"Guests set up a Facebook page to list complaints. Some posted pictures of burnt skin and dresses, caused by crowds waiting around the hog roast for up to an hour."
Guests were left with burns, in tears and without food and drink following event jointly organised with a Cambridge college
It was supposed to be a night of "decadence, debauchery, and indulgence", but instead guests of an Oxford and Cambridge University end-of-term ball endured a "catastrophe" with some left with burns, in tears and without food and drink.
Guests at Last Ball at Somerville College, Oxford, paid up to £150 for tickets but found that entertainers that were advertised did not turn up and almost all the alcohol had run out before 1am, five hours before the end.
May balls are a tradition at Oxford and Cambridge and other universities. They are normally extravagant and usually well managed by student committees.
The organisers of the ball – planned jointly by Somerville College and Jesus College, Cambridge – had great ambitions; they had planned to exhibit a live shark until they were inundated with complaints. In the event, the ball descended into farce with guests questioning what the organisers had done with the money paid by 1,000 guests.
The Cambridge Tab reported "Food ran out early on in the evening, with only one food stand to cater for 1,000 people. Vegetarians went hungry, with pita bread and cupcakes acting as measly substitutes for the previously mentioned hog roast. What's more, all the alcohol (with the exception of rum) had run out by 1am, and by 4am even that had run out."
Cherwell, the Oxford University magazine reported: "Somerville-Jesus 'Last Ball' goers are 'ripped off'. A 'violent scrum' for food, misleading advertising and 'unprecedented prices' criticised by students and alumni."
Guests using the maze got stuck in bottlenecks and some were injured when it was left unstaffed.
Guests set up a Facebook page to list complaints. Some posted pictures of burnt skin and dresses, caused by crowds waiting around the hog roast for up to an hour. One guest complained that he had to pick up tickets in person despite paying for postage. The same guest had to wait for an hour for a pork roll and suffered bruising in the melee to get food before it ran out.
Another student described how she was prevented from going to bed by overzealous security guards. "I'm a Somerville student and felt ill at about 2am on the night of the ball. Being cold, hungry and having drunk a fair bit I asked to be allowed to go to bed. I spoke to security and a member of the ball committee and when I wasn't allowed to go to bed I burst into tears and explained that I was feeling ill and suffer from depression. I needed sleep but was instead sent to the first aid room," she wrote.
She also noted that other Somerville students were not allowed to go to their rooms to pick up possessions such as asthma inhalers because of "security reasons".
Some of the ball organisers posted a letter apologising for their failures and denying charges of embezzlement. They blamed their failings on their inexperience and the small numbers of committee members. They blamed the injuries sustained at the maze on "some of the maze staff going rogue; a handful of maze actors attempted to leave their positions and sneak into the ball as guests."
“We like to believe in Brazil that we live in a peaceful, happy place, when the truth of our existence is far more complicated,” she said. “It’s like we’re Narcissus gazing into a pool of sewage.”
Rio’s public security officials acknowledge that they have faced a sharp increase in the number of reported rape cases, which surged 24 percent last year to 1,972 in the city.
While pregnant teens are being shamed for making bad choices in the US, a new ad campaign in Britain is tackling the other side of the spectrum with an arresting image of a pregnant old woman. The campaign, sponsored by the pregnancy testing company First Response, purports to warn young women that their childbearing years are numbered.
The average British woman bears her first child at age 30, 5 years later than American women. In the name of “provok[ing] a debate about how old is too old to have a baby,” First Response Get Britain Fertile had make-up artists transform 45-year-old British TV presenter Kate Garraway into a cartoonishly ancient-looking pregnant woman.
Yet even as First Response claims there is a lack of awareness about the female biological clock, they tout a survey by YouGov finding 70 percent of British women believe having a baby in her 40s would be too old. Women were also quite clear about their motives to wait: two-fifths said they would delay having a child until they have financial stability, while over a third said the cost of childcare is a deterrent. Another third said they would wait until they found the right partner.
Nevertheless, First Response has decided the solution to the trend of women waiting longer to have children is to criticize them, prey on their fears of aging, and exploit social disgust for even moderately sexual old women.
