EXPRESSIONS
- UNF True & False Laurel Wright
- 'Dragon Wars': a study in false advertisement Robert Orndoff
- FSU mandatory health insurance sets Fla. Standards Luis Zaragoza
- Study links lack of sleep, overeating Harry Jackson Jr.
- A study in 'new urbanism' Jamie Williams
- Prospective pet owners: Do your homework first Laurel Wright
- Oddball Antics Mike Pinree
UNF True & False
Test your University of North Florida knowledge and see how school-savvy you really are. From protest marches to slip-'n'-slides, there's plenty here to satisfy even the most manic trivia buff looking back through the school's 35-year history.
1- UNF's first student paper was called the Halyard.
2- The armadillo was almost UNF's mascot.
3- There were plans to merge UNF with the University of Florida.
4- UNF has on-campus Greek housing.
5- There has been a murder on campus.
6- UNF spent $50,000 to relocate turtles.
7- The skate park had little opposition before it was built.
8- Protest demonstrations occurred on campus during the 1970s.
9- 74 students were in the first graduating class.
10- UNF has always been a four-year institution.
11- Students at UNF used to celebrate Oktoberfest on campus.
12- There has been a loch ness monster spotting on campus.
13- A UNF student competed in the Miss America Pageant.
14- There are 123 blue emergency phones around campus.
15- An X-rated film has been shown on campus.
16- An escapee from a mental institution has been arrested on campus.
17- Poaching was once a problem on campus.
18- There once was an on-campus restaurant called Parrots and Ospreys.
19- There was once a taxi service that took UNF students around Jacksonville for free.
20- The Hyat Golf Learning Center has a nine-hole on-campus course.
21- Multiple students have had serious injuries while slip-'n'-sliding in the dorms.
22- UNF is a Division I school.
23- There is a webcam located on the Green.
24- UNF's original boathouse was destroyed by fire.
25- Curtis L. McCray was UNF's first president.
Answers:
1- True. The first student paper was published in 1974 under the name Halyard. It lasted for two years.
2- True. The student body voted for the armadillo to be UNF's mascot, but faculty overrode the decision and voted for the Osprey.
3- True. There was talk of merging UNF with UF during the early 1980s. The merge was opposed by the UNF president and faculty.
4- False. There is currently no Greek housing on campus, but there are plans to have housing built in the next few years.
5- True. In 1989, a female student shot a male student she was stalking while he was preparing to take a test.
6- True. UNF spent $50,000 capturing and relocating gopher tortoises to a reserve in Florida's panhandle.
7- False. The decision to build the skate park was one of the most controversial on-campus decisions in recent years.
8- True. Students and faculty had several small demonstrations protesting the Vietnam War in the 1970s.
9- False. UNF's first graduating class in 1973 consisted of 35 students, including 28 baccalaureate degree candidates and seven master of education degree students.
10- False. UNF opened as an upper-level university, allowing only juniors, seniors and graduate students to attend. The school was built as a commuter school with no dormitory or apartment complexes planned.
11- True. Oktoberfest was celebrated on-campus during the '70s and '80s, complete with a race and beer-chugging contest. The winners were given rewards like $25 in vinyl albums.
12- True. In 1974, there were reports of a creature living in a lake on campus. The sighting was serious enough to keep two university employees from working near the lake.
13- True. In 1981, Dean Herman, a UNF graduate student, was crowned Miss Florida. She went on to compete in the Miss America Pageant.
14- False. There are 175 blue emergency phones on campus. Seven more are currently in development.
15- False. The X-rated movie "Performance" was scheduled to show on campus in 1980, but the showing was eventually canceled.
16- True. In 1982, an escapee from a Washington, D.C. mental institution was arrested on campus for prowling.
17- True. From when the school opened until about 1974, campus police had problems with hunters wandering onto campus property and killing animals.
18- True. A restaurant called Parrots and Ospreys was located under a tent in the courtyard, but it was shut down in 2003.
