Dear friends!
I am happy to announce that we are now looking for candidates for next year’s Executive Committee of the Student Senate!
Student Senate is the governing body of the undergraduate students. Student Senate is a forum for student voice, and is responsible for allocating the student activities fee to student groups across campus. Each year during the end of the spring semester, we elect five students for the Executive Committee of next year’s Student Senate.
The positions are: Chair, Vice-Chair, Treasurer, Parliamentarian and Students for Student Scholarship Fund (SSSF) Chair. The Executive Committee facilitates weekly meetings, handles the logistics of Student Senate, serves as a liaison between staff, faculty and students, and communicates regularly with the student body.
If you are interested in running or have questions about any of these positions, please email studentsenate@gm.slc.edu and we will send you an election packet.
Election packets are due back in Student Affairs by 5pm on Monday, April 20th.
Elections will be held on April 25th!
always,
Michelle Lewin
Student Senate Chair
Class of 2009!!
I draft this letter to you expressing my dissatisfaction and reserved optimism. For a majority of this year we have been plagued by vague, counterproductive buzz words, i.e. “consistency” and “transparency”. We choose to rally behind personal objectives instead of reflecting the wants and desires of our constituents.
Ignoring the fact our “open” meetings seldom feature non-Senate students—despite the accessible meeting time—we fail to recognize our elected privilege. It is crucial that we remember the student body voted every one of us into office, we were not self-appointed. Rather than acting on their behalf, we make our decisions based on personal beliefs, but our heart and gut are not our constituency.
We are out of touch and out of control. We need to reintegrate student opinion and welcome discussion outside of the meeting time. The opinionated student body’s interests remain absent from our agendas. Internal dynamics, although structurally important, do not reflect the general concern of the larger student body, especially when left unexplained. When our discussions endlessly revolve around our own conflicts, we fall victim to circumlocutory ramblings.
This needs to change. The most recent issue of the Sadie Lou Standard addresses our ineffectual year. The blasé attitudes of the other articles directly reflect our inability to connect with our constituents. However, while the Standard announces the problem, it offers no viable remedy.
Here is how we do it. First and foremost, our goals need to be tenable. Attention must focus on the micro issues rather than the macro. All of our small accomplishments will amount to noteworthy productivity. Please take “hate speech” as an example. Instead of concentrating directly on SLC Anon, we decided to target hate speech. Our taskforce did not address either issue, and the website was removed because of Terms of Use violation. Hate speech still exists.
I propose the list below as the most immediate and accessible forms of implementing the necessary metamorphosis.
1. In accordance with standard procedure, to show equality, have Senate attend Student Life and request Pub Table space for regular solicitation of agenda topics from passers-by.
2. Reconfigure the next month’s set agenda topics to directly reflect the pertinent concerns.
3. Post our week’s agenda around campus similar to an advertisement for a dance.
4. Host Meet-the-Senators events. Provide free food. Order food late because people will stay. This does not mean follow current by-laws, and host exclusive class-events. This means welcome the entire student body once a month and just have a big social*.
We need to make our presence known: emails are easy to delete, people are difficult to ignore. As Senators, we act as direct mechanisms of change on this campus. Let’s start now.
If you’ve been shopping around for new smartphone technology lately (or if you’ve just been hanging around any Verizon shop), you’ve probably noticed BlackBerry’s got its own answer to the iPhone. It’s called the Storm, and it’s been designed with the iPhone-seeking, but BlackBerry-savvy consumer in mind.
In today’s New York Times, there’s a two-page editorial filled with readers’ reactions to the new product. But nothing beats the quirky, inaugural Fawkward podcast, where Adam Stepinski and Sadie Lou’s former Managing Director Nevan Scott weigh in on what might become everyone’s chosen stocking stuffer:
The well-known website I Can Has Cheezburger? has produced yet another branched-off collection of captioned pictures: Once Upon a Win. It provides user-submitted photos and videos of relics from the past, including (so far) original Chuck Taylors, Duck Hunt, Fun Dip, and Bob Ross, that painter guy with the afro who was sometimes on TV.
