Type Slowly

By Whet Moser / June 8, 2004

The best song of the last three years, and the most beautiful response to any of the horrible American tragedies to occur during that time, was recorded by Fred Durst and Johnny Rzeznik. Incidentally: Fred Durst is the lead cretin of Limp Bizkit, possibly the worst band ever, and Johnny Rzeznik of the Goo Goo...

Type Slowly

By Whet Moser / May 24, 2004

“Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose”—Nelson Algren I finally completed the process of moving on up. These days I work on the 29th floor of an architecturally significant office building in downtown Chicago amongst wealthy lawyers who openly discuss unimaginable sums of money, out loud, with their doors open to...

Type Slowly

By Whet Moser / May 18, 2004

I’m just going to be honest: I haven’t slept because I played sports video games for seven hours last night. I’m in a less pleasant mood than when I dropped 66 points with fake Joey Harrington. Anyway, some choice aesthetics: 1. iPod headphones Unfortunately, the choice phrase “yuppie jewelry” has already been coined and deployed...

Type Slowly

By Whet Moser / May 11, 2004

I am no more prepared to write a real column than I was last week. A wink and a laugh track, signifying nothing You have to be specific about not liking it, and you have to justify yourself. In general, I will assume you are being contrary just so you can be That Asshole Who...

Type Slowly

By Whet Moser / May 4, 2004

I am in no mood or state to write a real column, nor am I in any mood for anything constructive. Having just turned in my senior thesis, I’m dashing this off so that I can start studying for my programming midterm. Keep that in mind. Thus I present you with three unsympathetic takes on...

Type Slowly

By Whet Moser / April 27, 2004

Everyone who I have read or talked to about Fox’s new reality show, The Swan, has been so horrified by the idea that they’re unwilling to watch it. This goes for everyone from my girlfriend to Salon’s Heather Havrilesky, both noted reality TV junkies. Anyone who has had anything to say publicly on this show—aside...

Type Slowly

By Whet Moser / April 20, 2004

Toward an Ethics of File Sharing I. Keep in mind that this is an “ethics,” not a “legality.” Not everything illegal is unethical, just as not everything unethical is illegal. So, while sharing copyrighted materials remains illegal (and verboten under University policy), as it is generally practiced using programs like Kazaa and such, it’s worth...

Type Slowly

By Whet Moser / April 13, 2004

Last week I was invited to a dining- hall focus group, for which I received 10 Flex Dollars,1 a chance to bitch about the fruit situation in Bartlett, and the staggering reminder that the U of C is thinking about re-housing the Shoreland refugees in some kind of enormous architectural project (possibly south of the...

TYPE SLOWLY

By Whet Moser / April 6, 2004

The GWB media blitz—supported by the largest war chest in campaign history1—distinguished itself by immediately pissing everybody off in the most predictable way possible. Not only did they send the media up in arms, they couldn’t find an unexpected way to do it, which worried wonks like Michael Isikoff and/or his unnamed sources. “But privately,”...

TYPE SLOWLY

By Whet Moser / April 6, 2004

The GWB media blitz—supported by the largest war chest in campaign history1—distinguished itself by immediately pissing everybody off in the most predictable way possible. Not only did they send the media up in arms, they couldn’t find an unexpected way to do it, which worried wonks like Michael Isikoff and/or his unnamed sources. “But privately,”...

Mountain Goats shall Heal the musically challenged with new release

By Whet Moser / March 5, 2004

John Darnielle is a former psychiatric nurse who now works with disturbed children four days a week. He is the proprietor of Last Plane to Jakarta, one of the more elegant and thoughtfully considered music ‘zines on the Internet, and an occasional contributor to other publications on the subject of popular music. He has a...

Shelve Red Line shuttle plans now

By Whet Moser / January 16, 2004

Since last year’s S.G. elections, a number of people have made arguments for a Red Line shuttle bus, most recently S.G. Transportation Committee chair Joe Anzalone in Tuesday’s Maroon. Economically and logistically, they’re mostly sound arguments (with at least one glaring exception in Anzalone’s column), and maybe $8,243 for such a luxury is reasonable. But...

Lethem’s fortress: an enticing bohemia or a sad waste of life?

By Whet Moser / November 18, 2003

The Fortress of Solitude is a failed book about failure, a boho dream about the failure of boho dreams. Jonathan Lethem—whose previous work, Motherless Brooklyn, was a slim, perfectly realized detective novel with no real ambitions other than to be extremely good, which it was—tries to take on the epic American issues of race, class,...

