The Bulldog hockey team will travel over 6,600 miles this weekend

“It’s kind of like your whole body changes. That’s why you have to leave a cou­ple days early because oth­er­wise you will never catch up,” said Wietecha.

The ice rink, often referred to as the sheet, is an Olympic– size rink. The sheet is the same length, but is 15 feet wider than the one in Ewigleben Ice Arena. Daniels said the penalty-kill and fore-check can­not be as aggres­sive due to the extra space.

“We have the small­est rink in the CCHA and they have the largest rink in the CCHA, so that’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent too,” said Wietecha.

Alaska is also darker than the con­ti­nen­tal U.S. dur­ing the win­ter months. Daniels said when the team trav­els there between November and February, it feels like they landed on the moon. Fairbanks loses about five to 10 min­utes of sun­light each day until December 21, on which it will have less than four hours of sunlight.

Ferris has been unsuc­cess­ful against the Nanooks in recent years, both at home and on the road. Ferris is 0−12−2 against Alaska in the pre­vi­ous 14 meet­ings and has not won since the 2003–2004 sea­son. Their last vic­tory at Alaska came in 2002–2003. Wietecha said the time change and trav­el­ling are not excuses for their struggles.

“We can’t really use that as an excuse,” said Wietecha. “They do it when they come down here, so we can’t use that as an excuse ever.”

Ferris takes 21 play­ers, two coaches, an ath­letic trainer and an equip­ment man­ager on the trip. Daniels takes one less player to Alaska than other road trips because he does not want them to miss any more classes than they absolutely have to, espe­cially when not every­one will play as it is.

“We only take 21 play­ers to Alaska because I don’t feel good about tak­ing play­ers that far and then not dress­ing them,” said Daniels.

Players miss three days of school and must do either extra work before­hand or make up the work upon return­ing. Junior defense­man Zach Redmond said he does not take any school­work on trips.

“I try and get it all done before so I don’t have to worry about it,” said Redmond.

The trip to Alaska is actu­ally finan­cially ben­e­fi­cial for the team. One stip­u­la­tion that the CCHA put on the University of Alaska Fairbanks is the school is required to pay for the air­fare and lodg­ing for all con­fer­ence oppo­nents. In order to join the CCHA, the league required them to finance all travel expenses.

“Our only cost for the trip is our meals and our bus from here to the air­port and back,” said Daniels.

In addi­tion, Ferris ben­e­fits finan­cially because they are allowed to sched­ule two extra games. The NCAA allows teams to play up to 34 games dur­ing the reg­u­lar sea­son. However, all games played in the state of Alaska are exempt. Therefore, Ferris can sched­ule two addi­tional home games and receive the ben­e­fit of ticket sales, park­ing fees, and con­ces­sion revenue.

“Financially, it makes sense for Alaska to be in our league know­ing that we get two extra home games,” said Daniels.

In col­lege we’re not priv­i­leged to school can­cel­la­tions like we were in high school

Whether it’s H1N1 or just plain old influenza, it seems that cold sea­son is upon us. Classes are now filled with cough­ing, snif­fling, germ-infested students.

Area K-12 school dis­tricts have already felt the symp­toms of flu sea­son and have been forced to close school sev­eral days in the past week. For most schools, this means that over 25 per­cent of their stu­dent pop­u­la­tion was absent due to sickness.

In col­lege how­ever, we aren’t priv­i­lege to the same ben­e­fits as ele­men­tary, mid­dle, and high school stu­dents. We don’t shut­down or can­cel classes often, espe­cially not sim­ply due to illness.

I remem­ber when I was in mid­dle and high school; I loved it when school got can­celled for any rea­son at all.

In my high school, on three sep­a­rate occa­sions school got can­celled because of mer­cury con­t­a­m­i­na­tion in the hall­ways. Not to men­tion the count­less snow days we got in the winter.

In col­lege, if we’re sick we’re just told to stay in dorm rooms and not come to class for risk of expos­ing our pro­fes­sors and fel­low stu­dents to the microbes infest­ing our bodies.

A lot of stu­dents don’t stay away like they’re told, how­ever. For some, it’s because miss­ing class, if only for a cou­ple days, means falling behind with only a slight chance of catch­ing up again.

For oth­ers, I’ve been told that it’s because some of their pro­fes­sors have strict atten­dance poli­cies that don’t allow over two absences dur­ing the semes­ter for any rea­son, even illness.

It looks like it’s time for all of us to brace our­selves for the upcom­ing months and stock up on decon­ges­tants, cough syrup, throat lozenges, hot tea, and flu shots. Conditions are only likely to get worse as win­ter approaches in the next month.

