Free wings? Sounds like a good plan to me. I wonder if they have seitan wings, too... UCAB sends in the following event notice:
Have any plans for the Super Bowl?"If anything, come for the wings."
Come join UCAB for amazing free food and big-screen viewing.
When: Sunday, Feb 1 (today!) at 6 PM
Where: Usdan MPR
There'll be a big-screen TV in the Café area of Usdan tomorrow, for Obama's inauguration. Go with your friends and enjoy the historic celebration!
Nothing like a nice lunchtime Usdan fire alarm to get the day started right. Only this time, there was a real fire. The culprit: An electrical fire in the basement (I've been told a surge protector melted). Here are the immediate effects:
AMES, the Arab and Middle Eastern Students Association, will be starting back up this year!
Randa Tawil '09 and Amr Al-Zain '09 write to us on its behalf:
AMES aims to provide a forum of discussion for issues relating to Arab and Middle Eastern students at Wesleyan, representing them in all their ethnicities, religions, nationalities, and various other identities, and allotting them the opportunity to share their different cultures with the wider Wesleyan community. 'Arab and Middle Eastern Students' additionally strives to bring speakers, lecturers, and performers to campus to academically and artistically share facets of Arab and Middle Eastern life.For more information, e-mail to rtawil@wes.
If you are interested, please come to our meetings, Monday at 10pm on the comfy couches in Usdan. All are welcome.
Tickets to Thursday's Thanksgiving dinner at Usdan are still available:
Join us for our family-style Thanksgiving celebration dinner for the students served by volunteer Wesleyan faculty and staff in USDAN Marketplace (2nd Floor). Both dining rooms will be arranged family style with most tables seating 12 people. Seating arrangement is on first come first serve basis in groups of 12. Vegan options will be available.Date: Thursday, November 20
There will be two seatings for that evening:
* 5:00 p.m. – Please arrive by 4:45 pm.
* 7:30 p.m. – Please arrive by 7:15 pm.
RESERVATION BY TICKET: Here’s how the reservation is taken:
1. Decide which seating you and your friends want to attend
2. Pay at any register in USDAN Marketplace (2nd floor) or Café (1st floor).
3. Two Payment Options:
a. Meal Plan – Pre-pay $3.00 with points or cash & swipe a meal for $9.25 on your card the day of the event
b. Points, Cash or Credit Card – Pre-pay $12.25 at the register
4. Upon purchase of the ticket, you get a receipt from the cashier and bring it to the USDAN information desk located in the 1st floor.
5. Tell which seating you want, and the ticket will be dispensed.
ACTIVITIES THAT EVENING: There will be a handprint turkey drawing contest that evening -white placemat & crayons available. Bring out your creative side! The winners of the contest will have their art work displayed in Marketplace, and will receive jars of local artisan made jams.
Post-election madness outside Usdan last night, it was clearly a great time for the student body to pour itself into a gigantic celebratory mob. And nobody got tased!
Props to whoever brought the fireworks and compiled the Obama victory playlist, and to P-Safe for joining in the festivities. And to President Roth, for showing up (and tactfully declining the multiple drinks offered him by reveling students).
Photos courtesy of Hannah Berkman '12:
There were fireworks!
Mike Levin '09 got fireworks shots:
The creatively-named Election Night Extravaganza, hosted by the administrators of Usdan, the WSA, UCAB, and Bon Appétit, will be happening tomorrow night.
Swing by Usdan starting at 7:00 PM and you'll find three "giant-screen" TVs, along with several less-than-giant-screen TVs, tuned to the various news networks. Watch the votes (for Obama, for McCain) roll in and indulge in free food, hot chocolate, and hot cider. Bon Appétit will also present a special Late Night menu for the event.
Asst. Professor of Government and blogger Elvin Lim will also be giving a talk about the election, at Usdan, at around 10:00 PM.
Come to the Wesleyan Farmer’s Market this Wednesday, lots of seasonal goodies this week:
Date: Wednesday, October 22
- Your favorite vendors selling fresh produce, baked goods, soaps, jams, honey, goat cheese, spices, and breads!
