Petter decides, “Fuck it” and just changes his SFU e-mail.
Disney to buy out your entire childhood
Disney concocts their most evil scheme since The Return of Jafar
By Gary Lim
Space Mountaineer
Shocking news came from Disney Corporation after a confidential memo from the desk of Walt Disney executive Robert Iger was leaked on popular social news site Reddit, last Saturday.
According to the memo, Disney’s acquisition of Marvel, Pixar and most recently Lucasfilm are merely the first steps toward much grander aspirations. The note carefully lays out what seems to be Disney’s five-year program to purchase your entire childhood.
The note includes a schedule for future buyouts of the Jim Henson Company, Nintendo, Warner Bros, as well as several other prominent children’s entertainment companies. In an effort to quell the media rumours, the cryogenically preserved head of Walter Disney was temporarily unfrozen for to give a press conference.
“Well looks like someone let the Tigger out of the bag. Now I make no qualms about this, since I founded the company in 1923 the stated goal of the Walt Disney Corporation has been a monopoly on childhood. That’s all we want, just a measly little total financial control over the first 18 years of your life. Is that really so much to ask for the countless hours of heartwarming family-friendly entertainment we’ve provided over the years? I don’t think it is.”
Contrary to belief that the public outing might be enough to stop Disney’s twisted ambitions, it actually seems to have accelerated the plans of the multi-billion dollar corporation.
“We’re moving toward a bright new future, ladies and gentlemen,” the head continued.
[pullquote]Contrary to belief that the public outing might be enough to stop Disney’s twisted ambitions, it actually seems to have accelerated the plans of the multi-billion dollar corporation.[/pullquote]
“Not only will we own every piece of intellectual property you experience from ages 0–18, the Disney copyrighters are currently securing the patents to the memories and experiences that shaped all of you growing up. Your first sleepover? It’s ours now. Burying Mr. Bubbles in the backyard? Yep. The time Rhonda Finkelberg let you get to second base at band camp? We’re turning it into a feature-length movie starring Tim Allen as a talking dog. “
Picket Line Cheat Codes
Can’t find the blue key that unlocks that damn picketline? Tired of having to grind outside the Highland to grind inside the Highland? TSSU too damn OP? Well Peak Humour got the inside cheats that’ll have you ontop of the flagpole and kissing the princess in no time.
- Hold B to walk at a brisk pace. Alternate shoulder buttons to avoid eye contact.
- Change language settings: Pretend to be an international student. Bark mandarin at them
- TSSU members are weak to fire.
- Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A.
- Max out your infiltration level and sneak in through the parking garage
- Activate SCAB mode, walk through the line, grade all the papers. Laugh.
- Turn on no-clip. Avoid clipping TAs as you drive through them
- Defeat the picket captain before dealing with its underlings, or they’ll just respawn.
Spotlight on SFYou: SAAC
By Ljudmila Petrovic
Photos by Vaikunthe Banerjee
SFYou is a new addition to the features section. It aims to put a spotlight on SFU’s diverse population, including students, faculty, and groups across all the university’s campuses. Got somebody you think should be spotlighted? Email [email protected]!
The life of a student athlete is not an easy one: balancing school, daily practices, competitions, and sometimes work is already impressive enough. Some student athletes, however, take it even a step further, as they actively represent the varsity student body. Two such examples are Trisha Bouchard — the president of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) — and Jade Richardson, the vice-president.
SAAC was initially more of a social committee whose main focus was to bring all of the Clan’s varsity teams together. “Its main goal was to get all the athletes together, so we didn’t have a divide amongst the individual teams,” says Bouchard. “We wanted everybody to be one big happy Clan family, if you will. That’s what it used to be.”
Recently, however, SAAC has grown into a committee comprised of one or two reps for each of SFU’s varsity teams. The group meets once or twice a month and discusses things such as legislation issues, gender equality issues within the teams, and any broken NCAA compliance rules. Their main goal for this year is to bring student athletes closer to the rest of the student body. “We’re trying to bridge the gap between student-athletes and regular students,” says Bouchard. “We’re trying to get our school more involved in athletics, and have everyone join together.” SAAC is planning on hosting more social events, such as pub nights, and having more tickets sales and student discounts in order to reach this goal. “We’re hoping to get it out more to people that aren’t athletes,” adds Richardson. “It’s just difficult because obviously the school is in the NCAA, and the athletes are in the NCAA, but I think the school is somewhat disjointed from it.”
