A Thank You Note
Dear Student Body,
I just wanted to thank all of the wonderful drivers who park in the Woodbury Campus Center main lot. Over the years my car has sustained a wealth of dings and dents from you parking too close and slamming your door into mine. I recently bought a newer vehicle and within a month received the biggest scratch yet! Just the other day I watched someone slam into someone else’s bumper and drive away to find another spot!
I’m just fed up with the general lack of respect for other people and their property. We’re all busy and in a hurry to get to class, but that doesn’t make it okay to squeeze into a spot that’s too small, double park or smack someone’s car with yours.
Please try and respect your fellow students and their vehicles.
Emily
Senior
Free Press Never Looked Better!
From 1989-1991 I was the executive editor of the Free Press. We had a bunch of Macs networked and thought desktop-publishing was the greatest invention!
I gotta tell you, when I poke around the Free Press online today I get flashbacks and goosebumps…you are doing such a terrific job with technology we only dreamed of.
Moreover, the print-version of the paper has never looked better. You are doing such a great job!
And remember, as you get ready for finals and field bad criticisms and, most importantly, prepare to pass the torch to an executive editor-to-be, don’t let anyone get you down!
Keep up the good work!
Andrew J. Levesque
USM Alumnus
Thank you Free Press
To the editor and staff at the Free Press:
Thank you so much for all your support with calendar listings, articles and terrific reporting on subjects relating to women and gender studies programming, including the wonderful article on Kate Bornstein (Oct. 29), co-curricular events, the Freedom Bus to LAC for a convocation event (April 7), and Thinking Matters (April 21).
Getting the word out to the USM student community is important information, and you all have done a fabulous job!
On behalf of the departments and programs that I have been involved with this academic year, we thank you!
ROCK ON!
Gabe Demaine
Diversity/Scholarship Liaison
Discrimination During UMO Pride Week
A very close friend of ours rented a room at a hotel in Bangor because of the UMO Pride Week drag show, so myself, my sister and our friends all went to the hotel to drop off our stuff and start getting ready in the room. The queens and three Colby students who were doing a project for a class had all come to the room to get ready for the show and film a documentary on the drag community.
It was really warm in the room, so we asked the woman running the desk if the AC was on yet; it was not, but she came to the room to see if the heat was on, then came back to ask why there were so many people in the room. We explained we were going to the Pride Week show at UMaine and she was fine with that.
Then two queens went outside to have a smoke, and came back to find the woman standing there to say we had to leave – other patrons were upset and uncomfortable seeing men in makeup and dresses.
Then she said we were breaking a fire code – which we understood, however the woman had been to the room TWICE before and hadn’t said anything about a fire code.
So everyone packed and a few of our friends went to talk to the woman. She wouldn’t give us the money back because the room had “already been used” (for two hours!).
The person who rented the room said she wasn’t leaving unless she got the room money and key deposit back, so the woman said she was going to call the cops.
Another queen asked to speak with the manager – while the woman called the manager, she told us, “I’m from California, understand this culture and am not prejudice.but this is MAINE.”
The fact that our friends were discriminated against in Bangor, Maine really sickens us.
No one should ever stay at the Bangor Motor Inn – they are unreasonable and unwilling to adapt to circumstances that may make others feel uncomfortable.
If you are a paying customer in a hotel, you should be given the right to privacy of whatever happens in your room.
If you choose to get dressed in drag in a room that you paid good money for, you should not be forced out because you are “different.”
Pride Week is about being true to who you are and we don’t care if you’re from California, Tibet, Maine, Canada, Israel, or wherever. This is discrimination and it should NOT be tolerated.
Ashleigh & Adrian St. Pierre
Senior, USM Musical Theater
Senior, Brunswick High School
Economics 101
To the Right,
If you know anything about macroeconomics, you understand that recessions are caused by the understandable and periodic loss of optimism by the nation’s leading business firms. They rationally cut back on capital spending when there is a financial crisis and when sales in the economy decline.
So the people running the economy are periodically pessimistic and that’s why the economy sometimes goes into recession. So the idea, stated by Dustin Gilbert in his recent “From the Right” (April 21), is empirically false and shows a complete lack of understanding about basic macroeconomics.
If we had the time, we could enumerate six other such errors in this, but we won’t bother.
Secondly, we have never had a truly free market economy.
The major industries of this country, agriculture and railroads, which began the industrial revolution, got their start with huge public investments, like the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. Huge donations of free land were given to railroads and it was these public (government) investments that started the capitalist system that we know. This is just basic economic history.
Every modern capitalist economy has a large public sector. Without public education we would lack a skilled workforce. Without scientific research conducted by the government we would lack technology. We need publicly provided infrastructure.
Should freemarketers fire all of the air traffic controllers and move to a faith-based air traffic control system? Approximately 500,000 people would die under this scenario, so we’re not sure what Gilbert was trying to say. The assertion of the existence of a free market capitalist economy is pure ignorance.
He invokes logic, we invoke knowledge and evidence.
From Reality,
Michael Hillard
Professor of Economics
Molly Dolby
Junior Economics Major
Words & Images
Dear Editor:
I write in response to Jenna Howard’s one-sided article “Words + Images published without images” (April 21). I was the managing editor for the 2008 issue.
Last year, Jenna Howard was one of the art editors. It’s strange to see her write an article about the deemphasizing of a position she previously held.
It was not simply that “there was not time to enter art” into Adobe InDesign; it was that there was no way for the printer to put work in the middle of the journal after the proofing process, because to do that they would have had to start over from scratch. When the journal needed to go to Penmor, we had not received confirmation letters from all of the artists. This is why we’d hoped to insert the art after the proof, providing more time for responses. (And why didn’t she mention the two wonderful covers. Are they not images?)
It’s an ignorant thing to say, as Howard does, that the congratulatory letter usually “tells the artist that unless the journal is notified, their initial art submission gives the journal permission to print the work.” Really? According to whom? Words and Images accepts simultaneous submissions, and does not require that writers and artists let the journal know when the work is accepted elsewhere. Because they may have been accepted elsewhere, we need to get permission. This is the norm for national literary journals; when I was recently published in one, this was the first thing they asked.
Anyone who picks up the 2008 issue of Words and Images will see that it’s the best one in years. It contains work by Kevin Brockmeier, Michael Kimball, Dan Domench, Bill Rasmovicz and USM students Steve Gibbon and Zachary Mosher, and, as Howard said, interviews with film director Todd Field, novelist Richard Rousseau and the band The National.
Especially interesting is the interview with Mr. Rousseau, which contains fascinating insights into his famous books “Empire Falls” and “The Social Contract.”
Ryan has apologized to Marie Follayttar for a mistake made. She has apparently not accepted the apology. But this is certainly not front-page material.
If Ms. Follayttar was really so concerned about “contracts not met and whether this made the student activity fee vulnerable to a lawsuit,” she should’ve asked somebody, instead of just feeding her agenda to people who could put this completely one-sided and out of context “story” into print.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Rybeck