Illustration by Cody Angell

With the good ol' UA mired deep in debt and getting the finger from the state in pretty much every way possible, it's time to start looking for some ways to cope ÷ besides narcotics, of course. Here are a few of my creative ideas to bridge the massive budget gaps, many of which are even legal!

First off, let's look at what resources we already have that could easily be put to our advantage: a football team who was just emasculated by Wisconsin for one. I say we equip these guys with tube socks full of marbles and send them into the surrounding areas to collect "protection" money from the locals. Hey, I mean, the Tucson police have been pulling this off for years with their little traffic control scheme (i.e. being in cahoots with the crooked toads who run Parking and Transportation Services for the university) that intends to "cut down traffic" in the major flow areas of the side streets immediately surrounding the school. While I do resent this unmasked attempt to screw the student body out of further food/beer/crack money (depending on your major) and force those of us who thumb our noses at convention to pack camping equipment and anti-wolf implements to get from our cars to school, they do have a pretty good racket going.

Which leads us to option two: totally hosing people on parking; no, I mean even more than now. Here's the game plan: One totally random day each month at 6 a.m., the Parking/Transportation toads install those delightful Tiger Claw extreme tire destruction devices (let's consider this a free plug) backward in the exits of the garages, and if people want to take their cars out of the garages, they first have to pay $100 (small bills only) to large Italian chaps named Guido and Squiggy to put a board over the tire shredders so you lucky stiffs who are already paying way too much for the "privilege" of getting to school on time can go home.

Option three: Cut down on faculty salaries (yes, more than they already are) by offering ridiculous incentives. All you professors picture this: Instead of that extra five grand in your paychecks, you could have such perks as "free coffee and donut day," "sucker punch your immediate superior day" and "extremely causal Friday," wherein anyone caught wearing a tie would be forcibly stripped down, rolled in Crisco and then wrapped, mummy style, in toilet paper. Who could deny the huge boost in morale that one would be sure to bring? If push came to shove, we could install in all the contracts a little clause hidden in the middle requiring 10 years of indentured servitude that the hasty reader might skip over.

However, if forced labor isn't a viable alternative, we always have: Option four: kicking students out of the dorms and using the space to house federal inmates. Hey, I bet none of you knew that privatized prisons are the hottest item out there these days. (Gotta have space for all those people the "Patriot Act" deems unpatriotic!) We could easily pull in quite a bit, though we'd have to do a bit of renovation work to bring some of the dorms up to prison standards, including fixing whatever is in the water at Babcock Inn that made my skin die and fall off like a sick snake my first freshman semester.

Option five: cutting back the travel budgets. Let's say a certain distinguished professor has to make a speech on yet another invisible particle that he found, and to do so he has to travel all the way to Stanford. Could you imagine the money we'd save if we simply equipped him with gas money and sent him thumbing his way along the West Coast? Having the football team race to hop onto the cargo train to Los Angeles and ride hobo style would not only save money ÷ it'd also give highly beneficial exercise!

Or · we could obey what little common sense we have left collectively and stop throwing money at stupid projects, ugly, wasteful artwork and useless administrative positions, which would probably save us millions, particularly if we take one year off from any construction project (which I assume the prisoners housed on campus would appreciate ÷ they have to sleep too).