Hello. How ’bout that ride in? I guess that’s why they call it Sin City. Wait, wrong opener.

My name is Michelle and I am a girl and I go to UC Davis. I’m supposed to write columns until the end of the academic year, or until my totally cute new editor responds negatively to my subtle attempts at molestation. Grabbing ass is my way of keeping sexual harassment in The Aggie at an equilibrium.

I’m stoked to be back, and grateful this paper is apparently the kind of pop stand that rehires those who pass out on sidewalks in front of their future bosses. At 7 p.m. God bless student-run organizations and this wonderful institution called college in general.

It’s his 21st today, so hopefully if all goes according to plan, he’ll be passing out on the sidewalk in front of yours truly and we can call it even. Happy birthday, Adam.

Now, as I’m sure you’ve wondered countless times what the essential elements are of an introductory column, here it goes.

Quote a dead historical figure in order to sound intelligent.

Alexis De Tocqueville (a dude, just so we’re clear) wrote, in 1840, “Nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment.”

In this age of such personalities as Perez Hilton and Ann Coulter, it seems that everyone has an opinion and no lack of medium through which to express it. I appreciate being able to reach you guys via The Aggie, a newspaper that is nearly unavoidable on campus.

There really is nothing like picking up a paper outside of Wellman on your way to class, plus, reading the paper makes you look kind of smart and undeniably sexy.

Offer an opinion.

Overrated: Tapping a keg and watching football. Underrated: Tapping a keg and watching the freshmen work a bike circle.

Throw out advice.

College has its ups and downs. You can be crying like a 12-year-old girl at the end of Oprah’s latest book club pick because your computer died and took your eight-page term paper with it at 4:30 in the morning.

The next, you can be doing cross-knee releases on a frat house stripper pole for shits and giggles. Or, you know, whatever it is that rocks your socks. Don’t ask me how and/or why these things happen. Just embrace it as the twisted humor of life.

Also, I crossed night-swimming and waking up on a roof in Chico off my bucket list this summer, neither of which I recommend doing until the weather hits the 90-degree bracket again.

State three random facts about your vain little self.

I know people who would crawl naked across broken glass for Gaga tickets, but I would rather someone just give them to me because I’m lazy and stingy. I fookin’ love Oasis and yes, they will be reuniting when they run out of drug money. I think, “Hey, does this rag smell like chloroform to you?” is a hilarious pickup line but would never seriously use it, so if you’re a feminist looking to pick a fight … don’t.

A thought occurred to me the other day while I was coasting along the coast. I’m no mathematician, but let’s say, theoretically, that I live to be 86 years old. I want a nice, lengthy life, of course, so I can get a discount at the movies and hit up a couple of cruises. The downside, though, is not being able to go to the bathroom on my own, so I’m not looking to hit the triple digits.

In any case, college lasts four years for most, making it only 4.7 percent of my self-projected time on this planet. Imagine that. Consider how so much is condensed into such a seemingly insignificant fraction of your lifespan. Crappy as it may be to realize that there’s an expiration date on the wonderful madness, fit everything in. Live like Ferris. I have faith in you.

MICHELLE RICK doesn’t want your swine flu so don’t touch her unless you use Purell first. And Lysol your keyboard before you e-mail her at marick@ucdavis.edu.

On Saturday night, I was wearing a purple women’s power suit and a wool turtleneck vest that was much too small, introducing myself as Reverend G.A. Sweetwater.

I was traveling with two Irish nuns who had a taste for gin, Sister Nancy and Sister Bernadette. We were listening to “Got Your Money,” and the question was raised, “what would Ol’ Dirty Bastard (ODB), aka Roll Fizzlebeef, aka Osiris the One do?” We figured he’d allow for more gin. Sister Bernadette ended up napping in a garden, I committed one of the most egregious of rookie mistakes (the drunk dial), and Sister Nancy went from Irish to Jamaican. You might have heard us if you were anywhere between the 113 and J Street.

I had good reason to celebrate. I had just found out I was going to be writing a column for The Aggie, a column you may or may not be reading as we speak (so to speak).

I was very happy when I learned that I was going to become a real-life writer, but there was also a substantial amount of dread lurking around, too. It’s a strange feeling writing these words, knowing that more than 18 but probably fewer than a million people are going to read them. Who knows, maybe my column will really blow up and I’ll get a book-deal. Then I can say ‘peace out’ to you suckers and go live on the moon.