19- True. The Late Night Osprey was a taxi service funded by Student Government to curb drunk driving. It took students to places around Jacksonville.
20- False. The Hayt Golf Learning Center has a four-hole course.
21- False. There were accounts of slip-'n'-sliding in the Crossings after the building flooded in 2004, but no reports that anyone was hurt.
22- True. UNF made the transition to Division I in 2005.
23- False. There are webcams located in the Fitness Center, the Coggin College of Business, and a few other locations on campus, but none on the Green.
24- True. UNF's first boathouse was destroyed in 1978 by a fire.
25- False. McCray was UNF's second president. The first president was Thomas G. Carpenter.
Scoring:
0-5: It's time to pick up the Spinnaker, talk to someone, or maybe attend class. If this was a real test, it would be time to ask for some extra credit.
6-10: OK, it's a start. At least you got the Division I thing right - right?
11-15: If this test was graded, you would have a solid C - not bad for forgetting to study. Who said there's anything wrong with average?
16-20: Not too bad! You know more than most when it comes to UNF. Hopefully, your math and English skills are just as good.
21-25: So you're a UNF history buff, or maybe it's time you graduate. At least you do well on tests. Call up mom and dad - this one's going on the refrigerator.
Contact Laurel Wright at features@unfspinnaker.com -- PERMALINK -- TOP OF PAGE
'Dragon Wars': a study in false advertisement
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Be prepared for scenes of solitary monsters wreaking havoc in Los Angeles. Don't be fooled by the film's poster and expect to see a serpentine battle royale. The movie's advertising campaign is less than honest. |
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Good: It could have been longer. |
Movie posters are
wonderful things.
We go to theaters, and on the outside of the building there are these still images of what we can expect to see inside on the
silver screen.
One could go to the theater knowing nothing about what's playing and still make a fairly informed decision based just on titles and those frozen slices of action hung on walls in
glossy paper.
That is why I am so confused by the recent "Dragon
Wars: D-War."
The poster features two giant snakelike creatures battling it out at the top of a skyscraper in a large metropolitan area.
Folks, this never happens in
the movie.
People like movies that feature giant monsters destroying cities.
The people who designed the poster and came up with the title likely knew people enjoy these kinds of movies.
Too bad they didn't make one.
Instead, the film's first half hour takes place in an ancient Korean village under siege by an obviously computer generated army trying really hard to look like the evil army from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
Once this first half-hour of backstory is out of the way, the story moves to the present and becomes something resembling an hour-and-a-half-long "Power Rangers" episode with the
typical chosen-one-must-save-the-
world plot.
The protagonist is a news reporter who has stumbled upon his destiny to find a girl with a special birthmark who holds the key to saving the world.
The antagonists are an ancient army and a giant serpent that appears in the city for brief moments looking for the girl.
They leave a trail of destruction in their path that authorities tracking them just can't seem to follow.
This flick is loaded with movie cliches and flat acting, but that's to be expected in a movie that has both a colon and a hyphen in its title and that shouldn't count
against it.
In fact, this is one of the few things that actually make this movie fun.
At one point the hero takes a bullet in the chest to save someone else's life.
When asked if he is alive, he jumps up, says he is fine and continues saving the world.
The audience gave more than a chuckle at that one.
But by the end of the movie, these B-movie staples are not enough to distract the audience from the fact that there was never a duel between two dragons in the middle of a city.
Instead, the movie climaxes with the U. S. Army getting its butt kicked by that same sword-swinging, non-modern-weapon-wielding
wannabe army of Mordor from the first part of the movie.
This does take place in a city. There are a few cool shots of high-tech army helicopters crashing into skyscrapers, brought down by ancient rockets and winged reptiles (though not considered dragons by the movie), as well as whole streets full of people running in terror.
It even has a shot or two of people getting squished under the feet of mutant beasts of burden.
Finally at the end of the movie, just as the hero runs out of ways to evade the serpent, a second serpent appears and does as much to save the writers from having to write a logical ending as it does to save the hero.
