Reviews From the Road

When the pep band goes on away trips, we spend a lot of time on the bus. Instead of being productive To make the bus ride less monotonous, we watch movies (or anything on DVD; when we went to Madison Square Garden last semester we watched two and a half hours straight of Community).

Over February break (six weeks ago . . .), on my first overnight trip with the pep band, we ended up watching three movies, one on the way to Dartmouth, one between Dartmouth and Harvard, and one on the way back to Ithaca. After our lunch stop on the first day of the trip, we put in Dodgeball.

There are some movies that you watch for their story, animation, cinematography, character development, or thought-provoking ideas. Dodgeball is not one of them. The entirety of the movie was slightly totally ridiculous. That doesn't mean I disliked the movie; in fact I enjoyed it, but if you do watch it, be warned that there is very little substance to the movie. A group of guys joins a dodgeball tournament to try and win the prize money that will save their gym from closure, and that’s about all there is to the movie.

Then after the Dartmouth game on our way to Harvard, we watched Love Story (spoilers ahead). There are only two scenes that the pep band likes – the beginning, where Cornell beats Harvard in hockey, and the end, where Jenny dies. During this trip, however, we watched the whole movie, which contained a contrived plot, terrible dialogue, and seven thousand renditions of the Love Story theme. It was somehow nominated for both Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards and spawned a sequel, which was universally acknowledged as being awful. I thought Love Story was so bad that I liked it. Time to find the sequel.

The last movie of the trip was Django Unchained, which would not have been my film of choice. We were warned that it was a violent movie before it started. That was a very accurate statement. The beginning has some violence, and there’s some scattered throughout the middle, but things really pick up in the ending sequence. Up until that point, the violence had been excessive, but in the last scenes it’s so utterly unnecessary it’s absurd. The movie’s about a freed slave who becomes a bounty hunter, so you know there’s going to be some shooting, and then the last half hour happens, and it’s a little more than some shooting. I’m not sure I’d watch it again, and if I did, it wouldn’t be soon. The movie was well done, but the violence is somewhat off-putting.

Overall, it was an interesting mix of movies on this trip. Nothing fantastic, but nothing I regret watching either, though my brain cells might beg to differ about Dodgeball.

3.14.15(926535897932384626)

In honor of the pi day of the century, I decided to come up with some trivia questions to celebrate.

Don McLean song with the lyrics “’Cause the players tried to take the field/The marching band refused to yield/Do you recall what was revealed/The day the music died?”

Fill in the blank: As American as _________

TV trope with origins in slapstick comedy

Maine’s state dessert

Circular chart used in statistics in which arc length is proportional to quantity or percentage

Book featuring a lifeboat and a tiger

Type of detective who can be hired to interview people, search records, and conduct surveillance, among other things

Black and white movie about a paranoid mathematician

Police drama featuring a retired police officer who also runs a restaurant

Type of hopes an ant might have

Ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter

Leave your answers in the comments; correct answers win a virtual high five. And no, I did not get any pie today.

Thirsty Thursday

Merry: Pip, look at this.

Pippin: What are they?

Merry: I heard they’re called shots.

Pippin: They look even bigger than pints.

Merry: Do you think so?

Pippin: How do we get some?

From left to right: Virgin piña colada, nonalcoholic wine, soft cider, and 0 proof vodka

$9.03

In an effort to apply the knowledge gained in my two introductory economics classes avoid giving the Cornell Store any of my parents’ hard-earned money, I bought all my books for this semester on Amazon or from Ithaca’s only cooperatively owned bookstore (Buffalo Street Books). Due to the Cornell Cartel’s Store’s manufacturer-suggested pricing, with added contribution to the Buy the Dean a Drink fund, I got all the textbooks I needed for my ChemE classes for less than the Cornell Store was charging to rent a used copy of the book.

The liberal studies class I signed up for mainly because it fit in my schedule didn't have any books listed with the Cornell Store, but when I went to the first lecture, it turned out that we did indeed require books. Nine of them, in fact. We had the option of buying the books online from the bookstore and having them delivered to class, buying them from another source, or using the books on reserve at the library. I prefer to have my own copy of the texts, so that meant the bookstore or Amazon.

Because I obviously have nothing better to do with my time, I found all the books on Amazon and cataloged their titles, prices, and ISBNs. Then I compared the prices on Amazon to the bookstore prices. The bookstore sold the whole course pack at list prices for $137 while the books on Amazon cost about $115 (16% cheaper). However, Amazon would charge tax (about 8%) while the bookstore did not, and the bookstore would deliver to the lecture in time for me to do the first book reading, compared to five to eight days for an Amazon delivery. Furthermore, the books on Amazon were not uniformly 16% cheaper but ranged from list price to over 20% cheaper.

Naturally, what I ended up doing was buying the first four books we needed from the bookstore because they were all either list price or 15 cents cheaper on Amazon. I ordered the last five books from Amazon a few days later. I saved $9.03.

Road Tripping: The Frozen Apple

Once again, I remained in Ithaca over Thanksgiving break to enjoy its beautiful weather. I was fed plenty of Thanksgiving food on Thursday, on Friday I didn't leave my dorm, and on Saturday I went to New York City with the band for the Cornell-Penn State hockey game at Madison Square Garden. The game is called the Frozen Apple, I guess because it’s in New York City and it’s cold?

Anyway, we left at a decent hour instead of 5 in the morning like the time we took a day trip to Maryland. We stopped for lunch at the exact same place we stopped last year, watched two and a half straight hours of season two of Community, and got to Madison Square Garden (MSG) with plenty of time to spare before we were expected inside to play pre-game sets. We were allowed to roam the streets of New York City for a couple hours; I ended up with a group of people who walked over to the public library, then got dinner before returning to MSG.

Back at MSG, we got our instruments and tickets and headed inside. After riding over half a dozen escalators we reached the bridge level where we waited for awhile before walking out into the stadium playing Davy. Then we played a couple of sets and went to hunt down our seats where we would get to watch Cornell take on Penn State.

Less than half of the Cornell fans.
In contrast, the Penn State fans didn't even fill two sections.

As for the game itself, it was great, in large part because Cornell ended up winning. The first period, Cornell could barely get the puck out of their own half, and it was just a matter of time before one of the Penn State players jammed the puck into the back of the net. Then in the second period, Cornell finally started getting shots, and during one of their forays into the Penn State half, one of the Cornell players took a shot from distance that somehow got past the goalie.

From there, Cornell looked a lot better right up until the game-winning goal (which was assisted by Cornell’s goalie, who also scored a goal in his first start last season). Following that, the game shifted back toward Penn State, but when they couldn't score again with a couple minutes remaining, they pulled their goalie, leading to the third Cornell goal on the empty net. So we walked away from MSG with a 3-1 win and boarded the bus for the four hour ride back to Cornell, which featured bad movies, neck pain, and a return to everything ChemE, namely, lack of sleep and brainache (it’s kind of like headache, but is caused mainly by ChemE problem sets). All. The. Fun.