Much like the secret menu at In-N-Out, sometimes you have to be “in-the-know” to get the full benefits of things. Granted, you’re not exactly cognizant of what you’re missing, but those with the information understand how much better life is with animal and protein styles. The same goes for the secret menu at Jamba Juice (though I’m partial to the old classics), and even more for the things on campus that you have to be aware of to enjoy.

Last week I was leaving the Coho, happily sipping my iced coffee from when the familiar sound of the bike cop’s “siren” assaulted my ears. Foot traffic slowed almost to a halt, students started clapping and cheering him on and he pulled over a bike offender for riding on the walkway between the Coho and the Quad. Before long everyone resumed what they were doing, but the girl standing next to me turned and asked me about what had just gone on. I was shocked that she had never witnessed Davis‘ own version of the superhero: the Bike Cop.

It was then I realized there are things on campus I should know about; there are bound to be secrets that could make my time left at Davis more fun. Now that we all know the bike cop, I did some more research (thanks to all who replied to my messages and e-mails) and compiled a list of some other things to help us stay in-the-know.

Tunnels: There is a tunnel that connects the basement of Wellman Hall to the basement of Kerr Hall. The only caveat is that the door to the tunnel is locked, but only from one side. So you can access it through Kerr and get to Wellman, but you can’t gain entry the other way. According to DavisWiki.org (if you haven’t checked out the website, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!), there is also a tunnel between Sproul Hall and Olson Hall, and several others around campus.

Hart Hall Media Distribution Lab: Many of us have had professors say, “If you missed any part of the video, it’s on reserve at the Hart Media Lab.” However, did you know that you could head over and watch a movie in their ever-changing listings even when it’s not for class? If you have a break between classes and you’re looking for something to fill that time, look no further.

Acceleration chairs: The Physics/Geology Building has several elevators, and located in one or two of them are these strange looking chairs with red seats. The chair is designed to demonstrate the acceleration in the elevator, and they are pretty bouncy. For those who aren’t science majors, you’re probably like me and will never step foot into the science buildings except to use the restroom; now we have a reason to visit. See if you can find these chairs, and let me know if you get motion sickness … I need a test subject!

The Toad Tunnel: This local, off-campus attraction did put Davis on the map … at least as far as Jon Stewart is concerned. Several years back, then Davis Mayor Julie Partansky became concerned about the high number of toads being run over by cars passing from South Davis to North Davis over the bridge. So they built a six-inch diameter pipe that runs under the bridge to guide the toads to safety. This is one of the things that makes me love this town, and as such should be pointed out to each class of students. This, my friends, is something you should know.

University Haircutters: There is a barbershop in Lower Freeborn! In the basement of Freeborn Hall, around the corner from The California Aggie and down the hall from KDVS, lies the University Haircutters, open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. How fantastic is that? Warning: according to its DavisWiki page, this campus fixture may only be around for a few more weeks, so call and make an appointment while you can.

Honorable mentions (caused by a lack of space) go to: the fistulated cow, the Student Recruitment and Retention Center (free faxing … need I say more?) and hide-and-seek games at the Death Star.

EMILY KAPLAN hopes you enjoyed her little known facts about Davis. She highly recommends Mojito Night at the Bistro for all of your brainstorming needs. To suggest something for one of her last few columns, or inquire about mojito madness, e-mail her at eckaplan@ucdavis.edu.

Super Senior,

So I’ve got a date lined up this weekend, and she wants to watch a movie. The catch is that she’s making me pick one, but we haven’t been dating long and I’ve got no idea what to go with. Any suggestions?

– Ghost of Siskel

Of course I have suggestions, I’m the mother lovin‘ super senior biotch!

First suggestion: nothing with Hugh Grant. If you watch anything with Hugh Grant you become infected with Pansy Flu and no one will ever love you again. Also, the only Will Smith movie you’re allowed to watch is Independence Day (in extreme cases, Men in Black is acceptable), ‘cause the chick is hot and a bunch of cool shit goes down.

