On Campus

What students are talking about today (December 17th)

Fake IDs, cheerleading champs, Tolkien & weirdo engineers

A real Ontario driver's license (MTO)

1. Fake IDs have come a long way since I was 17. Back then it simply required peeling off the top layer of a real one, changing a 5 to a 1, and replacing the plastic. Today there are holograms and magnetic strips. Still, shady shops in Toronto are overcoming the technology and creating passable “novelty” driver’s licenses and university ID cards for anyone with roughly $50, CBC News reports. It just goes to show that if demand is strong enough, the black market will respond.

2. Some students will do anything to get out of Saskatchewan in January. The University of Regina is the only Canadian school sending a cheerleading team to International Cheer Union’s World University Championships next month in Orlando, Florida, reports the Leader-Post.

3. Marquette University in Wisconsin has long owned one of the largest collections of original J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts. This fall it got the English course to match. Archivist William Ready acquired much of Marquette’s collection in 1956 for $5,000. Apparently the author was worried about having enough money for retirement. After building Marquette’s collection, Ready moved to McMaster University where the archive now named for him includes the original A Clockwork Orange.

4. Memorial University students got a post-exam lesson in labour negotiations this weekend. A three-month-old airport worker’s strike plus a wicked snowstorm caused all flights before 1 p.m. on Sunday to be cancelled or delayed, reports The Telegram. The St. John’s Airport Authority can’t clear runways as quickly with 85 maintenance workers off the job and only a few available to work.

5. First-year engineering students at Queen’s University slammed their purple jackets on the ground on Friday, reports the Queen’s Journal. The tradition is a rite-of-passage of sorts for engineers who are not supposed to wear their bombers until after exams. Most of us will never understand the mysterious ways of the engineers, but we’ve got to love them anyway.

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