THE PARTY THAT DON’T STOP
Net: Let the record show that the first respondent to our music trivia question was …
From Jake DeWoskin: That would have to be Eddie Murphy’s failed attempt at a pop music career.
Net: But there were others who clamored for the bestowal of recognition, and we wish to acknowledge their efforts also. Here they are:
From Kathryn Hauser: Eddie Murphy recorded “Party All The Time”, I think in about 1986-ish.
Secretly, Rick James also appears on the song. I would like to add here that I am a graduate student in the School of Music, and this is a triumphant moment for me. It’s good to see that all of the time I spent studying hundreds of years of music history is finally making a difference in people’s lives. Need to know anything about J. S. Bach? Net: Nah — he’s been pretty irrelevant since he left Skid Row. But we’ll call if we need you.
From Stacey: It’s been a while since I heard that song, but I have it on tape back home. I’m pretty sure it was on Eddie Murphy’s album of songs (which is actually pretty good, by the way) that was released in the ’80s. Let me have my public recognition if I’m right. After four and a half years, I deserve it. Thanks. Net: You’re welcome, Stacey — we’re sure you do. In fact, all you folks out there in the University community, if any of you would like 15 milliseconds of fame, just write in, and we’ll print your name in Network — for FREE! Here’s your chance to occupy a brief moment in the minds of thousands of readers. We’re here for U — and we don’t believe in anonymity.
Except for ourselves, of course. Now, on to weightier matters:
PARKING PANDEMONIUM
From Dijit: Hey Daily, grow a backbone and stand up for the students who read your paper day after day. Have you even stopped to consider WHY people are parking in handicapped spots and risking a $600 fine? Net: Complacency bred by an affluent society and callous disregard for the unfortunate? Sounds like America to us. I’ve never done it, personally, but I can’t help but theorize part of the blame falls upon Parking and Transportation Services.
With the ever-increasing number of students coming to the University and the decreasing amount of parking spaces (East River Road ramp being demolished), the only solution Parking and Transportation Services has provided is to raise the rates in the ramps for hourly parking, student contract, and staff contract spaces. Net: What wonderful structural analysis. Foucault? Frankfurt school? I think that Parking and Transportaion Services has earned the “scorn and derision” of the University community.
This wouldn’t be as much of a concern, but as you put it, “the morning commuter seeking a place to leave his car for a few hours feels like Ponce de Leon questing for the Fountain of Youth.” Net: Yes, but do we REALLY know how Ponce felt? To do so, you would have to penetrate the matrix of class, race and gender relations of 16th century explorers — an ethos so foreign to us as to be nearly incomprehensible. Do you have any idea how long it takes STAFF members to get parking spots? The Washington Avenue Ramp waiting list was more than 12 years last time I checked.
Does this really seem like they are meeting the University Community’s needs? Net: No — but can you blame them for inadequately serving an insatiably consumerist society bent on ruthless acquisition of ostentatious and ultimately isolating devices as the contemporary automobile? Is it the University’s fault that inordinate numbers of individuals, many of them able-bodied and capable of using mass transit or even (gasp) walking, insist on using their environment-depleting, conspicuous-consumption driven testaments to capitalism in chrome? We think not.
As far as the doughnut eaters go, they know what we think they can do with their parking tickets. They may be ticketing two to three people a day for this, but I’d wager that at least a quarter of the people they ticket for the rest of the day are ticketed wrongly. Net: Perhaps we are ALL ticketed wrongly. If we follow classic principles of utilitarianism, you will find that the harm caused to the ticketed individual is, in all likelihood, too great to justify the societal happiness of ticketing. If no one is satisfied with a hopeless, enforced situation, perhaps it would be better for a few to be satisfied under anarchy, while the many see no real increase in their loss of happiness, as the end result remains unsatisfactory. I’ve been ticketed wrongly for parking with the departmental hang tag on more than one occasion Net: God. That sucks, and so has pretty much everyone else with whom I work.
This is absurd Net: But is it absurd as the human condition in general, laden as it is with hopes of immortality and glory that can never match the achievements of classical Greece, and the police department doesn’t give any sort of recourse for this. It’s either “pay for it” or “spend half of your day downtown talking to some disgruntled cubicle-dweller who listens to people like you whine about why you don’t want to pay for this bogus ticket.”
I say we all band together to stop this injustice Net: How Thoreauvian and start demanding the police receive tickets when they are speeding and when they are parking illegally.