Anyway you’ve got your own (hopefully) hot chick to impress with your Ebert-like discretion in cinema, so let’s get down to business. In order to prevent your Region 1 Disk getting rejected by her Region 2 loading bay (make sure there’s no scratches and that you rub the disk off before you go over), here are the flicks you should consider.

If she’s interested in a little chuckle with her cuddle, might I suggest the best romantic comedy of all time, When Harry Met Sally. Not only does it offer up an exceedingly accurate synthesis of Ladder Theory (Google it) early in the film, it definitely gives you something to talk about with the small spoon afterwards. That said, the orgasm scene in the restaurant will make you doubt all women for all time, so be warned.

Now this one’s a little under the radar, but Don Juan DeMarco is guaranteed to get her all twitterpated. It’s cute, it’s clever, it’s funny and it’s got Johnny Depp. Besides, he drops mad lines that you’d do well to imitate as often as possible: “Although there is no metaphor that truly describes making love to a woman … the closest is playing a rare musical instrument. I wonder, does a Stradivarius violin feel the same rapture as the violinist, when he coaxes a single perfect note from its heart?” Boo-yah!

I would also recommend a little film called Roxanne from 1987. It’s got Steve Martin, so it’s legit. More importantly, though, is the fact that it’s based on a relatively unknown play, Cyrano de Bergerac, which is right up there with anything Shakespeare ever did in terms of panty-dropping efficacy.

Then there’s the nuclear option: The Notebook. And it really is the nuclear option; it has devastatingly effective short-term results (so long as you don’t mind her yelling “Noah!” mid-coitus), but the fallout is disastrous. It sets a dangerously high precedent, and over time only serves to remind her of how lame you are.

If none of that is your thing, you could always make this a sort of test for her; pick a movie that puts your formidable manhood on display like a peacock … err … lion. Yeah. A lion. Or a bull. Or a bear. Come to think of it, anything would be better than a peacock.

For this endeavor, I suggest Gladiator, 300, Rambo, Predator, Rocky, Full Metal Jacket, Braveheart, Platoon and anything with Clint Eastwood (except Bridges of Madison County). If she digs it, congratulations, you’ve got yourself a keeper.

Super Senior,

I’ve seen this guy a few times around the DC and campus. I was immediately enamored by his magnificent facial hair and although I knew he would be graduating soon, I hadn’t realized until recently, through a couple friends who have seen his Facebook, that he’ll be going out of state. I’m completely heartbroken and don’t know what to do with myself. I wish my roof would collapse on me so I wouldn’t have to feel this pain. You look like a man of wisdom. What do you think I should do?

– Your love is a verb, here in my room (Kate)

(See also: “What Goes Around?” 3/6/2009)

I gotta hand it do you, you got balls. Big ones. And I dunno if I can keep up.

But I’ll try.

So now that you’re aware that the object of your desires will only be in your geographic area for another 10 weeks, it may be tempting to press the issue. Don’t. Rushing makes you sloppy, haste less focused, anxiety more frantic. You’ve got time, all the time in the world in fact, to see where this takes you.

For example, I know a couple that got together just weeks before he left for college … and just weeks before she started her junior year. They’ve now been dating for over four years.

So it’s entirely possible to get involved with people even when geography rears its ugly head. Most people don’t, and just use it as an excuse to get real freaky naughty without feeling too guilty.

Nonetheless, you’ve got an interesting situation on your hands and while you shouldn’t rush, you should move decisively toward your ultimate goal.

That is, now that you know what his room looks like (even that he has panty-dropper Incubus lyrics written on his wall) and have a basic understanding of the layout of his house, you could potentially navigate both in the dark. I’m not advocating anything, I’m just saying … knowledge is power you know?

