My return last December from a semester-long study abroad stint in Spain was bittersweet. As I boarded that America-bound plane, I wasn't sure whether to be happy or sad about leaving the life I had made in Spain and returning to my American friends and family.

But there was one advantage to coming home that I hadn't anticipated: the absence of that cloud of secondhand smoke that seemed to stalk me wherever I went in Europe.

Everybody smokes in Europe. Everybody. It's as ingrained in their culture as Monday Night Football is in ours.

The new assistant director of fitness and wellness is adding to programs to get the University Recreation Center and its new programs in shape.This fall, Stacy Cintron, a Florida State University alumna, replaced Trey Morrison as the assistant director of fitness and wellness at TCU.

With her new position, Cintron hopes to create a more organized environment in the Rec Center while providing more fitness options for students, Cintron said.

Students, faculty and members of the community will gather to hear the leader of the Iraq study group speak at the annual Jim Wright Symposium on Tuesday in the Brown-Lupton Student Center Ballroom. Lee Hamilton, who currently serves on the President's Homeland Security Advisory Council, formerly served in the House of Representatives for 34 years, according to the Web site for the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.

In the United States - a country that praises itself for intellectual freedom -- there are still organizations that try to censor great literary works because of so-called controversial material.The week of Sept. 29 will mark the American Library Association's 26th annual "Banned Books Week" in which the ALA encourages readers to protest this censorship by reading books that have been taken off some shelves.

Apparently, newspapers everywhere struggle with problems like advertising, circulation and printing color.Even in Russia.

Schieffer School of Journalism Director Tommy Thomason said after talking with an 11-member delegation of Russian news executives, he was reminded that journalists from both countries face the same issues.

"We come from different languages and cultures and different nations, but we're both journalists," Thomason said.

Administrators' efforts to increase security on campus and to create stronger forms of emergency communication should be applauded. Less than six months after the Virginia Tech Massacre, local universities are preemptively taking measures to protect their campuses and their students.

Currently, TCU has four means of crisis communication: e-mails, a recorded information line, the TCU home page and the media, which are necessary in order to maintain a high level of campus security.

Eons ago, back in the day when MTV played music videos and Tom Cruise didn't jump on couches, you actually deigned to spend your allowance on CDs. Some of those probably had the dreaded parental advisory sticker on them. Those are the ones you stashed far and deep in your dresser lest your parents find them and pop a blood vessel.

Gone are those days. But lyrics today are as explicit as ever, causing disgruntled Wal-Mart executives and prompting grandmas to pray an extra "Hail, Mary" for our generation's collective soul.

The Interfraternity Council met Sunday for three hours to create a proposal that outlined sanctions against four fraternities involved in an August brawl, but James Parker, assistant dean of Campus Life, said Monday he had yet to see it.Josh Schutts, coordinator of fraternity and sorority life and IFC adviser, said he and Dane Pearson, chief justice of IFC, would present the proposal to Parker but as of Monday evening, Parker said in an e-mail he had not seen it.

When driving back from my buddy's place after Thursday's mind-numbing loss, I started to smell something. The problem was that it did not smell like baby powder slapped onto a infant's butt, freshly cut grass on a midsummer's day or my mother's made-from-scratch chicken parmigiana. Heck, it did not even smell like the overbearing perfume emanating from the girl you just met at Whataburger at 3 a.m.

The 2007 season was burning, and it started to suffocate the hopes and dreams of this season. Funky-perfume-girl sounds pretty good right about now.