Opinion

The Times, they are a-changin'. The Los Angeles Times' parent company, Tribune Company, announced Friday that it was borrowing $250 million in credit due to the current financial crisis. The New York Times' revenue is down 12 percent.

When I first set out on "Mission: List," this week's column's item was most certainly not included. It's not a list entry I would recommend anyone else add to his/her own personal list, nor was it an experience I'd like to repeat.

Come one, come all!

Welcome to another year of Aggie columnists. We'll be here for your bus rides in the pre-dawn hours, your chemistry classes in the morning and all that extra time you need to kill between classes after you've finished the Sudoku.

Hi. I'm K.C. I did this last year. I'd love to talk about how awesome I am at life and write one of those jolly little intro columns everyone seems to be so fond of, but the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse just galloped by my window so I'm gonna skip the foreplay and get down to business.

Hello Aggie readers! It's a new school year, which means a fresh start - new classes, new opportunities, and (for better or worse) new columnists! I was told that this would be a good time to introduce myself, though I was planning on waiting until June … but what the heck? My name's Danielle. I'm an American studies major in my fourth and final year at UCD; which roughly translates to: "I have no idea what I want to do with my life and I'm screwed." I hail from sunny Los Angeles and, although I now live in Davis, I still wear flip-flops every day of my life. I enjoy long walks through the Arboretum, speak Spanish fluently when I'm drunk, and have read the Twilight series more times than I care to admit. I spent my most recent Monday night driving to Woodland to buy the last 15 bags of Mother's Cookies at Target, and on my list of favorite things ever, autumn in Davis falls right after puppy dogs and just before Johnny Depp.

I see the same picture over and over again - a horde of fake smiles all bunched together to make one shitty picture.

Dear Americans,

You have a tremendous stake in this election. Our nation has reached a pivotal moment, a time that should not and must not be ignored, in her history. We face an imminent choice, and we have to make a decision - soundly, carefully, deliberately and with haste.

God, I love my parents for always trying to keep me safe. There's really nothing that says "I love you, baby girl" like sending your daughter pepper spray in the mail (which I never curiously decided to play with and misfired) or forcing her to watch a "Too Smart for Strangers" video 238,947 times by the age of seven. I grew up next door to the elementary school I attended and was never allowed to walk home alone, even after I swore to take my little keychain harmonica to use as a whistle. But hey, I recognize that it was all for my own good.

The Peter J. Shields Library at UC Davis is in a bit of a bind.

In fact, that might be an understatement. The predicament that the library has been in over the past decade is slowly turning into a crisis. Long-term under-funding has seriously damaged the library's ability to do what it does best: provide an outstanding array of research materials for students and scholars.

Note: This is the first in a series of The California Aggie's endorsements for the Nov. 4 election. We will be stating our endorsements over the next two and a half weeks, and summarizing our opinions on Election Day.

The Davis College Republicans have been posting a deceptive flyer around campus, urging students to "Save UC Standards" by rallying against the elimination of the SAT II Subject tests as an acceptance requirement.

The University of California is the best in the world but it is on a slow financial starvation diet. It's a diet that forces those who are students to pay more and more and the general public to pay less and less for the university.

Hello, world. My name's Cheya Cary and for the next 27 weeks I'm going to be publishing columns - very much like this one - about pertinent issues facing UC Davis students, the greater American public and, thanks to our pioneering time-capsule program, our reptilian overlords of the year 3000.

My first column. I cannot lie: I am a small fish; the Aggie is a big pond for me.

The columnists were given the option of writing an introductory column this first week to, you know, introduce ourselves. I'm using this as my get-out-of-jail free card because I didn't have anything prepared. It's hard to write something so serious though, especially about yourself, because it makes you sound self-absorbed. Trying to write something comical makes it sound like you have no self-awareness. Everyone knows what I'm talking about. People who read the editorial columns are some of the most critical people in the world. (This is a good way to make some fans.) But we can't lie. We all, myself included, read the columns and make judgments on what people have to say. It doesn't help that there's a little picture of them in the top corner, as psychologically I'm sure that facilitates the cynicism.

The UC Davis Marching Band-uh! made national headlines last week when the San Francisco Chronicle reported that faculty band director Tom Slabaugh filed a sexual harassment complaint with the university chronicling a series of "ridiculous, disturbing and offensive" incidents he witnessed during his year as director.