Posts by Connor McGuigan

At BlogDH we take our sloth videos seriously. No commentary or unnecessary music tolerated–just quick slow-and-dirty sloth action. Above is a playlist of eight slothpicks we believe represent our tastes.

It’s Friday afternoon. You don’t go to the Rock to not watch sloth vids.

This morning in Rhode Island: It was pretty nice out. I took off my jacket on the way to class and got a little chilly. It was worth the experience.

This morning in Russia: A 10-ton meteor streaking across the early-dawn sky at 19 miles PER SECOND exploded and sent giant chunks of flaming space rock hurtling to the ground, injuring hundreds.

Read about it here, watch the videos here.

While the Avon continues to squeeze the life out of Quartet, The Ivy Film festival will be showcasing yet another unreleased, buzz-worthy film this week. Girl Rising is the powerful story of nine different girls from nine different countries that fight for an education in the face of adversity. Faced with arranged marriages, child slavery, and other tragic injustices, the girls see education as a way to escape and change their oppressive living conditions. Wednesday night’s 6:30 screening will consist of a segment of the film focusing on one of the girls’ story.

Girl Rising is the project of 10×10, a social action campaign aiming to communicate the importance of educating girls in developing nations. It focuses its message around the feature film, which, helmed by Academy Award-nominated director Richard E. Robbins, promises to be well-executed and thought-provoking.

After the segment’s screening, Holly Gordon ’93 (executive producer of 10×10) will speak about the film and her work. She’ll surely share some enlightening thoughts, but if that’s not enough to entice you over to Metcalf Auditorium, watch the trailer below, complete with a Bon Iver cover and somber voice-overs. It’s not often that tears are shed at a sneak peak, but I’d bet on this one getting emotional.

Image via. 

Brown’s creative culture can be tough to get a grip on. With so many talented artists pursuing diverse passions, some great material goes unseen or unheard. The Brown Beat, Blog’s latest column, seeks to remedy this. Through highlighting students and groups of all artistic disciplines and promoting collaborative projects, The Brown Beat will serve as an informational hub for student art at Brown. 

When Chae Lin Suh ’15 heard last semester that the Hillel Gallery had an upcoming opening, she pounced. Ten sophomore visual artists received her email. They quickly signed on, and without any notions of concept or direction, she had the makings of an exhibit.

A few months later, the pieces are finished and a thoughtful show is ready for its debut. HALFWAY, a collaborative exhibition between 11 sophomores, opens tonight at 8pm in Hillel. As the title suggests, the show explores being at a halfway point in life. As Chae puts it, it deals with the “space in between or the time in the middle.” The show features 13 original pieces and one recently-created collaborative effort. Check out the making of the latter here:

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Every year, sometime in mid-April, nearly 3,000 students log on with nervous excitement and sign off in shock and horror. The Brown Admitted Student Facebook group is a right of passage for prospective College Hill-dwellers, a frightening but ultimately misleading first glimpse at your classmates. These groups are, for the first few months, home to excruciating showmanship, awkward smalltalk, and strange requests. For posterity and humor’s sake, Accepted! 2017 has collected some of the funniest and most cringe-worthy posts from admitted students groups across the country. Check out the submissions culled from Brown’s Class of 2017 group. Some of these might look familiar…

Eat free or dine trying.
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Middle East Studies Luncheon Seminar
12-1 p.m.
Watson Institute, Birkelund Boardroom

Nukhet Sandal, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Studies, will be leading a seminar entitled “Public Theologies of Citizenship in the Middle East: Revisiting the Turkish Model.” It’s not clear what food is being served, but luncheon can mean only good things. RSVP to CMES@brown.edu.

Pizza and Applied Math DUG
5:30-6:30 p.m.
Barus and Holley 153

The Applied Math DUG is hosting this informal chat about career and class options and for students concentrating in or considering Applied Math. Free pizza will be provided.  