This brings me to my next rem­i­nis­cent mem­ory, snow days: some­thing that we’re unques­tion­ably not accus­tomed to in college.

Winters are one aspect of going to col­lege in Big Rapids that I was def­i­nitely not pre­pared for when I moved here last year. The sever­ity of win­ter in Big Rapids was a shocker.

I was awestruck when the snow­fall reached over 18 inches overnight. My advice to all fresh­men: invest in a shovel because you’re going to need it to dig out your car this winter.

Walking to class is also quite an ordeal, espe­cially when side­walks don’t get plowed before 8 a.m. class and you’re forced to trek across cam­pus through a foot or more of snow. And even if they do get cleared, they’re often cov­ered in ice and snow within the next hour.

I grew up in south­east­ern Michigan, where trucks begin plow­ing and salt­ing the streets at 4 a.m. and school buses man­aged to drive down even the ici­est back roads.

We also don’t get the same win­tery weather like that of Big Rapids how­ever and if we ever expe­ri­enced more than a foot-and-a-half of snow or exces­sive tem­per­a­tures in the neg­a­tive, we’d prob­a­bly have snow days for a week.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d take a day in col­lege over one in mid­dle or high school with­out a sec­ond con­sid­er­a­tion, but it doesn’t dis­count the fact that in high school, we were def­i­nitely priv­i­leged to a few more days off.

In a car-pedestrian acci­dent that occurred early Friday morn­ing, Fumitoshi Yonemura died after being struck by a vehi­cle on north­bound State Street near the Interdisciplinary Resource Center (IRC) building.

Yonemura, 18, was cross­ing State street at 7:56 a.m., accord­ing to the police report, when struck by a red truck. The police report, filed by Sargeant Craig S. Brockette, stated that eye­wit­nesses con­firmed that the vehi­cle had the green light, and that the walk sign showed a solid red. Yonemura was thrown onto the side­walk upon collision.

The dri­ver was Richard Weisenberger of New Hudson, Mich. Statements from eye­wit­nesses also said that there were cars on the inside lane of north­bound State Street that obstructed the view of both the dri­ver and the pedes­trian. The author­i­ties on scene included the Big Rapids Department of Public Safety (DPS) and the FSU DPS, among oth­ers. No charges have been issued.

A state­ment released by Leah Nixon, direc­tor of news ser­vices at Ferris, stated that local author­i­ties were attempt­ing to con­tact the fam­ily and friends of Yonemura shortly after he was con­firmed dead.

Yonemura, a fresh­man at Ferris State from Novi, Mich. was pro­nounced dead at the Mecosta County Medical Center. He was a stu­dent in the biotech­nol­ogy program.

Ferris President David Eisler said that this is a very sad day at Ferris. “I ask that you remem­ber the Yonemura fam­ily in your thoughts and prayers.”

Simple ideas that will make a state­ment on Halloween

It never fails that cer­tain peo­ple always have to find quick and easy cos­tumes at the last minute around Halloween, or they need a cheap cos­tume because they can‘t afford a store bought one.

There are some sim­ple tricks and ideas that you can put together in no time at all with very lit­tle money to achieve a great Halloween look. Guys and girls both have many very cre­ative options to choose from.

Lucas Hanson, junior in the sur­vey­ing engi­neer­ing pro­gram, said, “Go as Superman dressed up as Chuck Norris.”

Hanson said that all you need is a cow­boy hat, a Superman shirt, a jean jacket and a painted on beard.

Another fun idea for guys is to dress up as a “chick mag­net.” To achieve this look go to a hard­ware depart­ment or store and buy mag­nets. Once you have the mag­nets glue them to your clothes and then glue fake baby chicks to the magnets.

Most guys have a jer­sey from one sport or another in their closet. You can uti­lize that jer­sey for Halloween and go as the player whose name is on the back. To add to the look, carry around the ball that the player would be using or wear some of the equip­ment if you have it.

There are many options for girls as well.

Two ideas for quick cos­tumes come from Renee Urbanc, sopho­more in the music indus­try man­age­ment pro­gram. Urbanc sug­gests going as a Hooters girl or as a mime.

A home­com­ing, prom or beauty queen is also a great option. Many girls have for­mal dresses hang­ing in their clos­ets from high school dances and heels to go with them. All you need is the dress, some jew­elry, heels, a cheap tiara and to cre­ate a sash out of rib­bon or an old white sheet.

