A spring break by any other name (The Daily Tar Heel op-ed column)

It's 9 p.m. on a weekday, you're on a spring break, and you're in a country where the drinking age is being able to look the bartender in the eyes without flinching.

Naturally, you head to the bar where your friends have been for more than half an hour, sipping fish bowls and wondering where the heck you were.

You kick back, take a couple down and forget about life, stress and your grade point average for two to seven hours.

Then you saunter tipsily back to a seedy hostel and use your barely-passable-on-a-good-day language skills to convince the groundskeeper he should totally let you in even though it's past midnight and you smell like coco locos.

After some fraction of a good drunken night's rest, you heave yourself out of bed, stuff your face with coffee and pastries and run down to the local orphanage.

There you play soccer, tear down cultural barriers and play a formative role in young, orphaned children's lives. This is followed by coming back, eating, napping, eating and starting all over again. Although this time you might want to take it easy on the cocktails.

Sound like a pretty intense spring break? I'll say.

But here's what's weird. Suppose you're going as a part of some organization, and weeks or months beforehand you thought you'd maybe learn a little about this distinct culture you wanted to make a positive, enduring impact on.

With that—and just one of those mornings of playing games with local kids or painting houses—all of a sudden you've got yourself what's come to be known as an "alternative" spring break trip.

Alternative to what? Well, everything else I suppose: working, visiting friends, getting nine kinds of crazy with hundreds of people on a beach, etc.—all of which are respectable options.

But why is it a different category altogether when you actually want to interact productively with a community other than your own on spring break? Shouldn't that be a default or at least the ideal?

Spring break is just that—a break—but it's also an opportunity to step out of sheltered university life for a few days and make some new connections with the world outside of our socioeconomic peer group.

That can mean getting free shots from the guy who cleans the hostel toilets or just sharing a dance and an awkward conversation with a mysterious foreign lady, but it's better if it doesn't end there.

Learn a few more things about the real world; be open-minded.

And who knows, maybe some of us will get a better idea of what we actually want to do with our lives when we're finally out there for good.

But if nothing else, we should at least be sure to pick up after ourselves. Tipping well is good, too.



http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2013/03/a-spring-break-by-any-other-name

Oprah Winfrey Takes in Rihanna (Bounce Magazine Vol. 13 Issue 3, March 2013)

American billionaire Oprah Winfrey brought Barbadian recording artist Robyn Rihanna Fenty into her home last Friday, telling her, "Stay as long as you need," and "Just call me Mama Winfrey, dear."

It was late, so media mogul Winfrey told Rihanna to go upstairs and rest, saying the storm must have worn her out and telling her she looked as if she'd been "trying to carry the whole world on your shoulders.

"The talking can wait until morning," sighed Winfrey, the former talk show host, as she made eye contact with the unusually shy Rihanna. "Leave your wet clothes in the bathtub and I'll get them tomorrow."

Winfrey had already left fresh clothes out and made up the guest room for Rihanna earlier that evening, confident in her intuition that the headstrong pop star would return, drenched and downtrodden, despite having spoken so angrily to Winfrey earlier that week.

"Lord knows what I'm going to do with her," Winfrey said, shaking her head as she watched Rihanna quietly and obediently climb the stairs. "Too stubborn for her own good," she said, glancing sideways at husband Stedman with the slightest hint of a smile on her face. "Thinks she owns the world, and then she's shocked when it doesn't do quite what she expected."

Stedman stood by the fireplace, his arms crossed and brow furrowed, in the same place he'd been 20 minutes before when Rihanna showed up at the back door, dripping wet and clutching her old, grievously torn backpack like it was all she had left.

"She won't want to talk to you," Stedman said, moving to sit down at the nearby coffee table and pouring them both a glass of wine. "Help is the last thing she wants."

"Just like her mother," Winfrey said. "But she'll learn to listen, and then maybe she'll find out she's not so alone after all." She took the glass of merlot and looked hopefully up toward the guest room, where Rihanna fast asleep on the new linens. "It'd be too much of a shame to watch all that potential go to waste."

World Starting to Make Sense to 6th Grader (Bounce Magazine Vol. 13 Issue 3, March 2013)

After a long talk with his mother Tuesday about the facts of sex and childbirth, the world is starting to make a lot more sense to local 6th grader Tyler Statson, sources say.

After 10 years of being fed "some bologna about birds," Statson said he was overjoyed to finally find some conclusive answers.

"It never really added up right," he said. "I mean, babies are pretty fragile, so I don't even know how the whole bird thing would work without something really bad happening."

Statson said he'd known the stork story was nonsense for years, but he hadn't been able to puzzle anything out, and his parents had been conspicuously tight-lipped on the subject.

"Aunt Lucy helped a little, but without more clues the whole baby in her belly thing just made everything weirder," Statson said. "I still wondered how the baby got in there, so I tried to make the bird story fit too, but that was a dead end."

Statson said he understood why his parents were uncomfortable, but he really wished they'd had the stomach to tell him earlier.

