Free lift tickets. Two free season passes to Sugar Bowl. Free snowboard jackets, boots and apparel. A body-painting contest. A Greek attendance competition. The chance to be on television.

That’s what it took to get a crowd of 2,378 to come to the Pavilion on Saturday to watch the UC Davis men’s basketball team host Big West Conference foe Long Beach State.

The attendance was roughly three times higher than it was for the Aggies’ Big West home opener on Thursday and was more than half of the team’s previous five-game attendance number of 4,359 – an average of 872.

There are more than 872 people in UC Davis’ student body who participate annually in March Madness pools. There are more than 872 students who will tune into ESPN’s “Super Tuesday” coverage of Indiana-Ohio State, Memphis-Tulsa and Kentucky-Tennessee tonight.

There are more than 872 college basketball fans on this campus. They should be fans of UC Davis basketball, too.

The Aggies are coming off a three-game set that shows how far they’ve come in the past year. They came within three points of knocking off Cal State Northridge, the unanimous preseason Big West favorite, on the road Monday night, and then handed UC Riverside its first conference loss on Thursday.

On Saturday, UC Davis battled back from a 40-10 Long Beach run to close the first half to bring things within two possessions before falling to the 49ers, who are undefeated in conference play.

In short, Aggie Pack’s promotions for the Long Beach-UC Davis tilt worked – on Saturday. If UC Davis’ college basketball fans keep coming back, then the promotions’ effects can be measured as a season-long success.

We’ve had this problem before. In 2005, 5,386 fans came to the Pavilion to watch the Aggies beat Stanford. In their next home game six days later, the attendance number shrunk back to 875.

Hopefully, that doesn’t happen this time. This class of team deserves a better class of fan.

The unhealthy alcohol-caffeine hybrid drink, Sparks, is about to lose its energy. After attorneys general from several states bullied MillerCoors, Sparks‘ manufacturer, into halting production, several questions remain.

Why only go after one part of the alcohol-caffeine drink market? California Attorney General Edmund Brown admitted that Sparks represents “90 percent of the market,” but the other 10 percent remains. Clearly, when Sparks is off the market, the other drinks in this genre will see spikes in sales.

Additionally, the attorneys general made no effort to stop bars from selling drinks such as Jägerbombs or Red Bull and vodka. These drinks follow the same basic recipe as Sparks, but there was not even a request for bars to limit sales of such drinks. Why the attorneys general chose to attack only one part of the large alcohol-caffeine market is a mystery. If these drinks really are dangerous, they should be banned in all forms – not just one brand of what can be found at a store.

The complaint against MillerCoors also criticized the company for marketing the drink to a young audience with colorful advertisements. Sparks advertising, in our experience, has been minimal. Beer ads are much more prevalent, especially during the professional football games that are watched by many under the age of 21. Even if some of the Sparks advertisements were seen by 19- and 20-year-olds, the clerks at liquor stores are still responsible for ensuring that adult beverages are purchased only by legal adults.

A more basic issue is that public policy should be coming from the legislature. Attorneys general are tasked with being the legal advisor to a government. If an attorney general feels that Sparks is dangerous, she or he should contact a local legislative representative and pursue policy in a typical manner – not simply act as they please with their immense power.

If Sparks is so dangerous that it must be removed from the market, then we should see a blanket ban on alcohol-caffeine hybrids in both liquor stores and bars. Any other way of tackling this problem is simply shooting at fish in a barrel.

Israel is fighting a Hydra.

In Greek mythology, the Hydra was an enormous, serpent-like creature with multiple heads that could not be defeated by conventional means; if a would-be hero severed one of the heads, two more would sprout, strengthening the beast. The harder someone tried to destroy the beast, the more dangerous it became.

Like the Hydra, Hamas gets stronger the harder Israel tries to destroy it with military force.

Since the fighting began on Dec. 27, nearly 900 Palestinians have been killed, at least half of them civilians, and 235 of them children. Every innocent Palestinian civilian killed reinforces support for Hamas‘ Islamist, anti-Zionist rhetoric, makes radicals out of the moderate masses, and making peaceful co-existence an even more elusive dream.

Hamas came to power capitalizing on the Palestinian people‘s growing discontent with the way Israel was (and still is) treating them. Hamas is essentially a terrorist organization-turned-political party, as it regularly carries out attacks, including suicide attacks, against Israel. It is a fundamentalist group that has Israel‘s destruction in its founding documents.

It came as no surprise that Israel was terrified when Hamas came to power during the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections.