As the only Canadian school in the NCAA, SFU’s student athletes face additional challenges. “It’s so much easier for schools in the States to have this sort of thing, because they have so much manpower, so much money dedicated to this,” says Bouchard. “Whereas SFU doesn’t have that yet. We’re hoping to slowly get there, but it’ll be a process. It won’t just happen overnight.” The two student athletes discuss the lack of support they feel when they go down the US schools for games: a 7,000-person university will bring out a crowd of 4,000 people, says Richardson. Needless to say, SFU’s home games have a less than satisfactory turnout. Furthermore, being the only Canadian university in the NCAA puts a lot of pressure on SFU’s student athletes. “When we go to the States, we’re the ambassadors for Canada, we’re ambassadors for SFU, we’re the faces of the school when we travel,” says Richardson. “Our actions are what people see when we travel, what they’re going to think of our school, so I think it’s unbelievable how little support we have.”
In their roles as president and vice-president, Bouchard and Richardson organize and lead SAAC’s meetings, and also go to any meetings with compliance officers and other institutional bodies within SFU. Furthermore, they represent SFU at meetings with SAAC representatives from other schools, which are held twice a year in Seattle. This has provided them with the opportunity to see how varsity athletics fit into the SFU community. “SFU beforehand was strictly an academically driven school,” says Bouchard. “Now we want to have it still focusing on the athletic side, but bringing in that athletic component as another attribute to SFU.” Furthermore, they are working towards raising money for the Make a Wish Foundation. “This is the first year we’ve been able to do this,” notes Richardson. “We want to at least equal the funds of some of the teams in our conference. It’s definitely something we need to start focusing on, and people need to be aware that we’re moving forward.”
“I think it’s important that people do know about the work that we do, aside from being athletes,” she adds. Both Richardson and Bouchard noted that there is a certain stereotype surrounding student athletes, and they want to dispel the archetypal image of the “dumb jock” through their work with SAAC. “That’s not how it is,” concludes Bouchard. “People need to change how they perceive SFU student-athletes.”
Shit happens
November is Crohn’s, Colitis, and IBD Awareness Month
By Adam Dewji
No disrespect at all to the Mos this month, but I am personally going to dedicate myself to Crohn’s and Colitis awareness, a cause that November shares with prostate cancer awareness
Many people are shy to talk about Crohn’s, Colitis, and other bowel diseases, in fear of awkward subject matter in conversations, being treated differently, or being made fun of (especially in high school). You can laugh at all the funny words in this article — in fact, I encourage you to. Laughter is great medicine. I still laugh at all the good poop jokes in the world.
What is it?
Crohn’s and Colitis are two types of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBDs). They cause the intestines to become inflamed, and can cause ulcers. Crohn’s Disease can affect anywhere from the mouth to the anus.
IBD is a very painful realm of diseases, with often unpredictable episodes of pain, including inflammation of intestinal tissues. The diseases are caused by the body’s immune system; the body has an irregular response and attacks its own tissues. As was my experience, stress also has been correlated to triggering symptoms.
One in 160 Canadians suffer from IBD. There is no cure for it, and it is for life. Most people require lifelong medication, and after it stops working, surgery is then required to remove affected areas. Surgery is not always successful, and when the intestines are stitched back together, the disease begins to spread from the surgery site once again.
The level of pain and the symptoms are individual to each person. For instance, my older brother also suffers from Crohn’s, and we vary drastically on what foods will work with us and what types of pain we feel.
Imagine this: you have a burn on your arm and it’s been there for a week. For whatever reason, you grab a wire brush, and slowly drag it across your arm. Now, imagine that burnt tissue inside your intestines instead of on your arm, and imagine food aggravating it every time you eat. This is what many people suffering from IBD deal with in their everyday lives.
For most sufferers, IBD affects quality of life. I’m lucky to have great friends who have helped me maintain a positive outlook, but a lot of people with IBD do not have the support that I do. I hope to be able to help others through this article.
What are the symptoms and how do you get checked?
If you feel pain in your abdominal area after eating (up to 12 hours after), and it hasn’t been diagnosed, go to a doctor.
