Phone Calls and Complaints Change Parking Rule

The new parking lot rules brought resident students together like no other event on campus has this year. Instead of club fliers promoting "ladies night" or "2-for-1" drink specials littering the parking lot, yellow envelopes with $15 parking tickets inside were on hundreds of windshields.

Changing Lot 23 (the parking lot next to AL) to commuter parking angered many people - especially the residents who were use to having the ease of a one or two minute walk to the resident hall.

Now, they were being told to lug their groceries from the parking garages.

But after three days of yelling, complaining and calling traffic and parking, the rule has been suspended. For the first time in a long time, students, residential or not, rallied together to change a rule or policy.

Use this as an example for the future. FAU is a small enough school where 100 or 200 students CAN change something if they really want to.

Two-and-a-Half Minute Super Bowl, World Series, World Cup

Football and basketball players get four quarters to win their league's national championship. Baseball players get nine innings to win the World Series. Soccer players get two halves to win the World Cup. Professional golfers get 18 holes, and professional bowlers get 10 frames.

Cheerleaders get two-and-a-half minutes. One chance. One routine.

The FAU Cheerleading team took a team of 20 girls to Orlando last weekend to compete in the National Cheerleading Association's annual national championship competition. There were 150 teams total competing in the competition but 21 other teams in their division.

The team didn't finish as high as they had wished - they finished 12th.

Even the award presenter knows how intense this competition is. Before presenting the awards, she said: "Please don't let today's two-and-a-half minute routine and the place you finished in today determine the rest of your season."

There is still a debate amongst top dogs in the NCAA, as there has been for years, to decide if cheerleading and/or dancing should be a sanctioned NCAA sport. Right now they can receive scholarships from their university, but they are not recognized athletes.

The girls that compete in these competitions are athletes. They flip, stunt, tumble, fly in the air and hold each other up with such ease - it's simply amazing.

I have never been in that type of position, so I could only image the pressure that was on them. A whole season of practice for two-and-a-half minutes of performance time. And... although you are competing against other squads, it's not like football where you can capitalize on an interception or a missed field goal. Judges - who you don't know, have never met and will probably never meet - use their subjective opinions to rate how well they think you tumbled, flipped and cheered.

Girls: You did great. Granted I don't know much about it and I am a little biased towards you, but you did better than the hundreds of schools who didn't even think they were good enough to field a team at the competition.

I look forward to next year's competition.

"Reject parking lot" is now for residents only

Commuter students and resident students usually have one common complaint about FAU: parking. But when students started coming back from winter break this weekend, they found a nice surprise: additional resident-only parking.

In lot 23, which is located next to the Arts and Letters building and just to the east of Indian River Towers Resident Hall, white lines were changed to green lines, indicating a change from “all decal” parking to “resident decal” parking.

In my circle of friends, we creatively called the small strip of parking lot that is located in the southern most part of lot 23 the “reject lot,” because if you had to park your car in there, that meant you were rejected from the IRT parking lot and the big part of lot 23.

This should anger commuter students, because they are losing parking spots. However, now residents can leave during the high-traffic times and actually come back to campus and find space to park their cars.

Another parking change: Lot 16, which is the University Center parking lot, is now faculty/staff and commuter students. This should put a smile on the faces of some commuter students. This angered some resident students that live in Algonquin because now they lost their close proximity parking. This will also anger the lazy residents who drive to the caf to eat everyday.

One more thing. Apparently the yellow emergency phone booths work around IRT. A community service officer pressed the big red emergency button the other night, and the blue light started flashing. That’s a good sign. I haven’t heard about these emergency boxes not working since 2002 when then Boca Student Senator Rafi Menachem went around and pressed some of the buttons just to see if they worked as part of a Campus Action Committee initiative.

Welcome back students, and happy new year.