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E-mail: editor@dailyemerald.com
Online: www.dailyemerald.com
Friday, October 31,2003
Oregon Daily Emerald
COMMENTARY
Editor in Chief:
Brad Schmidt
Managing Editor:
Jan Tobias Montry
Editorial Editor:
Travis Willse
DUII charges
lead to serious
consequences
Editor's note: This commentary is part of the Emerald's and
ASUO Legal Services' ongoing efforts to assist students through
education as well as representation. ASUO Legal Services' attor
neys are licensed to practice in the state of Oregon. Information
disseminated in this article does not constitute legal advice, and
does not create an attorney I client relationship. For legal advice,
contact an attorney licensed in your state. You should not make
legal hiring decisions based upon brochures, advertising or other
promotional materials.
Although it is against better judgment, it's not against
the law to drink and drive in Oregon unless:
(1) You have blood alcohol of .08 percent or higher, or
(2) You are noticeably impaired by alcohol or a controlled
substance, regardless of your blood alcohol level.
"Noticeably impaired by alcohol" means you exhibit
signs such as slurred speech, fumbling for your driver's li
cense or loss of balance. Police will typically test a suspect's
eyes in a manner which they claim can prove noticeable im
pairment, even if you seem otherwise fine.
ronce win stop your car it tney reasonably suspect that
you are driving under the influence of intoxicants (DUII).
Common signs of DUII to police are weaving, forgetting to
use headlights and driving too fast
or too slow. Once stopped, offi
cers will ask for your license and
ask you whether you have been
drinking. If they smell alcohol,
observe bloodshot, red or watery
eyes, or receive an admission that you have been drinking
or consuming a controlled substance, they will ask you to
exit your car to do field sobriety tests (FSTs).
Oregon courts have determined that FSTs are consensual,
meaning that drivers may decline to perform them. This in
cludes the right to decline the officer's request to look into
your eyes with a flashlight while you follow the movement
of his finger or a stylus. If a driver does perform the tests,
the driver must listen carefully to the officer and do exactly
as told or risk a failing score. If performance of FSTs is de
clined, the officer will decide whether he has probable
cause to make an arrest for DUII. If you are arrested, you
will be handcuffed and taken to the station. At the station,
you will be asked to blow into a machine to determine your
blood alcohol count. If you refuse to blow, you will lose
your license for one year. After January 1, 2004, refusal to
blow will result in a fine of $500 to $1,000, in addition to
the one year license suspension. You can still be charged
with DUII when you blow less than .08 percent if the officer
believes you were noticeably impaired.
The first time you are charged with a DUII, you may be
eligible for a Diversion program. You will be advised of
your eligibility when you appear in court, and you will have
30 days from that date within which to accept the Diversion
program. Diversion requires you to pay court costs and par
ticipate in drug/alcohol evaluation and treatment. Court
costs and treatment can run as high as $2,500. The diver
sion period lasts one year, during which you must commit
no new offenses.
GUEST
COMMENTARY
Penalties for DUIIs increase with each successive charge.
In addition to mandatory jail time, the minimum fines are
$1,000 for a first conviction, $1,500 for the second and
$2,000 for the third and subsequent conviction, unless you
are sent to prison. A fourth DUII conviction becomes a
felony if it is within ten years of the other convictions.
Penalties are not just issued by the court. For example, a
DUII conviction can keep you from getting certain jobs and
will cause your car insurance to increase dramatically.
Bicycling under the influence is also a crime and subject to
diversion programs, fines, incarceration and treatment re
quirements. A better alternative is to ride the LTD bus, which is
free with your student ID.
Laura Fine is an attorney at law for ASUO Legal Services.
Letters to the editor and guest commentaries are
encouraged. Letters are limited
to 250 words and guest commentaries to 550 words.
Authors are limited to one submission per calendar month.
Submission must include phone number and address for
verification. The Emerald reserves the right to edit for
space, grammar and style.
More than just a same
Ah, the 1980s.
In a decade laid to waste by over
cooked imagery, overconsumption and
the simply overdone, Big Brother wasn't
watching you, but Madison Avenue was
certainly distracting you.
But in August 1985, an unassuming
gray box from Japan became a welcome
counterpoint for a youth culture inured by
years of usually mediocre mainstream mu
sic, often equally mediocre foreign policy
and the general disaffection of an era bet
ter suited to rush than to reflection.