Dressing up like Mother Nature is a sur­pris­ingly sim­ple cos­tume to put together. If you take a long skirt and shirt and glue fake flow­ers and twigs onto them you can put the look together for very lit­tle money. After you get your out­fit down, mess­ing up your hair and inter­twin­ing flow­ers and twigs into it is a great addi­tion to the look.

The are also some gen­der neu­tral options to choose from.

A mummy is one that any­one can do by wrap­ping toi­let paper or gauze around your­self until you are fully wrapped. A scare­crow is another option. All you need to pull off the scare­crow look is hay to stuff in your clothes, jeans, and a flan­nel shirt. Going as a hippy is also a great option. You sim­ply need a flow­ery, loose shirt, bell­bot­toms and some sunglasses.

Bubblegum under a shoe is sure to be a crowd pleaser. Dress head to toe in pink clothes and then tie a shoe to the top of your head. It’s sim­ple, easy, and sure to get a few laughs.

Dressing up as a dice is a sim­ple afford­able cos­tume as well. Just find a card­board box and some black and white spray paint, then paint the box white and spray black dots on the sides.

Some peo­ple pre­fer being cre­ative with their cos­tume and would rather do these cheap ideas than buy a cos­tume from a store. Urbanc said, “Stores are over­priced and it is eas­ier and more fun to go to Goodwill and put some­thing together.”

These are just some sim­ple ideas that are quick and easy to throw together. They can help you save money and time. A lot of the things needed for each cos­tume can be found in your closet, at Goodwill, at thrift shops, or at a crafts store or depart­ment. These ideas might just help you in your last minute search, or your money sav­ing search, for a Halloween cos­tume that kills.

Costumes for Him and Her

Men

• Tom Cruise from Risky Business
• Chick Magnet
• Superman as Chuck Norris
• Professional Athlete
• Cowboy
• American Tourist

Women

• Hooters Girl
• Cowgirl
• Prom or Beauty Queen
• Cute Animal
• Mother Nature
• Frazzled Housewife

Neutral

• Hippy
• Mummy
• Gum Under a Shoe
• Mime
• Dice
• Scarecrow

Bulldogs look to build off GLIAC Tournament appear­ance last season

The Ferris State men’s bas­ket­ball team returns four starters and looks to improve its .500 record from last season.

Last sea­son, the Bulldogs fin­ished with a 14–14 over­all record and a 12–10 con­fer­ence record, which was good for third in the GLIAC. The team earned its fourth trip to the GLIAC Tournament in the last five years.

The team has four starters return­ing from last year: forward/center Justin Keenan, and guards Darien Gay, Dontae Molden, and Josh Young. The Bulldogs have eight play­ers return­ing from last year’s team. This year, the team’s expe­ri­ence of play­ing with the same core group of play­ers should be an advan­tage. Bill Sall is enter­ing his eighth sea­son as the Bulldogs’ head coach.

“We have a lot more expe­ri­ence than in the past and dur­ing the off-season they worked really hard,” said Sall.

Last year, Keenan and Gay were both All-Star can­di­dates for the Bulldogs. Keenan led the GLIAC in scor­ing with 20.2 points per game a sea­son ago and the Sporting News voted him as a pre-season All-American. Gay was an All-GLIAC sec­ond team pick last year.

Ferris will be look­ing to rely on its return­ing play­ers to improve on last year’s 14–14 record. Throughout the sea­son, Ferris aver­aged more points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks, but were not able to turn those num­bers into more wins.

“We have taken a lot of strides in a lot of dif­fer­ent areas,” said Sall.

On the offen­sive side of the ball, Sall feels very com­fort­able with the team’s inside pres­ence and believes the guards will be able to pro­vide some consistency.

Defensively, Ferris will try to pick up the pace and be more pres­sure ori­ented. Sall wants the team to be an aggres­sive and attack­ing team on both sides of the ball.

Overall, the team believes it can improve upon last year and sopho­more cen­ter Jim Boylan believes the Bulldogs have the tal­ent and mind­set to do so.

“We have a good core of return­ing play­ers and we all want to win the GLIAC,” said Boylan.

Ferris opens the reg­u­lar sea­son on Nov. 15 at Lewis University (Ill.).

America and media mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion about social­ism con­tinue to fuel mis­con­cep­tions about President Barack Obama’s administration

Dr. Thomas Jorsch, Ferris State University his­tory instruc­tor, gave a speech enti­tled “Why Barack Obama is not a Socialist”.

Humanities Department Colloquium series put on the speech to edu­cate the cam­pus about media mis­con­cep­tions of President Barack Obama and social­ism. Jorsch’s speech on Oct. 22 com­pared and con­trasted the Obama admin­is­tra­tion with social­ist views.