Get Britain Fertile ambassadors Garraway and Zita West insist that they are not trying to push women into a panic over their ticking fertility clocks. Yet the campaign, which officially launches June 3, would do well to extend beyond the caricature of the old woman. Thus far, First Response has not suggested they will explore ways to bridge the vast disparity between the average cost of raising a child — roughly half a million dollars in the US, not including college tuition — and the employment prospects of the average 25-year-old couple. In the US, the average college-educated 20-something earns $45,000 a year, while their unemployment rate is far higher than their older counterparts. Highly-educated young people are also increasingly finding it difficult to find jobs that match their very expensive education. In the UK, two-fifths of all unemployed people are younger than 25. Nor does the campaign touch on the UK’s childcare costs, which are the second highest in the world.
Rather than address these real fiscal issues young women explicitly say are keeping them from having children earlier, Garraway writes that women are simply being too picky about settling down with the right partner: “I’m not suggesting for a minute that you settle for the first half-decent man who comes along – every woman has the right to hold out for Mr Right – but you may find that really addressing your feelings about having a family means the man you thought was Mr Right comes in a different form. I suppose the word for it is mindfulness.”
This advice ignores the far higher divorce rates among people who married younger than 30. In the UK, the divorce rate hit a 40-year low last year as couples delay marriage til age 30 or later.
It is true that pregnancy is riskier for women in their 40s, and studies suggest that the risk of autism rises if either parent is over 35. But the Get Britain Fertile campaign launch coincides with a “fertility breakthrough” that would make women undergoing in vitro fertilization 3 times more likely to have a baby. While the current average success rate is around 25 percent in Britain, new time-lapse imaging could raise it to 78 percent.
As technology allows women to have more and more control over their reproductive decisions, efforts to dictate the correct time and methods women should use to get pregnant are growing more common. A recent Singaporean ad campaign took a similar approach with a series of patronizing leaflets using fairy tales to depict women’s waning fertility. Jezebel compiled the lengthy laundry list of things pregnant women are often told they must or must not do in order to successfully bear a healthy child.
First Response’s and other fertility campaigns will probably have little impact on the birth rate. But they will perpetuate the insidious notion that women, and women alone, are to blame for any reproductive troubles they may have.
† manutergium, n. Etymology: < post-classical Latin manutergium hand-towel, especially for liturgical purposes (early 5th cent.; from 7th cent. in British sources) < classical Latin manus hand (see manus n.1) + terg- , stem of tergēre to wipe (see terse adj.) + -ium -y suffix4. Compare manuterge n. N.E.D. (1905) gives the pronunciation as (mæniutə̄·ɹdʒiɒ̆m) /mænjuːˈtɜːdʒɪəm/ . Christian Church. Obs. rare.
A towel on which a priest dries his hands after washing them before celebrating Mass.
1774 T. West Antiq. Furness Explan. Ground Plan sig. a2, The piscina, or cistern, at which the priest washed his hands before service..over it hung the manutergium.
At the heart of the struggle for the churches is a contradiction: As Harlem’s fortunes rise, tithing — the traditional source of the churches’ money — is fading away.
Convos With My 2 Year Old is a funny new web series from Warmland Films and father Matthew Clarke about real conversations that he has with his 2 year old daughter (Coco), as reenacted by himself and another grown man. In episode 1, the little girl’s innocent words become quite intimidating, when spoken by a scruffy-looking adult male.
Roland Mesnier, who worked at the White House for 26 years beginning with the Carter administration, said when President Bill Clinton came into the White House in 1993, he had a “scary” appetite.
“He could eat five or six pork chops.” He recalls the episode of a strawberry cake he made one evening. Clinton devoured half of it all by himself, and the next morning he wanted more. ‘No one could find the cake,’ says Mesnier, who had a face-to-face with the distraught commander in chief. ‘Clinton was pounding on the table and shouting, “I want my goddamned cake.”’
me too buddy
What is it about being High in Government and cake?
When I studied The Great Gatsby in college, we spent an entire class period on the character of Meyer Wolsheim–. From the multiple descriptions of his oversize nose and atrocious dialect (“gonnegtions”), it only took five minutes for the class to determine he was supposed to be Jewish, and someone involved was terribly racist. The question then became, was the racism from the author, Fitzgerald, or the narrator, Nick Carroway? An added complication, if Gatsby was conceived by the author as Jewish, but not known to be Jewish by Carroway, does that mean that Fitzgerald was not racist? Or at least less racist? With five minutes left in the class period, one of my classmates said that she had an uncle named “Gatz” (Gatsby’s birth name) and he was Jewish, so the class voted for Gatsby as Jewish and thus the narrator as the racist.
