Miami Student

A while back I wrote a column about Ann Coulter where I made two conclusions: one, Ann Coulter is a right-wing nut job, and two, I would not have sex with her. These two statements hardly seem that surprising or controversial to me, but the amount of hate mail I received seemed to contradict this. My sources tell me I was a topic of much discussion at a College Republicans meeting, and I got one e-mail that called the column "a misogynist rant with no redeeming political value." That one was from my mom. The fervor soon died down, however, and life returned to normal. That is until one day I opened my e-mail to find 30 messages from people without "muohio" addresses. Most of the messages made it clear that I was the liberal spawn of Satan and an uninformed socialist who had most likely had an abortion. I replied to one of these people, asking how he, living in Philadelphia, had read my column, and he was kind enough to point me to the source, a right-wing Web site called freerepublic.com where someone had posted my column. …

Ben Roethlisberger has done things on the field that no other NFL rookie quarterback has ever done - win his first eight starts and complete 68.8 percent of his passes - but its his off the field attributes that separate him from most NFL players. On Sunday I attended my first NFL game as a member of the media. I went to the Pittsburgh Steelers' 19-14 victory over the Cincinnati Bengals at Paul Brown Stadium in order to write a feature story on Ben. (Shameless plug - see page 6.) I covered Ben for two seasons while he was a RedHawk and I was pleasantly surprised to see that he hasn't really changed since becoming the NFL's rookie sensation. …

"Okay. Don't make eye contact with them, walk fast and I'm home free. Here we go. Okay, it's going good. They're looking at the girl over there - oh no, they saw me. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry! Run, damnit run!" Welcome to the inner monologue of a person trying to dodge the people who pass out fliers, or the word of God, at the HUB corner at the Shriver Center. But in essence, aren't we all just like those poor souls out there, doing their job as a passionate student, as an active citizen, or as someone who was actually dumb enough to sign up to do it? Do we not all possess that inner sense of fervor to enlighten the masses and promote our causes? Survey says, hell no. Except, this is not where the problem lies, but instead, it rests solely on the bastards and bastardettes who avoid these people who are just trying to make a difference. One of my first negative experiences as a student at Miami was visiting Shriver and being bombarded by flier people, and the dude who told me I was going to hell. Aside from having already known my post-death destination, I was shocked and appalled by the gargantuan barrage of info hurtled in my direction. After the initial experience, I became one of those people who would march with their eyes focused on the ground, so that they would avoid having to take a flier, or talk to someone. …