Socialism can be defined as an eco­nomic orga­ni­za­tion advo­cat­ing pub­lic or direct worker own­er­ship, admin­is­tra­tion of means of pro­duc­tion and resource allo­ca­tion. Socialist soci­eties are char­ac­ter­ized by equal access to resources for all indi­vid­u­als with a method of com­pen­sa­tion based on the amount of labor expended, while democ­racy is defined as a sys­tem in which gov­ern­ing is car­ried out by either the peo­ple or an elected representitive.

Although Jorsch claims that Obama is not a social­ist, he believes that democ­racy and social­ism are closely related.

“Socialism is democ­racy, there is no dis­tinc­tion,” said Jorsch. “But Obama is a lib­eral who hopes to use gov­ern­ment to reg­u­late the abuses of capitalism.”

Obama’s auto and bank bailouts were one of Jorsch’s com­par­isons. Jorsch said that Obama’s actions do not add up to social­ism because social­ism would not have given money to pri­vate busi­ness own­ers; rather, it would put the power into the work­ers’ hands.

“Socialism is the pub­lic run­ning busi­ness for the ben­e­fit of the pub­lic, not the ben­e­fit of pri­vate enti­ties,” said Jorsch.

Healthcare reform was another issue that Jorsch dis­cussed. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Obama’s reform plan will cre­ate more secu­rity for those with health care, make health care afford­able, cre­ate cov­er­age for the unin­sured and reduce the profit of insur­ance companies.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau sta­tis­tics from 2008, there are 47 mil­lion unin­sured Americans. 18,000 peo­ple die yearly because they can­not afford med­ical bills. Jorsch believes that Obama’s health­care tac­tics mir­ror his pre­de­ces­sors, Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, more than socialism.

Jorsch, who con­sid­ers him­self a social­ist, believes that America could oper­ate eff­i­cen­tily under a social­ist regime.

“Our present cap­i­tal­is­tic sys­tem is based on greed,” said Jorsch.  “What we need to do is demol­ish that sys­tem and cre­ate one based on cooperation.”

Socialism may appear to cre­ate utopian soci­eties; how­ever, some peo­ple think that America could fall under such a sys­tem. Many audi­ence mem­bers ques­tion the incen­tives for indi­vid­u­als to excel when every­one is con­sid­ered equal.

Whether or not President Obama is actu­ally a social­ist lies entirely in the mean­ing of the word

Socialism: one lit­tle word that strikes panic in the hearts of Americans for fear that their ideals of free­dom will be jeopardized.

After attend­ing Dr. Thomas Jorsch’s lec­ture, I now real­ize that some Americans’ ideas about social­ism are incor­rect and that the crit­i­cisms of President Obama being a social­ist are based solely on ignorance.

Dr. Jorsch defined social­ism as pub­lic own­er­ship of the means of pro­duc­tion. The peo­ple col­lec­tively own and oper­ate the busi­nesses and com­pa­nies instead of wealthy CEOs. The goal of a pure, demo­c­ra­tic sys­tem of social­ism is that every­one works for every­one else’s benefit.

Although sev­eral things about social­ism were brought to light after attend­ing his lec­ture, there are still a vari­ety of issues that are still unclear to me.

First, look at the def­i­n­i­tion of social­ism. Merriam-Webster describes social­ism as “any of var­i­ous eco­nomic and polit­i­cal the­o­ries advo­cat­ing col­lec­tive or gov­ern­men­tal own­er­ship and admin­is­tra­tion of the means of pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of goods.”

This fol­lows along with what many Americans believe social­ism to be: gov­ern­ment own­er­ship. While search­ing through var­i­ous his­tor­i­cal and eco­nomic ref­er­ences, I was unable to find a con­crete def­i­n­i­tion of social­ism. Some said pub­lic own­er­ship while oth­ers said gov­ern­ment ownership.

This dif­fer­ence over the tech­ni­cal def­i­n­i­tion of social­ism may be all the American peo­ple need to believe that Obama actu­ally is a social­ist. If we fol­low the mean­ing of gov­ern­ment own­er­ship, then not just Obama, but the entire U.S. gov­ern­ment is headed toward socialism.

If we fol­low Dr. Josrch’s def­i­n­i­tion of social­ism, that the peo­ple own the means of pro­duc­tion, then per­haps it is pos­si­ble. It is my belief, how­ever, that social­ism would only be pos­si­ble if America was a true demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety, where the peo­ple actu­ally have con­trol over the means of production.

Even though we elect our politi­cians and law­mak­ers by pop­u­lar vote, it can be argued that we really don’t have any power.

