The Daily Cal is back! I missed it so.

Two good stories: the one confirming Matt Murray as Student Regent-designate and the one on the Berkeley deportee in Israel.

The Daily Planet chose to run an AP story on the same Church of the Nativity topic. It's inferior to the Daily Cal's version in several ways, mostly in the focus on the personal over the legal and political ramifications of the arrests.

The new columnist is Marie Mathiesen. She's apparently from Denmark. But she's writing from Baja, which might explain why her writing seems so distracted and by-the-numbers.

I had a list of things I wanted to bash in her column. I'll start with the topic. No, wait, the writing is worse. No, it's the weird dialogue conceit that tries to make a column out of a Zagat guide. Praglib made the point that her advice is financially illiterate. (When the Rhetoric majors notice these things, you know it's trouble.)

Here's a suggestion: Count all the money you spend in a month on fancy coffee drinks, food in restaurants, new clothes, and various stimulants (cigarettes, other smokeables, alcohol, and whatever), then take that money and save it instead. Do you really need to go to the Chinese Restaurant you have been to 50 times already? Cook dinner yourself. In a short time, you will be able to afford to go somewhere.

Afford to go where, San Leandro? Assuming I can reduce my existence to a bare, spartan life, I could maybe manage to save $600 in a semester. Congrats; I'm still $400 short on a roundtrip ticket to Nepal. We're talking about a upper-class white kid, too. I doubt Suzy Q. First-Generation has the luxury to go to see the Alps. And considering Marie was hired as a 'Foreigner' columnist, her column about Travelling to Distant Places has nothing more relevant then 'It's Fun' ?

Part 1 of a series in 'Setting impossibly high standards for non-Kevin columnists.'




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