Israel transformed the Gaza Strip into a virtual prison; it now controls all fuel, food, and water shipments into Gaza and has banned most Palestinians from working within Israel. This was done in hopes of preventing further terrorist infiltration and to undermine support for the Hamas regime.

In 2007, Israel intensified this tactic by cutting fuel shipments to Gaza in hopes of seeding anti-Hamas dissent. Well, as the failure of the U.S. Cuban embargo shows us, the ol‘ “make em‘ miserable and the people will rise up“ trick doesn‘t always work. And in this case it didn‘t; Israel‘s restrictions did little but bolster Hamas‘s support base by making the 1.5 million people living in Gaza more miserable than they already were.

Hamas knows it cannot defeat Israel on the battlefield, thus its tactics are aimed at embarrassing Israel and building its popular support base in the Palestinian public. Hamas thrives on Israeli military action, and its constant but not cataclysmic missile attacks were designed to provoke a violent response.

And provoked Israel was; Hamas‘ refusal to extend the ceasefire, along with its marauding missile attacks gave Israel the right to respond.

But just because Israel had the right to respond doesn‘t mean that it was smart to do so. Israel has the right to defend itself, but the 20 Israeli citizens killed by Hamas‘s missile attacks don‘t justify the deaths of 500 Palestinian civilians. It just doesn‘t.

And by initiating an all-out ground invasion, Israel did exactly what Hamas wanted.

Hamas has no qualms about sacrificing innocents to further its political goals. Hamas hides its fighters among civilians and takes cover in hospitals and schools, knowing and hoping that Israeli attacks will kill innocents. They store their weapons in mosques, knowing that Israeli warplanes will destroy them. In other words, Hamas is doing everything it can to make Israel look really, really bad.

The majority of those living in Gaza don‘t share Hamas‘ fundamentalist sentiments, but when the bombs start to fall, the people shooting back at the invading army start to look a lot like the good guys.

Hamas is winning the propaganda war it sought to win all along.

Israel could have responded to the rocket attacks by only bombing the tunnels Hamas uses to smuggle in weapons, leading to fewer civilian casualties and hampering Hamas‘s ability to threaten Israel with missile attacks. Better yet, Israel could have relaxed restrictions on Gaza, creating a political situation where Hamas had no choice but to agree to an extended ceasefire.

Israel‘s current actions in the Gaza Strip might make Israel feel safer in the short term, but in the long run will only strengthen Hamas‘s political credibility, create more terrorists, and plant the seeds for even more violence down the road.

The Hamas Hydra won‘t be slain by conventional means. Another way must be found.

MICHAEL HOWER‘s prayers go out to the Palestinian and Israeli peoples and hopes that one day they will be able to cast aside their differences and live together peacefully. Until then, you can reach him at mahower@ucdavis.edu.

The basic principles of banking have always been a bit fuzzy to me. For almost two years, I struggled with the concept of a ledger – desperately trying to collect receipts, remember specific amounts and record it all before things got too out of hand.

Unfortunately, even if I was able to successfully remember every withdrawal from my account, I was forced to rely on math skills that made even the most dimwitted calculus student look like Albert Einstein in comparison. As a result, I often resorted to breaking the proverbial laws of banking, and “writing checks my ass couldn’t cash.“

A couple of years, and hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees later, I finally realized that there is one great truth in the field of banking-if you’re taking out more than you’re putting in, you’ll probably wind up getting screwed.

Enter president-elect Barack Obama, who this week learned that he would be inheriting a record high $1.2 trillion federal deficit. Luckily, Obama has a plan, promising to “cut unnecessary spending,” and do everything within his powers to get the American economy back on track.

A big part of Obama’s recovery strategy is the often-talked about “economic stimulus plan.” Stimulus, that’s a good thing, right? Definitely not something that will almost double the deficit over the next two years, and have almost no positive effects on the economic situation, right? Wrong.

The Obama stimulus will consist of spending and tax cuts which could potentially add another $1 trillion to the federal deficit before 2011, and many economists are claiming that even such an obscene level of spending won’t be enough.

According to a report by Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, two of the Obama’s top ranking economic advisors, the plan would essentially peak toward the end of 2010, meaning this is where we can expect to see its most impressive results.

The report predicts that, without the stimulus plan, unemployment in 2010 would hang somewhere around 8.8 percent, but with the plan could be cut down to a much more manageable 7 percent.

Just in case you were wondering, as of December 2008, unemployment sat at 7.2 percent, meaning that even with Obama’s plan, we’ll be just as screwed two years from now as we are today. Don’t forget, we’ll also have added another trillion dollars to the federal deficit. Money well spent, indeed.

