But of course, that’s what Star Trek had lost track of before this movie – senseless violence. For the first two seasons of Enterprise, nobody died; good guys or bad guys. This implied that space was less the final frontier, full of uncharted mystery and danger, but more like an indoor playground at Chuck-E-Cheeze, where you might get bruised on the slide or find a dead raccoon in the ball pit but, in the end, would learn a lesson and go home relatively unscathed. By the time we’d reached the season finale of Enterprise, I halfway expected the final scene to show the entire crew merrily ghost riding the ship through the Xindi expanse, or some shit of equal stupidity.

At this point, you might be wondering why, if I’m not a Trekkie, I kept watching such a horrible show for so long. To be honest, I was bored, my parents were watching it, and I didn’t know any better – as a result, my first experience with Star Trek coincided with the series’ darkest hour. It’s like if the first Indiana Jones movie you watched was Indiana Jones and the Attack of the Crystal Skull, or the only James Bond movies you ever saw were For Your Eyes Only, The Man With The Golden Gun, Moonraker, and Octopussy.* I’d gotten started on a Star Trek that suggested the series was about present-day social issues chunkily transposed onto a spaceship; the movie harkens back to the original series, which was all about killing Redshirts, macking on alien chicks, and being an unstoppable asshole genius all through the galaxy.

*Wow, Roger Moore is in all of those movies. I wonder if there’s a connection of some sort…

Star Trek isn’t a perfect movie – I don’t expect to see it winning Academy Awards or generating the same sort of fanboyism that The Dark Knight did last summer – but it is fun. The thing is, though, it isn’t stupid fun; I did enjoy Transformers, but a lot of that was because I was watching an epic blockbuster that cost more than the combined income of my entire family based on toys marketed to kids in the 1980s. Star Trek is a really expensive movie based on something more valuable – a group of racially diverse spacefarers who have attained a godlike popularity in our culture. Sure, none of them can turn into a truck (yet!), but their history is somewhat more illustrious.

Truman Capps would also like to mention that the movie had a great script - there just wasn't anywhere good to mention that in the main text of the blog, so he's sacrificing the potential joke here to let you all know.

Credit Crisis

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

President Obama’s new education budget includes a proposal for a radical restructuring of the government’s Pell Grant fund that has been met with general enthusiasm from students and colleges alike. Under the current plan, students receiving a Pell Grant would not always get a straight deal, as the amount of the grant depends on how much money was allocated to the program that year by Congress. As we all know, left to its own devices, Congress will seldom get the job done right, and as a result the amount allocated to the Pell Grant for the last several years has not kept up with inflation, contributing to a steadily shrinking availability of funds for college students. Obama’s new plan will guarantee funds for the Pell Grant every year at such a rate as to keep up with inflation and, hopefully, fulfill his plan to make college affordable for all Americans.

However, as important as it is to reform college loan plans now, there still remains the issue of the students who weren’t lucky enough to be born a few years earlier; the ones who have been earnestly competing for a number of grants, scholarships, and loans that are fast disappearing as our economy burns down, falls over, and sinks into the proverbial swamp.

The shortfall between rising tuition prices and shrinking financial aid has been filled recently by credit card companies, in yet another example of absolutely terrible decisions students make when they have no other options available (similar to cold DoughCo for breakfast but somewhat more dangerous). Credit card use among students has skyrocketed in spite of the fact that money is currently in very short supply; only now, students aren’t just using their credit cards for condoms and beer anymore. A recent study by Sallie Mae found that roughly nine out of ten students now rely on their credit card to cover basic school expenses, such as textbooks and even tuition. These students estimated charging up to $2,200, and only 17% reported that they paid off their cards every month, with another 1% lucky enough to have their family covering their credit card bills.

Ordinarily I would chalk these numbers up to student irresponsibility, but the simple fact is that for a growing number of students, the choices are either drop out of school or incur substantial credit card debt. This issue is yet another remnant of the economic irresponsibility that preceded Hindenburg-style explosion of the subprime mortgage bubble – credit card companies are more than willing to sign students up for large lines of credit, drawing them in with incentives such as temporary zero percent APR or free hats. As a result, half of all students surveyed have four or more credit cards. As money gets tighter, the cards become the only option, and as debts mount that free CapitalOne baseball cap isn’t really worth it anymore.

To make matters worse, credit card companies have been steadily increasing their interest rates over the past six months. One student in Denver was shocked to find that her interest rate had jumped from 9.9% to 25%, further contributing to the sizable post-college credit card debt she has to look forward to. In an economic climate where the average credit card balance among students is more than $3000, these sorts of rate hikes have the potential to push us into yet another financial crisis, as cash strapped students right out of school struggle to pay off mounting debts. Looking on the bright side, though, it probably won’t be too hard for them to get a house in today’s market.

