Posts by Melanie Johnson

Taken with Vignette, not Instagram.

I’ve seen a handful of these signs around campus today but have no idea where they came from. If you’ve seen other funny ones or know the origin of these, let us know in the comments. I won’t be too disappointed if I don’t find out, though — I like the idea of an anonymous litter-fighting vigilante running around, keeping us clean.

If you’re participating in the Housing Lottery (aka Shelter Games), you’ve got until Wednesday the 11th (numbers 1 through 460) or Tuesday the 17th (461 through 697) to map out your strategy. Which (at least for my freshman and sophomore groups of 11 and 8 people, respectively) meant contingency plans upon contingency plans upon contingency plans. Historically, it has proven a huge pain in the ass to navigate the huge amount of room info, past results, and other pertinent information from the Res Council website: there’s just so much.

Fortunately, some students created a tool to make the process at least 10,000 times easier (actual mathematical figure). Nathan Malkin ’13 and Sumner Warren ’13 have developed Cella over the past semester as a successor to their CS32 project Domus, a desktop app with similar functionality created with Miya Schneider ’13. This tool is incredibly versatile as well as informative. It uses a database of rooms and your preferences (only want to live on Main Campus? Want to live anywhere but Pembroke? Know what dorm you want to be in?) to provide you with tons of options for a group of a specified size, also taking into account your lottery number in comparison with past results in order to rank the probability of each room. It also provides links to floor plans and other info specific to each dorm (gender neutrality, apartment rate, etc.). If you want to play around with different breakdowns of a large group, create as many separate searches in separate tabs as you want. Check out their About page to see what else the tool can do, or better yet, go forth and experiment. The design is incredibly intuitive and easy to use.

May the odds be ever in your favor.

While we’re waiting to hear who BCA scored for Spring Weekend 2012 (April 20 & 21), here’s a fairly complete round-up of all of the recent rumors from Spotted@Brown, strewn about amid Kony debate, casual hookup requests and passive aggressive noise complaints. I looked up each act’s tour schedule on Songkick to gauge its feasibility:

Ludacris is playing in Alabama in May and at Bonnaroo (TN) in June. Solid 5/10 for plausibility.

Yeasayer‘s only upcoming gig is a music festival in the UK in July (plus they played here in 2009). Fleet Foxes last played in September and don’t currently have anything scheduled. Diplo is touring heavily now through August and doesn’t have any solo performances scheduled for the few weeks around SW… but his project Major Lazer is performing in the UK on both nights.   Mike Posner has a March date and Bamboozle, but I’m going with a 0/10 AKA impossible since Diplo can’t be in two places at once…

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“SUPER DEADLINE DAY” sounds like it should be a lot cooler than what it really is, which is the deadline for submission of various housing preferences, most notably Program Housing and fraternity/sorority housing. According to ResLife,  Super Deadline Day is also the last day you can request to live on a same-sex floor, even though forms were already due for other special interests like substance-free and over-21 housing (… what dorm is that? How hard do they party?). Super Deadline Day is this Thursday (March 8th), so if you’re considering one of these options, figure it out in the next few days!

If you’re living on campus next year, consider bookmarking the Residential Calendar 2012 so you don’t forget any deadlines in the housing lottery frenzy.

Floating around the Internet recently has been the story of a young entrepreneur, Kellyann Wargo, who has made a legitimate business out of shuttling UMich Ann Arbor students home after “successful” nights out. A ride costs $5 and comes with a free bottle of water, a $5 off Plan B coupon, and “a complimentary high five.”

Wargo was often sought out in the wee hours by her friends, as she was one of the only girls with a car. When she realized the enormous demand for early morning, post-hookup rides home, she decided to turn her de facto cab service into a business venture.  In addition to the video/article linked above, you can watch her interview with the Heritage Ann Arbor here.

Anyone with a car want to take up the torch here?  One might argue that Brown’s campus is too small to have a market for a cross-campus cab service, to which I would respond: “Perkins.” Maybe this can simply turn into a SafeWalk-like WalkofShameWalk — complete with flip flops and an oversized sweatshirt.

In honor of reading period’s kickoff, we are making the transition from time-wasters to study breaks. Same deal, just more of them (and a different name). Good luck studying (and breaking)!