The gaming oracle that is the original
Nintendo Entertainment System mo
nopolized many of my summers at my
aunt's and uncle's California house in
the late '80s. Most years, they would only
have the Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt
cartridge, but that was always more than
enough. Even in the modem era of trilin
ear filtering and subpixel anti-aliasing,
the eight bits and 80 minutes of Super
Mario Bros.' 32 levels (or 20 minutes and
eight levels, if you know where the Warp
Zones are) still match up toe- to- black
goomba -toe with graphically superior
40- and 50-hour games. Summer trip to
Sacramento after summer trip, my chores
were picking fire flowers and weeding pi
ranha plants. Lunchtime? Red mush
rooms (and green ones, because I
learned where those were, too). The rest
of my afternoons I ran, trying to rescue
the Princess and discovering that, of
course, she was in another castle.
After that watershed summer of 1985,
video games were no longer the exclusive
domain of dorky engineers in chino shirts,
who'd retire for the evening to dusky pizza
parlors and smoky pool halls to pour
change into Asteroids or Pac-Man or some
other antedivulian console.
Now they were children's games too,
something you'd do to unwind from the
grinding rigmarole that was second
grade. By the end of the decade, many
moms had welcomed video games in the
house (almost) as readily as they had Mr.
Belvedere or ALF. And the NES didn't
even encourage children to eat sticks of
butter or cats.
Anyway, fast-forward maybe 14 years
— and at least six Mario Bros, sequels,
Travis Willse
Rivalless wit
depending on how you count. An invita
tion to the first Nintendo College Media
Day lands on the office's Pulse desk.
Editor in Chief Brad Schmidt and
Pulse Editor Aaron Shakra couldn't go,
and I asked (read: pleaded, with some
dignity) for the reporting assignment to
the video game Mecca.
The trip would prove to be a welcome
counterpoint to weeks of late hours in
the office, staying up till 2 a.m. doing
math assignments, and the general dis
affection of a term better suited to sleep
deprivation than to relaxation.
The day after a flight on a plane-with
fewer-seats-than-I'd-hoped landed me
in Seattle, shuttles carted 22 other col
lege newspapermen and me — yes,
every participating school sent a guy —
off to Nintendo headquarters in Red
mond, Wash.
I should digress here: Even in retro
spect, a company shelling cash out of
some expense account for twenty-some
thing college students to fly to Washing
ton to play video games still seems pie
in the sky. (Particularly since, given the
company I kept there, most of us
would've spent the free time playing
games anyway.) But rest assured, Nin
tendo's public relations people knew
what they were doing: Most of the crop
of recently released and upcoming titles
that Nintendo paraded at the media day
— including the long-awaited sequel
Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and the Pa
per Mario quasi-sequel Mario & Luigi:
Superstar Saga — were strong enough
that some good press is all but guaran
teed — and rightfully so. (To wit, see my
review in next Thursday's Pulse section.)
We journalists enjoyed ourselves too,
but expectedly so. Bringing in writers
who care enough about video games to
fly out of state to play them is about as
likely to draw complaints from the par
ticipants as driving children to a candy
store and handing them new flavors of a
confection they've enjoyed for years.
Organizers had scheduled more than
gameplay for the day, though: In the
morning, four of Nintendo of America's
localization experts explained the chal
lenges of translating games from the
original Japanese — and often making
them otherwise more culturally relevant
to the target American audience. That in
cludes inside jokes, too.
When presenting translators Tim
O'Leary and Bill Trinen were localizing
Animal Crossing, a simulation game
wherein players control a village popu
lated by animals, the two found an ami
cable green and yellow duck with a nu
meral 3. Both being University grads,
they named him Joey. (Localization is
the process of translating a foreign game
and making it more culturally relevant to
a target audience.)
Likewise, O'Leary and Trinen replaced
an untranslatable Japanese joke that a
salty seagull spews in the same game
with a shtick that starts, "So there's this
husky, a duck, and a cougar, and the
duck asks the husky..."
But certainly the junket's climax was
Nintendo's demonstration of Double
Dash's network capabilities, wherein
players can link several Nintendo Game
Cubes with broadband adapters for mul
ti-screen play. Surely, this is not your fa
ther's video game.
In the waning months of 2003, video
games are possibly more than ever a wel
come counterpoint for a culture inured by
years of usually mediocre mainstream mu
sic, often equally mediocre foreign policy
and the general disaffection of an era bet
ter suited to rush than to reflection.
But if you'll excuse me now, I need to
nurse an acute appreciation I've devel
oped for F-Zero GX.
Contact the editorial editor
at traviswillse@dailyemerald.com.