Assistant Journalism Professor and Fun Star advisor Brian O'Donoghue announced Wednesday that the newspaper would be hiring a permanent defense attorney for the paper.

"We've been fortunate," said O'Donoghue. "We haven't been sued so far. But we've come dangerously close and it would only really take one solid hit to bring this whole thing down."

"I'm real glad to be working for them guys at that newspaper," said Salvatore Broncini.

Most recent attacks on the Fun Star have come after editor Casey Grove's critiques on campus goings-on in "The shit list," "The shit list redux," and "Shit soup for the soul."

In it, Grove claimed that several tenured professors were freebasing cocaine with state legislators and that UAF Museum director Ivanna Boneya was, in fact, a pile of feces from a nearly extinct species of orangutan, a pile of crap that had been confused with a functional human being.

Said O'Donoghue, "We really dodged the bullet on that one. We probably could've gotten away with the whole freebasing thing, but monkey poo never goes over well with anyone. We eventually had to prove, in court, that as Casey writes, he goes into a type of trance that mimics mild retardation. People seemed content with that explanation."

Legal problems flared to their peak in the spring of 2005 with an article intended as a routine look at a UAF theater production.

"'UAF art department constructs 40-foot vagina,' was the headline," recalled Grove in a phone interview. "What you have to understand is that the issue was basically harmless, but once the word uterus was out there, all bets were off."

The art department constructed the forty-foot vagina for "The Taming of the Shrew." In the article, Fun Star writer Zander Bartley described Theatre UAF's sometimes elaborate stage production in one sentence: "You can't just ignore a 40-foot vagina, because it is, metaphorically as well as visually, a 400-pound gorilla sitting in the corner."

"Tess [Phillips, UAF Art Director] was mentioned in the article and she's got this whole thing about the female reproductive system," said Grove. "It was a kind of pissed off that I've never seen her, and she was ready to go all the way with it."

To avoid a legal battle, O'Donoghue quickly pushed for the dismissal of Bartley from the Fun Star and a retraction of the article.

Said O'Donoghue, "He was lucky. That whole thing could have turned south and he would have become the poster child of what never to do at a school newspaper, or any newspaper for that matter. As it stands, he got a slap on the wrist."

Bartley, who left UAF shortly after setting fire to himself as a display of "high art" near the fountain of flags, was unavailable for comment.

"Having an attorney just, around, I think, will really help morale," O'Donoghue said. "That and it's just nice to have someone to talk to."