This isn’t a problem caused by improper education about the dangers of out of control credit card debt; it’s a problem caused by desperation and lack of other, safer options. If we’re going to improve the economy, it’s important to safeguard the financial futures of the new generation that is soon to enter the workforce with bad credit and huge debts. More needs to be done to provide adequate financial aid so that students leaving school in debt won’t have to watch their debt double every couple of years. Likewise, we need to see to it that credit card companies don’t draw students in with low interest rates only to jack them up again a few months later, the allure of free hats and T-shirts aside. Banks and auto manufacturers got their bailouts; now students need them too.

Quiz Overload

Wait a second... I've used this one before, haven't I?

Before we start, I’d like to point out that it’s Mother’s Day. This was a holiday more or less created by Hallmark, which is why I’ve opted not to get you anything, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day!

So, anyway.

Facebook is a work in progress. When I first joined Facebook three years ago, there weren’t notes or status updates. Over the next couple of years, they added those features, and for a brief and glorious time everything was perfect. It completely trumped MySpace because of its clean layout and lack of customizability, and on any given day there were probably one or two fewer pedophiles as well. Facebook, like the Titanic, was soaring to new heights every day. Unfortunately, then it hit an iceberg, which ignited its hydrogen and caused it to explode and sink.

Yes, they added Applications, their reasoning being that Facebook was already just a bunch of bored kids poking each other, so why not just crank up the lame and throw in some Star Wars trivia? And all of a sudden, Facebook was basically MySpace with a slightly better layout, and eventually they changed that, too. I even wrote an early blog update about it, so you know it had to be important.

Now they change Facebook more often than I change my underwear – I mean, there’s been like two updates in the last year, already. Yes, like I said, Facebook is a work in progress, only it seems like the only real work they’re doing is seeing how much more confusing they can make the interface before they drive away all their users – it’ll probably take some time, since at this point it has some 200 million users who have forgotten how to make friends in real life.

The newest layout really causes problems for me because it assumes that I like my friends a lot more than I actually do. Sure, I’ll feign interest when they talk about the many career opportunities for a dance major or let them drive me to the airport from time to time, but my news feed now notifies me of every status update, upcoming birthdays far into the foreseeable future, and all the most recent pictures they’ve posted. All told, this is far too much exposure to the human world for me. Somehow I’ve accumulated over 500 friends, and looking at my news feed is sort of like getting raped in the face by all of their personalities at once, and most of the time it isn’t pleasant.

What’s worst about the layout, though, is that it has now decided that I give a shit about the quizzes that my friends are taking. Interestingly enough, I don’t. I actually feel that taking online quizzes should be a sneaky, shameful activity that one partakes in secretly, behind closed doors, and never tells anyone about. Why, again, do we need a computer to give us arbitrary information about ourselves? In high school, I took a career aptitude test, after which the computer told me that the US Army had sponsored the test and that, interestingly enough, my ideal job in life would be an artillery officer in the US Army. I didn’t take those test results seriously, much less plaster them all over the Internet for everyone to see. Well, that is, until now. But, see, it’s different, because… Blog… Something…

Look, the point is, Facebook has begun to share every one of my friends’ test based personal revelations with me. For example, in looking at my news feed today I discovered that one of my friends’ maternity clocks had gone off, as she had taken the Should I Get Married quiz (result: YES!! GO FOR IT!), the What Kind of Parent Would I Be quiz (result: Perfect!) and the How Many Children Will I Have Quiz (result: Three girls). Before long, she’ll be taking the Am I Pregnant test, and her boyfriend will be taking the Holy Shit Is It Mine Please Don’t Let It Be Mine Oh Shit Oh Shit test. Facebook has now begun to fill the place of overbearing mothers everywhere by urging users to get married on a whim and start cranking out kids, preferably three girls, so as not to prove it wrong.

The problem with these quizzes, besides the fact that they clutter up my Facebook and I don’t give two shits about them, is that they seem to give uniformly good results. I doubt many people have taken the What Kind of Parent Would I Be quiz and scored in the “Crack Whore” percentile, save for perhaps actual crack whores, but if that were the case then they’d already know what kind of parent they were.

I’d urge all of you to stop taking these little Facebook personality tests, but it seems as though there’s some sort of instinctual human urge to put facts about yourself into a computer and see what happens – that is the principle that Facebook was founded on, and it would be a shame for us to turn our backs on it now.

Truman Capps doesn't like the new Facebook, but he won't join your goddamn protest group, already.

