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(05/17/10 12:00am)
Author's note: Three major mp3 download websites, Amazon, eMusic and iTunes, each have exclusive bonus tracks, as does the vinyl release. This review was written based on the eMusic version of the album, with the bonus track "Call on God."Every once in a while, I get an urge to turn back the clock to the 1970s, back when soul and R&B ruled the charts, Afros were bigger than the heads they topped and James Brown was shouting, "Ain't it funky!"
(05/17/10 12:00am)
I have a bit of advice for underclassman readers: Find something about Rice you can learn to hate.Hopefully this will be easy. If you cannot hate Rice, though, at least get tired of it. Boredom, or even an itch to get out of here, will make graduation that much easier.
(04/23/10 12:00am)
We knew it was going to be bad, but we did not expect this. The Houston Astros blasted off with the worst start in baseball, going winless for their first eight games but sitting, as this newspaper went to press, at a nicer record of 5-9. Already four games behind in the National League Central Division, the Astros are looking for answers. What went wrong?
(04/23/10 12:00am)
Out of the Park Baseball 11 is the Rice University of baseball video games. It's geeky and obsessed with statistics, and it lets you do nearly everything short of taking a swing yourself. OOTP 11 is a simulation game that puts the player in the position of general manager of a baseball team. As GM, you do not step into the batter's box and swing for the fences. Instead, the game focuses on managing the team, negotiating trades, promoting minor leaguers and building a playoff dynasty.
(04/16/10 12:00am)
Most people agree that spirituality is a good thing - even essential to our human experience. Pundits worry that people are not satisfying their spiritual needs, and the Rice Student Association recently hopped on the bandwagon with a survey assessing resources for students' spiritual health.And, for the first time, there is now a distinction between faith and spirituality: More and more people tell researchers, "I'm not religious, but I am spiritual." Elaine Ecklund, a sociologist at Rice, conducted a study and found that 20 percent of atheist scientists still describe themselves as having "spirituality."
(03/19/10 12:00am)
A computer bug leads four office employees on a search for a missing co-worker in The Bug, the Rice Visual and Dramatic Arts Department's spring play. The Bug may be modest in length, plot and ambition, but it delivers the laughs in a thoroughly enjoyable corporate comedy of errors.The Bug is a small-scale play; it is only an hour and a half long, and it consists of a single long scene in one room, with an intermission in the middle. There are only four characters, and the play follows their conversations over the course of a rather atypical morning at the Chicago offices of Jericho, Inc.
(03/12/10 12:00am)
The first scene of The Ghost Writer feels like something from a Hitchcock movie: A passenger goes missing from the ferry to Martha's Vineyard, and his body is found washed up on the beach. In scenes to come, the movie will allude to modern politics and rely on a car's GPS system for a valuable clue, but The Ghost Writer is still an homage to Hitchcock's mode of storytelling. This is an old-fashioned suspense movie updated for a new century. Ewan McGregor (Angels and Demons) stars as a professional ghost writer whose name is never mentioned. The writer is assigned to pen the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Die Another Day's Pierce Brosnan). The last ghost writer to try to write Lang's life story-well, his body is the one that washed up on the beach.
(02/19/10 12:00am)
When Pittsburgh Pirates fans feel sorry for you, you know your team is bad. The Pirates are in many ways the worst franchise in baseball. The last time a Pirates team had a winning record was in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was president and most current Rice students were still learning how to count. So, when a Pittsburgh sports blog called the Bucs Dugout posted an entry called, "Schadenfreude: Your 2010 Astros," it was obvious that the Houston Astros were in trouble. Pirates fans are experts in bad baseball.
(02/19/10 12:00am)
A few weeks ago, I walked into a 1950s-style diner named Cheesy Jane's and ordered a burger, onion rings and chocolate shake. Above my table, a model train coasted along a track suspended from the ceiling. A different song began to play on the oldies radio station, and the singer asked a series of questions I hadn't heard in years: "Who put the bomp in the bomp ba bomp? Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong? Who put the bop in the bop she bop? Who put the dip in the dip da dip da dip?"
(01/29/10 12:00am)
On Tuesday, all eyes will be on Hollywood as the 2010 Academy Award nominees are announced. Ten movies may be set to be nominated for Best Picture - not five, as in years past - but that does not mean there is any less debate about the ballot. Which movie will take home the top honors?Who were the best actors and actresses of the last year? And is there any category in which Avatar will not be nominated? What follows is a summary of the best movies of 2009 in two parts. At the end, I name some probable Oscar winners and a few movies which might receive surprise nominations. But first I list my five favorite films of the last year -I'll leave the debate about the 10 best to others. These are not necessarily predictions of which films will get Best Picture nominations; instead, read them as one avid moviegoer's attempt to sort out his favorites from a great year at the movies.
(01/22/10 12:00am)
Michael Bublé's fans have traditionally had to tolerate long waits for his CDs, but until now the waits have been worth it. His fourth studio album, and the first in more than two years, Crazy Love finds Bublé branching out into new styles and new artistic directions, often with mixed results. The high points are magnificent, but too often on Crazy Love his soft, tender singing voice and fondness for love ballads clashes with his desire to do something dramatic and unique. There are a few tunes on Crazy Love that bring to mind the best of Bublé's past work: He collaborates with a cappella group Naturally 7 for a touching rendition of the standard "Stardust," and with Sharon Jones for the spunky "Baby (You've Got What it Takes)." "All I Do Is Dream of You" is an exciting number with fantastic backing vocals, and "All of Me" is a classy jazz tune that gives Bublé a chance to let his golden voice take center stage.
