Call me a cheapskate if you want, but I haven’t paid full price for a PC video game in at least a year. At the same time, I have well over a hundred games in my Steam library, and at least a dozen more from other digital download services. What’s strange, however, is that at least a quarter of them I’ve never played; of those, I bet at least half of them I never will. Yet I scope out new game deals nearly every day, and fight the temptation to add the increasingly backlogged catalog of games. Do I have a problem? Probably. I’m working on it.
Saturday morning found me awakening far too late and starving for something novel. I enjoy eating at Val, seeing everyone, recounting a night out and sharing stories over badly needed coffee, but sometimes I like to get away, to leave campus and to find a change of scene. And so, prompted by this desire, I found myself heading down a busy Route 9 at around noon and stepping into Esselon Café, which happens to serve breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as beer and wine. (We also saw two women drinking mimosas.) Luckily they serve brunch too.
Lemonville sounds like a shady place to learn the ropes of investing, doesn’t it? As an economics major, I was taught to run the other way for fear of learning anything about lemons. On the other hand, if your crash course in investing came via headlines during the financial crisis, then perhaps you’ve been in Lemonville for longer than you’d care to admit. Or worse, if you still don’t know much about investing, then you might be stuck up Lemonville creek without a paddle.
I learned of Roger Ebert’s death not two days after he reported that he would be stepping down from reviewing 200+ films a year in favor of reviewing one or two a week. What he called a “leave of presence” now means more to me than simply an affirmation of his witty and clever phrasing. Roger Ebert will never write a review again, but his comment reminds us that the legacy of the man who dedicated 46 years to professionally writing about film will never go away.
This weekend saw Amherst host its most famous presenter for the semester. (Spring Concert doesn’t count). Rachel Maddow, as everybody knows as the host of “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, gave a book talk about “Drift”, some non-fiction piece about something military, something blah. Or at least, that’s what everybody was expecting right? It turns out, her critique of our country’s recent approach to war was quite fascinating, and, for the average student, revelatory.
The two latest James Franco movies, “Spring Breakers” and “Oz the Great and Powerful,” were released within weeks of each other, and could not appear to be more different. In “Spring Breakers,” sex, drugs and violence abound in pursuit of the “American dream” — embodied, in this case, by a killer spring break. “Oz,” on the other hand, is a 3D Disney wonderland with scenery stronger than its plot. Neither film is a great success, but each has its merits, and it’s quite magical to watch them back-to-back and see Franco transform from a greasy wannabe gangster into a dapper wannabe wizard.
Imagine, for a moment, that for the first time in your Amherst career, you are visiting the Mead Art Museum on your own accord. For some, this will be a fresh memory, while for others such an imaginative feat might be a near impossibility. Imagine that no class brought you to view sketches or still-lives as source materials for a project, no visiting family members brought you along on their touristic explorations of Amherst and the surrounding area and there are no Zumbyes singing among the artwork as you meander the Mead’s galleries.
