Freep No Sleep

The Daily Free Press, Boston University’s independent student newspaper, is a completely different world than the typical college undergraduate student experiences.

Co-News Editor Vivian Ho generally spends 50 to 70 hours a week at 648 Beacon St., she said. A “day” in Vivian’s FreeP life begins at 4 p.m., and on a good day ends at 3:30 a.m., on a regular day later than 4:30 a.m.

However grueling it sounds, the rewards outweigh the costs, she said, and the hijinks and friendships the paper has fostered make it worthwhile to keep coming back every day.

(full disclosure: I am Vivian's fellow Co-News Editor!)

Boston City Council's week focused a lot on issues that will affect the college population-directly and indirectly- this week.

Sadly, I did not make it the meetings, but a reporter for the DFP was there experiencing the circus in my stead.

First of all, Rep. Vinny deMarco (R-Plymouth) is still really against the sale of the drug salvia.

Check out the update on the war on legality of salvia here.

Most importantly, Mike Ross' wants to enforce his prohibition of more than four unrelated undergraduate students living together off campus. It was passed in March 2008, but implementation has been sketchy at best reportedly.

A new ordinance, if passed, would force universities to report violators' names to the city.

Check out more details on the latest development of Mike Ross' housing restrictions on undergrads here.

This crusade against undergrads is kind of ironic when you consider he represents large amounts of BU and Northeastern students.

Here is an article from his second reelection in 2001-the headline is
"With Students' aid, unopposed Ross reelected"

However, many residents of Allston-Brighton are really for the ordinance because student residents drive up rental prices.

I'm biased, so I should probably present the other side of the Allston student/non-student conflict via a great AB Google group that I frequent daily.

and the conflict continues daily....

Boston City Council-you have a new greatest fan.

City Council met in their weekly meeting last Wednesday, and I was front row center. I was one of the few. Although noon on a Wednesday is not prime time for many people to attend public meetings, I was a little surprised.

The doings of the Council are not completely clear to me; however, I did notice the councilors’ love of their BlackBerry phones. While embattled Councilor Chuck Turner talked…and talked, his coworkers checked their emails, shuffled through papers and one Councilor sucked on a milkshake.

I had heard before from my cohorts at the Daily Free Press that many City Council meetings went this way. (Of course unless they were about banning machetes) This meeting proved it was true. It was basically a list of what ideas the councilors had for future discussions and meetings. It was generally the worst kind of meeting, the meeting to set up another meeting.

However, I consider myself a new fan because secretly I patrol universalhub.com for the latest scoop on Councilor Flaherty’s violations of ethics charges and felt my heart pick up a beat when I saw the breaking news that Councilor Sam Yoon announced his candidacy for Mayor.

Councilor Turner’s long winded speech supporting new programs supporting youth down on their luck is just all the more captivating when you know what Turner is going through right now.

All of this and more proves how apt the title of "circus" really is for the council. I just hope more people start going to see it.



Check out my article here about how the dreaded subject ‘the economy’ festered its way into most of City Council meeting.

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