- Purchase Wesleyan Farmer’s Market t-shirts: locally printed, organic cotton, made in USA ,$15:
- Pumpkins and HOT MULLED APPLE CIDER from High Hill Orchard will also be sold to support the market.
- There will be kettle corn!
- Live music from Wesleyan’s very own Sam Long, Nate Monschein, and Howe Pearson!
- Swipe points or pay cash for a fresh lunch from Bon Appetit (vegetarian option will be available)! This week Bon Appetit will feature hamburgers, kilbasa, organic veggie burgers, organic salad greens, and hot butternut squash soup - all made with ingredients from the market.
In light of some apparent confusion in the Shoutbox, it's worth noting that Usdan's fall break hours are up. For those staying on campus, looks like it's going to be sandwiches from Neon: the Marketplace is closed from Saturday until dinner Tuesday, and the Cafe closes at 6:00.
On a similar note, I don't know what WesWings' fall break hours are--if anyone knows, please comment--but its website now lists its lunch hours as 11:30-2:00, rather than 11:30-1:30.
Lastly, Usdan will again be closing at 9:00 tomorrow for fumigation, part II.
EDIT (Ben, 9:21): Forgot to mention that the Usdan fall break hours list every BA-operated dining establishment. Also, the fall break hours for the libraries and Freeman--which closes at 7:00 Friday--are up.
Director of Health Education Lisa Currie writes:
In celebration of National Massage Therapy Awareness Week, WesWELL and the Usdan Center are sponsoring free chair massages for the Wesleyan community. Massages will be provided by licensed massage therapists from the Connecticut Chapter of the American Massage Therapy Association. No appointments necessary; just drop in and sign up. Bring a friend!Date: Monday, Oct. 20
If you've tried to eat outside Usdan in the past few weeks, you probably had to deal with the nuisance of having your food almost immediately surrounded by bees. As it happens, these insects are actually yellowjackets, a type of predatory wasp which can be more aggressive than honeybees when provoked, but whose stings are not any more harmful than bee stings (unless you're allergic).
They've been so active lately because yellowjacket hives expand in late summer and autumn, and our lunch food is a prime feeding source for members of the hive (which is probably somewhere on campus):
Although adults feed primarily on items rich in sugars and carbohydrates (fruits, flower nectar, Mountain Dew and tree sap), the larvae feed on proteins (insects, meats, fish, etc.). Adult workers chew and condition the meat fed to the larvae. Larvae in return secrete a sugar material relished by the adults... In late summer, foraging workers (nuisance scavengers) change their food preference from meats to ripe, decaying fruits or scavenge human garbage, sodas, picnics, etc., since larvae in the nest fail to meet requirements as a source of sugar.There's not much to be done about them, but here are some tips on dealing with yellowjackets. They should be gone once the weather gets colder, but until then your best bet is to avoid eating outside.
Today's campus copies of The New York Times have a special surprise: the front cover featuring photos of the presidential candidates have been covered with glistening gold and black spray painted squares. Any clues on the reasoning behind the cover-up? Is it a protest? Art project? Does it have anything to do with tonight's presidential debate? Leave it in the comments...
Looks like the university may not have made a $47 million mistake on Wyllys Avenue after all. Apparently last month's "required maintenance" was fruit fly-mandated fumigation. From today's Argus:
Fumigation efforts to control the fruit fly population in the Usdan University Center will continue this month. The measures, intended to ensure health and sanitation within Usdan, shut down Late Night dining on Tuesday, Sept. 30, and will take place again on Tuesday, Oct. 21.But wait, there's more!
“While we do have fruit flies, the rumors of an ‘infestation’ are incorrect,” [BA Resident District Manager Michael] Strumpf wrote in an e-mail to The Argus. “We are simply controlling, with the assistance of the Middletown Department of Health, what all food service providers must deal with when fresh produce is delivered to location from outside vendors."
[Strumpf] added that both the Sept. 30 fumigation and the follow-up fumigation scheduled for Oct. 21 comprise the first two steps of a professional extermination plan.
