Blogs

TRAVELIN’ WITH JACQUELINE | Blue Bees

By |

Like most people, I don’t find insects particularly interesting, but I thought I’d attend a West Campus-scheduled Cornell Insect Collection Tour on Sunday, September 25 with my SA Erin! The Cornell University Insect Collection is located in Comstock Hall and is one of the world’s biggest insect collections. As you will see from the myriad photos that are to follow, I really enjoyed myself. I saw so many beautiful insects and learned about methods of insect preservation. One of the first organisms we were shown was water bugs!

Entertainment

TALK IS CHIC | Fashion Forward or Fashion Backward

By |

Cuddling in Eleni’s queen sized bed recounting a fun evening, we began discussing our lack of photo documentation this year.  By the time you reach senior year, is taking a #selfie in your novel mixer costume lame/sad/pathetic/overdone? Or were we having too much fun dancing and twirling? Either way, we’re getting nostalgic and sappy as our time at Cornell comes to an end:

GO:  Won’t we want to look back at pictures of us in our Brandy Melville crop tops and LF chokers, which are likely to be painfully outdated? ET: Or the body contouring, mini dresses that may only be acceptable and flattering in this realm of our lives?

Entertainment

WHITE KNUCKLES | Spell it Right

By |

Starbucks never gets my name wrong: bold and thick, the four letters written with the sharpie mark my Cinnamon Chai Latte with comforting exactitude. My mother hated her name, could not bear the length of it, the excessive r’s and the harshness of the t, or maybe because of the fact that it was two names stitched together. For me, she wanted something short, the smoothness of the bilabial consonant, the bright ringing of vowels; she liked the literariness to it and its universality. It is impossible to mispronounce, to be  corrupted by accents or unconventional variations or too many confusing syllables. During my exchange year in Maine, my little host brother used to spell it “Ma,” because “M is pronounced Em, and a is pronounced a.” Like the clarity of a crystal, it was simple and immediate.

Entertainment

DAYS OF OUR LIVES | Chemistry

By |

In my first year of college, I made the misstep of taking class at the ungodly hour of 8:00 a.m. Against all advice, I, the beaming young student, was eager to tackle the demons of chemistry in the wee hours of the morning. The folly of my decision would soon become apparent through sleepless nights of composing reports and balancing equations, but for the moment I possessed an unrelenting determination to succeed. After successfully ignoring my alarm for a week, I soon understood that 8 a.m. was not as charming as I had thought, and I numbered the days until I would finally drop the course. On the last day, I decided out of respect for the teacher that I would brave the challenge of the early morning one final time. So I sat in the last row of seats, unsure of whether or not to take notes, feeling an awkward sense of premonition.

Blogs

MOSKOWITZ | One Summer

By |

One summer, I gutted the prickly bush that sat on the side of my driveway. I was much younger, but I can’t exactly remember when it happened. The bush sprawled out and a handful of stalks reached out to the sky and then curved back towards the driveway. The stalks formed bent bridges between a vibrant, green forest and the dirty blue of the asphalt.

Every time I pursued adventure, I had with me a pair of red metal shears. They were small enough to fit in my hand and be pressed together, but the blades were thick and wide.

Bill Nye

MANGA MONDAYS | RWBY, Guns and Important Questions

By |

I’ve been meaning to write this post for quite some time now. Since about the middle of RWBY volume 3, in fact. However, I kept putting it off to make sure I addressed the topic appropriately. Well I’m going for it now, so no turning back one way or the other. Oh yeah, and beware of spoilers.

Blogs

GROSKAUFMANIS | Not Like the Other Girls

By |

Some forms of sexism are easier to detect than others. For instance, we automatically know that when a child is told that they “throw like a girl,” he or she is being insulted. Despite the fact that none of those words alone are negatively charged, we can draw from societal context that “throwing like a girl” is bad, and, at the very least, not as good as “throwing like a boy.” This kind of sexism is pretty black-and-white: it points to misogynistic residue that exists today, with entire campaigns dedicated to combatting it. However, when sexist language directed towards females comes from females, the issue becomes more nuanced; particularly when the sexism is largely implicit. The irony of insular misogyny is both sad and abundant: girls condemning girls for being girls.

Entertainment

AKABAS | Bracketology: Who/What is winning 2016?

By |

There are many things that literally everyone on Earth hates, such as hangnails, hotels that charge for WiFi, late-2000s M. Night Shyamalan films, and that moment when you don’t check your phone for an hour and there are 257 unread messages from a single group chat when you come back. There aren’t many things that literally everyone on Earth loves, but one of those things is March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament. A single-elimination bracket – the concept that you need to win every single game to stay in it – is ingenious. I support using the bracket concept whenever humanly possible, so let’s make a bracket to determine who or what has had the best 2016 so far. The competitors were determined subjectively by me, and the seeds, listed below, were determined primarily by number of Twitter followers (credit to former Grantland-writer Rembert Browne for this idea).

Entertainment

WATCH ME IF YOU CAN | So Meta: Movies about Movies

By |

Movies that walk you through how a movie is made give off a metatheatrical vibe.  The Academy also happens to favor these kinds of film when choosing best picture.  Here  are some films that are reflective of show business. ARGO.  The film that Ben Affleck directed and starred in hit it big at the 2013 Academy Awards, taking home the little golden man for Best Picture.

Entertainment

GOOD TASTE ALONE | A Utilitarian Romance With Mankind

By |

Buzzfeed, or some similar listicle oracle, recently informed me oh-so-helpfully of the top seventeen most romantic places to visit (I assume they meant with a partner and not just by yourself). Which, of course, got me thinking – what makes a place romantic? I guess this is where we have to admit that romantic means something different for everyone. So dozens of people might call Ithaca’s gorges romantic, but to one person that might mean, “Damn, these gorges really make me wanna bang anything that moves,” and to another, “Golly doesn’t this gorge just make me want to stare at the moon and talk about our spirit animals,” and to yet another person, “This would be a postcard-perfect place to begin an attempt to beat the 50% odds of divorce.” And yet, most people can agree that scenic vistas of nature are romantic, similar to cute or expensive restaurants or places that are quiet and private. Then, you have misattribution of arousal – a term used in psychology – which is actually pretty trippy.