In the recent film, director Baz Lurhmann leaves Gatsby’s origins open to interpretation. The character of Meyer Wolfsheim is still presented as Jewish, but only in name. The dialect is softened and Carroway’s voice over narration is not included in this scene. Luhrman also makes an effort to soften elements of the character’s appearance and personality; instead of two molars used as cufflinks and discussed in detail, Wolfsheim has one used as a tie pin, which is only mentioned in passing. As to the reaction of other characters to Wolfsheim: in the novel Gatsby is happy to see him leave; In the film, he is happy to see him arrive. These are easily understandable alterations, necessary to make the scene palatable to a modern audience. Less easy to understand? Luhrmann’s decision to cast a Desi actor to play the role. Even stranger, Amitabh Bachchan, after 40 years of Indian superstardom, decided to make The Great Gatsby his American debut.
The parallel between Jewish and South Asian fears was called “recycled anti-Semitism” in an article by Abdul-Azim Ahmed from the journal South Asian Popular Culture. He was discussing the BBC show, Citizen Khan, but the same idea can be applied to the use of Bachchan in Gatsby. Luhrmann, in interviews, acknowledges that “Fitzgerald draws the character in what some might say is a very broad, anti-Semitic manner,” but says that he saw Wolfsheim as representing “the ‘other’, the underworld.” And his goal in casting was to find someone “really exotic.” In justification, he cites for instance the casting of Omar Sharif as the Jewish gambler Nicky Arnstein in Funny Girl(1968). He says that, to the audience of the 60s, Sharif conveyed the same amount of “exotic” that Jewish meant in the teens and twenties.
In the 60s, Omar Sharif represented the danger of the almost-white other, playing everything from Russian in Doctor Zhivago (1965), to Arab Lawrence of Arabia (1962), to Jewish in Gatsby. Now, South Asians to some degree are taking up that role. Anil Kapoor in24 played the president of a fictional Arab country. Ben Kingsley just played “The Mandarin”, an Arab terrorist with a Chinese name. And now, Amitabh Bachchan is playing Jewish in Gatsby.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Luhrmann has brought an Indian influence into his films. Luhrmann first included a Bollywood artist in Moulin Rouge, with some success. He sampled the song “Chamma Chamma” in the middle of his epic finale number, Hindi Sad Diamonds. In the credits and on the subsequent soundtrack release, he credited the singer, Alka Yagnik, and the songwriter Sameer, but he slighted the composer, Anu Malik. Malik was so insulted that he was still bringing up the slip in an interview over two years later. When Luhrman discusses Moulin Rouge as a musical, he talks about Stanley Donen and George Sidney, Hollywood masters of the genre. What Luhrman says he got from Bollywood was the message of “love and spirit’, and that is what he carries through his life and his work.
In interviews from the early 2000s, when Moulin Rougewas released and Luhrmann’s Bollywood connection first gained notice, Luhrman said he and his wife went to see a Bollywood movie on impulse while on a research trip to India in 1993 and were swept away by the emotions of the characters- and of the audience. But he had not yet met members of the Bollywood film community. In 2010, he went on a motorcycling trip from Jaipur to Bombay accompanied by his artist friend Vincent Fantauzzo. In Bombay, Fantauzzo and Luhrman participated in an art show, attended by starlets and industry hangers-on. He and his friend then made a pilgrimage to Jalsa, which is Amitabh Bachchan’s large family compound outside the city.
As Bachchan tells it, the artist Vincent Fantauzzo was “doing some work for him” and brought along his friend Baz. An international artist working for Bachchan isn’t unusual: as part of the recent celebrations for Bachchan’s 70th birthday, there was an exhibit of 70 works by 70 leading artists inspired by him. Luhrmann and Fantauzzo did in fact collaborate on a portrait of Bachchan coming out of their visit, which was exhibited at a Hong Kong art festival and later sold to raise money for an Indian charity.