In addition to the fruit flies, other maintenance issues have recently occurred in Usdan.It was cold, energy-inefficient, and had an inadequate kitchen, but I don't seem to remember any fruit fly infestations in Mocon. Yay nostalgia!
“Prior to air flow adjustment in Usdan’s basement kitchen, the Health Department determined that there was mildew…growing on tiles that were very damp due to humid conditions,” Strumpf wrote.
The conditions leading to this mildew have since been corrected. However, some staff workers have expressed concerns about the health hazards the presence of mildew poses.
Bernice Laille of Bon Appetit writes in to remind us that Rocktoberfest is coming up at dinner this Thursday, Oct. 16. The faculty band Busted Roses, including special musical guest Michael Roth, will be performing from 6:00-9:00. BA will be serving a German-style meal including "Best of the Wurst Sausages," Spätzle, Sauerkraut, Blaukraut, potato salad, and root beer kegs. Be there or be rechtwinklig!
Date: Thursday, Oct. 16
Time: Dinner 5:00-8:00 PM; Busted Roses performance 6:00-9:00 PM
Place: Usdan Marketplace
Today I met our dining director, Michael Strumpf, who has replaced Delmar Crim. We discussed both the recent Wespeak I wrote and the blog comments about the new addition of hot soup at the Cafe, as well as new options. I'm glad to say that our conversation went great and I think that Michael brings some promise to B.A. at Wesleyan.
Just to give you a little background, Michael has worked with Bon Appetit for 10 years. He worked on the bidding contract that went on 3 years ago, and admits that the current way in which the Marketplace and Cafe are set up does not match some of the original goals. However, he is very concerned with the quality of the food and making the Wesleyan students happy. He has agreed to the following things at the Usdan Cafe:
I went to Usdan today and was reminded of how frustrated I am with Physical Plant's recent crackdown on "illegally" parked bikes. Where, I wondered, could I lock my bike without the risk of it being confiscated? The bike rack was full, the lamppost was occupied, and the handrails were taken, too. What to do?
This issue was recently covered by the Argus. Liz Wojnar '12 interviewed Cliff Ashton, director of Physical Plant, and I beg to differ with his view. While Ashton's statement was correct:
Bike racks are, and continue to be, provided in many locations, convenient to classroom, dorms, Campus Center, and other buildings. However, in spite of best efforts to provide bike racks, locking of bikes to handrails continues.... his statement overlooks the real problem. The issue isn't so much the convenience or the location of the bike racks. It's that there are simply too few bike racks to reasonably accommodate the number of bicycling students on campus. Says Ashton:
We often see bikes locked to handrails within 30 feet of an empty bike rack.Well, more often, I see bikes locked to handrails within 30 feet of a fully-occupied bike rack:
Of course, bicyclists shouldn't block handicapped access to buildings, or block stairways, or prevent egress from a building in the event of an emergency. But, when our only choice is to obstruct a handrail—or risk having our bikes stolen—we all know what students are going to do.The UCAB is sponsoring a Spa Day at the Daniel Family Commons:
Three massage therapists! Delicious sandwiches (roasted veggies with sun-dried tomato spread, turkey with cranberry relish, roast beef with brie and onion marmalade)! Seasonal fruit and fresh vegetable trays! Tea tea tea! Soothing music!Date: Saturday, October 4
Claire Staples '09 writes:
You. On your bike. With a noisemaker. Assemble at said time in said place. Make noise with said noisemaker, on your bike. For two minutes. Then disperse. End of action.Date: Thursday, Oct. 2
Usdan will be closing at 9:00 PM tomorrow (Tuesday, 9/30) for "required maintenance," rather than its customary 2:00 AM. Yes, this means there is no late night tomorrow night. That is all.
It looks like Usdan--at least the first floor--is getting a much-needed paint job. Here's the view of the first floor computer area as of about 4:30 this afternoon:
Newly painted side on the right, obviously. Looks pretty similar to the yellow in Fauver. It'll be interesting to see how much they paint; it looked like they were working on one of the meeting rooms, too, though I'm not sure whether it was being painted the same color.