Today, part three of In Focus‘s photo series “2011: The Year In Photos” was posted.  This is the final installment of the three-day series, and you can view all 120(!) images by starting here and working your way through the galleries.  Ranging from funny to powerful to downright upsetting, these beautiful photos of interesting events, each accompanied by 2-3 sentences of backstory, are all fascinating.

Sarah Kay ’10 has published an illustrated version of her poem “B”, the piece with which she opened her TED talk in March.  The poem, dedicated to a hypothetical future daughter, is poignant, funny, unbelievably wise beyond Kay’s years and hard to summarize in one sentence — which is why you should listen to it yourself.  Available for only $6, the beautiful hardcover features illustrations by Sophia Janowitz, Kay’s oldest friend and a 2010 Yale graduate.  With nothing but five-star reviews so far, “B” is #70 on Amazon’s bestsellers list and rising, surpassing even Tina Fey’s autobiography.  You can buy the book and read a brief interview with Kay here.

Many of Kay’s spoken word poems can be found online. Kay first performed for a national audience when she recited an original poem entitled “Hands” on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam in 2007.  Since then, she has become a YouTube sensation; her videos regularly receive upward of 100,000 hits, and the recording of her performance on HBO boasts over 700,000. She has performed in the UK, India, the Czech Republic and South Africa. Joined by Phil Kaye ’10, Kay co-directs Project V.O.I.C.E., a nonprofit that brings spoken word poetry to grade school students.

Kay is currently working toward an MAT in Secondary English Education at Brown.

If you’re like me, you want to stay inside until April. But you also want to eat some food, and honestly the 20-foot trek from New Dorm B to Jo’s is 20 feet too many…

Instead of scratching your head for an hour and then deciding “screw it” and getting a Spicy With, check out foodler.  Not only does it tell you who’s open and who’s delivering (with user-submitted reviews so you can weed out the good from the bad!), but it also keeps you up-to-date on discounts and rebates.

BRB, getting me some Chinese with a free order of crab rangoons.

There was too much crazy to be contained in one post.

8 Nov ’09, 9:49 p.m.:  Two female Brown students stated they were on the basement level of the Rockefeller Library studying in a work station when they noticed a middle-aged male talking on a cell phone. When one of the females took a closer look, she realized the male had his penis exposed and was looking directly at her. The subject fled on foot. Officers searched the area with negative results. … Rock masturbator, John Street masturbator.  Clearly, masturbators love hipsters.

18 Sept ’09, 2:26 p.m.:  Complainant reported that half of her ice-cream birthday cake was stolen from a refrigerator in a common area in Sidney Frank Hall. The incident occurred sometime between 3 p.m. on Sept. 17 and 2 p.m. on Sept. 18. She also reported that other food items were also stolen from the refrigerator in that area in the past couple of days and months prior, that belong to other students that work in the labs on that floor. The common area room does not have a lock on that door and access can be gained by anyone. … What was I supposed to do when I saw half of a birthday cake in a fridge?! [Read more →]

Sunday night, we got a crime alert e-mail about a robbery on campus. Crime can be scary, but sometimes it’s funny! Here are some amusing crime reports gathered from old BDH crime logs.

22 Oct ’10, 1:11 p.m.:  A custodian stated he witnessed a Brown student attempting to break into the washing machine in the Perkins Hall laundry room with a butter knife. The student admitted to the officer that she was attempting to break into the washer with a butter knife to take quarters to do her wash. A check of the coin box was made and no damage was observed. The case has been turned over to the Office of Student Life. … Maybe if she didn’t live so far away from everything, she wouldn’t have had to resort to such drastic measures.

27 Sept ’09, 2:16 p.m.: A resident counselor in Bronson House reported that at 10 a.m. she noticed graffiti depicting images of male genitalia and some words drawn in black permanent marker on a door of a room. She stated that she waited until 2 p.m. to speak with one of the residents of the room to find out if there was any reasoning behind the markings and found there was not. Neither roommate wished to file a complaint. Facilities Management was notified of the graffiti. There are no suspects at this time. … No reasoning behind art?  How pedestrian.   [Read more →]