Special Projects

Rondelet back after two years

Rondelet returns tomorrow at 10 p.m. after a two-year hiatus. While the location of the dance remains at the Trevisio restaurant in the Texas Medical Center, several changes, such as the addition of a winter theme due to a change in event timing, have been implemented in an effort to revive the formal dance.Rice Program Council Social Co-Chair and Interim Vice President Libby Ulman said that they had hoped to bring back the tradition in a slightly different way while maintaining the spirit of Rondelet.

Women go 1-1 against conference bottom-feeders

All it took to fall back into the pack was a few missed shots and some unforced turnovers. The women's basketball team, which has taken large strides this season, just cannot seem to win those big games that could earn the team its place among the Conference USA's most elite programs. The Owls, lumped into the middle of the standings beginning the weekend, had two conference games that could have started talk around the league about the possible successes of the team. They welcomed Marshall University into Tudor on Thursday and then traveled to East Carolina University on Sunday afternoon, two very winnable games for the young team.

Last week's online poll results

This week's Editorial Cartoon

H&D closes colleges, savings less than predicted

Closing the residential colleges for the second year in a row in an effort to save money, Housing and Dining once again offered alternative winter housing for the 23 days of the break the colleges were closed, this time at a Holiday Inn, to any students who could not go home. Twenty-seven students, both international and regular, utilized this option. H&D estimated that utility savings alone were around $40,000. In addition, Rice did not subsidize the hotel stay this year, increasing expected savings.

Beyond The Hedges

National

Rice Track & Field 2011: Men need strong performances in pole vault and heptathlon

When canvassing the roster for the next season, a head coach is first inclined to look for the voids left by departed athletes. With Jason Colwick (Martel '10), Simon Bucknell (Martel '10) and Chris Kato (Martel '10) all having graduated, it's clear Head Coach Jon Warren (Jones '88) will seek to get results from newcomers or returning stars to fill their spots on the men's track team. While the gaps exist, it takes a very small leap of faith to realize that athletes like senior outdoor All-American decathlete and heptathlete Philip Adam, long distance runners redshirt junior Michael Trejo and redshirt sophomore Gabe Cuadra, sophomore decathlete and heptathlete Clayton Chaney and senior hurdler Connor Hayes will continue their impressive campaigns, which helped lead the Owls to a fourth-place finish at the Conference USA Indoor Championships last year. "We've lost a few guys in the [pole] vault and a couple in distance, but we've got the ability to have guys come in and bring the same effort," Warren said. "I feel like we have the potential to improve from last year."

Baker Institute Student Forum debate: America's stimulus legislation

At its signing, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act legislators hailed the bill as the Keynesian fiscal stimulus needed to cure the recession. Yet more than a year after the Obama White House signed this "economic Viagra" into law, the economy remains as flaccid and slow-moving as ever. Furthermore, the law represents an unwelcome and dangerous intrusion of government and has plunged our deficit into staggering and unprecedented depths.Apologists of the stimulus have two main arguments, the first being that we are technically now out of the recession. This is indeed true, but the slow and sluggish recovery hardly amounts to any sort of success. Rather, the dangerous tide of unemployment remains unstopped. The current rate of ?9.6 percent could even go over 10 percent. Sanguine projections about the health of the economy mean nothing to the millions of Americans out of work.

Tron:Legacy: Visually interesting, plot lacking

Don't listen to the naysayers: Tron: Legacy is actually a really good movie. With jaw-dropping visuals, a thundering soundtrack composed entirely by Daft Punk and the revival and continuation of the story of the original 1982 Tron, it's just plain fun to watch. The movie comes up lacking in plot - Legacy essentially recycles the original Tron's story structure, with only a couple of nuances - but name the last time an effects-driven feature had a deep, philosophical storyline. Legacy picks up some 20 years after the events in Tron. Software engineer, ENCOM CEO and arcade owner Kevin Flynn (True Grit's Jeff Bridges) went missing shortly after the events of the first film and his son Sam (Country Strong's Garrett Hedlund) has grown up to be a motorcycle-riding rebel who wants nothing to do with his ownership stake in ENCOM, Flynn's software corporation. Following a mysterious page received by an old friend of his father's, Sam ends up getting sucked into and trapped inside the computer world of The Grid, where his father has been searching for a way out since he first disappeared 20 years ago.

Women post strong record over winter break

It is a good season for a freshman if she can make an immediate impact on the court, helping her team win games. It is a great season for a freshman if she can earn Player of the Week honors and work her way into the starting lineup. It's an unbelievable season if she can win five freshman Player of the Week awards; a feat only seen one other time inside Conference USA. With senior starting forward and team leader Jackie Stanley out with a knee injury, Head Coach Greg Williams (Hanszen '70) knew that someone on his roster would have to fill the void. Little did he expect that help to come in the form of a freshman - 6'2" Jessica Kuster - who is leading the team in rebounds and second on the team in points, which is just what the Owls needed to stay above .500 despite the injuries to their star.

Classic Flicks: Adaptation presents hidden comedic gem

Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of Adaptation (2002), is one member of the sparse crowd of directors and screenwriters who force you to rethink the limits of the human imagination. Kaufman bends genres, characters and minds in his best films, which include Being John Malkovich (1999), Human Nature (2001), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Synecdoche, New York (2008). All are among the most complex, comedic and confounding films in recent history. These films are not to be pigeonholed into categories like "dramedy" or "romantic comedy" - it is better to posit that they merely exist in time, space and film.In Adaptation, Kaufman blends fiction with reality, writing himself (or rather, a version of himself) into the screenplay. Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage, Leaving Las Vegas) is a screenwriter living in Los Angeles who, during the filming of Being John Malkovich, is hired to write a screenplay based on the book The Orchid Thief. Living with Charlie is his fictional twin brother Donald (also Cage), a less talented writer than his brother. But the "genius" - as Donald calls Charlie - finds directly adapting the boring book on orchids to be an astonishingly Herculean task; in an effort to break through his severe writer's block, Charlie even attends one of screenwriter Robert McKee's famous seminars.