Rejected

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

As I look back through my life, I can chart a rich and vibrant history of rejection. When I was six, I tried to join the Boy Scouts, but was refused admission because of that pesky religion clause. When I was 15, a girl told me she didn’t want to go out with me because she was “Really just a free spirit.” When I was 18, I anticipated my almost-certain rejection from Stanford University and opted not to fill out their long application and instead just go to the state school that had already accepted me. I’m thankful for rejection – I don’t know where I’d be without it.

Such is not the case for soon to be graduates at Harvard University – yeah, you know, the school that rejected you. According to the Boston Globe, Harvard’s Office of Career Services has begun offering a seminar on handling rejection for students who will soon be entering the bleeding and near-comatose workforce. Participants in the seminar are reassured that rejection and failure happen to everyone and are not the end of the world. Funny; I’ve been hearing those same things from my mother for about 20 years (along with pleas to drive carefully and reasons why any girl would want to go to prom with me).

How is it possible to make it through two or more decades’ worth of life and still be completely unprepared for rejection? I’ll tell you a story – between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, I applied for a lot of part time jobs in the Salem area and got turned down or passed over for every single one of them. Fred Meyer did not trust me to go around the parking lot collecting unattended shopping carts, Roth’s felt I was unqualified to put groceries into a bag, and Hollywood Video didn’t want to let me in on the ground floor of their rapidly dying industry. Finally, through the good graces of a friend’s father, I was able to “score” a job pressure washing birdshit off of SUVs at a car dealership, which required me to get up at 7:00 AM every day, all summer, and go to work with three guys who made fun of me because I was going to go to college. So in a sense, even my seeming success was really just a larger failure in disguise. I learned a lot about rejection that summer, and it didn’t cost me a damn thing.

Getting rejected isn’t a measure of self worth; it’s simply a statistical certainty. As the Rolling Stones taught us, you can’t always get what you want, because in many cases multiple people want the same thing. I’m baffled as to how it could take some people so long to figure this out. I understand that there’s bound to be some serious anxiety involved when students are looking to land a job that can help them pay off $135,000 in student loans, but is the situation really so bleak that the best and brightest students our country has to offer have to be taught how to fail? I’m a Journalism major, for God’s sake – I don’t even know if my industry is going to exist by the time I graduate, let alone if I’ll be able to find a job in what’s left of it. That’s because I know how to deal with rejection: keep getting rejected until you don’t get rejected anymore, then quit trying.

What kind of school is Harvard running if its students nearing graduation still don’t know how to deal with rejection? Rejection and failure are what college is all about – that’s what bad grades, caps on class sizes, and the opposite sex are for. If your students haven’t figured out how to bounce back from a setback yet, either they’ve got a problem with learning or you’ve got a problem with providing a worthwhile college experience.

Ironic, somehow, that a school which accepted 9.2% of its applicants this year is offering rejection counseling to the people who actually got in. On the other hand, maybe getting turned down from the top school in the country is a good enough lesson on rejection on its own.

Asinine Flu

Okay, worst state, go ahead and turn black. Holy- Well, would you look at that?

So, we’re all going to die, apparently. And it looks like pigs are to blame – they always said pigs were really smart, but I never expected them to be capable of genocide. I suppose in the end it’s fitting, given my somewhat irresponsible bacon consumption, but I’ve always seen it as more of a “non-survival of the most delicious” situation (hence why the Tiramisu Bears of Colorado are nearly extinct).

This is definitely a good reason to think that I’m stupid, but my main source for information during this whole Swine Flu brouhaha has been the Wikipedia page for “2009 Swine Flu Outbreak in the United States,” because when it comes to global pandemics it’s every country for itself, after all. The best thing about the Wikipedia page is that it has a map of the United States, with each state color coded based on suspected swine flu cases, confirmed swine flu cases, and swine flu cases resulting in death. When I first heard about Swine Flu (which, come to think of it, was less than a week ago) the majority of the map was blank save for Texas and California – so, I mean, no big loss there, right? When I checked back 24 hours later, several more states had lit up, and then several more, and several more after that. At this point, it basically looks like the malevolent hand of disease used the United States as a coloring book. Good news is that they colored inside the lines; bad news is that it means we’re all going to die.

A similar situation took place in (Outbreak, The Stand, Dawn of the Dead, Police Academy 4), wherein the disease starts out small and then spreads across the country uncontrollably, usually resulting in the apocalypse. And I’ve got to say, if this is the apocalypse, it’s basically the lamest apocalypse ever. Right now the entire country is afraid of a disease that is basically a less deadly version of the ordinary flu, which kills literally hundreds of people every year. This is basically the Diet Flu, but everyone is treating it like it’s Mountain Flu: Code Red.

