Transport 101

Homer Simpson said it best when he said “public transport is for jerks and lesbians.” To be honest, nothing will ever match the ultimate satisfaction and convenience of driving your own car to university. You can go wherever you want to go before and after your classes, use your car as your own personal locker and you can stay late after classes. Life is good when you’re a motorist, but it’s also fucking expensive. With the prices you pay for parking these days, it’d be cheaper to hire a prostitute and get her to give you piggyback rides. When you find a good parking spot in the city, don’t tell anybody ever. There are some interesting places around the city to park for relatively little, and some of them will do student specials from time to time. For those of you who don’t have the time, patience and money to make driving/parking work for you, there’s always public transport or cycling.

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Tutorials 101

It’s week two, which means that some first years will be about to experience something entirely new: a tutorial. The first tutorials of your university career resemble the first day of a new class at school. They have that awkward ambiance where everyone is making mental notes about who they want to sit next to and who they definitely do not. Unfortunately, unlike in lectures, you can’t hide in the back corner and glare at anyone who tries to sit down next to you. Tutorials pride themselves on being small and personal; and that they are. Yep, you actually have to make conversation and eye contact with your fellow students. You even get to relive the get-to-know-each-other games that you learnt in Year 3! You know, the ones where you repeat three fascinating facts about your partner to the rest of the class and everyone pretends to be super interested? “Susie is studying Law, enjoys running in her spare time and would like to work for the United Nations one day.” Bah.

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Those five long, lonely years in the high school wilderness have finally paid off. You have withstood the perils of pubescent pimples that plagued your youthful countenance. You overcame an examination system that has befuddled many for half a decade. You navigated the raging rapids of hormonal teenage friendships. All this without getting knocked up by that devious high school boyfriend who you were going to be with ‘forever.’ However, while our fine tertiary establishment may be the land flowing with milk and honey, not everyone has what it takes to make sweet honey milkshake from the get go. The university environment is notorious for its ruthless social stratification and is infamous for its cold, efficient sorting of the dweebs from the diamonds, the posers from the popular and the clueless from the classy. It is of vital importance then, if one were to enjoy university life at its full potential, to avoid being shunted disgracefully onto the lame side of this social divide. With that we come to the central premise of this piece, instructing you on how to be a socially accepted in this dog-eat-dog university setting; how to be ‘Uni-Cool’.

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After decades of unanswered questions, International Rescue, a global aid and rescue operation set up by American ex-pat Jeff Tracy, was declared a threat to global security. Pentagon officials cite unease with John Tracy’s former background as an astronaut and resulting intimate knowledge with American defense technology, as well as IR’s advanced reconnaissance and communications equipment, far superior to any U.S. military hardware in action (and presumably in development). It seems that Tracy’s determined push for secrecy has backfired, with the United States government deciding that IR now poses a threat to public safety, as opposed to the safety net that IR claims to provide.

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Israeli Tennis and the Middle East Peace Process

Although the coming of a new year should guarantee peace and harmony for the millions of people who inhabit this fair planet, 2010 was ushered in by an epic tragedy.

The world looked on in shock as Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer participated in the ASB Classic tennis tournament. Despite continued building of so called Israeli ‘settlements’ in the West Bank, no law exists within the tennis community to prevent Israeli athletes from entering tennis stadiums.

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The Day the Earth Shook

On February 27 2010 a devastating 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck Chile, affecting 80% of the population and leaving at least 2 million homeless. Instead of trying to portray what it was through my own words, I have reproduced a young girl’s terse, unedited account of her terrifying ordeal. It offers raw insight into one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded that  has ripped apart so many lives. 17 year old Camila wrote the following just after the initial quake terrorised her family and neighbours in Santiago, 325kms away from the epicentre of the seismic activity. Her story as it appears on the New York Times website is one of the fortunate ones. Her circumstances allowed her family to be counted amongst a nation of survivors. Others were not as fortunate.

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