Imagine being on a team going into battle with your leader in points, assists and rebounds absent.That is the reality for the women's basketball team, as junior guard Natasha Lacy missed the teams' NCAA tournament first-round victory over Texas A&M and will again be absent tonight against No. 3 Rutgers in Trenton, N.J.

Team officials would not comment further on the matter other than comments made to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Lacy leads the team with averages of 14.4 points, 7.4 rebounds and 3.9 assists per game.

Walking up the stairs in the Bass Building a few semesters ago, I overheard a conversation between two young women."That's so ironic," one of them said, turning to the other.

"Ironic?" the second girl asked, turning up her nose. "That's not a real word."

TCU students aren't the only ones who have a vocabulary problem.

One of my professors frequently discusses the "statue" of limitations on certain laws. My friends and I are in a heated debate over whether the "statue" is a stone sculpture or perhaps a nice copper.

On Tuesdays at 5 p.m. many students can be found wandering The Main or the University Recreation Center, but each week one freshmen sits, with gavel in hand, preparing to lead the Student House of Representatives meeting. Thomas Pressley, speaker of the House in the Student Government Association, said that after serving his first semester as a representative for the AddRan College of Humanities and Social Sciences, he was looking to get more involved in SGA in the future- - but not necessarily right away.

Last Monday, South Dakota passed legislation banning virtually all abortions in the state, and, according to an Associated Press article published earlier this week in the Skiff, "setting up a court fight aimed at challenging the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion." This decision is better known as Roe v. Wade, one of the most controversial Supreme Court rulings of all time.The South Dakota bill would make it a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, for doctors or others to perform an abortion unless it was necessary to save the mother's life.

They haunt from the trees. They swoop through the air. They leave their mark on clean cars. And they are more than some students can bear.They sport iridescent feathers and gawking yellow eyes. They can be more than a foot long. And above TCU's campus, they flood the skies.

They are birds. Big black birds. Grackles. And according to one TCU student, "Those birds are evil."

Students and Fort Worth residents are complaining about their excessive stay in town, and according to officials, their population just won't go down.