All Posts Tagged With: "star wars"
Ottawa students take Star Wars study break
More than 200 battle with lightsabres
Jane Lytvynenko
Wielding hundreds of red, green and blue lightsabres, students at the University of Ottawa ran into battle Thursday night. The first official lightsabre battle brought out about 200 participants to just outside the university library. The event mimicked an annual battle in New York.
Jozef Spiteri, a vice-president at the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO), said he met the organizers of the NYC event at the North by Northeast festival in Toronto and decided to bring the idea to Ottawa.
Spiteri’s term ends this month. He always wanted a Star Wars-themed party, so it was now or never. “I thought it was a cool closing statement,” he said.
What students are talking about today (November 12th edition)
Elmo scandal, Concordia on homestays, a regrettable tattoo
Kevin Clash (Bill Thompson/Wikimedia)
1. Concordia University has responded to complaints by Chinese students about homestays advertised through a link on its website. One student told CBC News that she hadn’t been fed enough, losing weight as a result. “While Concordia is not involved in providing homestay services, it has undertaken a careful review of the allegations,” reads Concordia’s statement.
2. Kevin Clash, the 52-year-old puppeteer behind Elmo, has been accused of having a sexual relationship with a man who was 16 at the time, according to a statement from Sesame Street. Clash denies the boy was underage, but he has taken a leave of absence and has been disciplined for inappropriately using work computers.
3. The Fiscal Cliff, a Jan. 1st deadline of doom that the U.S. economy faces if Congress doesn’t amend its agreed-upon package of tax hikes and spending cuts, is apparently a subject of interest for Star Wars fans. They took to Twitter with the hashtag #StarWarsFiscalCliff. Here’s one such missive from Tweeter John Podhoretz: “Ben Bernanke? That wizard is just a crazy old man.”
Continue reading What students are talking about today (November 12th edition)
What students are talking about today (October 31st)
Tyler Bozak’s Halloween horror, Star Wars sold & Psy in T.O.
YAXZONE/Flickr
1. If you’re planning to go out for Halloween at the University of Prince Edward Island, you may be out of luck. Tickets to the annual Halloween party at the The Wave pub on campus sold out in six days and people are desperately seeking them on Facebook, promising extra cash—even cookies. Last year, tickets were controversially resold for $50 each “a full $37 more than the listed price,” reports The Cadre. Oh the horror!
2. If you haven’t already got a costume, Kevin Hurren of Western U. has a few cerebral suggestions. My favorite is the ceiling fan.
3. But be careful that your costume won’t be interpreted as racist. Toronto Maple Leafs centre Tyler Bozak was criticized for wearing black makeup as part of a Michael Jackson Halloween costume. After a flurry of criticism, he Tweeted: “That’s a tribute to one of my fave artists. For anyone saying its racist is crazy!”
Continue reading What students are talking about today (October 31st)
How NOT to study for midterms
The art of wasting Time
With midterms looming, here are the five best ways to procrastinate:
5) Clicking the “random article” button on Wikipedia. And then, when List of towns in Western Australia appears, you decide you’ll get back to work the instant you find a vaguely interesting-sounding article.
So you press the button again. Aircraft parts industry.
The game continues.
4) Create an account on a boring online game that you would never actually waste time on during summer vacation. And then when your virtual garden has accumulated 5,800 points and you can finally purchase some bonsai trees, it’s suddenly the night before your biochemistry midterm and there’s a whole chapter about amino acids to catch up on.
3) Arranging all the pencils on your desk into a to-scale TIE Fighter model. After a couple minutes of diligently working on your analysis paper, you suddenly realize: for every TIE Fighter, there must be an X-wing . . .
2) Remember that scene from the Bourne Supremacy, when Jason Bourne kills an assassin by smacking him with a rolled-up magazine? If you slow it down frame-by-frame, you can see that he was using an issue of Maclean’s. Seriously, take a look.
1) Writing a blog post about the five best ways to procrastinate.
-photo courtesy of Dvortygirl
No secrets in cyberspace
Yet another career ruined by Facebook
Hardest part of university? Not what you’d expect.
How do you navigate when your biology tutorial is in the math building?
Now that I’m more than two months into my first semester, I’ve finally overcome the biggest transition between high school and university. For me, it wasn’t the increased workload or the fast pace that were the most difficult to adapt to. It was figuring out where the hell my classes are.
I’m not saying that the sudden change of pace or huge workload were easy to adjust to. They weren’t. But high school was like a self-contained little village, with every class confined to a single building.
My physics lecture and lab were easy enough to figure out- they’re in the physics building. My chemistry lecture, on the other hand, is in the arts lecture hall. My anthropology lecture is in the biology building. And my biology tutorial is in the math building. See what I mean?
Sure, I have a campus map. But there’s a huge problem with maps: they were designed by people with a sense of direction. If I’m lost, knowing that I’m in grid A-12 and that the chemistry tutorial is in grid C-33 wouldn’t help. If I had to choose between two paths, I wouldn’t be able to use the left-thumb rule to figure out that I’m facing North-East and must therefore head South-West. I’d have to use the “eeny meeny miny moe” rule.
Luckily, my sister Jenny, who has a sense of direction, is taking the same program as I am. Meaning, for the first week of classes, all I had to do was attach a tether to my sister’s book bag. There was only one problem with finding classes by following my sister: it only worked if I followed my sister.
Sure enough, after a physics lecture, we started heading towards our chemistry class. I stopped walking for a moment to put my calculator in my book bag. When I looked back up, I realized to my horror that my sister was gone. The safety tether had snapped.
