Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) spoke last week at the Fletcher Political Forum in a packed Cohen Auditorium, preaching the importance of multilateral foreign policy and the superiority of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader spoke at the campus center on Saturday as part of his "Massachusetts Marathon," in which the activist aimed to set a new international record for the most campaign stops in one day.
It might be called the Will Forde disappearing act. Or perhaps the football team simply couldn't find a way to combat a stout Amherst defense.
The field hockey team has made a habit of defeating its rivals in record-breaking fashion.
The football team was well aware of the Lord Jeffs' dominant front seven heading into Saturday's game.
The men's soccer team knew it had to win its third straight game in order to break free from the logjam at the bottom of the NESCAC standings and ensure an easier road to the playoffs. The Jumbos didn't help their cause Saturday against the 9-3 Trinity Bantams, dropping the game 1-0 in overtime.
The volleyball team emerged from this weekend's Hall of Fame Tournament with just its second loss of the season, falling to Springfield in the finals and moving to 24-2 overall with wins over host Smith and conference rival Amherst.
After 90 minutes of competitive play Saturday against the Trinity Bantams, the Jumbos found themselves on the wrong end of a 2-1 result, marking their fifth loss in the last seven games.
Senses Fail has long been a staple of the emo-core (screamo, regular old emo, what have you) scene, and for about five years now they've been dividing listeners into camps of those who adore them and those who abhor them. With its latest album, "Life Is Not a Waiting Room," the band further entrenches itself in the mediocrity of the post-screamo rock world. The album kicks off with "Fireworks at Dawn," a song that, for the first time in the band's history, is increasingly upbeat and hopeful, even though singer Buddy Nielsen whines, "Fireworks at dawn as I sip for assistance/ This flask keeps me calm, it reflects back my bent image/ Of someone who's lost, growing older by the minute." While these lines are certainly far from upbeat, the chorus brings in the rest of the band blasting away as the lyrics take a turn for the better. "So get on your feet, wipe the dirt off and get with it/ Destiny waits at your door/ It's time to move on, because the past can't be your passion/ So what if you did something wrong?/ Find someone who hasn't." This first song gets the listener excited for an album about redemption, moving on and finding optimism long since forgotten. But unfortunately for everyone involved, the album immediately reverts back to the self-pitying ways that fall neatly within Senses Fail's comfort zone. "Lungs Like Gallows," the second cut off of "Life Is Not a Waiting Room," explodes with a barrage of massively EQ'd bass drum hits and overly simple guitar riffs. Simply put, the song sounds like something that was cut from the band's previous release, "Still Searching"(2006), because it was just too generic. When a new release sounds like rejected material from a previous project, you know you've got problems. The real kicker is that "Lungs Like Gallows" contains the precious line, "I've been breaking mirrors since 1984" as well as "I give blood, but not for a cause" and "I open my umbrella even when I am indoors." What makes it even sadder is that apparently this band takes itself, as well as these absurd lyrics, quite seriously. The generic emo nature of this music doesn't stop at lyrics either; the guitar work of Garrett Zablocki and Heath Saraceno is, if anything, a regression from "Still Searching." The simplicity of barre chords and syncopated palm-mutes is an art form best left to bands such as Underoath or Atreyu. It only gets worse from there. The rest of "Life Is Not a Waiting Room" plays like a therapy session gone wrong. "Garden State," a song presumably about the band's glorious home state, opens with "The Garden State has never looked so pitiful and gray/ As I awake to the garbagemen today." What's that, you say? This would be the perfect place for a wasted-life metaphor? Not to disappoint, the next line reads, "I hope they take all my old mistakes/ Because I can't seem to face them on my own." The first single from the record comes in the form of "Family Tradition," another snappy little jingle about depression — what else is new? Although lyrics have already made up a good percentage of this review, it's correctly so, because with lines that read like "So help me, please someone come quick, I think I am losing it/ Forgive me, I inherited this from a stranger I'll never miss/ I'm sick," it's impossible not to get a good laugh out of the stilted high-school heartbreak. If this were a band's debut album (and it were 2002 instead of 2008), lines such as this might be excusable, but seeing as Senses Fail is now on its fourth LP release, each of which has been progressively more self-indulgent and self-loathing, it is utterly unforgivable to release an album of this drivel with any serious intentions. Undoubtedly, it won't be long before Senses Fail "mutually" parts ways with its record label as a result of this album.