I literally just thought of that.

I am a hypochondriac, and was pretty seriously freaked out about the bird flu back in high school. Like most things I did or thought about or had happen to me in high school, it seems really stupid now – for all its flying potential, the bird flu never made it to this country; further proof that pigs know something other animals don’t. At the time, though, I was seriously dismayed that I lived in a somewhat densely populated area, and would often plan out intricate scenarios in which my friends and I would escape to an isolated cabin to ride out the apocalypse and then rebuild society afterwards (usually during Spanish – I have the illustrations around here somewhere).

But the swine flu is here, now – it’s in the same goddamn county and city as I am; a kid at a daycare center a block away from my apartment probably has it – and I’m really not all that bothered by it. Honestly, I’m really just kind of speculating about how long it’ll be until they close the University of Oregon, and then for how long. So basically, I’m treating a global pandemic like a snow day – my sincerest apologies to the hundreds of Mexicans who have died during this infectious snowstorm.

Maybe I’ve finally acquired both common sense and a teenaged sense of invincibility at the same time – sure, I’m not a teenager, but better late than never, after all. Common sense is telling me that since I’m young and healthy I’m the least susceptible to the flu, and teenaged invincibility is telling me that even though the majority of the people who died in Mexico or in the 1918 pandemic were young and healthy, it’s not going to happen to me because I’m way too awesome and invincible to die.

What would it take for me to be really scared of the Swine Flu? Short list: Vomiting blood, zombification, ability to make Sarah Palin president, vomiting blood made of zombies. As is, the flu is more of a bad cold than anything else. We’re freaked out by something less serious than the mutated superbugs created by the questionable ventilation and overcrowding at my high school. For all we know, the Swine Flu could have originated at Sprague High School and then travelled to Mexico when one of the students was on her mission trip there.

But we’re scared all the same; something that we perceive as harmful is coming across our southern border, so the news channels have all created new graphics with scary music and the president has, for arguably the first time in history, used his platform to remind us to wash our hands and cover our mouths when we cough (he’s drawn a lot of criticism for neglecting to mention washing behind the ears).

So that’s why I’m not scared, and I don’t think you should be, either. Your best defense is doing stuff that you should always be doing: keep your hands clean, avoid sick people, and don’t put that in your mouth – you don’t know where it’s been. And even if the worst does happen, and the Swine Flu mutates to a point that it kills everyone on Earth, it still won’t be as bad as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Truman Capps suggests that concealed carry permitholders use their guns to shoot the Swine Flu.

Mein Fuhrer, I Can Walk!

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

The EMU is a great place — not only is it home to the Oregon Daily Emerald, but it’s also the campus’s source for binding, sandwiches and, thanks to the Pacifica Forum, controversy.

The Pacifica Forum was founded 15 years ago by Orval Etter, a 94-year-old retired public policy professor. His intention was to create an informal group that would gather to discuss issues such as violence, militarism, and war from multiple points of view. However, in 2003 the Forum began inviting Holocaust deniers and white separatists to speak at their meetings in order to give perspective on the Israel debate, which is a surefire way to piss off the neighbors. For example, in 2008 the Forum hosted a lecturer who referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as a “moral leper and communist dupe” and declared that an ODE columnist who supported the War in Iraq displayed a “Talmudic hatred for humanity.” So, y’know, that’s one point of view, I guess.

Recently the Southern Poverty Law Center , an Alabama-based civil rights organization, declared the Pacifica Forum a hate group, which led ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz to demand that it no longer be allowed to meet in the EMU. Members of the Pacifica Forum argue that they have every right to be there, as Etter is a professor emeritus at the University, and that they are a free speech organization, not a hate group. The debate came to a head on Friday at the Pacifica Forum’s most recent meeting, billed as a response to the SPLC’s designation. What began as a discussion devolved by the end of the meeting into members of the Pacifica Forum and its detractors exercising their right to free speech very loudly at one another. Notable highlights from the proceedings include a comparison of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the KGB and the declaration from those involved with the Forum that hate doesn’t incite violence, which the Forum’s opponents countered by declaring the Forum a “freak show” and defined anti-Semitism as reading Holocaust denier literature “without puking.” The dispute ended when Etter rose from his wheelchair, Dr. Strangelove style, and adjourned the meeting.

To the Pacifica Forum: If you’re trying to prove to the community that you aren’t a hate group, yelling at your detractors isn’t going to do you any good. Right now a whole lot of people perceive you as crazy and antagonistic, and whether that’s true or not doesn’t matter when your meetings consist of a roomful of people yelling at one another. In defending your right to be on campus, you’ve basically dug your own grave.

