STREAK: Junior Anete Klintsone has stepped up her game early in 2012, as UCI boasts a 2-2 conference record.

VICTORY: UC Irvine is 3-1 in conference play after two straight road wins in Northern California.

EFFECT: In front of a Best Buy over the holiday break, I encountered a teenager selling chocolate to support his Boys & Girls Club of America in the Inland Empire area.

The new year has arrived, and college students are all probably feeling the same post-holiday blues and agitation in regards to us not being accustomed to writing 2012 on our homework assignments and papers. 2012 is here though, and whether this is our last year on Earth or not, with the looming predictions by Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar, we must continue living our lives here at Irvine.

In 1995, when Kim Jong-il consolidated power, an alarming number of frogs disappeared from North Korea. The reason was that desperate North Koreans were eating frogs to ward off starvation. The famine that occurred between 1995 and 1998 ranks among the most underreported and obscured man-made tragedies. Half a million to 2 million people died; yet no one believed these estimates because the insular nature of the North Korean government turned any information about it into propaganda or rumors.

After six months of debating, campaigning and pandering, the official race for the GOP nomination has begun. Over the next five months the frontrunners will continue to claw at each other and wrestle with capricious Tea Partiers and the feisty Republican base until the dust settles in June and Barack Obama’s challenger emerges. The great irony of this circus is that the person whom Republicans have been trying to avoid will end up leading them. I am talking, of course, about Mitt Romney.

The times they are changin’, Mr. Dylan. They’re changing, indeed. I remember growing up in a time that now seems long ago, when the government actually encouraged people to vote. They had entire campaigns dedicated to it. They even got Jason Mraz to tell me to do it. That was back in the day. Back before the Republican party decided that it wanted to try and stop people from voting. And I’m not talking about the good old-fashioned “put the fewest number of voting booths in the most inaccessible part of town, to prevent all the minorities from voting” trick. I’m talking about the newest war on Americans that the GOP is fighting.

We, as human beings, are known to do some pretty odd things. Just like the rest of the natural world, we as a species exhibit certain behaviors and rituals that are exclusive to our race alone. We gasp spastically when we find something to be amusing. We clap our palms together to show appreciation. We move around in metal boxes on wheels. And due to the repetition of habit, along with the apparent popularity of such customs, we often fail to recognize the peculiar nature of these practices, as seen from a detached and unbiased standpoint.

iPads are easily one of the most innovative Apple products yet. They are changing the way we do everything from entertaining ourselves to organizing professional business presentations. There is even talk of the iPad replacing the clipboard in our hospitals. It is staggering to consider the technological progress of the past 50 years. This quantum leap can’t help but tease the mind with visions of what may come to be 50 years from now.

Who the hell is Ronald Ernest Paul? To his supporters and admirers, he is a shining beacon of hope, honesty and true politics. He signals a return to a politics for the people, not for the government, a philosophy steeped in the work of Ayn Rand and the ideals behind libertarianism.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney beat former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucus last Wednesday by a razor-thin 8 votes. Undoubtedly, the common saying that “every vote counts” holds true in this case. While the event was historical due to Romney’s slim margin of victory, one needs to consider a couple of facts before referring to it as “unpredictable” and “unexpected” as some news pundits and analysts have dubbed it to be.