Sen. Barack Obama announced earlier this week that he had raised an earth-shattering $150 million for his presidential campaign in September — the newest record in a fundraising effort that has earned the Democratic hopeful over $600 million over the past two years.
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As temperatures begin to drop and clouds roll in, most Tufts students reach for their sweaters and scarves, covering up the pale skin that the winter months usher in. But in spite of years of research linking ultraviolet radiation tanning beds to melanoma and other severe skin cancers, some universities are promoting tanning salons for students seeking a summer glow.
I can't stand Rachael Freaking Ray. Fortunately, there is a large group of people who back me up on this. Web sites have been devoted to people's deep-running hatred of her, like rrsux.com. While I am not an avid visitor of the site, there are numerous things about RFR that really get me going. Here are my Official Top Five Reasons Why I Can't Stand Rachael Ray:
State handicap accessibility regulations have tripped up a would-be revamping of West Hall's plumbing system.
American Enterprise Institute Resident Scholar and CBS News analyst Norman Ornstein spoke in the Coolidge Room last night about the 2008 presidential election, a race that he said represents a "public desire for change" but is strikingly similar to the 1980 campaign. Ornstein began his talk, "An Election of Change: How Much, What Kind, What Consequences?" by outlining the current political landscape, which has seen Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama jolt ahead of Republican rival John McCain in the polls amid the recent economic downturn. Ornstein explained that with Americans' economic "safety net" having been torn apart by the financial collapse, voters now feel an even more urgent need to put the country back on track. "The public desire for change was vivid," he said. "This was an election of change. If, a year ago, we had been able to have a referendum allowing the country to TiVo through the coming year — just push that button and be done with the Bush administration, be done with the Congress, move on — I think it would have gotten a 98-percent vote to move on and get off to the next chapter in our lives and in our country's future." While the concept of "change" has become a rallying cry on both sides of the presidential race, Ornstein said the general election field is a blast from the past, so to speak, resembling the 1980 campaign in which then-Gov. Ronald Reagan (R-Calif.) ran against Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter. "In 1980, we had another election of change, [with a] public that had had its fill of Jimmy Carter's presidency by the time we had moved into the final stretches of that campaign," he said. In the current race, the polls have remained strikingly stable since each major candidate chose his nominee, with the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) as Republican vice presidential nominee representing "one significant blip," Ornstein said. Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) has had about a three- or four-point lead in national polls since the Democratic National Convention at the end of August, according to Ornstein. The 1980 race featured similarly close polling numbers, Ornstein said. "And yet, with that enormous desire for change, and a president whose approval rating rivaled that of [President] George [W.] Bush -— down in the 20s — Ronald Reagan, the principle challenger, through July, August and September and into October in the Gallup Poll ranged between having a three-point lead to being down by a point because Americans looked at a challenger and saw an actor … that knew nothing about the world at a time when the world was a dangerous place." But after the only debate of that election, held on Oct. 28, Reagan finally convinced Americans he could lead — the same thing that is happening now, Ornstein said. The scholar called the recent spike in Obama's numbers, in which his Gallup Poll lead over Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) has poked into the double digits, "predictable." During a brief question-and-answer session, Ornstein addressed the diverging campaign styles of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), who he characterized as having a "George Steinbrenner approach" and Obama, who he said chose inexperienced people but put them in appropriate niches, delegating his subordinates into one the best-run campaigns in American history. "It has become very clear that McCain can't run much of anything," however, as he has run a top-down organization that has altered its message everyday, Ornstein said. This was the inaugural speech in the Frank C. Colcord Lecture series, which is sponsored by the political science department and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service.
Tufts' Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) received two grants totaling close to $700,000 last month to conduct research on the political participation of different demographics and promote online civic activism.
Junior Andrew Rosen, the top singles player throughout the fall season on the men's tennis team, entered the 2008-09 campaign not knowing what to expect.
