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OPINION
Customers will still crave special sauce New York tries to force fast food chains to post calories on menus
the temptation of fast food even easier for us to fall victim to by creating the dollar and value menus. Fast food fits comfortable into a college budget. If you only have $3 in your pockBy Melissa Pollard et and a half hour before class, you Daily Titan Staff Writer don't have the time or money to opinion@dailytitan.com sit down at a restaurant and order Fast food. We all know it is bad something healthy. But that same $3 will buy you a for us, yet we keep falling into the full meal off the dollar menu at Mctemptation. Starting in March, New York Donald's, and you won't be late for City's fast food restaurants will be class. Placing the calorie amounts on required to show the calorie count fast food menus may affect a few for all items on their menus. The New York City Board of customers, but it won't stop them Health passed a regulation that re- from eating what they want and quires all fast food chains with 15 or where they want. After the new menus are up, there more locations in New York to post the calorie amounts on their menus. will likely be a decline in the number So with the calories being out in of patrons going to fast food restauthe open for us to see, are we going rants, but it will be only a small decline and for only a to stop eating fast short time. food? If you only have There will be I don't think those people that that showing us the $3 in your pocket stop going for amount of calories and a half hour before will a few weeks, maybe we eat is going to a month at most. stop us from order- class, you don’t have They will come ing a Big Mac or the time or money to realize how unChicken McNugto sit down at a healthy the food gets. really is, but will Customers are restaurant and order eventually get past not idiots. something healthy. it and go back to We don't need eating fast food the to know how many same way they did calories are in an order of french fries to understand that before the new menus went up. There may also be a change in they are unhealthy and that people what customers order when going to shouldn't be eating them. So if we know that fast food is fast food restaurants. With the calorie amounts of all unhealthy, why do we keep coming the food and beverages easily availback for more? able to them, some will want to take Two reasons: time and money. My biggest excuse for eating fast the heathy route and order a salad or food is that it fits into my schedule a lettuce wrap. These people will still visit fast and, like me, there are many of us out there that are both full-time stu- food restaurants, they will just order the items with the least amount of dents and full-time employees. Sitting down to a home-cooked calories, thinking they are still eating meal just doesn't always fit into the healthy. Fast food chains have been around breaks we have in our lives. Going through a drive-thru to for years. It's hard to drive down a main grab dinner or lunch before class is much more convenient than sitting highway anywhere in the country down at a restaurant and ordering a and not see a Carl's Jr. or Taco Bell on every corner and this isn't going potentially healthier meal. Fast food chains such as McDon- to change just because calories are ald's and Wendy's have also made being displayed on the menus.
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MySpace and Facebook have ruined good breakups I've been thinking a lot about relationships lately, watching spring flings spring up early and winter lusts end cold. And I've caught myself thinking about my own. Don't get me wrong, my girlfriend's fantastic. She lets me use her hair to make handlebar mustaches while we hang out with her friends and can fake cry on command for discounts at restaurants and local retailers. And that's roughly ... 20 percent of what I look for in a relationship. However, even though things are going great, I still have to keep on the lookout for a breakup. We're not married, we're not engaged, we're not tied together like Harrison Ford and Karen Allen at the end of "Indiana Jones and The Raiders Of The Lost Ark". We're just college students that have been together for almost a year. There's always a chance of a random breakup. Let's say we do breakup. Where does that leave us? Well, for the first week, she'd sob relentlessly while drinking cups of coffee to stay awake enough to fill her diary, observing the romantic collapse by way of writing awkward poetry and sketching pictures of me. While she would be productive, I would just be passed out nightly in a variety of forms – face down in my living room with a bottle of cognac, with sunglasses on in my bathtub with a bottle of whiskey or at my dining room
January 28, 2008
Jake’s Take
