GREAT MOMENTS IN PARAPHRASING

Who says the UCSB Daily Nexus doesn't cover important issues?

A UCSB freshman living in Figueroa House at Manzanita Village set off fire alarms when he discharged a fire extinguisher in the residential halls Wednesday evening.

Sean Downing, 19, a business economics major, said he took the fire extinguisher that was mounted on the wall across from his residence hall room and sprayed it in the hallway. Fire alarms in the hall went off when sensors detected the gas from the fire extinguisher.

"I didn't think it would freaking turn on the alarms," Downing said.

Ahh, our disenchanted youth.

And the Nexus?

He said he tried to inform students that there was no fire, but their response was not what he expected.

"They laughed at me. Someone called me an ass," Downing said. "I got a lot of [people saying to me,] 'Why the hell did you do that?'"

Either Mr Downing is a grammatical nightmare or a paragon of vulgarity supreme. His choice of major makes me think the former, but you never know.

The opinion page of the Nexus seems mostly devoted to a daily ping-pong match between defenders of Israel and Palestine. Whichever one gets their piece printed on monday tends to *win*, 3 to 2.