Jokes aside, I promise to be as interesting as possible. I won’t bore you with any sesquipedalian tergiversation – an ambiguous use of long words. Well, I did just there. I’ll refrain from such jackassery again.

Look to my column for a break from your daily life. It’s a chance to see through my eyes, a chance to learn from what can go wrong. For example, I once masqueraded as an Albanian foreign exchange student. I was talking to some girls about how the newest movie showing in my old neighborhood was Independence Day, some 12 years after the film’s release.

One of those girls then introduced me to Besmir. Turns out Besmir was a real exchange student from Albania. He was not pleased with me. Go figure.

The lesson I learned was to only pretend to be Albanian when I can really pull it off. I’ve not tried it since, but I gleaned some wisdom from the experience. Perhaps I can instill some of my vast knowledge into whoever honors me by reading this column.

I’ve been in Davis for what seems like five years – although it’s only been four and a few odd weeks – and I like to think I know my way around the place. This column will be geared to that tune. No politics, no eclectic poetry reviews, no hideously long tirades about why people shouldn’t have sex without consulting their astrologists.

A sexual pun, on the other hand, is a lot of fun, so I’ll try to squeeze that in whenever I can (that’s what she said). Oh, what fun we’ll have this coming year.

To end this introduction, I will leave you with some of Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s tried-and-true samurai philosophy, applicable even to your daily Davis life:

“There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.”

As scholarly as I am, I learned that from a film. Props if you can tell me which one.

WILL LONG used that samurai wisdom last year and he survived. E-mail him how you endure the rain at wclong@ucdavis.edu.

Although The California Aggie published a correction on Tuesday to the article, “Davis debates Measure P Wildhorse Ranch,” this correction doesn’t give a proper sense of the extent to which my views were mischaracterized and I was misquoted.

I never agreed that the project was “sustainable” as the article contends. I have argued in print elsewhere that the project is fiscally unsustainable. As a member of the City’s 15-member Housing Element Steering Committee that ranked the Wildhorse Ranch site 27th of 36, we concluded that it “would promote car travel … [since it is] far from downtown and UC Davis.” With over 2,000 units already entitled, building on the periphery of town is sprawl, and not smart or sustainable growth. I also never said that “the election will cost the city and county money.”

Initially, I was shocked by the numerous inaccuracies and obvious bias of the article. Now I understand why: the reporter “is a communications intern for Davis City Councilmember Don Saylor,” one of the Council majority who rushed to put Measure P on the ballot.

The Davis Enterprise has joined us in recommending a no vote on Measure P. To learn more, please visit 2000HomesAreEnough.org.

MARK SIEGLER

Economics professor, Sacramento State

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed over 221 bills two Sundays ago. Among them was Senate Bill 86, which would have banned UC Regents, CSU Trustees and community college leaders from giving executive officers pay increases during bad budget years.

On the surface, this sounds logical – especially during this time of budget turmoil and high emotions. Students have been watching their fees creep steadily upward while waiting longer to get into classes. Faculty and staff have been doing more work for less pay and with fewer resources. They have a right to be angry, but legislating away the ability of our leaders to attract top-notch talent is not the answer.

Yes, this is exactly the line regurgitated by administrators every time someone gets a raise. And yes, it smacks of elitism and makes the populist masses boil over with rage. But that doesn’t make it any less accurate.

CSU presidents and UC chancellors are already notoriously underpaid compared to their out-of-state counterparts. A California Postsecondary Education Commission report found that leaders of both institutions earn approximately 38 percent less in California than they would in other states’ public universities. The median salary for presidents of public four-year colleges nationwide is $427,000, yet between both UC and CSU, only two campus leaders make more than that.

This doesn’t even include private universities, which have pay rates in an entirely different world, but still compete with public institutions for personnel. Asking an individual to leave their job and work for the UC system for nothing except a change in title and maybe a moving allowance is a pretty hard sell.

We’re in a financial crisis, that’s no secret. But we didn’t get here by overpaying our leaders and we’re not going to get out by underpaying them.

In evaluating the budget cuts to campus units this week, it became clear the university is doing an adequate job of protecting students from the effects of these cuts.

However, protecting students has left them in the dark about what exactly the cuts will entail.

Aggie reporters investigating the cuts intended to find the specifics of the reductions – the percentages, the layoffs and the programs and classes no longer available. After all, the purpose of the series was to include students in the current actions happening at their school.

