GeezLouies.net

From the latest Virginia Tech Magazine… I truly hoped this was an April Fool’s joke.

Pritchard Hall, currently the largest all-male residence hall on the East Coast, will transition to a co-ed residence hall in fall 2009. Pritchard will house a mix of 41 percent females and 59 percent males, a reflection of the gender balance of the student population on campus. The hall has housed 1,016 men during the 2008-09 academic year and has housed more than 40,000 men since it opened in 1967. The decision to open the building to female students was based on an increasing demand for co-ed housing and the changing gender balance of the Virginia Tech campus, with a higher number of females in the general population electing to attend college, increasing popularity of Virginia Tech among female students, and a higher number of women choosing to remain on campus after their first year.

I lived at Pritchard my freshman year of college. It was great. I met some of my closest college friends that year in that dorm… though I don’t think it would be great as a co-ed dorm. I enjoyed the male bonding that goes on there… or at least went on there. It’s different when you add girls to the mix :) Anyways, Pritchard was the dirtiest of the dorms, nasty to say the least. I hope they clean it up some before allowing the girls to move in.

Tent Cities
On a more serious note, it seems that the economic down turn and credit crunch is creating a new industry, tent-making. People losing jobs and homes are flocking to tent-cities all around the U.S. according to various news agencies.

The extent of the fallout is still being figured out, but from what I’ve gathered, most of the population is clueless as to what’s going on. People are continuing in their old ways and have not prepared or planned much for the prospect of losing a job or home.

Joan Burke, who campaigns on behalf of the homeless, said the images of Americans living in tents would shock many.

‘It should be an eye- opener for everybody,’ she said. ‘But we shouldn’t just be shocked, we should take action to change things, because it’s unacceptable.

‘It is unacceptable that in this day and age we have gone back to a situation like we had during the Great Depression.’

Continue reading

Interesting article written in the International Herald Tribune on China’s growing obsession with Ivy League schools.  I had a teacher at Tsinghua who was studying English who wanted to go to Harvard.  She didn’t just want to go.  She HAD to go.  This was her life’s dream.

Now, eight years after the publication of “Harvard Girl,” bookstore shelves here are laden with copycat titles like “How We Got Our Child Into Yale,” “Harvard Family Instruction” and “The Door of the Elite.”

Their increasing popularity points to the preoccupation – some might say a single-minded national obsession – of a growing number of middle-class Chinese parents: getting their children into America’s premier universities.

Because government policy allows families only one child, many parents feel immense pressure to groom their sons and daughters for success and, in the process, prepare a comfortable retirement for themselves. They fervently mine the expanding volumes of child-rearing manuals – “Stanford’s Silver Bullet,” “Yale Girl,” “Creed of Harvard” – for tips on producing what the Chinese term “high-quality” children.

Continue reading

Being at Mama Geezlouie’s family’s house has allowed me more time to entertain myself with television.  Last week I had the choice of watching American Idol or The Biggest Loser.  Of course we watched AI for the majority of the time and switched to TBL during commercial breaks.

Each time I saw a contestant on TBL I am reminded of the baggage we all carry.  Though these people on TBL carry it all physically and can be seen by others… we all have baggage (whether we admit it or not) and we try to hide them until they show up at the most inconvenient times. Continue reading

I was on my way to work and picked up one of those free Washington Post Express papers they hand out at the metro.  Front page had a picture of the plane that landed on the Hudson River.  It was one of those weird surreal feelings you get when you see something you don’t see every day.

“The captain said, ‘Brace for impact, because we’re going down,” Kolodjay said.  He said passengers put their heads in their laps and started saying prayers.  He said the plane hit the water pretty hard, but he was fine.”

Continue reading