To the Forum’s opponents: I understand that these are heated issues. I’ve listened to the tape of the proceedings, and people indeed said some shocking things. But by yelling right back and referring to their views as “garbage” you’re just fanning the flames and doing nothing to resolve the issue.

In this writer’s opinion, the Pacifica Forum is a hate group. It’s one thing to host a speaker at your discussion group who denies the Holocaust, but when you repeatedly give stage time to Holocaust denial and speakers with ties to Neo-Nazi organizations and white supremacy groups, there is cause for concern. The Forum has thus far been allowed to meet on campus because of Etter’s ties to the University, however, I echo the opinion of Sam Dotters-Katz that the presence of a hate group in the EMU undermines student union’s mission of cultural development.

However, the absolute worst way to deal with what certainly appears to be a hate group is to stand there and pitch hate right back in its face — it’s a waste of time and is about as likely to make people reconsider their beliefs as their yelling is to make you change yours.

I get that this is also a very personal debate. I’m not Jewish, and while I find a lot of the things that were said at the meeting to be offensive, I’d guess they’re much more so to people closer to the situation than I. But in fighting hate, it’s important to keep your cool, lest you become what you’re fighting against. Because here’s the thing: After awhile listening to the tape, I couldn’t tell who was who anymore — it all sounded like a bunch of angry people yelling at each other.

Mystery Science Hatemail Theater 3000

Woah... Fuck you, Truman Capps!

So some of you may have noticed that my most recent column for the Daily Emerald pissed off basically everyone in the universe. This is a sampling of some of my more colorful constructive feedback.

**

Read your article concerning concealed carry on college campus.

Good to know – I was wondering, actually. How’d you like it?

May I inform you of a few facts, about myself in particular.

Oh, this probably isn’t a fan letter.

When I went to school (Grammar school & high school were all in one building) in rural NC in the 1950s every old farm truck that we got to drive to school in order to pick up fertilizer, etc. on the way home had a gun rack and a .22 rifle or shotgun hung in all the racks.

Fertilizer Etc? That sounds like some sort of hillbilly boutique shop.

Most were loaded, none were stolen. In the beds of those trucks were a variety of weapons; axes, bush axes, pitchforks, hoes, grubbing hoes, chains, ropes, wire, knives, etc. etc.

So what I’m getting from this is that rural North Carolina in the 1950s had a serious zombie problem. And also, I live by a few sorority houses and I’ve seen more than my fair share of grubbing hoes in the beds of pickup trucks, thank you very much.

Every boy I knew back in those days had a pocket knife you could shave the hairs on your arm with ; a matter of pride.

Yeah, gotta keep that arm hair in check. Y’know, for the… Pride.

I doubt seriously if you could have kidnapped one of us without serious risk to your well being. This was high school. By the way, we were taught at an early age to respect our fellow man and not to interfere with his lawful pursuit of his business. Notice I said lawful pursuit.

I’m sorry that my contrary opinion apparently interfered with your lawful pursuit. From, like, two thousand miles away. Apparently the pen is mightier than the concealed weapon.

By the time I was college age, (20) I was halfway around the world in Nam, a crew chief in a US Navy Combat Flight Crew. We carried handguns on our persons and had fully automatic weapons on the plane which we used to defend this country.

You were a crew chief at age 20? Yeah, well, I wrote a hit public access TV show and directed it, so I’m not sweating it either.

I did my time as a police officer and served the public with a weapon on my person most of the time.

I carry a weapon (with a TX concealed carry permit) about 99.9% of the time.

LOL TEXAS LOL

I do my time about once a week on the range to keep myself well versed in the use of that weapon. I very seldom go anyplace I can't carry the weapon. I am retired so I have very little need to go where the weapon can't go.

Because, I mean, the Old Country Buffet can get pretty crazy on a Friday night. You can’t just go in there with your dick swingin’ in the breeze.

I haven't been on an airplane since 9-11 and don't intend to board another one unless it is a matter of life or death, mine. I most certainly have no need to go on a college campus as they are about the most liberal places I can think of, most especially in my part of the country.

Wow, really? The most liberal places in all of Texas? You’re just adorable. Listen, let me tell you something: Never come to Oregon. I see like five drum circles before breakfast, and just last night I saw what I thought was a woman taking a piss at a urinal.

In short I should like to take this opportunity to remind you that, contrary to popular opinion, the world is a dangerous place.

…Really? You mean the terrorists aren’t kidding when they say ‘Death to America’?

We have a real war going on here just south of the border in Mexico plus the usual amount of crime in a city. (El Paso, TX).

I’m with you there – I’d want to have a gun on me at all times in El Paso too. That way, suicide is always an option.