But this scene does not take place anywhere near a
populated area.
Instead, they are outside of a castle in some kind of desert or plateau, and the battle takes all of about 7 minutes.
If you like movies with magical dragons, watch "Dragonheart," or "Dragonslayer."
If you like movies with ancient warring armies, watch "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King." or the classic "Willow."
If you like cities crumbling under the feet of dueling monsters, watch any of the "Godzilla
Versus" movies.
If you like waiting through
a whole movie only to be left completely unsatisfied, watch "Dragon
Wars: D-Wars."
Contact Robert Orndoff at features@unfspinnaker.com -- PERMALINK -- TOP OF PAGE
FSU mandatory health insurance sets Fla. Standards
Florida State University just became the first public university in Florida to require health insurance for new students, but it may not be the last.
Other state universities, including the University of Central Florida, are keeping a close eye this year on FSU's experiment and may soon follow suit.
"Hats off to FSU for being a pioneer," said Bob Wirag, director of UCF's student-health center. "Every school in the system will be watching.."
Mandatory insurance for college students is commonplace among private schools and has found growing popularity among the nation's public universities.
But Florida State's new health-insurance requirement comes amid increasing concerns about the rising cost of attending
public universities.
Students cannot use Bright Futures, the state's Lottery-funded scholarships, to cover the premiums, but students who qualify for financial aid will be able to request increases to cover
the cost.
While FSU is plowing new ground for Florida's public universities, mandatory coverage is prevalent elsewhere.
More than 80 percent of the nation's private colleges and 30 percent of public schools require their students to carry health insurance, according to the American College
Health Association.
Advocates say mandatory insurance drives down the cost of school-provided policies because schools can negotiate better benefits and prices when they have a larger pool of potential policyholders, said Lesley Sacher, director of FSU's Thagard Student Health Center and a principal architect of the policy. She is the American College Health Association's board president.
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Study links lack of sleep, overeating
If you can't tame your appetite and your weight keeps rising, you may not be getting enough sleep.
Poor sleep habits have become so closely associated with obesity that some scientists want obesity therapists to address sleep with the same intensity as diet and exercise, according to the National Sleep Foundation.
"There's an association between [inadequate] sleep and obesity," said Dr. Joseph Ojile, head of the Clayton Sleep Institute.
There's also a double whammy, said Dr. Joseph Espiritu, an expert in sleep medicine with St. Louis University School of Medicine.
Once you're obese, you're more prone to sleep apnea - the collapse of the upper windpipe - which interrupts breathing during sleep. That's the vicious circle: Sleep apnea can help cause obesity, and obesity can cause sleep apnea.
For decades, studies found overweight and obese people tended to have poor sleep habits. But all the evidence was statistical, not scientific.
The physiological proof - albeit from a relatively small study - came in December 2004 when a University of Chicago researcher in endocrinology, Eve van Cauter, found poor sleep disrupted two hormones associated with appetite.
Cauter's findings show that sleep and insulin choreograph the dance between leptin, which tells the brain there's no need for food, and ghrelin, which tells the brain it's chow time.
Here's what happened: Test subjects slept only four hours a night, rather than eight. In only two nights, the hormones malfunctioned.
Leptin production decreased by 18 percent. Ghrelin production increased by 28 percent.
On top of that, the test subjects - healthy young male college students - started eating like they were at a frat party.
They reported craving more high-calorie, high-density, high-carbohydrate foods, including a 24 percent increase in appetite for candy, cookies, chips, nuts and starchy foods such as bread and pasta.
A week into the experiment, blood tests showed an inability to use insulin so intense it mimicked diabetes.
Also, lack of sleep increased the production of cortisol, a hormone associated with increased belly fat.
The researchers concluded sleep starvation boosted appetites, increased appetites caused overeating, and overeating caused weight gain.
One major effect of the study has been to change the medical community's belief that sleep problems only cause mental - not physical - problems, experts say.