Thankfully, after a week of following my sister, I knew that I had to head down the path to my right.
Or left. Or straight ahead.
I asked someone for directions to the arts building. “Oh, that’s just south of the library,” he said. That would have been really useful- if I knew where the library was. Or which direction is south. There was only one thing left to do.
I clung to a tree and whispered, “Leia… Leia…”
Don’t mess with a rat’s testes
Until last Monday, my grade 12 biology class was incomplete. Like lemon meringue pie without the fluffy cream layer. Or a Star Wars movie without a cool, undeveloped and quickly killed-off bad guy. After a rat dissection, my biology class is now finally complete. Cutting up a once-living animal in the name of scalpels and [...]
Until last Monday, my grade 12 biology class was incomplete. Like lemon meringue pie without the fluffy cream layer. Or a Star Wars movie without a cool, undeveloped and quickly killed-off bad guy. After a rat dissection, my biology class is now finally complete.
Cutting up a once-living animal in the name of scalpels and microscopes is kinda like eating a kiwi. As in, you have to forget what that furry outer layer looks like in order to enjoy it. I expected the rat to be a stiff, chemically-preserved board. Instead, it was damp and mooshy. I’m not sure which would be worse.
I assumed the ickiest part of a dissection would be the dissection. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Step one of official dissection procedure is- get this- tying the rat up. Maybe this helps prevent escape attempts and violent zombie-rat uprisings, but either way, once my rat was stretched across the board, each paw tied down to a post, he looked kinda like an Aztec sacrifice.
Or a tiny, furry Christ.
Maybe it was the chemical used to preserve the rat. Maybe it was the fact that dead things tend to stink. Either way, the smell of exposed rat organs is right at the top of the hierarchy of repulsive smells.
After five minutes of poking around, I got used to doing what felt like an invasion of the rat’s body space. It took another 30 seconds to realize that the dry lumpy thingy poking out of its mouth wasn’t a crispy rat tumor: it was it’s tongue.
By the time I reached the rat’s circulatory system, I finally stopped feeling like I was being disrespectful by removing a dead organism’s body parts. Which was right about when I noticed that the group beside me had decapitated their rat.
Beheading an animal that has the potential to be vaguely cute (once it’s been Disney-fied and is sitting in a dimly-lit room) already earned the group some serious psychopath points. But apparently they felt as if the rat hadn’t been mutilated enough. I watched and cringed in horror as they chopped off their rat’s testes.
I had just witnessed the launch of three potential serial killer careers in the making.
When I looked away, refusing to add to the rat’s indignity, I suddenly noticed that I had inadvertently smooshed a pin through one of my own rat’s ears. Had I been alone, I might have wept, then whispered, “I’m so sorry…”
And then maybe found out what a cross section of his tail would look like.
Artsy doesn’t have to be fartsy
Why I don’t hate my humanities class after all
My nerd membership card is at risk of being ripped in half. I might have my honorary eye glasses confiscated. I may no longer be allowed to worship His Bobbafettness. After almost two months of second semester, I’m finally ready to admit it: I’m enjoying my humanities class.
Science nerds and humanities classes aren’t supposed to mingle. If a Nerdian ventures into the City of Artsy Classes, we’re exiled from our homeland on pain of death. Or at the very least, our Star Wars action figure sets (all sealed in original mint-condition packages) will be smacked around a little and have a corner viciously folded down. But in direct defiance of the Nerd Code of Honour, I’m finding the class… well… interesting.
The class, “Individuals and Families in a Diverse society,” claims to cultivate “an awareness of and insight into students’ own personal and family development.” It also promised to teach Learning Skills.
Surely I was doomed.
But then something miraculous happened. I didn’t have the gall-bladder bored out of me. When we learned about the traditional transitions that adolescent Canadians face, I didn’t find my mind shutting down into a sanctuary of exponential equations and horizontal asymptotes.
I’ve even gained some invaluable Learning Skills.
No, it doesn’t quite match the thrill of finding a derivative, setting it equal to the slope of a tangent, and then solving a problem in which a point off the curve of a function must be found. But if losing the right to say words like “vertices” and “polynomial” means finally learning what the hell words like, “conceptual framework,” and “occupational attainment” actually mean, then it’s totally worth it.
Unless, of course, it means my Bobba Fett is in any sort of danger.
scott.dobson.mitchell@gmail.com
Extra year of high school? Where’s the victory in that ‘Victory Lap’?
When my biology teacher started talking about a victory lap during class last week, I figured she must be talking about race cars. Or maybe the sound her cat makes when it drinks. But apparently ‘victory lap’ can also be directly translated to, “A grade 12 student that stays behind for an extra year because, [...]
When my biology teacher started talking about a victory lap during class last week, I figured she must be talking about race cars. Or maybe the sound her cat makes when it drinks. But apparently ‘victory lap’ can also be directly translated to, “A grade 12 student that stays behind for an extra year because, well, they can.”
I’m staying open-minded though. I’m sure there are some valid and compelling reasons for staying behind in the public school system for an extra year. I just haven’t figured them out yet. And until then, I admit, I’ll continue to think that willingly staying behind for an extra 200 days of high school is (nearly) the dumbest idea on the planet. Of course, nothing is more dumb than Toby Maguire having been cast as an action hero.
I mean, it’s not like my school offers “Basket Weaving 101” or “Why Star Wars is way Better than Star Trek” courses. You know, to artificially inflate my grade point average to look better on my university applications.
So isn’t calling it a ‘victory lap’ sort of like calling a house with a roof that’s been peeled back by a tornado “open concept” ?
scott.dobson.mitchell@gmail.com
