By Falice Chin
Woohoo! SU election time is approaching again! Students will be bombarded with posters left, right and centre until Feb. 15. Then the posters will stay for another week or so before being torn down altogether. Oh wait, one candidate has already been spotted tearing down posters of his opponents. The great poster war has begun.
Poster wars are similar every year. Candidates make the same mistakes; I don’t even know where to begin this rant.
Chris Blatch for president has nice posters, but the words are plentiful while the font size is way too small. Unless students have super vision and can read 100 words per second while passing through the hallway between Mac Hall and Science B, his gigantic posters convey relatively little information. That, of course, is better than having absolutely nothing on the poster, I’m looking at you–Steve Vaivada for VP Events.
Then there’s always a load of crappy photos. Pixelated, poorly-cropped, or just generally unprofessional-looking–like Jen Smith’s webcam pic. James Hawkins looks high in all his photos, maybe that’s supposed to convey the message of “fun” for the position of Events Commissioner. Speaking of fun, I can’t tell if Vyskocil’s photos are supposed to be funny, especially the one that has his face pasted to someone else’s body–umm, huh?
Bad slogans… “If you were running, I’d vote for you”… Okay. What the hell is that supposed to mean? Really, if I run for VP Op-Fi, will you vote for me, Jon Griffith? It’s a yes? Oh well now I’m absolutely convinced that I should vote for you too! What kind of logic is that? The illogical kind, of course!
Misleading posters are worse. Take “re-elect Brett Pearce for Op-Fi Commissioner”, for example. The implication here is that this is Pearce’s current position, hence the keyword “re-elect.” Not so, does this make him a liar? That’s for you discerning students to decide. I better not say anything too negative about Pearce before getting into trouble.
Mass appeal is important, I guess. Every year, there’s always at least one female candidate who will show a little cleavage or plaster the walls with pictures of a glamorously made-up face, complete with the latest MAC lipstick shade, metallic eyeshadow colours and other things totally useful to the Students’ Union. This year is no different, thanks to the studded nosed, mascara-heavy Deanna Cameron Dubuque.
While most candidates in the “events” commission try to make their posters synonymous with “fun, fun, and more fun,” Jablowski for Events Commissioner is exploring the geek route. His poster contains a lame HTML joke. Yeah… NERD!
I can go on and on about this. But instead of feeling frustrated this year with the poster war, I’ll take it as a source of entertainment. After all, some of these SU candidates are merely making a joke out of themselves.