While the medical community is encouraged, researchers want more extensive studies on a bigger selection of people and a wider range of physiological effects before saying poor sleep actually causes obesity.
"As a health-conscious society, this is enough data that we should incorporate good sleep health into our total health package." Ojile said. "If I'm going to go exercise, watch my diet, [and] go low-fat, good sleep should be part of that."
As for the test subjects from the University of Chicago study, all of them returned to normal health immediately upon paying their "sleep debt" - the amount of sleep they lost during they study.
Dietitian Lisa Galati of St. Anthony's Medical Center said after 25 years of connecting the dots she found many of her clients who needed help with obesity also needed help with sleeping problems.
One of the first questions she asks her patients is about how much sleep they're getting.
"They look at me as if to say, 'Why are you asking that?'"
she said.
"I know their sleeping pattern is a whole part of the package," Galati said. "Those are the people who will be less motivated to make changes in their lives because during the day they're just tired."
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A study in 'new urbanism'
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A view of Market Street in downtown Celebration reveals the interesting and varied architecture of this suburban dreamscape. |
What comes to mind when you think of celebration?
A birthday party? A
holiday festivity?
How about the planned town the Walt Disney Company created in 1994 near Orlando?
Located adjacent to the sprawling, suburban strip mall-smothered city of Kissimmee, and connected directly to Walt Disney World, Celebration is a perfect example of the styled urban planning known as "new urbanism."
Celebration's "Main Street, U.S.A." look - complete with white picket fences, wide sidewalks, front porch swings and
a squeaky-clean image - is
pervasive.
The clean, winding streets are reminiscent of Wisteria Lane in "Desperate Housewives."
While the aesthetics making Celebration exactly what it is are by no means concealed, some people maintain the cordial community is "fake" and "unauthentic," and that the town lacks both history and charm.
Criticism aside, Celebration is infact a real town.
Not only does it have a town hall, but a post office with its own zip code, a hospital, a golf club, a high school, parks, banks and even a branch of Stetson University located downtown.
The renowned cotton candy-colored Celebration Hotel is a recipient of the distinguished AAA Four Diamond award. The hotel is located downtown, directly on the main lake.
Dining options in Celebration run the gamut, from pizzerias and sushi restaurants to a deli
market eatery.
There's a chocolate and ice cream shop as well as an interesting British-style coffee, tea and wine bar.
Shopping in Celebration is just as diverse as dining.
There's a fine selection of jewelry and clothing to be found, an art gallery, and even a bookstore, complete with a decent-sized
selection of books on Celebration's history.
The town is almost exactly what one would expect from Disney: perfectly manicured and maintained, colorful, youthful and expensive.
Although Celebration's components are well-heeled and firmly in place, the feeling that you've visited a genuine town
isn't there.
Celebration's a bit too
manicured, a bit too faux pas
and perfect.
Maybe after time, if Celebration lets its hair down a little and allows the cracks and imperfections to show, a true culture and identity could unveil itself.
For now, though, Celebration remains an interesting study in new urbanism and a tranquil place you must-see to believe.
Contact Jamie Williams at features@unfspinnaker.com -- PERMALINK -- TOP OF PAGE
Prospective pet owners: Do your homework first
For many students, moving away from home means a new sense of freedom, and part of this independence may lead some to consider getting a pet.
There are lots of reasons people get pets - from protection to companionship - but no matter the reason, there are numerous factors a student must take into account before bringing a
pet home.
One of the most important factors is the amount of time one has available to spend with the animal, said Chere Garrard of the Jacksonville Humane Society.
"A pet is a lifetime commitment," she said. "Pets can live for a long time,"
A healthy dog can live an average of 13 to 15 years, and a healthy cat can live an average of 15 to 20 years, Garrard said.
It's important to evaluate the type of lifestyle one has, she said.
"Look at how often you're home and how active you are," she said.
