Simon Bradshaw

On Friday the newspaper of Imperial College Union, Felix, published a 'humour' piece. That article apparently never appeared in the online edition - which now leads with an apology for it - but you can see a picture of it here. As the Telegraph puts it,

Cook up Rohypnol to get laid, student paper jokes

I am disgusted with this, and I'm not alone, as this post and this post from my f-lists make clear. I will be writing not only to the ICU President but also to the Rector and the head of alumni relations to express my extreme displeasure and ask what measures are being taken to punish those responsible for this piece and to ensure that such material is never published in Felix again.

But I now have another problem. Next weekend is Picocon, the annual mini-convention of IC Science Fiction Society. My first Picocon was in 1987 and I was looking forward to my 25th anniversary of what was in fact my first convention and to meeting many of my friends there. But Picocon is held at Imperial College Union and the social side of it centres on the student bar at ICU.

I appreciate that ICSF, whilst part of ICU, cannot be held responsible for what Felix does. And the membership fee for Picocon will be spent in ways that benefit ICSF and its members (funding the guest, triciasullivan and buying books for the ISCF library) rather than going to ICU. But ICU will benefit from the use of the bar by attendees at Picocon. It doesn't seem right to me to take on ICU for its misconduct and then help boost its bar profits.

Looked at like that, the solution seems fairly clear. Having discussed the matter with darth_hamster, who shares my views, we will attend Picocon, albeit with rather uncomfortable feelings as to the venue. But we won't buy anything to eat or drink from ICU. We will either invite friends to join us in one of the local pubs (the Queen's Arms is a likely choice) or, if we are in the student bar at any point, we will drink only tap water.