A guide to what I am barely putting up with.
May 9, 2007 – 3:00 pm“The cacophony of groans, boos and applause echoing inside the University of Utah’s Kingsbury Hall was as divided as the men and their politics reverberating on stage,” read the opening line of the Salt Lake Tribune’s article covering the recent debate between Sean Hannity and Salt Lake mayor Rocky “America’s mayor” Anderson. Now, I use the word “debate” loosely, since this was a debate in the same way professional wrestling is a sport, in that it wasn’t a debate at all, really. After all, the Trib sent its theater critic to cover the event. A friend of mine (who shouldn’t have attended to debate in the first place) told me she never felt so embarrassed to be from Salt Lake City, and how she assumed everybody there had been raised in a barn. I don’t know if it was really that bad, I don’t really think the debate was as good for the public discourse as some made it out to be. If you attended the event, you were not helping anything, but you were aiding and abetting a fight.
On wholly unrelated note, this has been bothering me for some time: graffiti on bathroom walls, pee on the seats, and purposeful clogging of public toilets. I see this a lot in the restrooms at the University of Utah. This amazes me. Did high-school freshman start attending the university? I would assume that we had outgrown the stage in our lives when we found stuffing a toilet with the fecal mass of five human bowel movements and an entire roll of toilet paper humorous, an act many of us probably never found amusing in the first place. Let’s restore civility to the campus. While we’re at it, let’s bring back tweed, hats, canes, umbrellas, and smoking pipes. That’s my ideal campus.