This will be my last Argus report as President of LUSU. Often I am asked, “Was it good?” I tend to liken the experience of working for LUSU to a rollercoaster of emotional responses. Sometimes it’s awesome; sometimes it’s brutal; sometimes there is that brief moment of calm before a drop, and sometimes the person beside you starts vomiting uncontrollably and all you can do is watch.

In the final analysis of things, I still don’t believe student apathy exists. I’ve seen attendance for all LUSU events increase this year – and all our new events had great attendance. We had a high number of students vote, volunteer, and get involved at all levels. Hopefully this year can be used as a stepping-stone for Mike, Neva, and Chris – and student involvement will continue to grow. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a lot of great students during my year. Some people say that we have a thankless job, but I would argue that students showing up to events and enjoying themselves is a thanks.

At the beginning of our term, Trevor and I were criticized as inexperienced and too energetic…but I believe we have shown how much some excitement about your school can benefit the student body. Thanks Trev for the great year; I couldn’t have imagined working with anyone else.

There is a free BBQ this week on Wednesday, be sure to check it out. On Friday there will be a wrap up for the Haiti Fundraising campaign in the Study starting at 12:00, and a survey in regards to the direction of LUSU will be sent out to the student body soon. All that’s left to say is…

These pretzels… are making me thirsty!

Dave Grad,

LUSU President

president@lusu.ca, 343-8550

A (mostly) local meal from the editor’s hands

As an accompaniment to the feature on pages 12-13 I thought I would provide some of my own recipes for students to use. Now, I had some help with some specific because I do not ever follow recipes, I just put in what I know will taste spectacular. However, for your benefit, the measurements are provided, but you still must cook until finished – as every oven, BBQ, fire pit, and range work very differently. I have provided basic cooking instructions – as in temperature and which appliance – for those who are not as creative as I.

BBQ-ed burgers and fries with gravy

Ingredients: 1 lb fresh ground beef, 1-2 cups of breadcrumbs (own discretion), basil, salt, pepper, 5 large potatoes, vegetable oil, ½ cup saved meat stock, 3 tblsp flour

Directions: (1) Mix beef, breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, basil (or any other spices, but keep it simple) all together and make into whatever sized patties you would like. Put on BBQ (cook slowly on medium). (2) Clean and cut potatoes in strips, put in a pan with some vegetable oil under and over them (could substitute butter or margarine) and spice them up. Can use the three spices I’ve provided to make it easy, but can also use whatever you’d like (3) Gravy: use 1/2 cups meat stalk and water (can be frozen after you cook a chicken or turkey) add in 3 tablespoons of flour. Then whisk fast over lower heat until thick. Let simmer to thicken even more, stirring occasionally. (4) Presentation: Use rectangle platters, and rock everything the open bun patty with gravy and other sauces on a buffet style for people to grab as they please.

Delectable layered dessert

The easiest and most luscious in presentation: fruit, custard and homemade whip cream.

Ingredients: Lots of berries of any type (mixed or one kind). For custard- 1 1/8-ish cups milk, 1 tsp good quality vanilla essence, 
2 egg yolks, 1 tbsp sugar. For Whip cream- a heavy cream, more sugar and vanilla extract (read below as measurements are dependent)

Directions: (1) Custard: In a saucepan, bring milk slowly to a boil. In a separate bowl, beat egg yolks and sugar. Pour milk over the eggs in the bowl, and then return mixture to the pan. Stir until thick then add the vanilla. (2) Whip cream (from lowcarbdiets.com): Put cold heavy cream and flavorings in mixing bowl. Avoid ultra-pasteurized cream if possible. Try 1 to 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract per cup of cream, and 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar. Adjust to taste. Other extracts or flavorings (such as mint or chocolate) can be used as well. With any whisk, beat cream (you can use a hand whisk; it just will take longer). Start slowly with an electric, if you set it on high at first, you’ll have cream all over the place. Set the mixer so it goes as fast as possible without splashing. As cream thickens, turn the speed up. As it gets foamier, start checking for a soft peak, which is what you want. The peak should bend over at the top when you remove the whisk. As it gets close, slow down, because if it goes too far, it will clump and separate. (3) Presentation: place custard in the wine glass, any type of fruit on top, then finish with whip cream and a single piece of fruit on the top.