In order to increase the effectiveness of the Obama plan, some critics are recommending making the plan bigger. These people call for more deficit spending, more money pissed away into failed entitlement programs and more government control over an economy that’s been on life support for so long it’s probably brain dead. These people call for cutting taxes, and therefore revenue, while at the same time increasing spending. These people are talking about creating a federal deficit even larger than what this country saw during the Great Depression. Needless to say, these people are fucking crazy.

If a trillion dollars drops the unemployment level two tenths of a percentage point over the next two years, how much money do these lunatics think is necessary to fully fix the problem?

Perhaps it is with this question that we encounter the fatal flaw in Obama’s proposed solution. Spending massive amount of money in an effort to claw your way out of debt is about as effective as using gasoline to put out a forest fire. Maybe the average citizen would see a small amount of economic relief if instead of taking $1 trillion of taxpayer money and blowing it on the New Deal Part II, that money was left where it belonged – in the pockets of the people who earned it.

Unfortunately, as Inauguration Day draws near, I’m afraid citizens won’t be experiencing any unexpected swelling of their checkbooks, and more likely will have to embrace the inferno caused by the first of many failed experiments in Obama-nomics.

JAMES NOONAN thinks the American Dream was a hell-of-a good thing while it lasted. Tell him what you think at jjnoonan@ucdavis.edu.

Why is it that the moment you start settling in with somebody that you’re dating, they start unleashing an inordinate amount of unknown and unattractive characteristics all of a sudden? I know both girls and guys have experienced this common phenomenon, but it’s still surprising just how downhill people can go once that whole “honeymoon period” of dating is over.

All of a sudden, that sweet charming guy with the enigmatic smile who tells engrossing stories of his swashbuckling life is asking you to come check out his huge poop he just made in the toilet. And you can say goodbye to those cutesy phone calls you once received. You go from “Hey sweetheart, how’s your day been going?” to “Whadup ass-hat?” in three months flat.

Now you’re opening doors for yourself, driving him everyday and buying yourself a bouquet of flowers for your own birthday (“Here’s eight bucks honey – as long as you’re getting flowers, why does it matter who actually goes to pick them up? And pick up my prescription of penicillin while you’re at it. Kthxbye.“).

Sure, it’s not going to be romance and animal sex every single day of your life, and it’s always good to be comfortable being yourself around someone you care about. But what happens when the person you’re dating starts revealing their true selves and you’re not digging it? When did it become okay to go from Prince Charming to Prince-Pull-My-Finger?

Girls are guilty of the same crime too. As I’ve said before, the more time spent in a relationship, the legs become hairier and the underwear gets bigger.

There is also this other stage that both sexes are guilty of that I sometimes call the “Experiment Phenomenon.“

There you are, dating the girl of your dreams and you guys are in a good place. No more grey, “So are we together?” stage – it’s comfortable and you guys both know you’re for each other. That’s when she chooses this time to decide what it would be like to shave all her hair on her body. That includes the eyebrows, the head, and anywhere else that’s interesting. Why? Because she just wants to see “how it feels.“

You can’t disagree too vehemently; after all you don’t want to look like a shallow prick. But why couldn’t she decide to look like a mole baby before you met her, or perhaps after you guys break up? Given this, it probably won’t be long.

Or take the boyfriend you’ve been seeing for four months. Not only did he have a killer sense of style, but he also frequented the gym and ate the right kinds of foods. Then the day he snagged you was the day he decided to stop trying. After all, the ability to see his own feet didn’t offer any sort of thrill before, so why care now?

At first you tell yourself that him being “squishy” is quite adorable actually. Then fast forward a couple more months and you’re left wondering if that foul odor is coming from another Buffalo wing that might have gotten lost in the many crevices of his body.

Some people out there might be thinking that if a relationship reaches any of the above-mentioned points, it’s time to cut loose. Although it may be tempting, these reasons aren’t compelling enough, per se, to dump someone over. After all, it’s not like he cheated on you, failed to commit or murdered anyone.

This sort of reasoning then leads to the “I’ll do it after [insert inane event here]” sentence, where you plan on dumping your person after some “phantom” date, only to find yourself postponing it. In fact, every couple you know that has lasted more than two years lasted that long only because they planned on going out of town next week, then a concert a month later, then a wedding in the spring and then a trip to Hawaii that following summer.

LYNN LA hates it when she gets to know someone but then they change. Like that guy she dated a month ago who transforms into a werewolf every full moon and then became an alcoholic. Talk about commitment issues. To give her some silver bullets, email her at ldla@ucdavis.edu.