I do not intend to be caught in a crossfire without the ability or means to protect myself & mine. Thank you, however you may keep the "hope & change" that this government has promised us and I will keep my guns. I shall not trespass on any college campuses.

That’s a damn shame, because I feel like you’d be a real big hit with us liberal kids.

I shall also endeavour to not offer assistance to anyone in distress or who is being attacked as my interference could pose a risk to my fellow man.

Yeah, well, it’s all about the sanctity of life with me. Pray tell, dear sir, what are your thoughts on the matter?

I assume it would be a greater risk to offer my assistance than the risk incurred by being harmed by a career criminal and besides, I should most likely be prosecuted if I did so and harmed the criminal. We most certainly wouldn't want to harm the criminal, it would probably damage his self esteem while operating in his chosen profession.

And I appreciate that – criminals kick ass!

John,

Texas

**

(From the Oregon Commentator blog)

You didn’t think we were going to let yesterday’s opinion piece in the ODE about concealed carry on campus slip by, did you? In case you missed it, columnist Truman Capps wrote about how icky guns are and how they shouldn’t be allowed on college campuses.

You did, however, let my hard hitting investigative piece about corruption at the highest levels of the Miss Lane County Pageant slip by, though – and you call yourselves journalists.

There is no Oregon statute against concealed carry in bars or college campuses. According to ORS 166.370, possession of a firearm in a public building is a Class C felony, but one of the exceptions is “[a] person who is licensed under ORS 166.291 and 166.292 to carry a concealed handgun.” In fact, the only public buildings you are not allowed to carry a firearm into are courtrooms, airports and federal buildings.

The university system code against concealed carry is in clear contradiction of state law. I don’t even know where Capps got the idea that concealed carry is illegal in bars.

Wow, my bad – I assumed the state legislature had taken precautions against serving alcohol to people carrying guns. That must have been another one of my trips to the magical happy land of Common Sense.

Perhaps before he writes an article disseminated to the whole campus, he should do some basic research first. Or perhaps his editors should fact-check his stories for, y’know, blatant errors. Perhaps a retraction is in order.

Yeah, because if I made that correction then everyone would stop being mad at me for trying to strip away their civil liberties and throw them into gulags by not allowing them to carry handguns on college campuses.

I wrote an article last year about concealed carry on campus, which prompted this response from the ODE. Searching through the blog archives for “concealed carry” and “gun control” is also fun.

P.S. In his penultimate paragraph, Capps writes, “[I]f campus safety is such a concern, let Department of Public Safety have guns.” Can we nominate this for oxymoronic phrase of the year or something?

Instead, let everyone but public safety have guns. Just watch them try and write a parking ticket then!


**

(From “FoundingFathers”)

3 Quotes about arms from our Founding Fathers:

"The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." -- (Thomas Jefferson)

Followed by the quote, “Man, I hope a bunch of whackjobs in Michigan don’t use that as an excuse to stockpile guns if we elect a black guy.”

"Any society that would give up a little freedom to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." Benjamin Franklin

”What happens in a brothel in Paris stays in a brothel in Paris… Right?”

"...to disarm the people - that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them." (George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 380)

”And, speaking as a slaveowner myself, chains are great too.”

Do you think our founding fathers were kidding about this? Would they give up their rights because of a handful of isolated tragedies? Want to dwell on tragedies...the US...with your tax dollars...with the puppets you have elected...have killed ONE MILLION Iraqi's.

Dude, HUGE burn on puppets.

This self-identified-liberal gun restriction rhetoric in this article has been echoed so many times, its sickening. We've all heard this before.

”Self identified liberal”? Fuck you, asshole, I don’t need to go have somebody else designate me as a liberal – I’ll do that myself. There’s at least one individual liberty I support.

Gun control laws only stop law-abiding citizens. In the coming years, we will see civil unrest the likes of which we can't fathom at the moment. Martial law may be enacted by our puppet-on-a-string for a president Obama.

Yeah, that’s right! If we’re not allowed to have our guns with us on college campuses, Obama will overthrow the country! He’ll just make sure everybody’s on a college campus first so we can’t use our guns to put up a fight!

Tell me what you are going to do when the desperate criminals break down your door with their eye on everything you hold dear? Call the police? Sing them a song about Obama? Tell them about your carbon footprint?

Actually, the plan was to have gay sex with one of them while simultaneously giving a 16 year old an abortion. Good guesses, though.

Take you rights back! Our founding fathers died for them...

While raping their slaves.

**

Truman Capps is slightly dismayed that the group of people he pissed off the most was the gun owners who have their weapons on hand at all times.

