Months after Ruminator closed its doors for good, founder and CEO David Unowsky is still reeling from a breakdown in negotiations that occurred after he believed the issue had been resolved, leaving him bitter and with questions about Macalester’s motives.
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A group of students, frustrated by what they see as too narrow a focus within student government, are attempting to gain a majority in the legislative body to carry out their agenda.
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Forty-two members of the class of 2008 spent four days hiking, kayaking, canoeing and bonding this summer before embarking on their Macalester careers.
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During a Sept. 16 campaign stop at Macalester, Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate-turned-presidential candidate, alleged that Democrats might be breaking laws in their attempts to keep him off state ballots.
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Sana-e-zahra Ali Aamir ’08, Dupre Hall
“The gods in their wisdom did not let me see myself as others see me and instead let me skew in my own self esteem.” I live under what may be a delusion that I can make a difference. I believe that a committed approach and open mind can lead to great outcomes. I hope to bring in my own cultural and personal perspective while being open minded and flexible. I do not have the basis of stipulating specific issues that are of great importance this early in my experience. However, my passions do lie within the areas of the school’s financial aid policy, civic engagement, and curricular issues.
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Thirty-five students began campaigning for seats on Macalester College Student Government’s (MCSG) Legislative Body (LB) last Friday amid concerns from several candidates over representation and campaign policies. Elections will be held Tues. Sept. 28.
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The most striking characteristic of this year’s Legislative Body elections is contrast: at the same time that a group of students have organized a voting bloc that could walk in with a majority, numerous slots remain without candidates and most students on campus feel apathetic towards their student government.
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(Editor’s Note: This piece is the second part of a two-part series that is published in full in the upcoming issue of the Mac Today. The first part of this letter was published in last week’s Opinion section.)
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1. Macalester should reaffirm and continue its commitment to meeting the full demonstrated need of all admitted students. This policy, generally referred to as “full-need,” is designed to ensure that all students admitted to the college have the resources to do so and stands in contrast to the policy sometimes known as “gapping,” whereby students are admitted to a college but not provided with adequate financial aid. A “full-need” policy is not only different from a “need-blind” admissions policy but may stand in tension with it, since among the things threatened by our current need-blind policy is our ability to meet the full need of the students we do admit. In order to stretch our financial aid dollars as far as possible, we have had to increase the loan component of the aid packages offered to admitted students.
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Is student government irrelevant to the political concerns of Macalester students? Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash” depicts a postmodern dystopia wherein the U.S. Federal Government has become but one authority among many. Despite decrepitude in the face of more powerful mini-states run by mobsters and corporations, the Feds continue to intensify their internal bureaucracy.
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The women's cross country team had not won a meet in years. They had never before beaten rival St. Olaf. That all changed last weekend when on a hot and sunny Saturday afternoon, the Scots made a bold statement by capturing top honors at the St. Olaf Invitational.
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After coming out slow and falling to an early 6-0 deficit in the first game, the Scots rallied to take a 12-11 lead. Unfortunately, Macalester was unable to hold the lead and ended up losing the first game 30-27.
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First-year Max Weber scored a dramatic overtime goal to give St. Thomas its first win over Macalester since 1995, last Friday. The upset also brought the Scots’ 32-game MIAC unbeaten streak to an end.
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For a group of seniors who have never finished higher than fourth in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC), winning the Men’s Cross Country championship on Oct. 30th seemed like a lofty goal. Last year, that fourth place finish was the highlight of a season of hard work.
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After a series of easy wins for the women’s soccer team, including two conference victories over Augsburg and St. Mary’s, the Scots fell 2-1 in overtime to the No. 1-ranked University of Chicago Maroons at home last Friday.
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On a damp Tuesday night, I had the extraordinary pleasure of chatting with Joan Bennett outside the Campus Center. Just as I had sat down, sipped deeply on my Coca Cola, and opened the Hegemon, Joan bounded towards me, insisting she was late.