If that’s a bit too aggressive for you (or him … which it is, by the way) you might try a different approach. Maybe, the next time you see him in the DC or on campus or generally being a hunk around town, you should do what has been up to this point unthinkable and is for the vast majority of people the single most difficult thing to do to a member of the opposite sex; walk up, and say hi.

I know, it’s brazen. I know it’s bold. I know it’s blatant. I know it’s barefaced. I know it’s brash. I know lots of words that start with the letter b. But damn it, like any good teen movie you need some kind of cathartic revelation that resolves the pain and suffering in your heart before the ticking clock stops ticking.

Oh, and having experienced a bit of a roof problem myself, I can assure you that your roof would likely not be enough to put you out of your misery in the event of architectural fail; drywall, even when not dry, isn’t very heavy.

However, I appreciate the sentiment, and I can only hope you see the folly in escaping emotional pain by giving up on life. Rather, you should smother the emotional pain with OxyContin; it’s worked really well for Rush Limbaugh, and if a man with that much physical, er, emotional, baggage can find solace in a pill, then I have a feeling you could too.

K.C. CODY only has two more of these advice columns left. Send questions on all the issues you absolutely, positively, categorically, unconditionally must get resolved by then to kccody@ucdavis.edu.

So the United States tortures.

I guess what I’m trying to understand is why that’s even news. The United States tortures? Fuck yeah we torture! We’re the world’s lone super-power with the most expansive espionage apparatus the world has ever seen. If you’re genuinely surprised or otherwise shocked that we torture (or assassinate, or fix elections, or fund terrorists, or arm police states, or trade with governments that sanction sex trafficking, or subsidize businesses that engage in slave labor, or provide intelligence to dictators that use chemical weapons, and on down the line), then Jim Cramer has a recovery he’d like you to invest in.

Look, we wrote the book on torture. Several, actually. Who could forget the 1963 classic “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation,” or the “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual,“ 1983‘s most moving masterpiece? The books were even translated into Spanish so that the Latin American hit-men, generals, dictators and otherwise corporate friendly guns for hire we trained at what was formerly the School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) could take all that warm, fuzzy goodness home with them.

And what did those interrogation manuals have to say? Rather than quote from them, picture the scene: You’re in your home country of Chile, and it’s 7:30 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 11, 1973. You’re sleeping peacefully in your bed, when suddenly your door is bashed in, a blind-fold wrapped around your head, your arms and legs bound, and all your clothing removed. You’re then dragged outside, wedged into the trunk of a car and driven about and jostled violently so as to disorient you. Eventually you’re wrestled from the trunk, slapped around, yelled at in a language you don’t understand and then, still blind-folded and naked, thrown into an unlit, windowless, sound-proof cell not quite tall enough for you to stand but not quite long enough for you to lie down.

Then you wait. You’re kept awake for days in near complete sensory deprivation and fed and given water minimally with no apparent pattern. The temperature is changed rapidly and randomly from one extreme to the next; sometimes it’s as low as 40, other times as high as 100. Then you are interrogated, again at random, wherein your genitals are electrocuted, you’re given mild doses of LSD or some other mind altering drug, you’re twisted and contorted and slammed against walls. In time, you find yourself naming everyone you know, and even people you’ve never met, as subversive leftists with ties to mother Russia, because apparently that’s what this is all about.

This goes on for months, perhaps even years, and at the end of it all you suffer one of three fates; execution, death by exhaustion and disease, or an indefinite confinement spent lost swimming the soup of your own mind.

Your crime? You voted for and supported the democratically elected Salvador Allende. Your sentence? Torture and eventual expiration at the hands of the CIA trained henchmen of General Augusto Pinochet, America’s newest puppet dictator.

What I just described is pretty much how the aforementioned manuals suggest that interrogators, American or otherwise, treat a subject. It’s also what we’re doing to current detainees, except we’ve gotten even more creative. Yet no matter the actual techniques, in all cases the point is to “induce psychological regression“ so that the subject becomes nothing more than a body with a brain reduced to malleable, suggestible silly putty.

