You see the people milling around, waiting impatiently. Some are shuffling their feet, others are checking their wallets; all are nervous. "Man, if I don't get this, I don't know what I am going to do," mumbles one guy to his line neighbor. "My friend just got his and he said it's awesome, but it took forever," whispers another guy.

Although this is eerily reminiscent of the droves of Xbox 360 fans clamoring at the doors of Best Buy, it is far from. This is the Office of Student Financial Aid, the Bermuda Triangle of grants and money. These murmurs bring to light the problems the financial aid office does not want to see. Maybe this is simply the case of the squeaky wheel, but on a campus of 35,000 people, the wheel squeaks quite audibly. [Read article]

Last night, a normally quiet Gentle Ben's Brewery boasted a line extending well beyond its doors down East University Boulevard. Scantily clad females defied the weather outside and greased up males lined up to buy them shots of Jaeger. By 11:30 p.m., the line stretched to Kababeque and even to Pita Pit.

Sororities had date dashes, fraternities hosted late nights and beer pong tables everywhere sported pyramids of Keystone. [Read article]

A Freudian failure

It probably wasn't worth it, but for anyone listening closely to President Bush's immigration speech Monday, it was hard to miss his quickly corrected use of the word "illegals" to describe Mexican immigrants. In a strictly literal sense, he's correct; the men, women and children who leave the destitution of Mexico for a better life in the land that purports to accept the poor, the yearning and the huddled masses tend to be doing so illegally. Even so, the word "illegals" is a pejorative term, and combined with Bush's swaggering Texas twang, he succeeds admirably in presenting the U.S. as a bastion of hostility and ethnocentrism (because, apparently, we weren't doing that well enough before). For this snide slip of the tongue, President Bush gets a Fail. [Read article]

Wal-Mart not evil, merely a well-run business

In reading the column "Quit shopping at Wal-Mart," I believe that Dan Post should have tried to persuade the reader a little better. I believe that Wal-Mart is run well from a business perspective, but I agree it does not treat the people making the products correctly. I think that if people do not want to get treated the way they are at Wal-Mart, then they should not apply there. [Read article]