Belle & Sebastian: awkward first kiss leaves much to be desired

By Whet Moser / November 6, 2003

I think we all knew that the crisis of Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant was coming. Belle & Sebastian was supposed to be more of a collective than a band, more of a phenomenon than a career. The miasma of Fold Your Hands had an air of uncomfortable confusion about it,...

Canadian supergroup lays it on too thick on new Version

By Whet Moser / May 8, 2003

It’s tough to formulate general principles with regards to something as ridiculously subjective as pop music, but something along the lines of a Supergroup Principle seems safe: no supergroup will ever equal the sum of its parts. Don’t believe me? Try this: can you name three Traveling Wilburys songs? How about three Dylan songs? Three...

Grandaddy: in the groove and out of place at the Riv

By Whet Moser / May 8, 2003

The question of the night for Grandaddy’s show was: what’s Grandaddy doing opening for Pete Yorn? My companions and I eagerly debated this on the way to the concert, and on the way back as well, since it didn’t appear that they had any more of a clue than we did. Rooney, which features Jason...

Thompson proves to be an unparalleled guitar god

By Whet Moser / May 1, 2003

I came into Richard Thompson’s Saturday night set at the House of Blues as a Thompson greenhorn. I’d heard his work, knew of his reputation as the dark-horse candidate for greatest living pop guitarist, but had dismissed him as overly subtle and excessively restrained. I could certainly appreciate him as an outstanding, literate singer-songwriter, but...

A long drive for someone with nothing to think about

By Whet Moser / April 17, 2003

Don DeLillo is known as one of our greatest living novelists, but to call most of his works “novels” is to stretch the intention of the genre: they’re ideas with a plot and a cast. In his weird world of armchair semioticians, his creations pronounce rather than converse, their dialogue reading like a stylized reworking...

Top 5 Love Songs of All Time

By Whet Moser / February 14, 2003

In recent history, this list would have been five different takes on Palace Music’s “Valentine’s Day” (“It’s Valentine’s Day / And I’m catatonic”) and a make-your-own-Faith-Hill-voodoo-doll. Circumstances change, however, and this list features three unabashedly sappy songs, and I feel no shame in this, nor do I feel any shame in admitting that I was...

Nirvana and U2 offer album-buyers a loving look back

By Whet Moser / November 26, 2002

It’s hard to tell when exactly CDs get here to the Maroon office unless you’re here for the mail run–all the mailings immediately get pawed through. So it’s surprising that the new Nirvana compilation, Nirvana, and U2: The Best of 1990-2000 sat in the office unclaimed. This isn’t especially surprising if you work here: none...

Elvis Costello charms U of C with tales of romantic woe

By Whet Moser / November 12, 2002

W: I haven’t been here in sunny historic Hyde Park all that long, but when word spread through the office that MAB had signed up Elvis Costello I intuited that they’d hit a Jose-Canseco-off-the-restaurant-in-the-SkyDome-type home run. Suffice it to say that the Maroon office collectively flipped out when we found out about the show. I...

Type Slowly: RedEye vs. Red Streak

By Whet Moser / November 5, 2002

Cheer up, Hyde Park: The Tribune and the Sun-Times care about you. If you’re 18-34, part of that demographic which so famously does not read newspapers, then you’re the target audience for RedEye and Red Streak, the new tabloids that, since Wednesday, have been so visibly present on campus. Newspapers around the country are terrified...

Type Slowly

By Whet Moser / October 21, 2002

The northern Virginia “sniper” has killed nine people and wounded three in the past 20 days. And all this time, two people have been foremost in my mind: Don DeLillo and Thomas Harris. Please don’t think me insensitive.This is what English majors do when we’re cornered: run to the written word. To call DeLillo prescient...

Physicist Borst dies at 89

By Whet Moser / August 15, 2002

Alumnus Lyle Borst, a former member of the Manhattan Project and the founder of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, died July 30 at the age of 89. Borst, a Chicago native, completed his undergraduate education and his master’s at the University of Illinois, and earned his Ph.D at the University of Chicago in 1941. One...

Crime Report

By Whet Moser / August 8, 2002

The Original Pancake House on the 1500 block of East Hyde Park Boulevard was robbed at 7:48 a.m. August 5. An unarmed man entered the restaurant and demanded money from the cashier. The cashier complied, and the man fled on foot. Police are looking for a bald black man approximately 25 years old, 5’2” tall,...

DOE faces lawsuit from Chicago employees

By Whet Moser / August 1, 2002

Claims of racial discrimination by current and former employees of the Department of Energy, stationed in the Chicago office of the DOE at Argonne National Laboratories, have resulted in a lawsuit that may go to trial this year. The employees, who worked in the Safety and Technical Services division, claim that supervisors received substantial bonuses—”superbonuses”...