The belief that every­one could actu­ally work for every­one else’s ben­e­fit is some­thing that I wish America could be. Historically, Native American tribes existed in this type of fash­ion for generations.

However, in the cur­rent belief sys­tem that Americans have today, it would be almost impos­si­ble for peo­ple to oper­ate under a social­ist soci­ety. Too many peo­ple today are moti­vated by greed and many would exploit the sys­tem by attempt­ing to be “bet­ter” than every­one else.

Dr. Jorsch called him­self an opti­mist and believes that every­one wants to work and con­tribute to the bet­ter­ment of soci­ety. I, too, am an opti­mist, but I’m also a real­ist. Not every­one wants to work and American’s are too indi­vid­u­al­ist to work for the com­mu­nity instead of only think­ing of themselves.

Personally, belief that a people’s own­er­ship type of social­ism can work in America is utopian. Unless America goes through a rev­o­lu­tion­ary period in which soci­ety becomes col­lec­tive and the American peo­ple reshape their beliefs, then social­ism in America will never be possible.

The women’s bas­ket­ball team looks to adjust to a young lineup

The women’s bas­ket­ball team will rely on a young lineup to try to make a run in the GLIAC this season.

The Bulldogs have to replace the entire start­ing lineup from a sea­son ago. The team lost four seniors, includ­ing sec­ond team All-GLIAC guard Teghan Thelen.

Putting together an entirely new start­ing lineup is some­thing head coach Tracey Dorow will have to adjust to.

“It’s always some­thing you have to adjust to when you grad­u­ate play­ers, espe­cially a whole lineup,” said Dorow. “At the same time, it’s really excit­ing because we have a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ties to sur­prise peo­ple since we’re some­what of an unknown in the league.”

With such a young team, which has five fresh­men on the ros­ter, the Bulldogs will look to some of its vet­eran play­ers for leadership.

One of the return­ing vet­er­ans the team will rely on this year is senior cen­ter Andrea Clancy, who earned the Sixth Player Award last season.

“Andrea has really stepped up into a lead­er­ship role and we needed her to,” said Dorow. “She knew that we were los­ing our vet­eran lead­ers and I’m pleased to see her step up and be a leader.”

Another vet­eran coach Dorow will look to lead is junior guard Becci Houdek. Dorow said Houdek is a leader on the court and has a knack for the game.

Even with hav­ing such a young team, Ferris is not con­cerned about the lack of expe­ri­ence of the younger players.

“We’re a young team, but the fresh­men are get­ting there,” said Clancy.

Houdek said she is not wor­ried about hav­ing a young team because peo­ple with expe­ri­ence have stepped up and have helped the younger play­ers on the team.

The Bulldogs fin­ished the 2008–2009 sea­son with a 13–15 record over­all, but won seven of the final nine games of the sea­son. Getting off to a fast start this year is some­thing the team believes will be cru­cial to the season.

“It’s really impor­tant for us to start out strong early in the sea­son,” said Clancy. “We had some issues to start last sea­son, but that’s not going to hap­pen this season.”

Ferris fin­ished third in the GLIAC North divi­sion last sea­son and made it to the semi­fi­nals of the GLIAC tour­na­ment. The Bulldogs have high expec­ta­tions for them­selves for this year.

“We’re a lot more bal­anced over­all this year and the team chem­istry has really improved from last year,” said Houdek. “We don’t care who does the scor­ing and we don’t care how it’s going to get done. We’re focused on just mak­ing it happen.”

The main goal for the team this sea­son is to get to the regional round of the NCAA Division II Tournament, accord­ing to Houdek.

Ferris will start the sea­son with an exhi­bi­tion con­test against Oakland University on Nov. 1 and will begin reg­u­lar sea­son play Nov. 20 against Gannon University (Pa.).

A life is a string a moments, min­gled with the moments of oth­ers. And from one moment to another things change, lives change.

One of those moments was this past Friday when an acci­dent resulted in the death of a student.

It is in these moments that we pause for reflec­tion on our own mor­tal­ity. These moments, fleet­ing, remind us to cher­ish and sup­port one another.

For each mem­ory that is shared, we must persevere.

For each heart­beat that is extin­guished, we must fol­low our own hearts.

For each dream that did not come true, we must fur­ther strengthen our resolve.

A moment, a pulse, a thought or prayer, all of them are fleet­ing and all of them are chang­ing our world.

In this instance, we share in a moment of tragedy, and while there are so many moments in our days, there are never enough to waste on anger. There are not enough to blame or hate.

Eventually there will be peace for the fam­i­lies of those stu­dents impacted by this tragedy. One can only hope that their moment comes soon.