What is the surest way to know that the semester has truly gotten underway? Is it the sight of a crowded campus full of bustling, eager students rushing to get to their new classes while dodging misanthropic bicyclists hell-bent for leather?

While nothing says “Welcome back to Iowa State, farm boy” quite like a near death experience with a supersonic tweaker on a Schwinn … no.

Is it the snow-capped Campanile or the crow crap punctuated sidewalks offering a better non-slip surface than those big bathtub flowers your grandma has? Not really.

What is that gritty white stuff in bird crap, anyway? According to the immortal Kurt Vonnegut, “that’s bird crap, too.”

Is it the industrial kitchen smell of food circus egg casseroles hovering over Campustown each morning like a wicked, gassy omen of things to come later in the day, possibly in the middle of a quiet lecture hall? Again … no.

I love the smell of hamburger in white sauce as much as the next guy. And while nothing brings back deeply buried race memories as fast and furious as a face full of dining hall whiff, we must still look elsewhere for the truest indication that the semester is finally going full bore.

Is it the “Deliverance”-style pain in the ass you get when you buy dramatically overpriced books? Oh, yeah! Squeal you little piggies! Give me your backpack, stand in line and you better pray real good, too!

War profiteers are widely accepted as unpatriotic bottom-feeders because their crimes are obvious. Those who take advantage of their own countrymen during wartime strife to fill their pockets with patriot gold are OBVIOUSLY traitors.

Yet no penalties exist for bookstore owners and textbook publishers who feed off of students by charging unconscionable rates for new and used textbooks and other supplies without even the slightest hint of remorse.

I was at CBS that first day it got really cold before classes had begun. Some guy comes in wearing shorts for some odd reason and promptly slips and falls down the stairs.

Everyone had a good laugh, including the bare-legged, frostbitten acrobat who was much more concerned about his bruised pride than his bruised butt. This, I thought, is the perfect metaphor for this entire textbook scam which I call Screwed-Gate.

We get beaten and battered every single semester. It’s really quite vicious. We should be smart enough to know that we have been brutally done over. That we have been humiliated and debased in front of our peers.

But instead of doing anything about it, we just complain and try to laugh it off like there are no options. What can we do, right?

Will no one offer us a way out of this wilderness of exploitative business practices? Where the hell is Moses when you need him?

I would even settle for Charleton Heston in a bathrobe at this point. Did you see him in “Soylent Green?” God, he’s talented!

Sure, it’s nice to get a full cord of coupon books, credit card applications and magazine subscription forms. But why can’t we get freebies with our books that we could actually use, like Vaseline and Preparation H?

While they are up there, how’s about a free prostate exam?

The only options to buying inflated texts are totally illegal and should not be practiced, even though there are no copyright police cruising the U.S. in black vans looking for offenders.

Though no one would ever catch you, it would still be wrong to photocopy a $100 textbook for as little as $10 … wouldn’t it?

Of course it would, so don’t even think about taking your 15 percent discount card to Copyworks and taking the low road.

How easy would it be to take a used, overpriced textbook, scan it and save it to a zip disk for no more than the price of the disk that you had laying around anyway? It would be easy but oh-so wrong.

Horribly, terribly wrong, immoral and illegal.

Right now options do exist on the Internet. BigWords.com, varsitybooks.com, efollett.com and dunebooks.com are four such options which are making bookstores around the U.S. sweat a little.

You can buy your textbooks for as much as 40 percent off without ever putting on pants — which we all know is the best measure of truly worthwhile activities. Can you do it in your underwear? Sign me up!

When I was a kid, I lived in a tiny town called Crescent which was all of about 300 people.

We had one unattended church which was just a landmark, one gas station, three bars (which might explain the lack of churches) and one little grocery store which didn’t even have a name — it was just that small. We called it the little store, emphasizing the word “little” like that was its name.

Well, the guy who owned this store had no respect for his customers, high prices and dust coating all of his merchandise.

He wouldn’t let more than one kid in his store at any given time, and then he would kick us out as fast as possible.

One day, convenience stores were invented, and one moved to our town. Suddenly, the owner of the little store had some competition. And while the prices weren’t significantly better, the attitude was.

No one ever went to the little store again, even thought the owner put up a banner which read “locally owned.”

We could only but laugh derisively at that poor bastard as his business went up in flames.

If only he had practiced a modicum of decency, the town would most certainly have been there for him in his time of need.

I can’t wait until the tables turn on the Ames bookstores.

You may have noticed that I am kind of a bitter guy. That comes from a whole host of issues that I refuse to get into in one sitting, but anyone reading over the long haul can probably figure them out. I accept that risk.

I like to see people without a conscience get what’s coming to them, like the dinosaurs … hot-blooded lizards, fie!

I can’t wait until the tables turn on the student bookstores.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.