Remember that food drive we started back in November for the Marion-Polk Food Share? The one with the wacky barrels?
Well, the numbers have been tallied. And we managed to raise over $4,000 in food and cash donations!
A big thank you to everyone who donated.
This article was originally published before Instagram responded to the outrage with this message. Instagram has removed the confusing clause and apologized for the misunderstanding. Therefore some of the content of this post is no longer timely, but I believe the over-arching point about what people will accept from a social network is still worth discussing.
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Thank goodness there’s somebody out there pawing through massive license agreements and thank goodness the Internet allows for people to share the important parts.
Instagram just made everybody very, very unhappy by tweaking their terms of service. Here’s the changes Instagram highlighted, in my words, not theirs:
You don’t need me to say that these three bullet points are meaninglessly vague. Here’s the actual meat of the changes, buried in the fine print. This is the stuff that’s got everyone up-in-arms (this time in their words, my highlights): Read the rest of this entry »
The most sinister thing about finals week is the way it tempts you into thinking you have more free time. There’s a voice in the back of your head that says, “Yeah! No classes!” That voice is very hard to shut up when your head is buried in your textbook or in front of your laptop re-reading your final paper for the 100th time.
If you find yourself fighting with your brain about how to spend your study time, consult this list. While definitely not comprehensive, you can be sure that if your brain is telling you to do something on this list, you should definitely not do it.
Any NYU students reading this? They should already know the story…
Like all schools, NYU keeps a listserv of all its students for anytime it needs to send out mass emails. But because it was improperly set up, one student gave the entire student body access to that listserv by accidentally hitting “reply all” instead of “forward.” Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re NASA, you should really be more careful about throwing around phrases like “one for the history books.” That’s the terminology John Grotzinger, head of the Curiosity rover mission to Mars, used in a recent interview. But he was light on other details, so, since wild speculation is human nature, people are trying to figure out what Curiosity could have dug out of the Martian dirt that can be called “historic.”
The specifics of this discovery are remaining secret until (most likely) a conference in early December, to give the scientists time to triple-check the results. But since one of the primary objectives of Curiosity is to see if the Red Planet has ever been capable of supporting simple organisms, it stands to reason that a discovery along those lines would be the sort of thing NASA was looking for.
So what could they have found in the analyzed soil samples? Large amounts of methane, an organic compound that’s usually produced by lifeforms?
Sure, that’s a reasonable assumption, but who wants to hear that? I prefer the unreasonable, thank you very much:
There’s three kinds of college students during Thanksgiving break. There’s the people who travel home, gorge themselves on food, and return in the worst possible mentality going into finals.
Group two are the people who see a break coming and decide to get as much out of it as possible.
And group three doesn’t go anywhere, because plane tickets are expensive, they have a lot of work to do, or they don’t have a lot of close family.
If you find yourself in group three, you’ve got to make a plan to keep your sanity. Because if 7 pm rolls around and you find yourself sitting in bed, eating day-old Domino’s breadsticks, and watching re-runs of House, you might start to feel down. So here’s a few ways to stave off the lonesome Thanksgiving blues.
Every November, the staff at Bookbyte breaks into groups to compete in a food drive. Each team gets a giant metal barrel and gets a short amount of time to decorate it according to a theme. Then we stuff the decorated barrels with as much food as we can scrounge up and donate it to the Marion-Polk Food Share, a charity that feeds the needy in our community of central Oregon.
The theme this year was the 1980s. As you can see from the pics below, the first thing most of us thought about was 8-bit video games. (Click on any of the pictures for a larger image.)
1. An impressive Donkey Kong arcade machine using cardboard, paint, and LED lights, complete with buttons and a joystick.
2. This Pac-Man themed barrel packed in as many ’80s references as it could. You’ll notice Ferris Bueller, Ghostbusters, MTV, ALF, and other stuff that people born after 1990 might not recognize.
3. If we’re talking classic 80′s videogames, you can’t overlook Super Mario Bros., the elephant in whichever room you’ve setup your NES.
4. This entry was most tightly tied into actual purpose of the contest: fighting hunger. Most of our younger readers probably don’t remember “We Are the World.” It was a song written for charity by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie and featuring something like 8,000 other musicians. It was a huge deal at the time.
5. Our grand prize winners painted trash bags and boxes and made them into a homage to the greatest ’80s action star, the former Governor of California. (As somebody point out, it mostly looks like a Minecraft version of the Terminator.)
Those glasses aren’t painted on either, they’re hanging off his face. When you take them off, you get to see the T-800′s red robo-eye.
Written by Chris Fannon
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