Posted in Arts

Live Music is Fun - A Year in Review

Suppie. As the year comes to a close I feel it's appropriate to reflect on the past (school) year, and what better way for me to muse on the past 9 months (or so) than to do a recap of the best concerts I've been to this year. So I will.

Evan’s Reasons to Love Tufts #2: I’m an Economics Major with a Poetry Class

Alternate title: "My Poetry Professor Wears a Bow Tie to Class"

Did you really think I could spend all of my time thinking about equilibria (yes, Microsoft Word, that is a word…), "Fundamental Theorems," and, worst of all, how my generation will be the first in generations to have a lower quality of life than our parents?  Nah – I’d get too depressed (just writing that sentence necessitated the eating of two Lindt [also a word, Mr. Gates] truffles). 

To escape the equatorial doldrums of economic doom, I’m taking a poetry class this semester.

I didn’t expect the kind of parody of a poetry class that one might imagine from Mean Girls or Superbad, but I also didn’t expect Tufts' English department, with which I have no experience, to be so… awesome.  And awesome truly is the word for it.  I stand in awe of my professor: he is as adept at pulling a line of verse from my mind as a well-trained dentist is at pulling a tooth from a sedated seven year-old.

The class is small, discussion-based...

Music = ♥

If you had to choose to be either deaf or blind, which would you choose? I'd choose blind in a heartbeat. I can't even imagine a world without sound, let alone without music. Music has always been a very big part of my life. I learned how to play the recorder in grade school like pretty much everyone does, but it was in the fourth grade that I was offered the change to learn how to play the violin and my love of music has been steady growing since that day. I had the pleasure of going to the School of the Arts for middle and high school. It's a public school in my hometown, but it does require an audition to get in. I developed my violin skills as well as learning how to play the piano.

Once I came to college I didn't have as much time to play my instruments. I was in the orchestra at my first school, but decided not to bring my violin with me to Tufts. Last year I took piano lessons for a semester and last semester I took jazz voice lessons. Even though I might not have enough time to...

Tusks of Steel

Welding is inherently awesome.

Welding is a method of joining two pieces of material together such that the two pieces are formed into one on the molecular level.  Certain types of plastics are weldable, but that’s boring.  What’s really cool is welding metal.

Welding two pieces of metal together is fairly straightforward: you clamp them against one another, then superheat their junction so that they melt together and cool into one piece.  Simple enough, however as soon as the metal liquefies, it will begin to behave like any other fluid; flowing, dripping, and generally deforming; and the entire process should be isolated from oxygen and other atmospheric reactants since metal in a liquid state can bond with impurities very easily (re: corrode very quickly).

I learned very basically how to weld steel in high school, and as a freshman at Tufts attempted to hone my skills by practicing in my garage over break.  Unfortunately I didn’t realize that arc welding (using a small, sustained...

Weekend Update

Crosswords and camcorders? Just another action-packed weekend at Tufts. After my floor decorated the hall for the holidays, I couldn't resit a bit of decorating of my own. I threw up some Christmas lights in the part of the hall nearest my room, and added a few other touches. A review of a creative few days:

Photo Credit: Will Clarkson, 2011

Yep, that's my hall. Musicians, photographers, you name it. I gave videography a try this weekend, promoting Tufts 4 the Cure for my PR class (see: ExCollege).

No hints, just key pre-written letters. What could those words be?

Students submitted suggestions - and I chose this.

They figured this one out pretty quickly, so I inked it in.