“It’s party time” Zucchini bites

Ingredients: 1 zucchini (can also be a cucumber or other vegetable- be creative), 1 cup shredded cheese (discretion), basil, salt, pepper, baby tomatoes, 3 tblsp vegetable oil, garlic

Directions: Grease a pan with vegetable oil and set oven to 375 degrees Celsius. Cut up zucchini into circles, thinly sliced. Place the zucchini pieces on the pan, separate from one another. On each, piece sprinkle salt, pepper, basil and garlic. But each baby tomato in half – now, you can put half of a baby tomato on each (flat surface down of course) and put cheese (as much as you please) all over them. Cook in oven until they look finished, golden, and are hot. (2) Presentation: Basic layout for these is to put them on a plate, as they will go fast. Mmm…

Please enjoy these delicious dishes, and feel free to have a nice, cold beverage with them as well. Warning: cooking can become addictive. Bigger warning: eating is even more addictive!

Brandi Cameron

Editor-in-Chèf

I won’t tell you you’re wasting your time no matter what you are doing; I only ask you do the same for me

George K-L

How often have people told you that you’ve wasted your evening, only to find out they’ve spent the last three hours on Facebook? This has happened all too many times to me, and frankly, it’s making me mad.

There is no time wasted; only things you’d rather do with your time. Yeah, I could be studying for my physics midterm that’s in a few days, but I just don’t want to, I’d rather kill some Nazi’s in Call of Duty because it’s much more fun to me then studying how three capacitors must be positioned make an electric field zero, because I simply just don’t care about the latter. Also, because I am in the Geology program, I do not think electrical physics is all that relevant when pertaining to rock.

You’ve likely heard about the Comedy Network, whose slogan is “Time Well Wasted” and I couldn’t agree more: I’ve spent countless hours watching Just For Laughs, tosh.0 and Corner Gas.

Sure, it may not be productive, but I don’t want to be productive, I want my free time to be my free time and I will do with it what I will.

Free time should be exactly what it is: time in which do whatever you want. I choose to play some Xbox, you might choose to go kayaking or you might just to just sit there and listen to Pat Boone, in which case, I judge your taste of music.

Re: Should students expect another tuition hike? (March 8^th)

Last issue’s article on Lakehead’s looming tuition hike is bound to elicit an all-too-predictable reaction from students. The subject inevitably brings on a cavalcade of kvetching about how unfair it is that we must now pay more to attend school. The government is blamed, our woes are lamented, and the conversation generally ends there.

Don’t get me wrong - tuition increases will be felt hard by students from lower-income backgrounds and those not lucky enough to be supported by their families. This is a very legitimate concern. But I would like to suggest that, if we are to move beyond the cold comfort of complaining, students need to take a long, hard look at why the cost of education is rising – and why our increasingly expensive degrees are less and less likely to secure us good jobs.

What does it mean when nearly every Canadian university – including the nation’s most revered institutions like U of T and Queens – are posting growing deficits? When university graduates increasingly find themselves overeducated and underemployed? When governments which themselves are posting record deficits are unable to maintain an affordable post-secondary education system? These developments indicate that our education system may be inherently unsustainable. A system that gladly pockets students’ money while churning out arts graduates and teachers, with no regard for the fact that those qualifications are no longer in demand in our society, is clearly broken.

But it’s not enough to blame the system – our generation is faced with the task of confronting this broken system and starting to build one that works. The government will not do it for us, half-hearted annual protests notwithstanding.

If the skills provided to most of us by the university system are not needed, which skills are? It seems evident that the in-demand qualifications of the near future will not be the bachelors of history, English, and philosophy handed out to many of today’s graduates. The trades, green technologies, and agriculture are all on the brink of rejuvenation. Meanwhile, our bloated university system is charging us more and more money for a more and more irrelevant education.

The only way this will change is when students start demanding a different kind of education – one that involves us in our communities instead of building isolated islands of student living, complete with our own security and (shitty) food system; one that emphasizes hard skills which address the real challenges we face today, like the need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, create alternative sources of energy, and grow local food movements.

There is already a movement toward creating this kind of university, and we must continue it. The university administration has shown that it is not up to the task of balancing a budget, let alone stabilizing tuition fees; the government has shown that they are unable to bail us out of those rising fees. Only by making our universities our own, by building them into vibrant parts of a wider community that teach what we want to learn, will we reduce the skyrocketing cost of a university education – and in the process, get an education that we enjoy and benefit from.

