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Features

Come Hear the Music Play

In the last of the New South rehearsal rooms—past the 40 or so students practicing an Indian dance in a line; in the next, some 20 boys and girls watched another student show them where to put their hands to waltz—Lucy Obus (COL ‘11) slipped in her socks while strutting towards a collection of chairs and falls hard on her side. “Whoops!” she called before scrambling to her feet—“I’m ok! Let’s do this!” Mady Greene (COL ’10), started the song for the 15th time, the girls straddled their chairs, and dance rehearsals for Cabaret continued.

News

Funding boards hash out next year’s budget

At last night’s annual funding meeting, Georgetown University Student Association President Pat Dowd (SFS ’09) and Vice President James Kelly’s (COL ’09) proposed GUSA Summer Fellows program was allocated $10,820.35—$29,000 less than they had requested. Representatives from GUSA, the Student Activities Commission, the Georgetown Programming Board, the Center for Social Justice, the Performing Arts Activities Commission, the Advisory Board for Club Sports and Media Board divvied up next year’s $310,000 Student Activity Fees. In addition to detailing their funding requests, many of the boards discussed plans for reducing their reserve funds, which cumulatively total more than $800,000.

Corrections

Misspelled Last Name

In “Come Hear the Music Play” (Feature, April 10, 2008), the actress playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret was incorrectly identified as “Olivia Bennet.” Her name is, in fact, “Olivia Bennett.” We regret the error.

Editorials

NCAA fouls out on game tickets

Davidson College students had two reasons to smile during their Elite Eight game: their team had come out of nowhere to beat Georgetown and Wisconsin, and their trip to Detroit was free because Davidson’s administration paid for game tickets, transportation and lodging for students who wanted to go to the game. While Georgetown’s precarious financial state makes such a cushy arrangement unlikely, Davidson has the right idea: giving college basketball back to college students. This is something the NCAA, with its restrictive ticket policy, seems loath to do.

Editorials

Feds trying great train robbery

When D.C.’s first mayor-commissioner, Walter Washington, was appointed in 1967, Representative John McMillan (D-NC) congratulated him by sending a truckload of watermelons to Washington’s office. While the overt racism is gone, the federal government is still treating its responsibility to D.C. like a cruel joke. With Washington’s Metro system confounded by hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs, it’s time for Congress to help the District that it’s ignored for so long.

Editorials

Forget it, Georgetown, it’s China

With the Beijing Olympics only four months away, protests aimed the Chinese regime’s abuses and its support for the genocidal Sudanese government are mounting. Reporters Without Borders sells shirts with interlocked handcuffs in place of the Olympic rings, and Steven Spielberg left his job as an artistic adviser to the games over China’s indifference to the crisis in Darfur. Now is the perfect time for Georgetown to evaluate its own ties to two Chinese universities.

Sports

GU track heads outdoors

Winter was a kind season for the Hoya Track and Field Program. The men finished third in the Big East and won their first Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America (IC4A) title since 2002, and the women finished second in the Big East. In addition, sophomore Andrew Bumbalough and senior Matt Debole earned All American honors and lead the men to a 17th-place finish in the NCAA Indoor Championships.

Sports

Fast Break

Georgetown baseball (11-14, 3-6 BE) traded leads with cross-town rival George Washington (15-11, 4-2 A-10) for much of the afternoon on Wednesday, but a bullpen collapse in the latter innings cost the Hoyas the game and snapped their three-game win streak.

Sports

Streetball at Volta

March’s madness has dissipated into an apathetic April. The college tournament has left you with no one to cheer for. Your trip to sunny San Antonio bit the dust. Your only interest in basketball right now is to root against North Carolina’s Tyler “Psycho T” Hansborough because on Easter weekend his name received more air time than Christ’s. And all this negativity has got you in a funk of wasteful daytime drinking and hitless performances on the co-ed intramural softball field, where you wholeheartedly believe that it’s okay to blame your dribbling groundouts on the fact that the pitches are coming in too slow.

Voices

Shirt is a symptom of a larger problem that afflicts the campus

We are not saying that individuals in the Georgetown University Grilling Society are sexist, but the marketing tools that the Grilling Society and other organizations on this campus choose to employ systematically serve to demean women. The decision to associate their week with “Girls Gone Wild” and their initial decision to sell a t-shirt that read “GUGS, Grade A, Size D,” was a combination of marketing tools that we found offensive. There is a fine line between humor and sexism, and this line has been blurred—especially for the average Georgetown student.

Voices

GUGS admits shirt has offended some, Grills Gone Wild moves forward

From April 21 through 25, the Georgetown University Grilling Society (GUGS) plans to hold Grills Gone Wild Week, which will include a GUGS burger eating contest, ribs and pulled pork day, a grilloff competition, a sausage extravaganza on Georgetown Day and a BYOF (bring your own food). The GUGS Grillmasters will be grilling up pizzas, lamb, kebabs and all sorts of delicacies throughout the week to celebrate yet another successful semester on the Hilltop.

