What better way to kick off a weekend featuring a game against South Carolina than to tackle a program being instated because of the caliber of our opponent? First, we're going to give a we-care-that-you-care LAUREL to UF First Lady Chris Machen and her safety program Gator Watch. If you haven't heard about it already, this program starts this weekend and is meant to prevent UF students from getting caught up in drunken trouble. No, the administration isn't pegging us all as drunkards; they just want to make sure that we go about our game day business free of trips to the Shands at UF emergency room.
On the flip side, we're also going to shoot Gator Watch a happy-thoughts-won't-save-the-world-Peter-Pan DART for the incredibly weak helpful hints offered to us by the program. We get it: Have fun and drink, but don't drink and drive, and make sure our friends don't do anything stupid. Thanks, Tracy Byrd, we know all about the Watermelon Crawl.
While we're on the subject of this weekend's game, we would like to give a keep-on-truckin'-but-not-if-it-destroys-the-earth LAUREL to UF's Office of Sustainability. These resilient UFers keep plugging away with their efforts to go green. For this weekend's game and predictably huge tailgate session, they are planting trees in an effort to offset the carbon emissions. Hopefully, their steadfastness will be rewarded so they can move on to bigger projects. Best of luck, guys.
Moving on, now we would like to double up on the Gainesville Police and give former officers Bill Billings and David Reveille individual it-wasn't-cool-when-Clinton-did-it-and-it-really-wasn't-cool-when-you-did-it DART for using their positions as police officers to get some (illegally) while on the job. Absolutely disgusting. You are supposed to be the ones the public can trust. Instead, these two symbolize a vile fraction of police officers who have lost any sense of community.
We don't think this pair is representative of the rest of GPD, but if anything else like this surfaces in the future, don't expect the public to have any faith in those who are supposed to serve and protect.
Onto brighter pastures: We would like to grant UF Chief Financial Officer Matt Fajack a this-kind-of-ideating-will-land-you-in-an-IBM-commercial LAUREL for his dedication to improving UF and his innovative ideas on how to do so.
Fajack has stressed the contradictory nature of the Bright Futures program and proposals for raising tuition. He doesn't plan on doing away with Bright Futures; he just favors capping it so the state will have some incentive to raise tuition. UF can't rise in ranking if it can't raise tuition. Tuition hikes, as much as we hate the mere mention of them, would not spell the end for the undergraduate population, so be content knowing that this man is working to increase the value of your degree.
That'll do for this week's installment. Have a safe weekend, and go Gators.