Silly putty that will tell you whatever you want to hear. Which is why torture doesn’t work anyway.

But none of this is new. In 1996 the Intelligence Oversight Board appointed by President Clinton found that our torture manuals supported “[the] execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment.“ And we’ve known about our most recent tryst with torture since at least 2005 when Abu Ghraib broke. These memos are just another day at the ballpark, and that they were released with such proximity to the bank stress-tests is no coincidence.

So I’m somewhat confused about people’s surprise and outrage about such a blatant political distraction; it betrays a huge amount of naiveté and blind faith in the goodness of American “values” and “ideals,“ when really this country was founded on just one value (the dollar) and one ideal (more dollars).

I can forgive the naiveté of some, but those whom I cannot forgive are the sitting Congress and current administration, let alone the previous one, for pleading ignorance and feigning outrage. They know their history. Shit, they are their history; practically half of them were in government at the same time Reagan was peddling Israeli-made missiles to Iranian arms dealers so he could barter hostages from Lebanon and funnel the money to reactionary Nicaraguan hit squads.

They know that America itself tortures and that we’ve supported, funded, armed and outright trained other countries and juntas and paramilitary groups to do the shit we don’t want to be seen doing; shit that makes Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo look like fucking Disneyland. And let’s be clear; all the real torture, the pulling out of fingernails, crushing of feet with hammers, laceration of genitals with rusty razors, etc. is still happening right now at some black site in Eastern Europe or Saudi Arabia or something. We just don’t know the truth, because frankly we can’t handle the truth.

But when we do find out the truth, whether by accident (see: Watergate) or on purpose (see: Pentagon Papers), we need to hold those who authorized the malfeasance accountable and we need to do so as high up as we possibly can. Dick Cheney for one is scared out of his gourd; why else would he be running around the country, more visible than ever before, trying to drum up public support for torture if he didn’t think he was going to have to justify to a committee, court or joint session of Congress why he authorized it?

Oh, random note about public support for torture in the U.S.: according to the Pew Research Center, 54 percent of Americans who attend religious services at least once per week (and 62 percent of white evangelicals) say that torture can “often” or “sometimes“ be justified, compared to just 40 percent of Americans who are unaffiliated with a religion. I guess this is founded on the part of the Bible referred to as The Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus said, “If you strike someone on one cheek, turn to you the other also, so that he may utter false witness and provide you with actionable intelligence with which to justify a war of imperialist zealotry and material avarice.“ Or something along those lines.

Anyway, I personally just want to see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc. all go down hard for a whole bunch of other reasons; mostly economic and environmental. But since our laws protect abstract political rights (habeas corpus and the like) more than concrete human rights (health care and clean water), I guess a public hanging shaming for torture will have to do.

K.C. CODY isn’t a fool; he knows no such investigation will ever occur because everyone who’s anyone in Washington is implicated. Discuss this and other similarities with the financial crisis with him at kccody@ucdavis.edu.

The American Way has never been the only way – it’s just taught like it is. Inherent and obvious flaws in American capitalism have bred in the wealthiest 1 percent a paranoid fear of an alternative economic system having any kind of success.

After attempting to stop the Russian Revolution of 1917, this country’s owners decided to do all they could to run Soviet Communism into the ground. This they achieved – at the price of decades of single-minded military obsession and worldwide social anxiety. Where there could have been a prosperous truce, we have economic fallout.

The schools of development economics that brought Southeast Asia and Latin America miraculously out of the clutches of American multinationals have been discredited by our economic “thinkers.“ Meaning, of course, that those nations didn’t pay the piper.

Scandinavian and Canadian models of social democracy are ignored completely, as if they were coincidental flukes when individual benefits equaled collective gains. The UN takes heed, however, and rates the standard of living of those countries higher than our own.

