now for something completely different:

The Rants of a University Student _

g week marks the 51st anniversary

of the introduction of vitamin- enriched white bread to the Canadian market. Well now. Doesn't that just call for a Bud Light. It was announced last week that North Korea had entered an agreement under which they would begin to share missile technology with Nigeria. I don't know what everyone is freaking out about. Who cares if yet anoth- er volatile country with a lot of built-up angst and an unstable government has possession of nuclear arms? My fears were laid to rest when they promised to use them only for peacekeeping. Oh those wacky communists.

It also became public last week that many Canadian Forces militia groups across the country had run out of bullets. Great. So we've got like ten guys left in the reserves, the few subs that we do have don't work, our rescue heli- copters fall out of the sky and - now we don't have any bullets. Geez. We better pray we don't piss off the Nigerians.

I don't know what it is about drivers on this island, but there seems to be about, oh, I don't know, four or five who actu- ally know how to operate a motor vehicle. And I'm one of them. So I don't know who the other three

of you are, but I cannot stand being on the streets of Charlottetown with the other 32,000 lunatics. You'd think a city as small as Charlottetown would take advantage of its size and build a system that allows for the efficient flow of traffic. But no. There are four inadequately sized

sets of lights between Hillsborough and Maypoint. Of course, had they built a proper arterial highway with overpasses and merge lanes, we'd probably all be dead anyway, because no one else on the island knows how to merge either. (The exit from UPEI onto the Ave. is a

oT. It's like we've never seen white ees a leading in : of this. Hint: and out of | Stuff falling from the sky before |,..4 merge the city, and| @nd so we must act totally irra- lanes do not each has tionally and swerve our vehicles end with stop about 562 into on-coming traffic at top _|signs.)

billion sets speed. But that's ok. Our incredibly of traffic idiotic roadway

lights, all of which fail to follow any sensible method, causing cars that are unable to stop in the .2 seconds allotted to smash into each other. At least no one gets hurt, seeing as no one goes over 12 kph anyway. ;

You'd also think that the daily commute of thousands of workers and students in and around Charlottetown would war- rant the formulation of a mass- transit system. But again, no. The politicians keep talking, we keep walking and PEI continues to make no sense.

And the damn bypass. First of all, it is not a bypass. See, and I hope whoever built the bypass is reading this. The pur- pose of a bypass is to BYPASS a city, not to stop at nine separate

etiquette becomes even worse in the winter. It's like we've never seen white stuff falling from the sky before and so we must act totally irrationally and swerve our vehicles into on-coming traffic at top speed. But that's ok. Because it seems that someone forgot to tell the plows that they're actually supposed to plow snow off the streets when it starts snowing. "Oh ok. We'll get to it eventually." And they do. At three o'clock in the morning. See, while randomly pushing snow around the middle of the street with the loudest equipment known to mankind,

_ they want to ensure that no one is

afforded the benefit of sleep so

that we can get back to driving

like idiots again in the morning. A study released out of

2004 page 8

Montreal, Quebec this week announced that spending money on the prevention and treatment cancer actually saves lives. Really? So all that effort put into preventative medicine and chemotherapy wasn't just for fun? Wow. I applaud studies like this, aimed at answering these ques- tions that vex us daily. In fact, | think that I should be given a mil- lion-dollar government grant so that I can study how not being shot in the head greatly increases your life expectancy. Honestly. The Conservative leader- ship race recently welcomed a new candidate, as rich business owner Belinda Stronach decided

‘to add her name to the ballot.

Stronach has little to no political experience as well as a strong background in inheriting Daddy's money, and in not making a whole lot of sense when she talks. So you want me to choose some- one like that to become Prime Minister someday? This isn't the US you know. Congratulations to the Patriots for their victory at the XXXVIII Superbowl. But to be honest, I'm not that much into the "big game". As my good friend Neal put it: "I stopped watching baseball when Wayne Gretzky retired." Happy Groundhog Day. Have a good one! ryangallant@hotmail.com —