Yet reporters were told mere generalities – if they got any replies at all. They heard the percentages of overall losses, vague speculations of possible shortages and of course, the ever popular, “We’re just not sure right now.”

But indeed the units must be sure right now. Each unit’s budget has already been set. There are either layoffs written in the budget or there aren’t. There either will be a course offered winter quarter or there won’t. The unit either can afford to continue a service or it can’t.

Understandably, giving out this information freely is bound to cause a splash, but it’s better than the anxiety caused by confusion and possible job loss.

This anxiety is not the result of budget cuts themselves; it’s the result of those who are administering the cuts. Every employee knows that times are tough, but when they come to work and learn that several of their coworkers have been laid off without warning, they begin to lose trust in the university.

As one staff member put it, “Generalities that are anticipated in the future are one thing. Specifics that happen to colleagues are another.”

What’s more, these employees are overworked. One way that each department has cut back is by not filling positions when staff members retire or quit. However, this translates into longer hours and added stress for a reduced salary – an unexpected aspect of their job.

The obvious solution to this, in addition to the aforementioned issues surrounding the budget cuts, is to lay out the specific effects of the cuts to the members of each unit. University administrators must communicate better if their goal truly is transparency.

The campus has no doubt felt the pain of budget cuts, but seeing these cuts materialized has been a bigger obstacle.

Since this is my first political column in The Aggie, I thought focusing on a relatively green political figure would make for an appropriate start. And since I want to keep things light, I thought I’d focus on newly-minted Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.), who we all know and love as a former Saturday Night Live cast member.

Franken proposed an amendment to the 2009 Defense Appropriations bill that would, according to the Huffington Post, “[Stop] federal funding for those defense contractors who used mandatory arbitration clauses to deny victims of assault the right to bring their case to court.” Former comedian takes on Congress with baby steps. This sounds like a good thing, right?

Let me give you some context before you decide: Jamie Leigh Jones, an employee at KBR, Inc. (a former subsidiary of Halliburton), was drugged and brutally gang-raped by her American coworkers while overseas in 2005. After the assault, her fellow employees locked the severely injured Jones in a storage unit so she couldn’t report them to company officials. After bravely bringing the attack to light when she was finally released, Jones probably assumed the men who assaulted her would be brought to justice. Unfortunately, her contract with KBR made this impossible.

Anyway, back to Franken’s amendment, the passage of which would mean we would no longer give federal money to companies who protect rapists. Is it a good thing or not? The amendment to the bill was, in Jon Stewart’s words, an easy “slam-dunk.” You’d think that limiting sexual assault through legislation would be one of those “gimme” senatorial moves, like when a congressperson throws up an anti-child-molester bill or claims to be “tough on crime.”

The response he got in congress was different than you might expect. To hear the opposition tell it, you’d think Franken had been lining that bill with pork like there was no tomorrow. Instead of embracing Franken’s amendment, 30 senators voted against it: all Republicans, all males. As Senator Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) said, the amendment would be, “…a major, fundamental change in U.S. labor law, and I believe it would be very detrimental to employees to eliminate arbitration as an option.”

Detrimental to employees? More detrimental than rape and imprisonment? Apparently so, according to the Republican senators who voted “nay”. Perhaps protecting capitalism is more important than protecting people like Jones. But don’t worry; these senators are concerned with protecting capitalism as an ideology. They’re not concerned with specific capitalist entities that might benefit from shooting down Franken’s amendment – entities like Boeing, IBM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Franken is just a comedian. Shouldn’t we trust seasoned political veterans over him, people like Sen. Sam “No abortions even in cases of rape” Brownback (R-Kans.) and Sen. Jeff “Pro-torture” Sessions (R-Ala.)? Even Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) loves capitalism enough to want to screw over the victims of interested corporations.

Unfortunately for McCain et al, Franken’s amendment passed with a vote of 68-30. And unfortunately for me, what I thought was going to be a simple column about a new senator turned out to be a shocking example of the current Republican Party’s misogyny … so much for starting out this year without using the “m” word. But I only used it once, and for a feminist interested in politics, I think that’s pretty good.

HALEY DAVIS has a link to the rest of the senators who voted against Franken’s amendment for those who are interested. E-mail her at hrdavis@ucdavis.edu if you’d like to see it.