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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.

News

GUGS offends

The Georgetown University Grilling Society has decided to delay the sale of shirts that read “GUGS: Grade A, Size D” in response to accusations of sexism by members of several prominent campus groups. These students have also objected to the name of the GUGS event “Grills Gone Wild Week,” to be held later this month.

News

Murdoch defends News Corp

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is just like the Jesuits, he told a mostly-full Gaston Hall yesterday, “except we don’t insist on vows of poverty or chastity.”

News

City on a Hill: Hope for a healthier D.C.

On Tuesday, Councilmember David Catania (I-At Large) introduced one of the most promising pieces of legislation to come before the Council in recent memory: the “Healthy D.C.” plan, which would allow the District to provide subsidized health insurance for residents.

Editorials

GUSA’s own housing meltdown

No one can say that GUSA President Pat Dowd (SFS ’09) and Vice President James Kelly (COL ’09) lack ambition. Their GUSA Summer Fellows initiative has the laudable aim of providing free summer housing at Georgetown to undergraduates with unpaid internships they couldn’t otherwise afford to take, starting this summer. But Dowd and Kelly have approached the idea with a startling naiveté of the complexities involved in enacting such a bold proposal. Putting their energy towards an unreachable goal of trying to institute it this summer diminishes GUSA’s credibility and detracts from the program’s chances for next year.

Editorials

DPS shouldn’t run an arms race

Department of Public Safety officers are about to get a belated Easter gift: batons and pepper spray. By the end of March, all of Georgetown’s DPS patrol officers should be trained to use their new tools. But instead of protecting Georgetown against D.C.’s rising crime rate, these weapons might actually make life on campus more dangerous.

Editorials

Area taken out by the ballgame

While Washington prepares for the Nationals’ first game in their new stadium, one group of Washingtonians has little to be excited about: people living and working near the stadium who have been shut out of its economic benefits.

Sports

Hoyas shot down in Raleigh

There’s no best way to approach what happened to the Georgetown Hoyas in Raleigh on Sunday.

Sports

MVP candidates

As March Madness minus Georgetown rolls on and the NBA makes a mad dash to the finish line, one columnist has basketball on his mind. But because I can’t bring myself to revisit the tragedy of Black Easter, it seems like a good moment to take a look at an exciting end to the pro-circuit’s season and its ultra-tight MVP race.

Voices

Looking past the smoke and mirrors

Contemporary airlines have done everything they can to convince squirrelly passengers that riding in their jolly contraptions is virtually the same as traveling in a car. Southwest Airlines, with its uniformly perky staff, brightly colored planes and incessant “ding!”-ing has become an industry leader, largely thanks to the company’s ability to make truculent travelers feel at ease. Nevertheless, on March 6th, the F.A.A. levied a record-breaking $10.2 million fine on the airline for its failure to ground planes that had not been properly inspected and certified as up to code. And no khaki-clad, coddling flight attendant or cute cobalt-blue plane could change that.

Sports

What Rocks

After a 4-goal game against Rutgers last weekend, sophomore midfielder Ashby Kaestner has become a star on the women’s lacrosse team. Behind her stellar play, the seventh-ranked Hoyas defeated the Scarlet Knights 11-5, bringing their record to 7-1.

Page 13 Cartoons

Lying her way to the highest office in the land

When did misspeaking become synonymous with lying? When Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) suggested that she merely misspoke about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia, her statement was not an error in recollection, it was a lie. It is only one of many lies put forward by the junior Senator from New York as she desperately scrambles to save her nearly mathematically impossible campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Editorials

GU holds its first Women’s Week

Feminist author and blogger Jessica Valenti wanted to know what words came to Georgetown students’ minds when they heard the word “feminism.” The responses from the predominantly female audience included words such as “angry” and “bra-burning.”

“Most young women are feminists, have feminist values, but are too freaked out to use the word,” Valenti said.

News

CAG confronts student noise

Noise violations top the list of concerns for a new “task force” of University administrators and neighborhood residents, according to Citizen Association of Georgetown President Denise Cunningham’s March newsletter.

“The escalation of noise in the neighborhood is an issue that needs to be constantly addressed,” Cunningham said in an interview.

News

Union Jack: Obama gets Georgetown’s race relations problems

New York Times op-ed contributor Bob Herbert suggested on Tuesday that Senator Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) March 18 speech on race, which gained publicity for its willingness to tackle a difficult topic, should be required reading in classrooms across the country. He may be years removed from a college campus, but Herbert has the right idea. Obama’s claim that society still needs inflammatory remarks to drive people to action is certainly relevant to Georgetown’s campus.

News

Arming DPS

Some Department of Public Safety officers have started to carry pepper spray and batons and wear protective vests, and DPS hopes to have all officers trained and equipped by the end of March.

The University committed to the initiative at the end of August 2007 after requests by DPS officers for the equipment, according to University spokesperson Julie Green Bataille.

Sports

The Sports Sermon

The Georgetown women’s basketball team has been on the rise in recent years due to Head Coach Terri Williams-Flournoy—who joined the Hoyas for the 2004-2005 season—and her attempt to turn the program around. This year alone, the Hoyas managed to improve their overall record to 15-14 (5-11 Big East). The team finished the season ranked 13th in their conference, which placed them only one spot away from making a showing at the Big East Tournament.