Education DUG Presents: Classes, Chatting and Snacking
7 p.m.
Barus Hall

If you’re interested in the Education department and want to get the scoop on classes, professors and workloads from undergrad concentrators, go to Barus Hall at 7p.m. If you’re interested in “tasty treats,” Barus Hall might also be your evening destination of choice.

Our school’s social activity online becomes increasingly weird and intriguing with each new outlet. First we took the step from innocent eyeing to full-on baring. When that got out of hand, we reverted to anonymously complimenting. We got tired of that, so we moved on to criticizing and eventually admiring. Now, as a new semester brings new possibilities of online entertainment, it looks like we’re about to start…scrambling? If you haven’t already, meet Brown Scramblers, the newest entry in Brown students’ eccentric online lineup.

At this point, the whole thing is still shrouded in mystery. The title alludes to the well-documented Senior Scramble phenomenon. The profile’s 515 friends (hopefully all Brown students) are currently staying tuned for the “Big Event.” Its “About Me” and cover photo make it unclear whether it’s referring to sexual exploration or eggs. It turned 21 last week.

We’ve heard a lot of the buzz and theories about Brown Scramblers over at BlogHQ, but we’re still not sure of the profile’s purpose or what this “Big Event” during spring is. Until we figure it out, we’ll enjoy playing the odds. Here are some of our best bets on Brown Scramblers’ endgame:

An event for sexually adventurous seniors to meet each other, make eggs, and make out upside down while wearing beanies- 3:1
The most sound bet based on data gathered from the Facebook page.

A Brown speed-dating event- 7:1 [Read more →]

Max Wiseltier: Lord of Chaos

It’s happened to all of us at least once. You get an exciting group email, and in your rush to respond to the sender you accidentally hit “reply all” and notify a whole bunch of random Brown students that you’re “TOTALLY in!!!” They can be tough to live down, but these reply-all mishaps are usually inconsequential. Unless you’re Max Wiseltier.

Max was one of the nearly 40,000 NYU students who received an e-mail regarding a paperless option for tuition payment. Turning to his mom for advice (classic Wiseltier), he sent out a simple email reading “do you want me to do this?” To his horror, he soon found that he had hit reply all and sent his response to every student at NYU. That’s a lot of students–39,979 to be exact. To put it in perspective, a similar amount of e-mails would result if a Brown student tried replying to ResLife and instead sent out an email to a quarter of Providence’s inhabitants.

With Max’s mishap came the revelation amongst students that emails could be sent to every NYU student. Naturally, a bloodbath ensued. The reply-alls started innocently (“sorry think you have the wrong person”), but they soon took a silly turn:

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Breaking news: the internet is weird. The Useless Web has done a fine job in collecting the web’s most strange, pointless, and seizure-inducing content from the weirdest corners of the interwebz for your amusement and procrastination. If the creators of StumbleUpon and eBaum’s World joined forces and took LSD, it would probably look something like this.

After an exhausting saga riddled with false conclusions, the election cycle finally comes to a definitive close tonight. This means no more speculating, debating or anxious poll-poring. It’s time to stop focusing on binders of women. All that’s left to do is vote and wait for the results.

But where’s the fun in that? We have only a few precious hours left to enjoy the often absurd, always entertaining theater that is the American Presidential election–drink it in! If you’re a hardened poll junkie, revel in your final chance to extrapolate from the data found on sites like the no-nonsense RealClearPolitics. For hardcore economics majors, here is a more detailed comparison of the candidates’ economic plans. If you’re a prospective political scientist, peruse the analysis of intelligent blogs like The Monkey Cage and FiveThirtyEight. Use your last chance to consider every possible outcome on interactive sites like 512 Paths to the White House and 270ToWin. Finally, once the results start coming in and you’re a few beers into your election drinking game, you’ll want to catch Jon and Steve’s streaming live coverage. This only happens once every four years–take advantage of it. And feel free to add your favorite election-related time-waster in a comment!

Note: Guilt-free usage of these time-wasters is only permitted to those who actually voted. 

Image via.