When this asshole named David Hasselhoff blew off an interview that his minions had requested with the Aggie, he cruelly obliterated my childhood dream of having my boobies autographed by a D-list actor. It was ’round 10 a.m. and he was reportedly drunk, so I guess everyday is Picnic Day for the Hoff. Luckily, one of my friends stepped up and vowed to boycott all future Baywatch reruns. That’s a real friend.

It’s not easy to find that level of devotion. People are always promising you things they don’t mean and trying to get you to buy ShamWows, drugs and fake diplomas stating you graduated from Stanford Med (I got called out and fired my first day in the OR. Apparently performing a triple bypass isn’t as easy as you may have heard). There are a lot of flakes, phonies, nut-jobs, creepers, close-talkers, Stage 5 Clingers, rage-aholics and general uncool people out there, so when you find someone who gets you and is down for some debauchery, hug it out, bitch. Hug. It. Out.

One of the most admirable displays of friendship I’ve witnessed thus far occurred this summer. Some friends and I were rocking some pavement up I-80 when we ran into a speeding ticket. Two guys, two girls in the car, and after the cop was gone, the other girl said, “I would have totally given the cop a blow job if it got you out of that ticket.” There was a pause, and he responded, “Thanks. You’re a good friend.” No more words were needed.

When I think about it, my friends have done a lot of nice things for me. Like going back to the arboretum to find my left shoe. You see, a friend is someone who knows you’re a loser and still chooses to be seen with you in public. Not only that, but they’ll dance right along next to you when “Don’t Stop Believin'” comes on at the Dormal. They will play pirates with you in the library (in the completely innocent sense) even though they have an 8 a.m. final and a 10:30 one after. They will tell you that you have parsley stuck between your teeth. This is perhaps the most important thing a friend can do for you above all else.

But that’s not to say I don’t pull my weight in these relationships. Freshman year, one of my friends was nice enough to accompany me to a fraternity because I was too afraid to ask for my shirt back on my own. Apparently I wasn’t too afraid to walk home sans shirt, but that’s a different story. Anyways, I would later babysit her offspring so that she could take her finals, so I’d say we’re amicably even. Just this last Saturday I crooned an epic rendition of “Time After Time” to my friend, who was drunker than the Hoff himself and making out with an enormous burrito across the table from me.

Friends are also great to have around so that someday, or perhaps the next day, you can reminisce about the dumb crap you’ve done. It’s always nice to keep around witnesses because saying, “You had to be there,” at the end of a story is just lame. Plus, they can correct inaccuracies within the storytelling and, later in life, tell your future children things about you that will make them lose any remaining respect they might have had for you. You can’t go back to the good old days, but you can laugh about them forever.

Some relationships are too peculiar for labels, but they still count. Like those people you only talk to when you’re drunk. Or the ex-bestie who dropped off the face of the earth and may reappear someday, but perhaps not. Then there are those you once poured your heart out to but now have nothing really to say to. In the end, I’d like to think there are at least a few lollygaggers who will stick around for life.

So to you people, I say thank you. Thank you for taking me to my first ever party in the woods. Thank you for making sure I didn’t have a concussion after you accidentally knocked me over in a shopping cart. Thank you for helping me start that condom water balloon fight on houseboats.

I hope you invite me to your weddings, and when we’re old I can own you at shuffleboard in Florida. Mostly, I hope you don’t forget me. Cause after all … you’re my wonderwall.

MICHELLE RICK realizes that even if you got nothing out of this column, you’re well aware that she sings frequently. Badly. Send your condolences to marick@ucdavis.edu and she’ll forward them to the folks who have to put up with it.

It was almost a year ago to the day last Sunday (possibly untrue) when I was startled from a booze-induced bout of hibernation by four hoodlums crawling through my bedroom window.

I’ve been worried about serial killers and organ-thieves coming through my bedroom window ever since I was young, so I’ve taken precautions. My first move was to scramble for the hunting knife I keep under my mattress for just such occasions, but I was barely conscious so I growled and rolled over.

It was a good thing I didn’t knife anyone, because the people crawling through my window were my friends coming to remind me of the conversation I had had the night prior:

Buddy: “Hey, Will. We’re gonna go floating down Cache Creek tomorrow, and you’re coming with us.”

Me: “Okay, how great.”

Buddy: “Sweet. It’s gonna be a blast. I’ll call you around nine and we’ll swing by and pick you up.”

Me: “Okay, how great.”

Buddy: “What the fuck, man? Are you wasted?”

Me: “Okay, how great.”

That was all in the past. This year for our Cache Creek float, I managed to wake up on my own accord without even a single thought about knives.

Anyway, if you’ve never been to Cache Creek (not the casino), it’s a very impressive place to wake up to after a late Saturday night.

