The baseball team continued its recent up-and-down stretch with a 4-1 home loss to Texas State on Tuesday. Bobcats (34-12) starter Garret Carruth (4-2) tossed seven strong innings, limiting the third-ranked Owls to just one run on seven hits. Rice (31-12) starter Andrew Benak (1-1) struggled out of the gate, and after a pair of runs on three hits the freshman was replaced by Mark Haynes to close out the first inning.The loss is Rice's second in the last four games and third in the last seven, a foreboding stretch for a team that usually finds itself unbeatable in the late stretch of the season.
Sometimes, being average is not that bad. The women's tennis team finished their season with an 11-11 record off a dominant 7-0 win over Northwestern State University, rebounding from a close 5-2 loss against Conference USA favorites Southern Methodist University. SMU, ranked twenty-second, proved to be too much on Senior Day, which saw Rice honor its sole senior, and once walk-on athlete, Emily Braid on Friday. Braid helped the Owls to 70 wins in singles and doubles during her career. Braid started at the sixth spot but fell in straight sets, and closed out her Rice career with a fiery 6-2, 6-4 win against Northwestern State.
Jessica Jackley, co-founder of Kiva, the world's first person-to-person micro-lending Web site, spoke at the Shell Auditorium April 14. Jackley was invited by Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Beyond Traditional Borders Director, as part of the Rice 360 initiative. Kiva, which means "agreement" or "unity" in Swahili, has helped nearly 500,000 lenders across the globe loan approximately $67 million to individual entrepreneurs from 45 developing countries since its founding three and a half years ago, the organization's Web site said.
The Owls got to play a game at the regularly scheduled time in the sunshine today, something they hadn't yet experienced in this series. However, the sun didn't shine too brightly on the Rice baseball team today as they lost the finale of their conference series against Marshall 11-7.Games one and two of this series were both postponed due to rain, but both games got finished and the 27-10 Owls took both of them, 7-5 and 10-3, to win the series overall. Rice still leads Conference USA due to East Carolina's loss today to Tulane.
In the medieval world, the Mongols were the ultimate menace. They attacked with speed and ruthlessness, trying wherever possible to terrify their opponents and use the element of surprise.What made the Mongols especially fearsome was that you could not attack them back: A nomadic people, the fierce tribe had no home base to invade and no central government to overthrow. If for some reason your empire wanted to fight the Mongols, all you could do was sit and wait for them to attack you.
Putting aside problem sets and final projects, students in Rice's chapter of Engineers Without Borders will travel throughout Central America to serve communities in need this summer. According to its Web site, EWB-USA is a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing service to fulfill the basic needs of communities in developing countries. Members of Rice-EWB are working on one of four student-led projects in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras. These projects focus on various aspects of helping local communities, from installing water storage tanks to launching educational campaigns about how to sanitize their water.
Usually, lightning storms and track meets do not mix well. That was not the case this weekend as the women's track team overcame cold and windy conditions, in addition to lightning delays, to take first place at the New Mexico Tailwind Invitational held at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, N.M. Only sprinters, hurdlers, jumpers and weight throwers traveled to New Mexico, as the meet typically boasts strong tail winds - always helpful for sprinters - and fair conditions. The meet showcased the exact opposite, with headwinds both days and stormy weather on Saturday with temperatures in the 40s and 50s, far cooler than the temperatures in which the Owls typically compete.
Mechanical Engineering Professor Mike Massimino is preparing to fly out of this world. He will be launching into space for the second time on May 12 aboard the space shuttle Atlantis. While in space, Massimino will make repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope. Massimino was too busy preparing for the launch to speak with The Rice Thresher, but he is conveying his experiences via his Twitter account at www.twitter. com/Astro_Mike.
With his 2003 debut Chariot and 2008 self-titled follow-up, Gavin DeGraw had successfully, albeit somewhat mockingly, carved out a certain niche for himself. Cashing in on the oozing, over-indulged sappiness of One Tree Hill, the CW drama that initially landed DeGraw on the iPods of teenage girls across the nation, DeGraw found his place as a gospel-voiced piano-man, a lovelorn mixture of Isaac Slade and Lionel Richie, with a hint of Howie Day on the side.But with the March 31 release of DeGraw's third effort, Free, it's safe to say that the 32-year-old has abandoned the niche he has furnished so well. Gone are the over-produced, tinny guitar riffs; gone is the simple piano-and-drums formula; and gone, for the most part, are the Coldplay-esque refrains of unadulterated love, the kind of quixotic stuff that enthralls Madame Bovary and pisses off Chuck Klosterman.
Every girl, whether she is six or 60, has at some point in her life dreamed of being a superstar. Be it a pop star, a movie star or a secret agent, the dream of stardom is always the same. While most of us never get to see this dream fulfilled, there is one out there whom we can at least watch: Hannah Montana (a.k.a. Miley Stewart, Miley Cyrus), your regular girl next door secretly living the life of a singer and movie star. It should not come as a surprise then that her new film, Hannah Montana: The Movie, is just the peak of the Hannah Montana craze.
Brown College's annual toga-themed Bacchanalia party was held last Saturday night in the Brown commons, offering stressed-out students a break from their work in the week before finals.
Because of hectic, time-consuming finals schedules, the Thresher will publish the final issue of the spring semester on May 14.
Metro Police shot and killed a man carrying a knife Tuesday morning just outside of the Rice campus. The police had been following the man after he became involved in an altercation at METRORail's Dryden/TMC station, south of campus. When he took off along the outer loop, Metro Police fatally wounded the man, Rice Director of News and Media Relations B.J. Almond said.A female bystander sustained an arm injury from the shooting, but was treated by Rice EMS and was then transported to Ben Taub Hospital for further treatment.
For the full article with graphs and information about individual department budget cuts, please see this pdf.
One down, one to go. That's the motto for the Owls this week in regard to their junior starters, as they celebrate the return of Mike Ojala and eagerly anticipate Ryan Berry's arrival back from injury. Ojala, a junior, made his first start since March 20 last Sunday against East Carolina University, throwing the rubber game in a three-game away series and pulling home the win for Rice. Berry, also a junior, is expected back sometime after finals. The Owls (25-9, 9-3 Conference USA), currently ranked first by Rivals.com and second by Baseball America, played a three-game road series against ECU last weekend, who at the time was leading the C-USA standings and is now ranked 23rd nationally.
For a higher resolution version of this week's LAFFS, click on the image above.
Tolga Unaldi, here playing the reed flute, traveled from Turkey to share traditional Turkish music with Rice students at Tuesday's Turkish Night, hosted by the Turkish Student Association in the RMC.
Participants perform a traditional Native American dance in the Rice Native American Student Association's 11th Annual Powwow March 28. The day-long event is a celebration of Native American culture.