"I guess it's kind of weird," he said. "It's like you've got all the pieces right here, you just put this in there, do this, touch that, and then set the time for 9 months and you've got a baby.

"It makes a whole heck of a lot more sense than birds," he added, still angry. "That story was scary. I mean, if birds can bring you babies, then what other kind of weird stuff goes on I don't know about? And how do I know the birds won't just show up one day and give me one? They're birds, it's not like they know any better."

Statson said he felt a lot more confident and secure knowing that no baby would appear until he used his tools to make one.

"I'd always hoped the world was a little more logical than that crap about the birds. Actually I feel sort of like an idiot now, he said. "Do you know how many kids in first grade I told about storks and how they put the baby in my aunt's stomach? They must all think I was stupid. And what if they already knew? They were probably all making fun of me behind my back."

Resolving the mystery of childbirth has only left Statson eager to get more concrete answers for once.

"Next I gotta figure out that whole Santa thing," he said. "Maybe science class will start making sense again if I find out what they haven't been telling me."

"God, being little sucks," Statson sighed. "I wish people would just be straight with me. But I guess there's always Wikipedia."

Stand-alone Headline Tickers (Bounce Magazine Vol. 13 Issue 3, March 2013)

Hungover minister must've married dozens of couples last night

2nd grader starting to get pissed at know-it-all dad

Comedians worldwide mourn loss of Nazi Pope

Thousands of Romney supporters deported back to America

Egyptian protesters demand institutional change, end to obnoxious revolutionary tweeting

Have fun, and watch the road (The Daily Tar Heel op-ed column)

It was the end of my second semester of college, and I hadn't driven a car in months. I got sick of the P2P after the fall semester (very nearly literally), and my only time spent in cars was in short trips off campus, so I spent very little time in automobiles.

The end of the year arrived, and my dad came to drive me home. We got on the highway, starting the long, arduous trip to Raleigh, and I immediately felt the uncomfortable gastric squirm of motion sickness, greeting me like an old friend cheerfully wrapping his arm around my intestines. And not only was I-40 moderately nauseating a little before rush hour, but it was scary.

Granted, it may have had a little to do with riding shotgun in a 12-passenger van with suspension like a water bed, but something about breezing through dense traffic at high speeds was fairly unnerving, and the next day I discovered driving was even worse.

I quickly got over this anxiety in the following weeks, making myself drive every day and thus desensitizing myself to the mild terror of the highway. But that got me thinking.

My anxiety didn't constitute a full-blown phobia, but desensitization, as a legitimate therapeutic procedure, is regularly used for overcoming real irrational fears. Often it just involves repeatedly exposing people to heights, ducks, zippers or whatever it is they're afraid of, and then the original reaction to the stimuli is worn down until it's barely even noticeable.

But is it irrational to be afraid of cars? Because there's so much potential for things to go wrong, I think it's perfectly rational to worry.

We've come a long way since the pre-seat belt era, but today's highways aren't all airbags, car seats and rainbows now. It's definitely possible to worry too much, but most of us go about our daily lives without any concern at all for the danger we put ourselves in on the road.

It's like we've already been thoroughly desensitized, and now the incredibly dangerous is almost mundane.

Isn't it odd how routine it feels to climb into massive death boxes and go barreling down motorways at supernatural speeds, sometimes no more than a coffee spill or a violent sneeze away from smashing into other such vehicles?

For a species with such a supposedly strong instinct for self-preservation, it's shocking how often we entrust our well-being to complete strangers on the road. Especially when we know they're likely just as sleepy and unreliable as us — and no less prone to drinking, texting, eating or checking their complexion in the mirror while driving.

So let's do our part and be conscious of the tremendous impact a car can have on a person's skeletal structure.

In 2009 there were 10.8 million motor vehicle accidents reported in the United States, and almost 36,000 deaths as a result.

On that note, have a great spring break! But be careful around cars.



http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2013/03/have-fun-and-watch-the-road

Coyotes: North Carolina's furry new kids on the block (Mother Nature Network Blog)

Without a natural predator, coyote populations in North Carolina are freely expanding, both inside and outside of cities. They usually keep to themselves, but the problem is that coyotes in cities can easily become accustomed to being around humans, and that's when conflicts can occur—especially for those humans who aren't quite accustomed to coyotes themselves.

Chapel Hill resident D.J. Rogers was just starting his regularly peaceful commute one morning in September when he had one such encounter. He saw them as he was starting to leave his apartment, but they just looked like a couple of dogs at first. As they a came a little closer, however, he realized they were definitely coyotes.

"Knowing coyotes aren't fond of human encounters, I just bang around a bit more headed down the stairs, thinking it will scare them away," Rogers said. "It did not.

"Next thing I know, I am being silently stalked by two coyotes, quietly but surely closing in on me."

Rogers began to run, and he heard the coyotes doing the same behind him. "Just as I am about to cut a corner and lose them, I fall, ripping my shirt in the process," he said.

