I recently had the opportunity to be on BYU campus for the marching band competition, the homecoming spectacular and the BYU homecoming football game. I also stopped by the BYU Bookstore while on campus.

The grounds and buildings were beautifully cared for. The Cougar marching band was awesome and gave a touching tribute to the band teacher from American Fork. The theme of your homecoming was inspiring and uplifting. I hadn’t been to a BYU football game since BYU played Notre Dame at Notre Dame. It was great to see a sea of blue and white instead of a stadium full of “fighting Irish” green.

Thank you, “Mr. Manners” for giving generalized opinions about the entire student body at BYU and giving us another example of how narrow-minded and biased these letters are.

Just because my friend Akira slurps his soup doesn’t mean he’s socially challenged; he’s showing his love for the food just as he does in hometown, Tokyo. Clearly the way my Australian professor adds funny phonetics to the English language is a social blunder.  “Excuse me” never came out when I bumped you rushing out of class today — sorry, I had just heard my brother was in an accident.

While most Americans spend the evening of Oct. 31 dressed in imaginative costumes knocking on their neighbors’ doors begging for treats, most Christians — and LDS members should as well — celebrate a world-shaking event that took place on this evening in 1517 in the small German university town of Wittenberg. Knowing that on the morning of Nov. 1, the sacred All Saints Day, dignitaries, professors, students and town folk would enter the Castle Church to celebrate mass, the Catholic priest and Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, pinned 95 theses on the entrance to the church. It was customary in those days to formulate grievances as thesis statements and publish them in a well-attended spot, challenging interested parties to a public debate about the issues.

Recently, top fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld mocked the German women’s magazine, “Brigitte,” for deciding to begin using normal-sized women in its photoshoots: “These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television,” Lagerfeld said. “No one wants to see round women.” Before this, fashion house Ralph Lauren had to apologize for doctoring an ad to make an already skinny model look even more superhumanly thin.

BYU students would be surprised to realize just how annoying they really are.

The well-mannered person attempts to make those around him or her as comfortable as possible in every situation. This extends to any occasion where two or more people occupy the same breathable air and/or are forced to see, hear, smell, feel, or (in rare occasions) taste one another.

Even if I never acknowledge a fellow classmate, I still enter into a social relationship with him or her and am responsible to uphold my end of the social bargain, which we have come to term “etiquette” — pulling our legs in underneath our bodies when we sit in a heavily trafficked hallway, attempting a second time to park between the lines, using words such as “excuse me,” “thank you” and, above all, “please.”

My husband and I with our four young children went to attend the homecoming parade this last weekend. We are BYU alumni, and we especially love to hear and see the marching band. Last year, when sexually explicit lyrics were played at the Creamery on Ninth, we spoke to the person running the music and he went ahead and switched songs. This year it happened again. We spoke to the person running the music, and they were dismissive of our concern, so we left. The university needs to inform the public in advance of their choice to play sexually explicit lyrics at this public event to allow everyone to make their choice of whether or not to bother attending.
 
Lucinda Hancock 
Provo

When a responsibility is shared among a large group of people, often those people will falsely assume that somebody else will take care of the task. Such is the case with voting in Provo’s elections.

During the primary elections about a month ago, only eight people voted from the Wymount Park precinct, out of more than 1,700 registered voters! Three other student precincts had a combined total of 19 people show up to the polls. This is pathetic.

Earlier this summer, hundreds of students stormed the city council chambers when legislation was about to be implemented, requiring students to pay an additional parking charge (which was delayed but not removed). How many of these students will do the easy part of civic responsibility and just vote? After all, the people elected Nov. 3 will make the decisions for the next four years.