Entertainment

SUNSPOTS | 50 GOOD THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN 2016

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Last night, people around the world wildly celebrated, in intervals of exactly one hour, the Earth moving past an approximate, arbitrary point in its orbit about the sun. In New York City, specifically, thousands of people stood outside in the freezing cold for more than ten hours to watch a ball move slowly down a short to medium-length pole and then reach the bottom of that pole at the same time as the Earth reached the aforementioned point in its orbit. And with that, we made it to 2017! A lot of people are excited that it is no longer 2016, because a lot of bad things happened in 2016. But, believe it or not, some good things happened too.

Entertainment

AKABAS | A Way Too In-Depth Analysis of the Fast And Furious 8 Trailer

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Sometimes when people mention the Seven Wonders of the World, for a few seconds I think they’re talking about the Fast and Furious movies. The Fast and Furious franchise has gone from low-budget street racing movies to big-budget street racing movies to big-budget action movies to even bigger-budget action movies. It is a franchise running out of combinations of “and”s, “the”s and words starting with “F” to use for movie titles. It is a franchise that went from Vin Diesel playing a street-racing criminal to Vin Diesel playing an indestructible superhero. It is a franchise so far removed from logic that its chronological order is 1-2-4-5-6-3-7-8.

Entertainment

AKABAS | We Need to Do Something About Professional Sports Team Names

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As a society, we suck at naming things. I don’t really need to defend this claim other than stating that someone decided to name this place “Greenland,” but there are countless other examples. We park in driveways and drive on parkways, whoever named oranges “oranges” is possibly the least creative person to ever walk the face of this planet, there is a car repair shop in the United Kingdom called “Poorly Car Repair” (I swear this is real, click on the link), and the number of expert astronomers that probably signed off on a planet being named “Uranus” is truly quite astounding. Case in point: Last month, we had a baseball team in the World Series called the Cleveland Indians. Sigh.

Culture

THE E’ER INSCRUTABLE | Fimbulwinter: Tyr’s Wager, Part I

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“ᛏ Týr er einhendr áss
ok ulfs leifar
ok hofa hilmir
Mars tiggi.”

Time does not, and has never, suffered itself to be stopped on the whim of a mortal. If all mystified fatalism, be it twine-snipping hags at the base of the world-tree and the general stuff of soothsayers, has been stripped from our cold-fact cosmology, this central fact has never been, and almost certainly never shall, be doubted. The date of a man’s birth and of his death may be preordained or may hang entirely on Zufall, stupidity, and other waste-products of the human psyche, but its circumstances cannot be altered in fact. “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; /
Petals on a wet black bough.” -Ezra Pound

Shortly after I was born, I, a rosy-faced eructation on Planet Earth, received the mixed blessing of being initiated into a certain Bohemian brand of Protestantism, whose believers, given the demonym “Moravians” after their hilled Czech homeland, practiced burial rites which, even in my ur-youth, I found unusual. The various other cemeteries of colonial Pennsylvania ranged from the solemn to the gaudy, painted, weeping Madonnas and glum little cherubs shaking their heads.

Culture

De/Constructing America: Part 1

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By Amanda Xu and Jeremiah Kim

Amanda:

For many Americans, we can trace the origins of our family tree to an immigrant story. One of hardship, sacrifice, and — for the lucky few — bittersweet triumph over circumstances. If our nation is shaped by diversity, how have we ended up in such a problematic time marked by extreme divisiveness and inequality? We may never know where the origin of our racism and systematic disadvantage…

Jk it’s slavery. Jk again (kind of) — the relationship between race and disadvantage is extremely complex because the tentacles of systematic disadvantage extend far beyond individual cases.

Business

MANGA MONDAYS | Advertising with Anime: Places as Products

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If you’re ever riding a train in Japan’s Tottori prefecture, you might be lucky enough to ride the “Conan Train.” Which, as it happens, is exactly the same as a regular train, except for the fact that the outside is a giant advertisement for the “Conan” anime (that’s “Case Closed” in America). Why, you might ask, is there such an over-the-top advertisement for an anime in the middle of Japan’s least populous prefecture? Surely the advertisement would reach more people in Tokyo? As it happens, Tottori prefecture is the home of Gosho Aoyama, the author and illustrator of the Conan manga. Thus, it’s not that someone is advertising the anime or manga.

Business

SERENDIPITY | Charlie’s Cold Coffee Challenge (CCC)

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Why do we go to college? You’re probably thinking that the answer here is simple. Well Charlie, if you would stop writing this article in the middle of Sociology 1101, you would probably realize that you go to college for the superior education and job opportunities! Yeah, most of America would probably agree with you. In typical Charlie fashion, I’m going to counter the first paragraph I’ve written for this article and say something vaguely controversial that I’m sure everyone reading this will agree with anyway (I tend to do that all the time in order to increase viewership and Facebook likes): we don’t go to college for the textbook education.

Culture

THE WORLD AROUND YU | America Under Trumpism

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I grew up in a minority-majority enclave in the Bay Area. My elementary school was made up of 800 students whose demographics were made up of roughly fifty-percent East Asian and fifty-percent South Asian. There, at school, you could probably count the number of white kids on one hand. Almost everyone had immigrant parents and spoke at least two languages. There, you would see not just Christians but Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Atheists, just to name a few, playing together during recess.

Culture

TRAVELIN’ WITH JACQUELINE | Punkfest

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From Tuesday to Saturday last week, Punkfest Cornell took place throughout Ithaca, and included panel discussions (one of which featured members of Pussy Riot), live band and spoken word performances, an opening reception in Kroch and a film screening at Cornell Cinema. Unfortunately, I was incredibly busy last week, so I was only able to attend the aforementioned opening reception, but I have a feeling that would have been the event I enjoyed most anyway. The reception was celebrating the launch of Punkfest Cornell: Anarchy in the Archives, a new exhibition from the Cornell University Library Rare and Manuscript Collections in the Kroch Library within Olin Library. As you can see from the image below, the exhibit will be on display in the Hirshland Exhibition Gallery until May 19, 2017, so you have plenty of time to mosey on down there. Admission, of course, is free.