He then lay there a minute—composing himself and preparing to "throw down" against some coyotes—but it turned out not to be necessary.

"In the time it took me to have an existential crisis, the coyotes fled," Rogers said.

Coyotes are not new to North Carolina, or even to Chapel Hill, but they have become more of a visible problem in recent years. "I had heard news about coyotes being spotted all over Chapel Hill and Carrboro, but I figured the odds of encountering one were pretty slim," Rogers said.

Jason Allen, wildlife biologist for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission assigned to Orange County's district, said the coyote population of Orange County is definitely growing. "We know we've got coyotes in every county; we know the numbers are increasing," he said.

Allen said there are more coyote sightings in areas with more ongoing development, like Chapel Hill, for example.

Hunting coyotes is legal in rural areas of North Carolina, but it isn't permitted inside of most cities. "If people would hunt them, yes, it would effectively manage the population," Allen said.

Roland Kays, a director at the Nature Research Center at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, said that hunting doesn't work to keep coyote populations down. "They breed pretty quickly," Kays said.

"What it does do though is make them afraid of people," Kays said. He said that without hunting, coyotes stop being afraid of people, and that's when there are problems.

Kays says that scientists are working on better ways of managing coyote behavior, but at the moment hunting is the only tactic that has any effect. "Sirens, loud noises or lights, or different things like that—they just get used to it," he said.

There are, however, plenty of other tools and habits that individuals can use to avoid conflicts with coyotes without shooting at them.

The best way to prevent conflicts with coyotes is to keep yourself and your pets away from them; avoid giving them any kind of shelter, and try not to leave anything they can eat outdoors and accessible—like fruit, pet food and garbage. Actual coyote attacks rarely involve anything beyond cats or small dogs, according to information published by the N.C. Wildlife Resource Commission.

Kays says that coyotes are more than just pests to be managed. "They're basically our largest predator in most of North Carolina," he said. "They play an important ecological role in keeping a lid on the rabbits, deer, mice and rats."

They're not so much vicious invaders encroaching on our land as they are new neighbors moving in down the street; we just have to be courteous and a little cautious.









Growing populations of coyotes are spreading through both urban and rural areas in North Carolina; should residents be alarmed?
http://www.mnn.com/local-reports/north-carolina/local-blog/coyotes-north-carolinas-furry-new-kids-on-the-block

Could a new pope mean change for the church? (Campus BluePrint Blog Feb 2013)

German-born Pope Benedict XVI stepped down from his position as leader of the Roman Catholic Church Feb. 28, making Benedict the first pope to do so in nearly 600 years. At 85, Benedict says his health has deteriorated to the point that he can no longer properly serve the upwards of a billion Catholics in the world, and soon he'll be moving into a simple convent inside the Vatican where he will continue to write and reflect for the rest of his days. Of much greater significance, however, is what will happen to the prestigious post he leaves behind.

As Catholics worldwide have overcome the initial surprise of Benedict's resignation, rampant speculation has begun, concerning not just the identity of the next pope, but the future of the Roman Catholic Church itself. The church seems to be at a modern crossroads of sorts, and the election of a new pope could represent a change in the way the church works in and with the world.

One important question is what a new pope means for the political dimension of the church. Benedict and his predecessors have drawn criticism for their conservative views on issues like contraception, gay rights and women in the priesthood. A pope with a more progressive world-view would be welcomed by many. But substantial shift on these issues might be too much to hope for.

All 117 of the cardinals eligible to participate in the election of the next pope were chosen by Benedict or his antecedent, Pope John Paul II. Both of these popes adhered firmly to conservative Catholic doctrine, and this is likely to have had an impact on their selections. However, opinions can change over time, so a change in the church's politics, while unlikely, is possible.

But one thing that might change, and has indeed been the source of much discussion in the Vatican itself, is where the new pope comes from. The overwhelming majority of population growth in the 20th century church has been in regions like Asia, Africa and the Americas, and only one in four Catholics is European. But despite this radical demographic shift, the last non-European pope was a Syrian who died more than 1,250 years ago.

Neither is this diversity accurately represented in the 117 cardinals, of whom 61 are European. Most demographics are at least represented in some way, (except, of course, for women) but these are the 117 people who will be choosing the next pope, and tradition says that they will choose one of their own.

The cardinals will convene and elect a new pope mid-March, and until then it will be impossible to know for sure what they will do. A few significant names have risen to the top of the public debate, including one cardinal from Ghana, one from the Philippines and several from South America, but this might be no more than speculation.

Race will have to be an issue in the cardinals' deliberations, one way or another, but it will not be the only one. The new pope will have to lead the modern Catholic Church through its constant clashes and collaborations with other religions and the rising secularism of the west. He will be expected to be active and charismatic, to reach out to the youth and to fight to keep the Catholic Church a strong, relevant institution in the world.




http://campusblueprint.com/2013/03/04/could-a-new-pope-mean-change-for-the-church/