Mo' Firearms, Mo' Problems

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

The common argument made by the NRA is that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. This is mostly true, with the notable exception of the scene in True Lies where Jamie Lee Curtis drops a machine gun and it kills a roomful of terrorists. I would argue, however, that guns make it significantly easier for people to kill other people, and the majority of people on Earth ought not to be killed in the first place, with the notable exception of roomfuls of terrorists and certain Somali pirates. This reasoning is why I’m against allowing concealed carry on university campuses.

Currently, concealed weapon permit holders can take their guns with them everywhere except for government buildings, bars, and college campuses. While most people agree that it’s a good idea to keep firearms away from edifices of government and booze, there are 11 colleges nationwide that allow concealed carry on campus, most notably every public college in Utah. Due to some inexplicable admiration of Utah, lawmakers in the Texas House of Representatives are in the process of passing a bill which will make it illegal for public universities in Texas to prohibit gun owners with concealed carry permits from bringing their weapons onto college campuses.

Advocates of concealed carry on campus allege that allowing students and faculty to bring firearms to school is in accordance with their second amendment rights. The website for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC), a nationwide grassroots organization that advocates exactly what you’d expect it to, makes mention of the fact that experts agree concealed carry permit holders are five times less likely to commit violent crimes. What appears to be the central tenet of the call for allowing concealed carry on college campuses is the necessity to allow college students and faculty to defend themselves in the event of a Virginia Tech-style shooting spree.

I live in Portland and listen to NPR, and my family owns both a Prius and a Subaru (with a Volvo in our recent past) – it goes without saying that I disagree with the notion that a campus full of armed students and staff is any safer than an unarmed campus. While I agree that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, I also am a firm believer in “Mo’ firearms, mo’ problems,” especially on a college campus.

I’ve never heard a lot of people arguing to allow concealed carry in bars. Just about everyone seems to agree that a drunk person with ready access to a loaded gun is a genuinely bad thing. The thing is, after about 7:00 on any night of the week, a college campus and the surrounding areas become home to dozens of tiny bars, in the form of frat parties and freshmen playing beer pong in their dorm rooms. Have you ever seen two drunk people get into an argument? Imagine if one of them had a gun. It doesn’t even have to be a concealed carry permit holder – it could be a concealed carry permit holder’s roommate who took his gun. Let’s keep both alcohol and firearms prohibited on campus – people apparently respect at least one of those rules, and it’s been working out so far.
Of course, banning firearms on campus only ensures that law abiding students and staff don’t carry, which, in the eyes of the SCCC, puts us at the mercy of potential campus shooters. On the SCCC website, an image on the front page asks visitors which campus a mass murderer would be more likely to target – one that doesn’t allow students to carry guns, or one where students are allowed to be armed?

Here’s the thing, though – in my experience, mass murderers don’t seem to be terribly preoccupied with self-preservation. That could be why most of them commit suicide. And sure, an armed student body could potentially put down a campus shooter. But I think there’s a greater likelihood that if a campus shooter attacked an armed student body, responding police would have to deal with dozens of armed, adrenaline crazed people running around, and the resulting confusion wouldn’t do anybody any good. Mo’ firearms, mo’ problems.

If campus safety is that big of a concern, let’s let DPS have guns, not everyone else. Until then, I’m hesitant about allowing hundreds of guns onto campus in order to protect against one.

Don't Know What You Got 'Till It's Gone

Not the same, goddamnit...

I pulled my computer out of its black elastic carrying case, set it on my lap, and opened it up. The screen brightness seemed a bit low, so I hit F2 a couple of times to crank it up. Then, everything onscreen froze and a rapid clicking, scratching noise began to emit from deep within the bowels of my computer. This noise, I believe, is the technological equivalent of the noise your stomach makes right before the sudden onset of the trots – there’s a pretty good chance that you’re about to be absolutely fucked in the near future. After pressing every button on my keyboard in hopes of solving the problem, I hit the power button to restart my computer.

And that was the last time I ever saw my hard drive. Alive, that is.

The next day, an Apple technician told me over the phone what I’d dreaded was true – my hard drive had hit an iceberg and sank, taking a year and a half’s worth of accumulated stuff with it like so many ill-fated extras in the movie Titanic.*

*Titanic is one of my girlfriend’s favorite movies, and she let me use her computer extensively throughout the crisis I’m writing about. This one’s for you, Jen.

Getting my computer fixed took about five days. I don’t know if any of you have ever had to spend an extended period of time without your computer, but if you haven’t, I don’t recommend it. Those five days felt like a boring, depressing month, because as I quickly realized, my computer is pretty much at the center of my life. I use my computer for all my homework in addition to all my non-homework. About the only thing I don’t use my computer for is eating, and even then, I eat about half of my meals sitting in front of my computer watching Arrested Development on Hulu. The second day without my computer, I ate a Qdoba burrito sitting at my empty desk, staring at the wall, completely out of habit. Not kidding.