table with a bottle of bourbon and a half-finished board game that I've been playing by myself. Following that week of destruction, I'd pull myself out of my unhealthy rampage of a rut and listen to nearly every friend tell me, "Listen, man, you just have to get back out there" or "Just keep it a clean break." But there hasn't been a solid breakup for any college student since MySpace or Facebook happened. Like ... eight people had Friendster, so I won't even go back that far. Social networking sites have allowed young adults to push themselves back into the game at rapid speed while still clinging onto the old life. It's a bad combination. Allow me to jump into a second person male narrative for dramatic effect. Post-breakup, your nights are now filled with hours of browsing profiles of friends and acquaintances you always found attractive and then posting comment after comment accordingly. You make casual offerings like, "Hey, haven't seen you for a while. We should hang out. What are you doing next week?" Without thinking, you send out messages to a few previous crushes. You write rough drafts to make sure that your photo comments don't sound too desperate. You post a bulletin on MySpace as well as a note on Facebook with some snide reference to now having more time on your hands, hoping that possible prospectives venture to your page to notice your newly single status in order for them to
make good use of those newly single hands. Your new evening activity is like speed dating without the personality or smiles. You're all business. You're moving fast and thinking faster. You're on the prowl like a coked-up lion, like a teenage Simba if Disney and Brian De Palma collaborated. Social networking sites are your chance to score more rebounds than Dennis Rodman (long before anyone had to ask, "Hey, why does that name sound familiar?"). However, after you've bounced yourself from one uncomfortable date to another, you realize how much you miss your former significant other. And that's when the obsession kicks in. You find yourself as a loose wreck of a detective, like that traditional Hollywood cop character who just hasn't been the same since the night his wife was murdered. You're on a mission, you're looking for clues, you're putting pieces together like you were still doing puzzles with your grandfather. It'll be hours after midnight, in the second hour of inspecting every detail of your ex's profile page and you'll say, "Who is this Kyle character? He's left like ... four comments in the last few days. Wait, why is he saying that he had fun last night? Hold on ... let me just check out his page ... OK, there she is ... 'Yeah, f'reals. Three hours of Pete & Pete is always a good time.' “What the ... ? She had a good time with this guy for three hours? She's such a slut. And she's already moved on. Well, so have I!"
By Jake Kilroy take.kilroy@gmail.com
But you spend the next twenty minutes crying. Finally, you get back on the computer. It's nearly 3:30 a.m. and you've been at this for a few hours already, only breaking for that sporadic cry and a microwave burrito, still with no end in sight. This is what you've been reduced to because of social networking sites. It seems impossible to just walk away. You know if she still looks good and who she's been seeing (because of the 70-plus pictures), you know her vacations (given that she's added Facebook's "trips" application) and you know her relationship status (as changing that on MySpace and Facebook is our generation's promise ring or steady pin). There's no clean breakup anymore. You can't just throw her number away and move on. If you delete her as a friend online, she'll know and ask you what your problem is. You can't lie to your friends because her MySpace headline now reads "All good things must come to an end" and their Facebook feed will tell them that she changed her relationship status. Social networking sites have destroyed the clean breakup.
Starbucks’ smaller coffee meant for thinner wallets By Sarah Cruz
Daily Titan Staff Writer opinion@dailytitan.com
In coffee, as in life, perhaps balance is the key to success. Starbucks Coffee Company built its sometimes controversial reputation on high-priced specialty coffee beverages. But now, the company is exploring a more affordable offering. A se-
lect few stores in Seattle will be selling 8 ounce cups of coffee for just $1 with free refills. Of course, this new drink is a far cry from the usual financial strain to which many coffee drinkers have become accustomed. Starbucks chains are enjoyed by customers willing to pay up to $6 for a single drink, and criticized by those who think a little bit of coffee with a few ounces of milk hardly
warrants the cost. On one side of the caffeine aisle reside the people for whom Starbucks is a destination. On the other side sit the relics who are still amazed that a simple ‘cup of joe’ can cost more than a Sunday paper. In response to this polarization of coffee drinkers, the company is attempting to wade through the middle of the coffee wars, warding off
competitors like McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts by testing out the new $1 coffees. McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts recently introduced “specialty coffees," implying that their new beverages are the same quality as Starbucks but at a cheaper price. However, I’m not sure any of us actually believe that Dunkin' DoSee COFFEE, Page 16
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