Many thanks to writer Callan Main, and to The Argus for printing the article entitled ‘Aboriginal Participation in the Games: Partnership or Photo-Op?’ in your March 8 edition. It voiced the many of the same concerns and issues that I had become aware of with respect to the tokenism that was displayed. I pondered this while I sat and watched the entire 17 days of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games in fascination, right from the beginning of the opening ceremonies through to the end of the closing ceremonies.

Main notes that “if the [Canadian Olympic] team were to truly reflect the face of Canada, then we would have had 7 or 8 Aboriginal athletes on the 200+ Canadian team,” since close to 4% of the Canadian population is Aboriginal. I would like to add here, that many First Nations athletes would find it extremely difficult to train at the level that the Olympic competitions currently demand. Many First Nations peoples in Canada must live in Third World conditions (47^th on the United Nations Human Development Index) without affordable access to the food and nutrition that is necessary for leading a healthy lifestyle, let alone affordable access the food and nutrition that is required to partake in this level of professional athleticism. In this way, the Olympics are elitist and First Nations participation is thus marginalized. Athletes who wish to participate in the Olympics must train at professional levels, at least 4 hours per day, and for many First Nations peoples this is impossible.

Moreover, the elite Olympic competitions have been set up by European elites and are built on western sports. There are non-western nations who do possess long histories of their own Indigenous sports and games, however these do not fit the western Olympic model, and so their Indigenous styles and traditions in sports are effectively submerged.

This marginalization of Indigenous peoples also can be further applied with respect to accessing the expensive athletic equipment and training facilities used by athletes to gain participation in the Olympics. Many First Nations who cannot attain the same quality of life and standard of living as other Canadians due to the realities imposed by colonization are not be able to train – the increasingly sophisticated scientific and technological equipment and training that Olympic athletes must access therefore bars many Indigenous peoples because they cannot access these advanced facilities. Many must endure in substandard housing, lack of community infrastructure, and limited access to health care or employment.

Peter Rasevych

PhD Student

Faculty of Forestry & the Forest Environment

As a student in the graduate program here at LU, I have been part of many conversations regarding a particularly tense topic. I would like to preface that I am not speaking for the English department, which I am apart of, but have spoken to students from graduate faculties in more than a few departments.

Here’s the gist: as a master’s student you have to be continuously enrolled until the day you complete the program. This means that for students who do not finish in their first year – which I am assuming is a large percentage of grad students– must pay April to August tuition even though they may not be residing in Thunder Bay.

An anonymous source in administration claims this is because of continuous library privileges. However, if a student is not doing research over the spring and summer, or doesn’t even live or work in this city during that time, there is no need for them to use the LU library. Thus, wasting their money, and making ends even harder to meet.

The most frustrating part for many of us is that we will work this summer to pay tuition for our second year in the graduate program, BUT we’re still trying to pay off the –approximately $2,700– charge for the time we’re not even here. Something doesn’t add up.

Some graduate students have added that it makes sense to pay this if you re working on your thesis or project because you are then using LU faculty, facilities, and the library– whether physically or online.

Food Issue Info

One week today (Monday the 22^nd), at 330pm, is The Argus story meeting for the food issue. Our focus will be on local, environmentally friendly, and health issues in regards to food. If this interests you, please come out to the meeting, it is in The Argus office, UC2014 B, which is right above The Study (don’t go over the bridge to the cafeteria though, just keep walking straight then take a left). The issue will be circulated on Monday, March 29^th and is the second last issue of the paper for this school year.

Hiring This Week

This Wednesday is the final day to hand in your resumes, nomination form and pieces of writing to work for The Argus as paid staff for 2010-11. The positions available are news editor, news writer, arts and entertainment editor, sports editor, features editor, copy editor and circulation manager. Stop by the office to grab the nomination form because you need fifteen student signatures attached to your resume and pieces of writing. Note that you only need one nomination form pr person, not per position you apply for.

All forms are due at 4pm in my mailbox in the Argus office or you can drop it off at LUSU and they will put it in my mailbox in their office.

Every applicant is interviewed, and the interviews begin at 630pm this Friday, March 19^th and will be conducted that evening until all interviews are completed. The applicant may leave after their interview (one interview per person, not per position) and will be contacted, via phone or email as to the results, by Monday. If any position is not filled, it will be advertised in the Monday paper and the executive will then do interviews for that position independently.

Brandi Cameron

Editor-in-Chief