In a recent interview, Bachchan contrasted this experience with the attitude of Danny Boyle when making Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle merely had his office call to ask for legal release of images, which resulted in Bachchan politely ignoring his film. Bachchan has been honored by kings, so I imagine he expected a little more respect. Lurhmann approached him with an appropriate amount. Luhrman went to Bachchan’s home and spoke with him personally, following up with regular phone calls and discussions. Luhrman has stated that if Leonardo DiCaprio is a Prince, then Amitabh Bachchan is “the king.”
Luhrmann’s respect spills out into the way Bachchan’s character is presented in his film. Wolfsheim is introduced with a dramatic spin towards the camera in a barber’s chair. In his small scene, he is the center, both of the frame, and the conversation. As he told the Indian news source AVS during a brief red carpet interview at the New York premiere, when asked if any on set knew who he was, “No, but I did.”
Filming it this way was also a canny decision on the part of the director since, even across cultural barriers, Bachchan still effortlessly dominates the camera. On the red carpet, the screenwriter Greg Pearce mentions this effect, saying that although they may have never heard of him before, as soon as Bachchan appeared on set, “the legend grew.” In terms of the narrative of the film, this presentation works to support it. Meyer Wolfsheim is pivotal to the plot. Without Wolfsheim’s money and support, there would be no Gatsby. And Wolfsheim is a character aware of his own power and importance. It makes sense to showcase him during his time onscreen.
But to say that the meaning of Bachchan’s casting is only related to Luhrmann’s message for the audience, is to ignore Bachchan’s own agency in the matter. Bachchan not only agreed to take the part, his first outside of India, he wouldn’t even accept payment for it. So, what motivated him?
In 2009, there were two brutal attacks on Indian students in Australia. Sravan Kumar Theerthala was stabbed in the head with an ice-pick while Rajesh Kumar suffered burns from a bomb attack. These incidents were part of a larger pattern in Australia of hate crimes labeled “curry bashing”. The situation was worsened by the police response, which focused on advising students not to be “soft targets.” Don’t speak your native language in public, hide your accents, don’t be seen using expensive electronics. In other words, don’t look like the Orientalist ideal of a wealthy and weak Asian. Luhrmann said that the reason he and his friend went to India in 2010 is because “We were rather disgusted with the situation (in Australia). Vincent’s wife is Indian and around Christmas we decided we had to do something.”
When Bachchan agreed to meet with Luhrmann, it was a gesture of courtesy towards a fellow artist, but it was also a political statement. Bachchan’s own close friend, Bal Thackaray, the head of the jingoistic Shiv Sena group, had just called for a ban on Australian cricket players in Bombay because “[o]ur boys are being stabbed, burnt at, and shot at in that country” and therefore it was wrong for Indian cricketers to play with them in harmony. Bachchan’s agreement to work in Australia at that moment in time, and to work for an Australian, was a very big deal.
Bachchan may be playing a stereotype. Luhrmannn may have cast him because, as a South Asian, he is “really exotic”. But, at the same time, their collaboration is a moment of two people reaching out across barriers and trying to find peace through art. As Luhrmann says, it is a “gesture of friendship between our two countries”
Margaret Redlich is a graduate student in Media and Cinema studies at DePaul University and host of a weekly Bollywood movie nights.
Even though several marsupial families lived in the Americas before the last ice age, opossums are the only ones still remaining. Thanks to their opportunistic omnivorous diet and high rate of reproduction, opossums have survived in their current form for millenia, even despite their extremely low encephalization quotient. While rote brain volume does not in and of itself determine intelligence of an animal, mammals with smaller encephalization quotients tend to be more specialized and quickly speciated when hardships are encountered (such as ice ages). Opossums in the Americas generally have an EQ around 1/5 that of the raccoons.
Didelphidae (Western hemisphere opossums) have very short lifespans, generally living less than two years in the wild, which is very unusual for a mammal of their size (up to the size of a large housecat). However, they can generally produce two successful litters of up to 13 young each in their short lives.
Australian opossums, while distantly related to those in the Americas, have furry tails, larger brains, and are much less urbanized. They also bear fewer young, live at least twice as long, and are less than half the size of the largest North American opossums.
Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire Naturelle. Charles d’Orbigny, 1849.