(01/15/10 12:00am)
The oud is a millennia-old Middle Eastern musical instrument that Arab conquerors brought to Spain, where the locals trimmed down its size, lightened the sound and renamed it the "guitar." However, the guitar never caught on in the Muslim world, and the oud remains, to this day, the stringed instrument of choice in countries like Turkey. My great-grandmother was one of the premier oud teachers in Turkey, meaning, then, that my mother lived in a household filled with great music. All her memories came flooding back after I put this new CD, Istanbul, into our stereo. Istanbul is a carefully researched, gorgeously performed album of Turkish folk music, uniting musicians from political rivals Turkey and Armenia. "The best Turkish music I've heard in ages," my mother mused, before singing along to several instrumentals.
(11/13/09 12:00am)
Jenny, the protagonist of the new British film An Education, is no Lolita. She is just 16, yes, and she is seeing a man twice her age, but they are genuinely in love. The man, David, remains polite and demurs when Jenny says she wishes to remain a virgin. Their romance is a mutual adventure, not an exploitation. Or is it? The ambiguities of An Education, and the sympathy and suspense it adds to a story which could have been sensationalist, make it a beautiful film. Director Lone Scherfig (Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself) and screenwriter Nick Hornby (Fever Pitch) did not aim to demonize the predatory older man or sentimentalize his prey, and the result is so subtle that for a few minutes we wonder if these characters are actually in love.
(11/13/09 12:00am)
One of the most popular arguments against a possible acquisition of the Baylor College of Medicine is that buying a medical school would damage the culture and traditions that make Rice unique. I am here to argue that the opposite is true. Though the acquisition would not be without side effects, adding Baylor would, in fact, fit our institution's traditional personality perfectly. In his presentation to the Student Association, President David Leebron demonstrated a deep understanding of the issues at hand with the BCM merger. He defied expectations by clearly expressing his readiness to pull the plug on merger talks if they become unproductive or if the expense would outweigh the benefits.
(10/23/09 12:00am)
It was another bad year for baseball in Washington, D.C. The Washington Nationals were again the worst team in the major leagues, again lost over 100 games and again found newer, more creative ways to achieve futility. Much of the national media enjoyed making the "Gnats" a punchline this year. But the lonely souls who actually followed the Nats weren't laughing.
(10/09/09 12:00am)
The best-kept secret in Houston's classical music scene is, without a doubt, the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra. I have two good reasons for believing this to be true. First, though the Houston Symphony has greater technical ability, our Shepherd orchestra routinely outdoes the professionals in passion and flair. Second, the Shepherd School of Music does a very good job making sure its orchestra remains a secret.Yes, they perform a few concerts each year, and yes, most of those concerts are free to the public. But after the magic of the live performance is over, we have to wait another month to hear our orchestra play again. Every concert is carefully recorded, but CDs are made only as gifts for donors, and radio broadcasts have long been out of the question because of the royalties demanded by music publishers.
(10/02/09 12:00am)
Over a century after its first performance, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is still one of the funniest plays ever written. It is also one of the most popular, since theater troupes know that any production of this fast-paced, laugh-a-minute work will be a hit. But for a new production of Earnest to be truly memorable it has to really stand out. This week's staging by the Rice Players does not.
(09/18/09 12:00am)
When we think of great humanitarians, we often think of saints. We think of doctors, political activists and retired software tycoons. Many of these people grace the covers of our magazines and promote their causes on talk shows.But the greatest humanitarian to ever live did not sell microchips, did not appear on our televisions and, indeed, never became famous for his work. His name was Norman Borlaug, and he died last Saturday in Texas at the age of 95.
(09/11/09 12:00am)
Robin Williams has a serious actor's talent trapped in a comedian's brain. Even in his funny movies, he is best when acting with restraint: Witness his subtle performance in the flamboyant romp The Birdcage, or the way his character in Good Morning Vietnam changes as he realizes that war is not a joke.World's Greatest Dad is another comedy in which Williams keeps a straight face. He plays Lance Clayton, an unpopular high school teacher whose poetry class is filled with empty desks, whose novels are rejected by every publisher who reads them and whose son from a long-ago fling is the school's requisite friendless loser.
(09/11/09 12:00am)
The world of print journalism is evaporating. The paper versions of The Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are gone forever; my hometown newspaper in San Antonio, the Express-News, now has a staff roughly the same size as that of The Rice Thresher. Time reports that the Boston Globe is losing $1 million dollars a week, and rumor has it that even the The New York Times is burdened by enormous debts.Many news outlets, like the Post-Intelligencer, are switching to online-only formats. Those print media sources lucky enough to survive write columns about the inferiority of Internet news sites. An April article by Atlantic Monthly reported, "In a poll of prominent members of the national news media, nearly two-thirds say the Internet is hurting journalism more than it is helping." One anonymous respondent told Atlantic that the Internet "has blurred the line between opinion and fact and created a dynamic in which extreme thought flourishes while balanced judgment is imperiled."
