Armed with familiar (but dreaded) red Jeep Grand Cherokees that whiz around campus performing unknown tasks, sharp-looking uniforms, and a handful of radios producing mostly white noise and whispered instructions, one may say St. Olaf's Public Safety (PS) team is somewhat of a faceless-but-nonetheless-fear-conjuring-entity on campus.
What's the deal with Wiggles & Wok, the new restaurant that opened Feb. 6, replacing Quizno's at 200 South Water in downtown Northfield? Wok often connotates Asian cuisine but Wiggles holds no Asian affiliation.
Despite very sincere efforts, I am no geekier today than I was 10 years ago. At the age of 12, I dreamed of my college days: the chance to sleep in every morning, spend lazy afternoons with reruns of Sliders and Star Trek: The Next Generation and long, long nights of video game playing. My geek renaissance was like a tiny Mario, still waiting for the red mushroom to pop up and raise me to new heights.
Every 30 seconds, someone dies of heart disease. In fact, it is the number one killer in America, claiming over one million lives a year. That is more than the next six causes of death combined, including all forms of cancer. Heart disease affects both genders and all races equally.
For a disease that killed at least 20 (perhaps as many as 40) million people around the world, the influenza pandemic of 1918 has been mostly ignored in fiction. Myla Goldberg's new novel Wickett's Remedy admirably redresses literature's silence on the topic.