Sports

Men’s lax coming on strong

Having made ten straight NCAA tournaments, Georgetown’s men’s lacrosse team is accustomed to regular season success. This season has been no different; after a 1-2 start, the Hoyas won five straight, including Saturday’s 11-10 overtime win over no. 10 Navy. They’re now ranked fifth in the country heading into their game this Saturday at Fairfield.

Sports

Samantha Peters

The Georgetown women’s softball team completed an unprecedented five-game win streak last week, due largely to sophomore Samantha Peters. The starting shortstop for the Hoyas has been a force the entire year, posting nice numbers and leading the team in just about every offensive category. Through forty-two games this season, Peters has hit .391 with ten homers and thirty-three runs batted in. As if those stats were not impressive enough, she also leads the team with 15 stolen bases and has posted an on-base percentage of .443. She is currently on pace to record the greatest season in the three year history of the Georgetown University softball program.

Sports

The Sports Sermon

This year’s March Madness might be one of the worst. Here on the Hilltop, Georgetown fans were seriously disappointed when our Hoyas fell out of the brackets in the second round, a tough end to a season that began with so many hopes.

Voices

April Fools’ Hoya issue is tasteless and mean

A disclaimer on the front page of the Hoya’s annual spring joke issue advises its readers to proceed with caution. “Chill out, tight-ass,” it reads. “This issue is a joke.” Ah, so Jack the Bulldog didn’t actually have an affair with the West Virginia Mountaineer.

Voices

Pushing papers all around campus

Seeing that The Fire This Time’s latest edition had come out gave me a strange thrill.

Leisure

Subverting America

The advertisements for the Corcoran Gallery’s new exhibition, American Evolution, juxtapose two iconic images—Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington and Andy Warhol’s silkscreen of Chairman Mao—in an irreverent, catchy pairing. So I expected the exhibition to be a series of attempted “evolutionary” links between American works of art, but the Zedong-Washington alliance is actually the only one of its kind there. American Evolution might have used the iconic images to lure tourists into its convenient location across the street from the White House, but its real message is to be that the visual history of American myths created by our art are often accepted as reality—a reality which sometimes needs to be challenged.

Leisure

Salt Water Moon: a night in Irish Newfoundland

Everything about “Salt Water Moon” is minimalistic: the two-actor cast, the one-night-only timeframe and the plot’s straightforward love story. The no frills approach works; it strips the play down to its core, honing in on an intricate relationship between two people, and gives them the space and time to develop all the facets of their characters. “Salt Water Moon” depends completely on the performances of the two leads, who manage to create a quaint and hopeful tale of love, set during harsh times.

Leisure

Critical Voices: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Pershing

On Pershing, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin are peddling something you’ve heard before. The band’s second album is filled with the kind of amiable indie pop—replete with soft drums and guitar hooks—that sounds good on playlists for parties where you’re not friends with everyone coming. This kind of music is certainly available elsewhere, but the band does their work competently.

Features

D.C.’s Ticket Exchange

Opening night at Washington Nationals’ ballpark was cold, and I couldn’t find any scalpers.

Fans stood, alone and in pairs, on the red carpet outside the Navy Yard Metro stop, fingers held in the air as signals—two tickets? Three?—even as thousands of other fans, already ticket-holders, flooded Half Street. Beneath red-white-and-blue balloon bunting, they flowed toward the center field gate. An older man, two fingers up, stood next to a young boy clutching a mitt and a bag of peanuts.

Leisure

Running for love, perhaps weight-loss

If you were one of the skeptics expecting David Schwimmer to sink rather than swim in his directing debut, keep holding your breath, because the jury is still out. Schwimmer’s film, Run, Fat Boy, Run, was released in London last September, where it received stellar reviews and was king of the UK box office for four consecutive weeks. Americans, however, have been less generous to Fat Boy, which brought in a mere $2.3 million in its opening weekend, proving that the majority of American moviegoers continue to resist the type of dry humor that dominates the film. It’s a shame, because the movie is far wittier than traditional American slapstick comedies and makes for a hilarious and entertaining, if predictable, watch.

Leisure

Popped Culture: Nerds strike back

The geeks are rallying.

/Film, a geeky movie website, led a boycott of the insignificant spoof Superhero Movie to protest the cutting down of a film called, of all things, Fanboys. The feature film version of this story about Star Wars obsessives was shortened by the studio, and the geeks at /Film were not ok with that. Their boycott sort of worked—Miramax will release the complete Fanboys on DVD—but it just underscores the distinct force that the geek contingent has become.

News

Epicurean to open by end of April

About four years after the initial proposal to put a restaurant in the former Darnall cafeteria, Epicurean & Co. General Manager Hieu Pham said that Epicurean’s restaurant should open in Darnall by the end of April. No specific date has been chosen yet

News

$800,000 in unused funds

The Georgetown University Student Association recently conducted an audit of several student advisory boards and found that six umbrella student groups—the Student Activities Commission, the Media Board, the Georgetown Program Board, the Performing Arts Advisory Council, the Center for Social Justice and Club Sports—are holding onto more than $800,000 in contingency accounts.