Some symptoms can turn out to be other things, like heartburn, indigestion, stomach ulcers, or other gastro-intestinal issues. They may not turn out to be Crohn’s or Colitis, but trust me: it’s damn well worth it to get it figured out now. Waiting can prolong your symptoms, and don’t be afraid to tell your doctor if you have problems in your gut or even your butt. We have free healthcare in Canada. Doctors are here with good intentions, to help us.
Before I got diagnosed, my symptoms had been lifelong stomach-aches and general discomfort after I ate. I always just thought it was the way I reacted to different foods. I then started to develop symptoms similar to someone with a gall bladder infection, where having greasy foods would aggravate my pain and nausea. Soon enough, however, other foods started to trigger these symptoms; seeing as my older brother had already been diagnosed, I was sent in for a test.
This test was nothing serious: it was painless and non-invasive. No, they didn’t stick anything up my ass to check me out. The process is called a “Small Bowel Follow-through”: I had to drink some Barium solution (in order to show up on an x-ray). After drinking the solution, they were able to look at my illuminated intestines, and point out the spot where it was narrowed and inflamed.
This article could not possibly encapsulate everything there is to know about IBD, but hopefully it sparks some interest for you to find out more. There are so many personal stories to be found: I recently had a cousin who just had surgery on his intestines after all medications failed. If you currently already suffer from Crohn’s, Colitis, or any IBD, know that it’s always worth the fight. Always.
What sort of foods work for you and what doesn’t?
This is a really hard question to answer, seeing as my gut randomizes what works and what doesn’t by the hour. In fact, I’ve been at a restaurant and ordered food, only to have it arrive 15 minutes later and be unable to handle it. A hospital trip and four morphine shots later, I was in bed withdrawing morphine, all because my conscience had told me to “eat it anyway” for the sake of manners.If there’s one favour that I may ask of you: please tell two other people about Crohn’s, Colitis, and IBD. My goal here is to help people understand what other people are going through when they talk about these diseases. I’m asking those who don’t have it to be tolerant; those who may have it to get checked out; and those who do have it to keep fighting — life is on expert mode for a reason, make it worth it.
Counter-point: Why GMO’s suck ass.
GM crops do more harm to ecological systems than we can even comprehend
By Kristina Charania
Photos by Andy Rogers
It’s likely you have heard this out of every larynx that has come within five feet of you: we need to feed nine billion people by 2050. And, I will kindly tell you for the hundredth and fifty-fourth time: genetically modified vegetables are not the way to pass go, collect 200, and feed every hungry hand in the safest way possible.
Yeah, sure, remodeled crops are wonderful little innovations that grow in arid conditions and extreme temperatures. Farmers maximize their crop yield and feed a greater number of people by harvesting on otherwise unusable land, which sounds fantastic until you realize that the plants are durable enough to grow anywhere. This includes the places where you don’t want the little buggers to be — namely the quarantined areas that traditionally produce organic vegetables. Modified seeds blossom into superior organisms that will invade spaces and outcompete regular crops for the resources necessary for growth. While many scientific papers argue that present GMO crops aren’t vicious towards existing plants, natural mutations and further artificial modifications could lead to an unstoppable Weeds Gone Wild situation in your backyard. Wild girls will at least go home at 2 a.m. These crops won’t.
However, this is really exciting for big agricultural companies, who see these super plants as a way to make some serious dough. This is unfortunate for many reasons. Naturally, small farming practices are steadily put out of business by this monopoly. For example, biotech giant Monsanto imposes a similar oligopoly by producing 90 per cent of soy, 85 per cent of corn, and 95 per cent of sugar beets in the US, all of which are, unsurprisingly, genetically modified and hard to avoid if you buy foods at regular supermarkets.
Eventually, the products from companies like Monsanto will genetically converge into “the perfect crop”: one that is insect-proof and able to grow with minimal sustenance, water, and sunlight. These organisms will not only be susceptible to lethal disease that could annihilate a species, but the horizontal transfer of genes may give environmentalists a massive headache. For example, if scorpion poison-producing cabbages — which, by the way, are very efficient against pesky caterpillars — were present in the environment, a virus could transmit the gene that codes for the poison from one organism to another of a different species. Once this transmission occurs naturally in the environment, any gene could reach any organism. This could allow the aforementioned obtrusive crops to pass their DNA onto unmodified vegetables, which could cause a cull of caterpillars.