Cook had love for physics

Baker College sophomore Brandon Cook died Jan. 7 after a year-and-a-half battle with Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was 21 years old. More than 300 people attended Cook's memorial service Tuesday in Tomball, Texas.

Prospect of healthcare repeal baffling

Party politics is a funny, and often frustrating, phenomenon. It's a perennial tug-of-war, really, a back-and-forth struggle for ideological supremacy, often at the cost of sound policy. Sometimes it seems that the Republicans and the Democrats are destined to go at it forever.But every once in a while on Capitol Hill, you see a bill come along that is ostensibly above reproach, progressively post-partisan, universally appealing - a bill so undeniably sweeping in its scope, so unyielding in its reform, that one expects sheer force of reason to, for once, crack the monolithic gridlock of partisan bickering. Or so I thought.

Men struggle against conference competition

Playing in front of a predominantly absent student section over the winter break, there was no lack of drama in Tudor Fieldhouse for the men's basketball team. After a 2-2 showing at the 2010 Las Vegas Holiday Hoops Classic that earned Owls' sophomore forward Arsalan Kazemi C-USA Player of the Week honors, Rice returned to campus to take on Louisiana State University Dec. 29. Led by a 19-point, 17 rebound effort from Kazemi and clutch free throw shooting down the stretch, the Owls fought off a late LSU comeback to earn a 74-68 victory over their SEC foe.

Coffeehouse to expand to BRC

Coffeehouse will bring its business to the BioScience Research Collaborative early this semester. A cart featuring almost the entire Coffeehouse menu will be stationed in the BRC. Coffeehouse General Manager Christine Cooper said that the cart will tentatively be open the first week of February and will serve coffee and other treats from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Cooper, a Baker College junior, said that the BRC was built with a space for a cafe but was still looking for a vendor when Coffeehouse was approached last semester. Opening a second location for Coffeehouse is something that has not been done before but Cooper thinks it is a great idea.

True Quality in True Grit

As a general rule, I try to eschew teen girlpower coming-of-age stories. Yet I could not resist abandoning my initial misgivings and going to see True Grit, a Western written and directed by the famous Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo), and a remake of the 1969 film with a 14-year-old heroine. Fortunately, my fears of pink cowgirl boots and ribbons on ponies quickly disappeared as the young Mattie Ross ("Grand Cru"'s Hailee Steinfeld) earned her place among the gunslingers of Sergio Leone and Tom Ford films.The film opens with an older Mattie narrating the story of her father's murder as the audience sees his body lying in the snow. This is the first, and certainly not the last, example of the Coen brothers' macabre brushstrokes on the canvas of the American West. The story begins shortly after the homicide when the precocious teenager heads to the frontier to bring back her father's body and settle his accounts. After securing the coffin and adroitly haggling with a former business partner of her father, Mattie moves on to her ultimate goal: avenging her father's death.

GSA not a residential college

Diversity and inclusion. Unity and togetherness. Rice prides itself on its "one big happy family" philosophy. The attitude is actually a good one that promotes a pretty positive campus culture. But a line needs to be drawn.Quite simply, the Graduate Student Association needs to become a more independent institution. It is not and never will be a residential college, so there is no need to continue the charade. There is no need to include the GSA in the traditions belonging to residential colleges such as intramural sports and Beer Bike.

Baker Institute Student Forum debate: America's stimulus legislation

Both conservative economists, like Martin Feldstein, and liberal economists, like Paul Krugman, believed a stimulus was necessary to save the U.S. economy from a depression. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was such a stimulus. The Recovery Act was enacted almost two years ago and, with the midterm elections only a few weeks away, it is fair to ask whether the Recovery Act has been successful. Although the act was constrained in size by the polarization of Congress, it was, nevertheless, a hugely successful policy initiative.The Recovery Act was designed to boost consumption which would, in turn, increase employment. But it was simply too small. As respected economist Martin Wolff notes, "The U.S. was too cautious and not bold enough." The U.S. stimulus was only 5.7 percent of its GDP, whereas China's stimulus was 14 percent of its GDP. The U.S. stimulus was not only composed of government spending, but also tax cuts and aid to state governments.

East servery opens, serves crepes

The completion of East Servery and the Brockman Hall for Physics and Astronomy marks an end of a construction era at Rice, which started in 2007.Planning for both of these buildings began in 2008. East Servery opened on Monday and move-in to Brockman Hall is scheduled for Feb. 14.

Swimming looks to UNT after Owls capture three of four Florida meets

Recording more losses than wins thus far, the swim team had elicited skepticism from their devotees by the end of 2010. However, three dual-meet wins and a stack of season-best times later, the Owls have weathered a demanding start to the season against elite competition. Additionally, the team went through their usual rigorous winter training in south Florida to be up and ready for the remainder of the season and the Conference USA Championship Feb. 23-26. Still, the Owls had business to finish before they embarked on said winter training. While many students were carefree on the last day of school on Dec. 3, the swim team was busy preparing themselves for a clash against eighth-ranked Texas A&M University at the Rice Aquatic Center.