"You can't stay out very long," said Andy Miquelon, a junior accounting major who owns a dog. "You have to go home to let it out. It makes it hard to stay the
night out."
Places like the Humane Society try to match people with pets that fit their lifestyle, Garrard said.
"Some people come in set on a pet that might not be a good match for them," she said. "It's important to keep an open mind."
There are certain breeds of dogs, like Collies, that fit better with an owner who leads an active lifestyle, she said.
These dogs like to run and play catch, but there are also breeds of dogs like Great Danes that like to lounge around the house.
Another important factor when getting a pet is the financial commitment, Garrard said.
It's important to consider more than the price of the animal.
There are also other expenses like food, vet fees, grooming
and training.
The average dog costs about $1,500 a year, and unforeseen medical problems can raise that price, she said, so it's important to have a financial cushion.
It's also essential to check with the owners of the house or apartment to make sure that having a pet is permitted, Garrard said.
"Many people make the assumption that it would be OK for a pet, but some places may have a fee, a weight limit or breed exclusions," she said.
The dorms at the University of North Florida only allow fish for pets, according to the
Resident's Handbook.
Make sure that everyone agrees with having a pet, and check with roommates, parents and significant others, Garrard said.
It's not a good idea to surprise someone with a pet, because the pet may not be a good fit
for them.
Garrard said she encourages looking to adopt before going to a pet store, because purchasing from pet stores promotes
puppy mills.
Puppy mills breed in mass quantity, so a pet could have challenging health and
behavioral concerns.
If one does purchase from a pet store, it's a good idea to have the pet spayed or neutered to help reduce the amount of stray animals in Jacksonville, she said.
Luckily for students, there are a number of Jacksonville clinics which offer payment options for fixing pets accordng to income.
Contact Laurel Wright at features@unfspinnaker.com -- PERMALINK -- TOP OF PAGE
Oddball Antics
WHEW, WE MADE IT ... OH! POLICE DOGS RUN!
Two men robbed a gas station in Derby City, England, then drove off, later abandoning their vehicle in a parking lot where, they were soon to learn, the local police were conducting a dog-training exercise. They were arrested after a brief chase.
IT'S A BEAUTIFUL MOMENT THAT A GIRL NEVER FORGETS
Having sex for the first time, an 18-year-old girl in Germany lit some candles in her parents' attic to set the mood. While they were in the throes of passion, the room caught fire, forcing her and her boyfriend to flee naked into
the street.
THAT'S THE ONE THING WE DIDN'T COUNT ON
Two men burglarized a video surveillance business in Pleasanton, Calif. They were caught because it did not occur
to them that the company might have installed video surveillance equipment to protect
the premises.
BOB, WE'VE NOTICED SOME IRREGULARITIES WITH THIS CHECK
A man in East Durham, England, stole someone else's paycheck. Then, despite the fact that the check was made out to another man, he endorsed it on the back with his own name. Then, he went to a post office where he was well known and tried to cash it. His arrest
was swift.
THIS IS GOING TO BE GREAT! ... WHAT DO YOU MEAN? IS THAT A NO?
A man, who thought his relationship with his girlfriend was a lot further along than it actually was, took her to a baseball game in Houston, and, as they were being shown on the stadium's jumbo screen, dropped to one knee and proposed to her. In response, she dumped her popcorn on him and angrily walked out.
OBSERVE THE MIGHTY CREATURE TRANSVERSING THE WAVE... OH, NO!
Tourists on a whale-watching excursion off the coast of Sapporo, Japan, were thrilled to observe one of nature's behemoths gliding across the water. Then they watched in horror when a Whaling vessel a few miles away harpooned the beast, dragged it aboard and
butchered it.
SO, WHERE ARE THE LADIES?
Lured by young women with signs offering "Topless Car Washes," men pulled off the highway and under a big, blue tarp, expecting to have comely, half-naked wenches buff up their vehicles. Instead, it was shirtless and very masculine firefighters who awaited them. Some patrons were more than a
little peeved.
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