Opposing ideas are lies, we are told. There is only free-market capitalism, they wish us to believe. This they say because they tremble in fear of a better world. A world without the cancers of debt and dependence. A world empowered by conscious coexistence and mobilized social capital. A world we can and will bring into being.

In this country, economic policies are totalitarian. Our powers of democracy are unable to resolve this problem at the highest of levels. Capitalism has never been up for a vote. Instead, we have to cultivate the revolution from the ground up. And we’re not talking grassroots. We’re talking tree-roots.

First and foremost, we need community building. Humans united can accomplish exponentially more than alienated loners (also known as “ideal consumers“). To build a community, people of both sexes, all ages, all ancestries and faiths must interact with one another and realize what they all have in common: wants and needs.

With a spirit of togetherness and mutual respect, our entire concept of wants and needs will change. Rather than using consumption as a first resort, we instead have the opportunity to cooperate, lend, build, scavenge, reclaim, reuse, refurbish. We can also directly see how our choices can be modulated to maximize social benefits. Overall, this will reduce our dependence on the dollar and increase the purchasing power of kinship. Needless to say, this will also expand potential for effective political agitation.

Seeds for local community building: meet your neighbors, start gardening or composting, volunteer, scope out the local co-ops or cruise by a potluck at the Trilateral or the Domes. You may like it so much you’ll end up living there. Happened to me.

As an extension of community building, the practice of time banking offers to reduce the cost of living through communal provision of services. A time bank is a local registry of good-hearted favors, where talented individuals, as we all are, give hours of charitable work to those in need. By contributing to their fellow beings, people can amass “time dollars“ which are used in exchange for other services. Put simply, it’s a list of who needs a back scratch and who’s available to scratch it.

Services range from care for children and the elderly, subject-specific education, recycling, carpentry, home repair, transportation, medical services, counseling, advocating for social change, financial advising and the list goes on.

This stands to greatly reduce living costs and would further dislodge consumption as the first resort to get something done. It could also have a substantial impact on Social Security and Medicare – those social concerns politicians inadequately wrangle year after year. Time banks already span the nation, concentrated in low-income areas. A time banking program is actually endorsed by the U.S. government, so it needs only to expand and thrive.

Third, microfinance. Banks usually refuse to offer loans to low-income parties, of course, unless they’re unemployed homebuyers. Also, interest rates for small loans in the developing world can be downright usurious – from 10 percent to 100 percent annually in most African banks. This leads to social stagnation, as no working person, however ambitious, can get a loan, however small. Enter microfinance.

Muhammad Yunus pioneered microfinance in Bangladesh, offering microscopic loans as low as $27 to Bangladeshi workers, relying on goodwill and faith to see those small sums repaid. The cost of the loan to Yunus, he realized, was tiny compared to the impact it could have on a person in need. Yunus turned this idea into the now massive and diversified Grameen Bank and reduced poverty dramatically in Bangladesh, earning him the Nobel Prize in economics. Respect.

Once people have been insulated from the ravages of the dollar, we can start talking about the “big one.“

International debt forgiveness. This global economic meltdown has revealed what we already know: the interdependence of all national economies. As nations developed, they necessarily took on foreign debt. Now, those debts are draining GDPs for the benefit of nobody really. Countries should have the courage and intellect to accept those debts for what they were, leverage for modernization and realize that repayment offers less of a reward than a national community that is capable of realizing its full potential. Debt should be stricken from the record.

I’ll leave you with the words of Naomi Klein, unleashed at the 2007 meeting of the American Sociological Association.

“We who say we believe in this other world need to know that we are not losers. We did not lose the battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed.… Understanding this history, understanding that we never lost the battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of dirty wars, is key to building the confidence that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.“

So light those fires of spirit, o brilliant youths, so that we all may truly know freedom.

CHEYA CARY wants you to take this to heart. Nothing stands in our way but ourselves. To plan an uprising, e-mail cheya.cary@gmail.com.