Perhaps you’ve seen them before, out on the Midway Plaisance on a crisp autumn afternoon with coolers open and medieval banners flying. And perhaps you’ve been wondering who these men and women clad head-to-toe in armor and medieval crests might be. They are proud members of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), which began in 1966 in Berkeley, California, when a group of friends decided to hold a medieval tournament. The idea caught on, and the society has since expanded to include nineteen “kingdoms” spanning the entire globe. But the society does not confine itself to tournaments and battling. Many participants dance, sing, sew, and cook, all in a medieval fashion. Read the rest of this entry »

Upon hearing that Chicago’s Queer Intercollegiate Alliance was planning to stage a flash mob on the steps of the Art Institute, I was instantly reminded of the scene in Gus Van Sant’s movie “Milk” in which a furious horde of gay rights activists spills out into the streets of San Francisco and sends a trolley careening off of its rails. So imagine my disappointment when I arrived at the Institute at 6pm last Thursday, only to find that the “flash mob” consisted of about thirty blue-lipped college students (a bit less than the 550 who had replied “attending” on Facebook) forming a disjointed, shivering rainbow and being corralled to one side of the steps by slightly amused museum guards. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Saturday, the University of Chicago’s Uncommon Fund committee saw presentations on fifteen proposals that have made it to the final round of projects. This Friday, the committee will decide which of these proposals will receive a portion of the $40,000 grant. Fourth-year Connie Ma, who presented her project, “Fortune Favors,” emphasizes that “the Uncommon Fund was created to support projects and initiatives that without this money, wouldn’t really otherwise exist.” Ma seeks to involve the student body and the larger Hyde Park community in an effort to create witty fortune cookies, which will be distributed in student-run coffee shops, the admissions office, and neighborhood restaurants. “You don’t need to add ‘in bed’ to it to make it funny,” she promises. Read the rest of this entry »

The University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt (“Scav Hunt”) is frequently touted as the world’s largest scavenger hunt. The hunt is a four-day long event, famously ridiculous and fun, with teams made up of university affiliates—mainly undergraduates, but with some representation from graduate students and alumni. Last year’s list of 277 items included an El train quartet, an invented “Queens” cocktail, and a blog entry in clay, wood, paper, and electronic forms. And these were a few of the tamer items.

Scav Hunt inspires such devotion and obsession among its participants that it makes sense that it would motivate offshoots. And it has birthed at least one: the brainchild of Sebastian Ellefson (BA’04), Courtney Prokopas (BA’06), and Steven Lucy (BA’06), Finders Keepers is a company that brands itself as “the premier organization for scavenger hunts, road trips team building, and event planning.” Read the rest of this entry »

Jack Mayer is nervous. Leaning on a metal desk in the one-room office of Fire Escape Films in the basement of the University of Chicago’s Ida Noyes Hall, surrounded by cameras, cables, and computers, the young film director and fourth-year college student holds the brim of a tropical print ball cap and stares at the floor, thinking very hard. Mayer and his cast and crew of fifteen have spent eighteen months and thirteen grand turning his screenplay “A Girl Named Clyde” into a feature-length film. The movie is supposed to premiere in about two hours, upstairs, in the theater of the UofC’s Doc Films. Shot in high-definition, the film’s digital file is so big that the Doc Films system may not be able to handle it, and there’s no time to write a DVD. The search is on for a small cord that might be able to connect the film to the Doc system, but Mayer wants a backup plan. In a slight Georgia accent he sighs, “We gotta find ourselves a projector…” Read the rest of this entry »

A doctor’s office is a place where unpleasant scenes are played out and originality is not welcome. Compromising procedures and performances occur. There is little room for mimicry and things are often uncomfortable. But “Med School Rock,” an album recorded and produced by University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine student John Paro, is not a work of sterile white rooms and bedside manners. While the album, divorced from context, has an effect similar to that of a steel medical tool on the skin, this knee-jerk reaction is drastically reduced upon considering the circumstances of the album’s conception. Read the rest of this entry »

University of Chicago alum and progressive activist Heather Booth has taken on what she calls a “David and Goliath” fight for financial reform. She recently became executive director of Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), a coalition of national and state organizations that have united to improve the regulations of the financial sector. Financial reform will be the next item in a long list of issues she has tackled during her career. Though she has relatively little background in the area, she agreed to take on the job because, she says. “Here we’re facing a crisis, and we need to do something about it.” Despite often being initially uncertain or intimidated, she has been plunging into crises of similar magnitude since her time at the University of Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Bladt says he has a penchant for traveling “by the seat of his pants.” The idea of buying a plane ticket and figuring out the rest of the trip once he gets there is very appealing to him. Next spring, Bladt plans to embark on an expedition with three of his friends that promises to be more extensive than any he’s been on previously: the first trip around the world in an electric car. The group has titled their expedition Project EVIE (EV for Electric Vehicle) and for the last several months, they have been involved in rigorous planning, a search for sponsorship, and ongoing research in preparation. As Bladt anticipates the trip, he depicts it as simultaneously paying homage to the spirit of self-reliant, pants-seat travel and following a carefully mapped-out course, contingent on the support of other people. Read the rest of this entry »