And, most importantly, if genetically modified crops are accepted in society and forcefully pushed upon the agricultural sector, the genetic engineering of humans — the scariest notion of them all — is not far off the horizon. If we can comfortably produce apples sans-worms and jumbo carrots, we will want to eventually remove genes that propagate cancer in our offspring, and then the mutation for cystic fibrosis, and then the gene coding for cri du chat syndrome . . . you get the picture.
Of course, it’s important to understand and practice the genetic modification of organisms in controlled situations. But limitations and less real-world application are crucial because we can’t observe the side effects of any altered organism until they have formed a niche in our environment and it becomes too late to reverse any potential damage done. Call me a pessimist, but have fun dealing with Greenpeace when they say “I told you so,” as your garden grows a mind of its own.
Point: Relax the noose on GMO foods
In a world without fear, genetic engineering may be a viable solution to our many issues
By Esther Tung
Photos by Tim Stockton
To see counter-point, click here!
Picture an heirloom summer squash at the Kitsilano farmer’s market. The vendor is an MBB grad student, genial, bespectacled, bearded. Once he catches your eye, he’s quick to dive into his spiel.
This is the latest project from a group of SFU hobbyist engineers, bio-enthusiasts that congregate in the biology labs after hours to tinker with plant genomes. The squash is a revival from 1850s France, previously limited in production due to fragility.
On the market table is the fruit of their latest project. With the certain genes for tolerance to soil acidity and overcrowding silenced, it’s become feasible to farm it throughout Pacific Northwest summers. These ones are grown right out of his own backyard. The group is now engineering a strain of maize that will drastically reduce fertilizer runoff.
This entirely hypothetical situation highlights the much-ignored flipside of genetic engineering. Food politics currently tout organic, biodynamic farming as the messiah that will redeem our world from cancer, resource exhaustion, climate change, and economic recession. Yet, as flavourful and nutritious as organic food is compared to conventional farming methods, it poses a problem that no lefty enviro wants to address — there is no way we can feed our projected nine billion-strong population on the principles of Alice Waters.
Locavorism and the organic farming trend won’t die out, but will become an increasing luxury, afforded only by the richest two to five per cent of the world’s population (that’s us). Conventional farming methods have placed all their shitty cards face up on the table. Approving GE food is currently an expensive and tedious process, and so only afforded to maximum-profit motive companies like Monsanto.
Yet stringent regulation on transgenic foods has not resulted in less of it on our shelves — 80 per cent of packaged foods contain GMO crops, while cattle feed is usually GMO corn. A piece of legislation passed in the US in the 80’s which allowed universities to hand over crop patents to food companies, has concentrated the intellectual property rights to the building blocks of life in the hands of very few.
But imagine if there were looser laws surrounding the creation and approval of engineered foods. Imagine if the technologies became accessible to interested amateurs, the way that computer coding is a skill that can be acquired by anyone with the interest to learn. Imagine if legislation was expected to evolve to meet the needs of a changing industry and their consumers, much like with technology. Imagine the GE equivalent of Web 2.0. Approved staple crops could be freely distributed; the seeds free to be propagated.
GMO foods are inherently a disturbing concept. But the creators of a mango spliced with deep-sea flounder genes don’t expect it to be sold at Safeway, much like the artist behind a provocative painting will not hope to be displayed on the walls of IKEA. There are scenarios in which genetic engineering can be logical — take the hypothetical summer squash, for instance. No genes were spliced into its variety, only turned off, thereby accelerating the conventional breeding process. Rice requiring minimal water to grow could be created in a matter of months instead of years, solving water shortage problems in countries that depend on it as a staple. In areas of malnutrition, the most readily available crop could be infused with vitamins and minerals as an effective Band-Aid solution.
Yet because of the fearful rhetoric that surrounds genetic engineering, we’ve lost the imagination for its possibilities, and the curiosity to question whether its potential is being severely stifled. As a lefty enviro, I simply took the “facts” of GMO at face value. But hypoallergenic tree nuts, never-browning lettuce, inbred resistance to pests — all can be made possible by genetic engineering. Yet only the interests of commercialized food giants are represented in this realm of food politics.
It’s a precarious utopia that requires careful management. And I’m eager, though not hopeful, that genetic engineering legislation will change within my lifetime. But the first step to changing public policy is changing public conversation — so here’s hoping to making the first dent at exorcizing the demonic image of GMO.