We passed under old concrete bridges and watched the swallows flit about their tiny mud condominiums. We floated for hours without seeing a single telephone wire. We drank beer in the sunlight as it reflected off canyon walls. We even saw a raccoon, the most majestic of Earth’s mammals, as it came down a hill of toppled stone to wring its tiny hands in the water.

I called out to the raccoon to join us, but it didn’t. Which is good, because it was probably rabid and would have drank all the beer. (I’m pretty sure I’ve written about drinking beer with a wild raccoon before.)

After a long drift, we dried out at a farm and kicked it with some really huge swine before driving home. It was a mind-opening drive, listening to Eagle 96.9 and watching the sculpted California hills roll on by. A Mongol once asked Conan the Barbarian, “What is best in life?” Conan said something about crushing enemies and hearing the lamentation of women, but I think I’d say something more along the lines of spending a Sunday on a river.

Now, I’m not a religious man, and Saint Peter and the pearly gates sounds more like a porno to me than anything else, but floating down Cache Creek got me in my spiritual zone. Not to be morbid or anything, but I’ve often thought about death and what might be beyond death. I assume only worms, but there’s an unfounded theory I like to maintain that your consciousness will live on in whatever type of afterlife you train yourself to believe in. So if you live your life according to all that Buddy Christ said, maybe your mind/ghost will end up in heaven. If you’re some fiend who trips all the time about going to hell, then you’ll get your wish and suffer eternally with the old goat.

Cosmic truths aren’t handed out cheap, but it’s a theory I’ll stick to considering I’ll probably go to hell for all those deadly sins I commit. (I’m great at lust and gluttony).

Who knows. I’ve been right about a few things before. If I’m right about this one, expect to find me floating down a lazy river with a cooler of beer and a raccoon co-pilot until the sun burns out and my mind/ghost has to figure out something else do.

WILL LONG hopes you make the best of the Whole Earth Festival. You can catch him on campus this weekend or electronically at wclong@ucdavis.edu. Just make sure you don’t let the hippies con you into buying a $300 piece of wood.

The Aggie’s editorial on April 29 criticizing urgent spending measures was well intentioned, but we feel it needs some clarification: ASUCD Senate meetings are always open to the public, and the minute recordings for each meeting are posted the following week. A count of previous years’ urgent resolutions as a proportion of total legislation passed would show that the currently elected senators have passed less urgent legislation than ASUCD Senates have in recent years.

Despite this, the current sitting senators have repeatedly aimed to curb urgent legislation in an attempt to strive for greater fairness and transparency in the legislative process. Many pieces of legislation introduced as urgent this year could have been avoided, but La Raza Culture Days – the centerpiece example used by the Aggie in its opinion – was a justified use of urgent spending procedure.

It’s important to note that the “urgent bill” for La Raza Culture Days was falsely classified as “[lacking] planning from the organizers.” The bill was originally introduced through the normal process and referred to commissions, a two-week process during which time members of the public were notified of the proposed spending and could have approached senators and commissions with their concerns.

It was only after extensive changes were made to the bill in the Business and Finance Commission, which asked for a more in-depth budget breakdown, that the bill was forced to be introduced as urgent rather than be referred back to the Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission, which had approved the bill prior to the clarifications regarding budget allocations. The urgency, though the authors originated the process three weeks before, was due to the reality that the event would take place in a week’s time.

The Aggie was correct in saying that urgent legislation should be avoided when possible. But by citing a clearly justified use of urgent legislation, we wonder how well The Aggie is living up to its own responsibilities of researching editorials.

ALISON TANNER, SELISA ROMERO, JOEL JUAREZ, ANDRE LEE, DON HO, ABRHAM CASTILLO-RUIZ and OSAHON EKHATOR

ASUCD Senators

Fifty years ago, visionary leaders created California’s Master Plan for Higher Education. For decades, the master plan provided millions of Californians with opportunities to pursue their academic ambitions and improve their vocational skills. A well-trained and educated workforce entered the private sector and enhanced California’s reputation as a state on the cutting edge of the future, creating new and exciting industries, powering our economic growth and engaging in trailblazing research.

Now, however, our higher education system is reeling. The visionaries are gone and our community colleges and public universities are bruised by cuts, furloughs and ever-increasing fee hikes that threaten affordability and access for students across California.

Stories about this decline can be found on campus after campus. A University of California, San Diego professor worries about students’ inability to get into the classes they need for graduation. California State University, Sacramento officials consider turning away qualified students because more people want to enroll than the university has funding to handle. A CSU student concludes the system is creating a generation of student debtors.

A report this month by the Public Policy Institute of California finds that the state is confronting two main crises in higher education: budget cutbacks and an education skills gap. By 2025, the state will have a shortage of one million college-educated workers relative to demand unless we substantially increase rates of college enrollment and graduation.

Yet with all this daunting news, we spend more on prisons than we do on all three higher education systems combined – a black mark on the Golden State.

There’s a better way. Tens of thousands of Californians have marched on college campuses and city streets to save higher education.