It didn’t help that one of the overhead lights in my room burnt out at roughly the same time as my hard drive burnt out, because this made my room look shadowier and more depressing. My room is a boring place without my computer – I’ve got no TV and no printed pornography, so what else is there to do? Read? I wound up going to the library a few times to use their computers, but there are several hobos who also make regular use of the library computers. Not only did this make me feel dirtier for having used the same keyboards, but also I felt that we suddenly had something in common thanks to our shared desperation for Internet access. It’s never a nice feeling to know you’re doing the same thing as a hobo. That’s why I don’t yell racial slurs on street corners anymore.

Hoping to avoid catching AIDS from a library desktop, I checked out a school laptop from the technology department. As I recall from what little Harry Potter I’ve read, the school brooms at Hogwarts were pretty beat up and wouldn’t quite fly straight. The same could be said of the University of Oregon’s laptops. The six-year-old Dell I got from the library had the same general sliminess to it that most library computers do, and within ten minutes of getting it set up at home it crashed due to a thoroughly drained battery. For the 11 and a half hours it was in my apartment (I had to take this highly valuable piece of equipment back to the library at 9:00 the next morning to renew it) it felt vaguely like an impostor, as though your mother had gone on a business trip for five days and had hired a down on her luck prostitute to fill in while she’s gone. You wouldn’t feel comfortable with that woman. You wouldn’t form an attachment. And you’re damn sure you wouldn’t hug her. My loaner computer was basically a fake hooker mom, and I almost missed staring at the wall while I ate.

On Tuesday the tech repair center called to tell me my computer was fixed. I picked it up and was glad to see the little guy again, but his brush with death had clearly changed him. He was not the same on the inside – most likely because they’d had to replace his hard drive. The old hard drive, it seems, had incurred a mechanical failure of the sort that caused a piece of metal to scrape back and forth across the drive, literally scratching data right off of it. Apparently when they opened the back of the computer, ones and zeroes just came cascading out of there. Y’know, because so much data got scratched off. Not my best joke, but that was more or less what I thought about when they told me.

I’d been backing up my My Documents folder to an online backup server for several months. That, I had thought, was enough – it covered all of my schoolwork, all the blogs, and everything I’d written since 5th grade (although to be fair, the world would be a much better place without most of the video game fan fiction I cranked out in middle school). As far as I was concerned, these were the only important things on my computer.

About a year ago, I found an awesome pen and ink drawing on the Internet of a SWAT team battling a horde of zombies breaking into a building. I don’t know where I found it, but I saved it onto my computer in my “Awesome Pictures” folder, which I had not been backing up. That picture is gone, and there’s very little chance I’m ever getting it back. There’s a part of me missing now – a very specific, niche part of me, but a part of me nonetheless. Will I ever find another SWAT team zombie battle picture? Probably not. There’s not a wide market for that sort of thing. I also lost all of my music and the software I’d downloaded, along with my Watchmen desktop. I now know exactly how people feel after their house burns down with all their possessions inside. I mean, do you know how long it’s going to take me to download Camino again?

Some people say that God doesn’t shut a door without opening a window, and I’ll admit, the loss of all my MP3s has galvanized me into obtaining a much wider variety of new music (through entirely legal means) than I would have before, and the chance to load up my computer with all new data gives me a chance to be a little tidier with it this time around. However, I can’t help but wish that maybe God could have just left the fucking door open in the first place because it would’ve saved everyone a headache.

Truman Capps is rebuilding his lolcat collection from scratch, so to speak.

RIP Hard Drive

The hard drive in my MacBook died two days ago, turning the linchpin of my scholastic abilities into a $1500 paperweight. It also made all of the information present on it disappear faster than you can say "AIG." This included my homework, the novel I've been working on for four years, and everything else I've ever written.

Fortunately, I've been backing up my computer to an online Apple server every night for the past six months, and my Dad has been kind enough to wrestle with the service in an attempt to restore my information. Mad upz to Dad for that one. The good news is that I'll be getting everything back - novel, homework, my entire writing history. The bad news is that until I get my computer back from Apple, I'm going to have to be a computer hobo, looking at porn in the library and writing blogs on The Girlfriend's (currently functioning) MacBook.

So this is your Saturday update - hopefully next time you're here, there will be something else. If this wasn't funny enough for you, feel free to go on YouTube and look at Chocolate Rain remixes for awhile.

Truman Capps has had one helluva weekend.