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Funny bones
In one of my classes recently, my non-american-ness was given away by a word I¥d never heard of before: the funny bone. Believing it was just a...well, just some funny bone, I didn’t quite follow the discussion. Flustered, I blurted out that in my native Icelandic we call it a “stupid bone,” as if that made any better sense (somehow your native language always seems to do things right, doesn’t it?). Later, to my relief, I learned that funny bone has the English synonym crazy bone, which comes close to the concept in Icelandic (i.e. vitlausa beinid where vitlausa is ‘stupid/crazy/wrong’ and beinid ‘the bone’). Surely the agonizing pain I experience when I hit my elbow has much more to do with craziness than amusement. So my question is: why the hell would you call this particular body part funny, when its distinguishing feature is precisely how much it hurts when you hit it? I was even more perplexed when I learned from my dictionary that crazy bone also has the metaphoric meaning of “a sense of humor.” In my quest to unravel the mystery of the word, I stumbled onto some interesting details.
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The father-son picnic wasn’t going as planned. Archery and canoeing were near disasters, and the forecast for the evening’s marshmallow roast was partly awkward with a chance of forest fire. “I should have stayed in frickin’ Florence,” Pinocchio muttered to himself as he desperately tried to “chow down” his burger and prepare for the upcoming bobbing-for-apples ceremony.
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I did it. I moved off campus and it wasn’t that big of a deal. It was a difficult decision to make—to cut the umbilical cord myself—for I was afraid I’d be alienated from the people and energy of campus life that I enjoyed for two years. Of course there were the days when frankly I would have rather not ventured into the unforgiving lighting of CafÈ Mac. But I worried that once off-campus, I would avoid campus like the plague as a self-righteous upperclassman and forget how much I really liked going to Soup and Substance and MacCinema. And how would I start my mornings without the routine comfort of being flipped off by a driver on Grand? Nevertheless, on the last day possible I canceled my housing contract with the Veggie Co-op and dove head-first into house-hunting plans. I reminded myself that bills, dish-washing, and leases were unpleasantries I could not avoid forever, and I also reminded myself that I really really love eating meat.
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Japan’s Takashi Miike, whose new film “Gozu” plays at the Oak Street Cinema this week, has been the most prolific innovator in world cinema for several years now, averaging four to seven films a year and working in multiple styles with relative ease and consistent good humor. In his native country, Miike seems to be regarded as an eccentric craftsman of genre entertainment (best exemplified by the “Dead or Alive” trilogy, 1999-2002). Given his filmography this seems a fair assessment: ost of his films continue to be violent yakuza stories, many of them released directly to video. (This isn’t as shameful a fate as it is for American movies; video releases, or V-cinema, constitute a broad subgenre in Japan, comparable in certain ways to low-budget film noir of the ’40s and ’50s.)
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It began with drums and marching, and concluded with a burial. Though this sounds more like a Civil War battle than an artistic performance, Bread and Puppet Theatre’s “Insurrection Mass and Funeral March for Rotten Ideas” was as politically charged as the former and an impressive and inspirational example of the latter.
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Rock:
After an astonishing concert at Roskilde this summer, I had my hopes up for The Hives’ new album, Tyrannosaurus Hives (Interscope, 2004). When it arrived—the whole half-hour of it—I was relieved to discover that they did not only fulfill my expectations, they exceeded them.
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Resolved: bespectacled, white laptop dorks can make sick hip-hop albums. No, I’m serious. It’s true. They just tend to do it alone in their rooms, rather than with a whole entourage of rappers. Springing forth from cluttered computers across the country are infectious, undeniably “hip-hop” tracks, devoid of MC’s. This new breed of instrumentals gives the musical innovations of hip-hop their due respect and visibility while advancing them beyond simple vehicles for raps. Also, it sounds sweet.
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The Mac Weekly is an entirely student-produced publication. The opinions expressed in this document are those of its authors and editors, not of Macalester College.
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