My bill, AB 656 – the Fair Share for Fair Tuition bill – will generate almost $2 billion a year for our community colleges and public universities. It would levy a 12.5 percent extraction fee on oil companies. California is currently the only major oil producing state that does not impose an extraction fee on oil companies. Even former Governors Sarah Palin of Alaska and George W. Bush of Texas both levied oil fees and used them to help fund higher education in their states. Now is the time for California to join the rest of the nation.

Big Oil has experienced record profits in recent years. For example, Exxon-Mobil earned a $45.2 billion profit just two years ago, the most ever by a publicly-traded U.S. company. AB 656 will redirect a small portion of that huge profit to the place California needs it most to secure a prosperous future – higher education.

Join the movement to support higher education in California and recommit our great state to investing in the Master Plan for Higher Education. To date, over 75,000 supporters have signed cards and over 12,000 people have registered their support for AB 656 by joining Facebook.com/FairTuition.

Join us on Facebook.com/FairTuition today to help California keep the promise of the Master Plan for Higher Education.

ALBERTO TORRICO
California State Assembly Majority Leader

The UC Center Sacramento announced last week that UC Davis is stepping up to the take management control of the center.

UCCS was the only academic program offered through the UC Office of the President and it could not maintain responsibility for the program. Considering that it was at risk, we are glad to see that UC Davis was willing to take control.

It is vital that the UCCS program continue and that UC Davis take the reins of the operation.

The center operates two programs: a public policy and a journalism program. Since the UC system does not offer a journalism major, we applaud UCCS for continuing to provide UC students with hands-on local internships and real-life experiences. Although some have the opportunity to participate in the UC Washington program, not all can afford to spend a quarter in another state. UCCS allows for a cheaper and closer experience.

The switch results in new advantages. All UC students can now use UC Davis resources while enrolled in the program. They can work with UC Davis faculty, have health care and even use services such as Counseling and Psychological Services and the Activities and Recreation Center. Because of its close proximity to Sacramento, UCCS generally has many UC Davis student participants. This trend will most likely continue and can further benefit Davis students. For example, Davis students were not technically enrolled at their home campus last year and did not have access to Davis facilities although enrolled in UCCS.

Considering the experience that students receive from this program, we commend UC Davis for its effort to take over for something that the UC Office of the President could not maintain.

Although the impulse to help people by controlling them may sound like a good idea to some, adhering to democratic ideals strike it from the list of viable options. But policy leaders in Europe have been increasingly more inclined to “protect” Muslim women – and the rest of the population – from themselves by banning them from wearing hijab in public. If you’ve ever before read this column, I think you know my opinion on this issue.

Do I habitually wear a head-covering for religious reasons? No. Would I ever do so? Almost definitely not. But my decisions about my body are exactly that. It is not for me, or for anyone else, to decide that a woman may not wear hijab while she’s walking down the street. Just as the government hasn’t the right to decide what skirt-length is appropriate for me, neither does it have the right to legislate the sartorial expression of faith or culture. (I recognize that claim covers a lot of ground, but for the sake of brevity, I don’t want to bring in issues of nudity, obscenity as defined by the government, and the manifold definitions of “faith” and “culture.” Let’s stick with the topic of traditional head-coverings for this column.)

That a Belgian woman could face arrest for wearing traditional Islamic clothing is not only a trespass against the religious rights of a citizen. The recent law banning the hijab in public is also infuriatingly patronizing, seeing as the ostensible objective of it is to save her from herself. Belgian center-right MP Daniel Bacquelaine said banning the hijab is “a question of human dignity. The full face veil turns a woman into a walking prison.”

Bacquelaine, you see, is taking it upon himself to define the social and religious experience of an entire group of women. I find it interesting that Bacquelaine, a man and non-Muslim, is protecting their “human dignity” by taking away their freedom of religious expression.

That isn’t to say that addressing the oppression of women in general isn’t important; if you’ve ever before read this column, you’ll know what I think about that, as well. But the assumption that every Muslim woman wears hijab because she had no choice in the matter is absurd. And if the government is really so concerned with protecting women’s rights, providing better access to educational opportunities or health care would be far more important than monitoring their personal expressions of faith – but I’m making the assumption that this issue is solely about “human dignity,” and not about policing the bodies of women in an ethnic minority.

Personally, I think most (okay, all) mainstream religions have institutionalized oppression in some way. But how is policing the garb of a group of women, however well-intentioned, anything other than subjecting them to a different kind of oppression? Trying to save them from one perceived patriarchal injustice by imposing another – does that make any sense at all?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get dressed and go outside. Maybe I’ll wear a tank-top and shorts. Maybe I’ll wear the most concealing thing I own. Either way, it will be my decision, and one that should be afforded to everyone.

HALEY DAVIS actually isn’t big on shorts. She can be reached at hrdavis@ucdavis.edu.