Crime Report

By Whet Moser / July 25, 2002

Two juvenile suspects, 13 and 14 years old, were detained by University Police for a robbery that occurred at 60th Street and Stony Island Avenue, at 10:11 pm on July 21st. The two youths forced a man off his bicycle and fled. They were found at 6100 South Ellis Avenue and identified by the victim....

Stripes open garage door

By Whet Moser / July 25, 2002

We arrived a bit late for the show, partly because we were at a bar, and partly because we hadn’t had the opportunity to hear some clips from the opening act, the Clone Defects,1 and their name seemed a bit off-putting. It was kind of a shame. I caught their last song, a punked-up soul...

Obituary: General Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., 89

By Whet Moser / July 18, 2002

Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., former commander of the Tuskegee Airmen and an alumnus of the University, died July 4 in Washington, D.C. of Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 89. Davis was born in Washington, D.C., to the Army’s first black officer, Benjamin O. Davis Sr. He enrolled at Case Western Reserve University, and then...

Type Slowly

By Whet Moser / July 11, 2002

I’m going to sound potentially inhumane for saying this, but I can’t read the New York Times’s “Portraits of Grief” anymore. I can’t bear it. It’s not that it causes me to grieve excessively. I can’t read it because it’s a failure: it may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but during...

Street, former Professor of English and Dean of the College, dies at 85

By Whet Moser / July 7, 2002

Robert Streeter, former Dean of the College and Dean of Humanities and an important figure in the development of the University’s curriculum, died at his home in Danville, Pennsylvania Saturday at the age of 85. Streeter, an alumnus of Bucknell College and Northwestern University, began his academic career at Bucknell. After a brief tenure at...

George Ranney Sr., trustee, dies at 90

By Whet Moser / July 7, 2002

George Ranney Sr., a former attorney, steel executive, and member of the University’s Board of Trustees, died in Lake Forest Hospital Sunday at the age of 90. Outside of his achievements in law and business as a partner in the Chicago office of Sidley & Austin and as a vice chairman of Inland Steel Corporation,...

Heaven, I need a better comeback single than this

By Whet Moser / July 7, 2002

So it was about 4:30 a.m. here in the office when Pete & I finally acquired an mp3 of “Heaven I Need a Hug,” R. Kelly’s unfortunately titled new single. Better yet it was a radio rip, the DJ fading in over the outro to announce, “that’s hot—I’m feelin’ this. A whole lot.” We were...

University receives $6.25 million from EPA for Environmental Statistics Center

By Whet Moser / June 27, 2002

The University has been awarded a $6.25 million grant by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish a center to investigate the use of statistical methods for investigating environmental problems and developing new approaches in the field of risk assessment. The Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science will hold its first meeting September 19th...

Dance marathon held in Ida Noyes

By Whet Moser / April 22, 2002

The dance marathon began at the Cloister Club in Ida Noyes Hall last Friday at 8 p.m. with students dancing to the Beach Boys. By 2 p.m. on Saturday, after 18 hours of dancing to Aretha Franklin and Ja Rule, the marathon had raised $5,500 for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS foundation. Jasmine Harris, a...

I had sympathy for Chuck Jones

By Whet Moser / March 1, 2002

Chuck Jones A think piece A couple of years ago, when I attended an institution where I could take a class called “Postmodernism,” my teacher asked how I felt so at home in the green fields of metanarratives, pastiche, parody, and self-referentiality. For a glorious semester I thought it was an innate ability to see...

Researchers find that women can detect genetics through scent

By Whet Moser / January 25, 2002

University researchers have discovered that females have an extraordinary ability to detect small genetic differences between males with their sense of smell, preferring the scent of men who are genetically similar, but not identical, to their fathers. “We’ve just showed that humans have this capacity and preference. No one has shown this yet, even in...

The Jick is up

By Whet Moser / November 6, 2001

One of my friends who listened to me listening to one too many Pavement CDs started referring to me as “emo boy.” I took great pains to point out that Pavement isn’t emo, but the difference really started to seem academic. Basically his point was that I’d probably be a lot happier and get more...

U of C wins $3.4 mil grant to study climate

By Whet Moser / October 15, 2001

University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratories scientists will have $3.4 million over the next five years to develop tools for the “grand-challenge” problems in climatology, thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation. “It’s very troublesome that we don’t understand the physics behind [climate change],” said Dr. Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor in the...