Of course, some fads come back into style years later—one cannot walk across the SLC campus without seeing at least one pair of Converses. Thanks to the amazing innovation that is the Internet, games like Duck Hunt can still be found. And old-school candy, like Fun Dip, bubblegum cigarettes, Ring Pops, and rock candy, is still available online and at some candy stores.
Due to the holidays, the blog’s been a little slow as of late, but there’s nothing like a relaxing animated video to kick things back into gear (especially when Conference Week is just around the corner):
If you’re like me, that statement probably has you scratching your head a bit. According to the book series-turned-film phenomenon Twilight, vampire-death-by-sunlight is pretty much…well, dead news. Other myths now include garlic, holy water, and that pesky lack of a mirror reflection.
The modern reworkings of the genre are traceable to a few different factors. For one thing, rewriting the rules is just good storytelling. Upending conventions lets you surprise the audience. You thought garlic was going to ward off the boss vampire? Sorry. You planned to kill him with that little piece of sharpened wood? Good luck. These days, you’ll see vampires slapping crosses out of the way more often than shrinking in fear.
Not sure what Buffy would think, but at least the sex appeal factor still remains…
Many children show a talent for singing, acting, or some other high-profile Hollywood careers at a very early age. But what happens when they grow up? Some lucky celebrities manage to make a decent living for themselves as adults, whether they stick with acting or singing or move on to something more “normal.” Most end up as has-beens living off the money they made as children. The lucky few, including Haley Joel Osment of “I see dead people” fame, Natalie Portman, and Britney Spears and others from the Mickey Mouse Club have moved on to bigger and better things (though it’s slightly doubtful just how successful Britney has been, depending on how you look at it).
The blog Former Child Star Central, run by Joal Ryan and called “an information mecca” by The London Times, keeps one up to date on the latest child star news – where are they now? FCS Central can tell you. It even has a convenient list of tags, from celebrities’ names to television shows and movies to “babies,” “did porn,” and “drugs.”
Today, Wednesday, November 19th, the Coalition for Community Respect (CCR) will be holding a meeting to discuss the college’s attitude toward on-campus smoking. While the Committee on Student Life has weighed in on the issue of smokers’ “rights” over the past few years, and the potential for a campus-wide ban looms over our heads, CCR believes “that through creating an open discussion among all members of the community, we can achieve a mutual respect between smokers and non smokers alike.”
If you would like to vocalize your opinion or simply seek to know what’s going on, join CCR in the Film Viewing Room (in Reisinger) from 6 to 8 pm. Complimentary snacks will be provided.
Can’t make it to the meeting? Contact CCR for more information.
If you’ve seen or read anything about the new Macbooks, you’ll know they were designed with the environment in mind. While Apple’s “green” goals aren’t exactly under-the-radar, the rest of the technology industry’s eagerness to jump on the bandwagon has been.
The other day, however, Wired published an article outlining the development, pointing to the recent recession as a main cause. Will the United States follow in the footsteps of Europe? Only time will tell:
Other than saving money, the industry-wide shift toward cleaner tech is also being driven by new laws regarding electronic waste. In 2003, the European Union passed the Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive Act, which requires manufacturers to take responsibility for recycling their products after consumers discard them. In other words, if Sony sells a TV to a European customer, Sony has to take the TV back and recycle it at the end of the device’s life. While the directive is only directly affecting Europe, it’s spreading to the United States and Asia, too: Many big tech manufacturers operate internationally, and it’d be both inefficient and costly to make an eco-friendly product for Europe and a dirtier version of the same gadget for another country.
If you’re a cinephile like me (or at least a design geek), you probably know what it’s like to salivate over a good title sequence. Whether the credits come first or last, it doesn’t matter: what’s important is the execution.
Fortunately, Art of The Title shares the sentiment. From popular fare like Napoleon Dynamite to obscure and cultish hits like Ginger Snaps, Art of The Title provides each visitor with a snapshot of the best title sequences around today. The best part? You can watch them all, then read contributors’ takes on art, form, and everything in between. Some even include brief analysis.