There is an odd ice-cream truck making the rounds in the far reaches of Queens. It sells Tweety Bird ice pops and frozen SpongeBob SquarePants treats (with gumballs for eyes) like the rest, but instead of blasting the conventional — or counterfeit — version of the Mr. Softee jingle or a demented "Turkey in the Straw," this one only puts out a depressed, tinkly version of Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns." No one, not even the truck's driver, knows why. [Glorified Tomato via WyckoffHeights.com, Related]
Florida teen Kaitlyn Hunt, who has been charged with a felony for having a sexual relationship with her younger girlfriend, has rejected a plea deal that would have included two years of house arrest and having to register as a sex offender. A statement released by her lawyers argued that she is being selectively prosecuted for having been in a same-sex relationship when she turned 18:
Our client is a courageous teenager who is choosing not to accept the current plea offer by the State of Florida.
This is a situation of two teenagers who happen to be of the same sex involved in a relationship. If this case involved a boy and girl, there would be no media attention to this case. [...]
If this incident occurred 108 days earlier when she was 17, we wouldn’t even be here. [...]
Along with Kaitlyn and her family, we are going to fight to have the law changed so no other teenager finds themselves in this same position created by the State of Florida and prosecuted unfairly.
Kaitlyn’s father, Steven Hunt Jr., explained this week that the charges seem to stem entirely from the parents of her girlfriend, who knew of the relationship, but waited until Kaitlyn turned 18 to object. According to Hunt, “Kate has offered to permanently cease contact and leave the state if charges are dropped, but that offer has been rejected by the prosecutor and the girlfriend’s parents.”
Over 270,000 people have signed a Change.org petition started by Hunt calling on Assistant State Attorney Brian Workman to stop Kaitlyn’s prosecution. The ACLU of Florida has condemned the prosecution, pointing out that it’s “a life sentence for behavior by teenagers that is all too common” and that “one cannot seriously maintain that Kaitlyn’s behavior was predatory.”
"The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can. He must. Not can: must! Because he has this commandment within him. Instead, this ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God. That we can kill in the name of God. And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.”
“Instead,” the Pope continued, “the Lord has created us in His image and likeness, and has given us this commandment in the depths of our heart: do good and do not do evil”:
"The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”
Google Translate says that the caption on this image is Japanese for "Bill of surprised frontispiece monster world." I can't really hazard any guesses beyond that, but hey, monster money!
Being public on the internet means having to interact with many different sorts. Recently I've been having to deal with a heckler on Facebook. The heckler is actually of a particular type. I'm still trying to learn genetics at this point in my life, so I don't propose to assert that my opinions are beyond dispute. But there is a variety of discussion which is not fruitful.
An interesting aspect of talking to people about genetics is that totally novice intelligent lay people are often ver
“Students announced the filing at a press conference in New York yesterday afternoon, along with students from the University of California at Berkeley, who are also filing a Clery complaint against their school. In addition, students from the University of Southern California and Swarthmore College announced that they were filing Title IX complaints. Gloria Allred, a Los Angeles-based women’s rights lawyer, attended the conference and represents Occidental College students, who filed a Title IX complaint on April 18.”
At one unidentified location, there was a report that a mixture of rubbing alcohol and caramel coloring was presented to customers as scotch whisky, and the same establishment allegedly served murky water as top-shelf liquor.
I always thought that it was time for bowties to be a little more happy and spontaneous. The traditional ones as we know them are already almost shaped like a butterfly. So why shouldn’t the beautiful graphical and gracious designs of butterflies replace the traditional plain ones?
The ties can be made to order, just pick one of your most favourite or fitting butterflies for the moment you want to wear it and I’ll make them for you. They are each individually drawn, painted (with textile paint) and sewn, stitched, precisely worked on. Don’t hesitate to message me! (here on Tumblr, or charlotte-hofman@hotmail.com)
(The name “Vlinderdas” is also a Dutch pun, for we call the bow tie literally a butterfly tie)
Kiera Wilmot, the Florida high school student who was expelled from her school after an unauthorized science experiment was misperceived as a weapon (at least for purposes of arrest and charging), won't be going to jail. She will, though, be going to Space Camp, thanks to a crowdfunding campaign started by author and former NASA engineer Homer Hickham. All charges against her have been dropped.
Florida teen Kaitlyn Hunt, who has been 
