6 THE DAILY VOICE, APRIL 2, 2014

EDITOR JENNY PENG

SFU prank wins over a skeptic

‘ve never been much of a prankster, fe: I’ve never liked being pranked,

which must make me kind of boring, especially on April Fool’s Day.

There’s just something about the unknown and the worry of how far people will go for a joke that makes me nervous.

In high school, the best April Fool’s jokes often involved large amounts of condoms or Silly String being placed in someone’s locker, and a stink bomb that left the entire school outside for half an hour one year.

Apparently, this tradition of pranking dates back to medieval times, and is often used as an excuse for people to let their mean inner prankster out.

And if you are the prankee, you have to accept that excuse because it’s all in the holiday spirit,

right?

Add to that the speed of social media, and there’s a good chance the embarrassing prank your friends pulled on you will be seen by many more people than you wanted.

I did like the MTV show Punk’d, but that might have just been because Ashton Kutcher is cute, and watching celebrities get tricked into thinking they’re getting a speeding ticket in their sports car is much more entertaining than getting one yourself.

But not all pranks are made to be completely embarrassing.

This year SFU convinced students they were opening up a new campus called SFU Orbit to expand their learning experience into outer space.

Last year the school’s prank involved removing classroom seats as part of a “healthy campus” initiative.

These pranks earn SFU some credit for planning in advance and it’s also nice to see a university with a jokester side.

My initial dislike for pranks may have stemmed from the time my dad received a fake winning lottery ticket for $10,000 and told me we were going to Hawaii.

I told all my friends, only to find out that in order to redeem your prize you needed to mail your ticket to “123 NoWhere Drive, in Make- Believe Land.”

OPINION

MEGAN BOBETSIS

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Journalism instructor Ethan Baron oversees The Voice. Email him at ebaron@langara.be.ca

Dear park board, why anew skateboard park?

ome people in the Mount Sis community are fuming

over a proposed skateboard park in either Robson Park or Jonathan Rogers Park, and who can blame them?

Vancouver currently has nine skateboard parks and it’s time to cap the park board’s strategy to add more noisy skaters to the neigh- bourhood.

Especially when Mount Pleasant residents have complained about these sites being “a magnet for men who dominate the tiny facility to the point where neighbourhood kids can rarely use it,” according to a Vancouver Courier article published in 2012.

It’s easy to see why there’s support for these parks because they’re a playground for socializing, bonding, and exercise in a society where obesity is a worry for the

government.

However, nine is plenty.

The last time I checked, the city never designated anything for my Tai Chi ritual or added more space for my rollerblading hobby.

The Mount Pleasant Pool Commit- tee and the Vancouver Society for Promotion of Outdoor Pools says they don’t hold “a position” on skate parks, and many of them “support the benefit of skate parks to our society.”

However, they fear that it could reduce the possibility of an outdoor pool being built there in the future.

An outdoor pool in rainy Vancou- ver? Just how useful that pool will be is questionable too, but at least it’s something that residents seem to want.

Besides, documents for the consultation meeting they’re having on April 3 for the skateboard park

date back to 2005 and don’t include any information on the new parks built since then.

How do they ST expect resi- A \ dents to make Al an informed OPI N ION decision when JENNY PENG

the information is outdated?

Whether it’s a new skate park or an outdoor pool, it has to appease the residents. Otherwise, it’s not worth taxpayers’ money. For now, it doesn’t look like a skateboard park makes any sense.

As for the park board, convince us that it’s worth the money, time, and headache for putting up with the noise in the park.

No U-Pass? Youre on

fter all the money we students A in tuition and added study

costs, you’d think something as simple as a U-Pass (which we all have paid for) could at least be in stock when we need it.

If you’re going to run out of passes, at least have someone available to explain why the ma- chines were left empty and maybe, just possibly, apologize?

Not the case here at Langara.

From Monday afternoon until about 10 a.m. Tuesday, Langara’s U-Pass machines ran out of April passes, causing many students to have to pay for their Monday commute home and Tuesday commute to school out of their own pockets.

I don’t know about most students, but it costs me nearly $6 to make my way home to North Vancouver and then back to school the following morning. No lunch for me today I

guess, not that I have time to eat it anyway!

It’s not running out of passes that gets me. That’s life, often rife with annoying setbacks.

No, what gets me about this whole situation is that there was no formal attempt at apologizing to students for this inconvenience or to make reimbursements to those who had to pay again for something they’d already paid for.

The least the school could’ve done was purchase replacement day passes for all those who had to shell out for their rides to and from school. Nope.

And another thing: when a fellow reporter went out to gather informa- tion for a story which focused on why the machines had been left empty, they were met with the usual wall of bureaucratic silence that safeguards certain officials from having to explain themselves.

The reporter was looking to get

JENNY PENG comic

your own

some sort of idea as to why the machines had been left empty on the last day of the month, and he could not obtain a single response to his question.

No one knows why, huh? Really? In a school with thousands of students and hundreds of staff, there is only one person who’s in charge of those little machines being filled and they’re not even around today?

And yovrre telling me there’s no one else in the entire faculty that knows anything about why they were left empty? I don’t get it.

Fortunately the machines are now refilled. Now maybe they can refill my empty pockets.

OPINION

CHRIS SLATER

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EDITORIAL STAFF THIS ISSUE:

MANAGING EDITOR/ PAGE 6 Jenny Peng

PAGE EDITORS

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PAGE 2

Jesse Lam

PAGE 3

Tricia Lo

PAGE 4 Bill Everitt

PAGE 5 Nick Eagland

PAGE 7 Andrea Anthony

PAGE 8 Kendra Wong

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