Nov 21, 2019 | Exclusive |
Thank you to everyone who submitted a meme for the Farmington Flyer’s Inaugural Meme Contest! While there were many great choices, the competition was strong. Here are the memes that stuck out the most, including the choice as winner of the prestigious Meme Contest.
Honorable Mentions
Submitted by @slumberjack666 via Twitter
Submitted by Ze’ev James
Submitted by Jacob Bishopp
(I apologize in advance for the formatting) Way to go everyone! Very valiant effort, but not good enough to be the best!
Saving the best for last, the winner of the Inaugural Farmington Flyer Meme Contest is…
Congratulations to the winner, Rowan Burns
Nov 21, 2019 | Bite Me Beaver, Feature |
Dear Bite,
My work friends and I have been getting together for True American game nights and we usually host it at my place. But now they assume every Saturday will be a game night and they’re inviting people who I don’t know well enough to want in my apartment. How do I explain that, while I don’t mind hosting games, I need them to stop setting the date, spreading the word, and inviting other people without my say so?
-Don’t make yourself THAT at home.
Dear home,
Your coworkers need a sense of what it’s like to find uninvited friends in their home. Try surprising them in the middle of the night and whispering, “Let’s play a game,” over their sleeping form. Bring friends to liven the party, or some nice strangers to be adventurous. For extra surprise, you can all wear fun masks- don’t worry about major horror franchises that could turn this to nightmare fuel.
Dear Bite,
I’m Editor in Chief of the Flyer and though I love journalism . . . I also want to tear my hair out. When eight hours of editing isn’t draining enough, the Flyer attracts more drama than you’d think a peasant student paper could- between Title IX reporting, angry readers, and being severely understaffed, I’m up to my eyeballs in paperwork, edits, and emails. I’m also an unofficial TA for the journalism class and the students. . .they test me (guys, I love you, but when for five out of five issues you send PDFs or Word docs, not Google docs like I beg for, I make angry editor noises). How am I supposed to make next semester more survivable? Telling the journalism class I’ll eat their legs has put a little fear into them, but not enough.
And to everyone asking who writes this column, it’s definitely not me sorry I have no idea.
-This Final Issue Felt Like My Final Breath (Darby Murnane, Editor in Chief and President of the Farmington Flyer)
Dear Final Breath,
Clearly someone isn’t ruling with an iron fist. There won’t be any paperwork if you just set it on fire. You can rule over the flames from a throne of Flyers and spell your next headline in the ashes. As for angry readers and students who don’t listen, they can use their complaints and PDFs for the kindling. Though, if you do go with the leg-eating, I hear they’re great with a little paprika.
Nov 21, 2019 | Feature |
Holiday Spending
Sticking to a budget and finding a little extra money for gifts makes holiday spending a struggle. As with any type of budget, set aside a selected amount of money and try not to overspend.
There are a few ways you can save a few bucks before the holiday spending is in full force. Start with small tasks like collecting all the empty bottles in your room, or even from your friends, and bringing them to the bottle redemption center. Not only will you earn a few dollars but your room or apartment will be a lot cleaner, leaving more room for festive activities like Christmas trees and that heaping pile of presents you can now afford because of the extra money you earned for yourself.
In the weeks leading up to the big holiday spending, set aside your spare change and bills each week in an envelope or jar and it will add up surprisingly fast. Cashback apps like iBotta, Checkout 51 and Dosh to name a few, allow you to scan your receipt after any purchase and get cashback on applicable items. This is especially handy on receipts from grocery shopping which generally have a lot of items on the receipt.
Black Friday and holiday spending can cost a lot of money, so be conscious and don’t spend more than you can afford!
DM FinLit on Instagram at Umf_Finlit or send me an email at caleb.grover@maine.edu to set up an appointment.
Nov 21, 2019 | News |
Jocea Jordan Contributing Writer
Practicing 10 hours or more a week, UMF’s Bust-A-Move Beavers (BAM) dance group members are working hard to make their end-of-semester performance a memorable one.
BAM is one of two UMF dance groups and they hold two performances every year. Each performance is held at the end of the semester with three different show times. The dancers choreograph all 25 of the dances on their own, and even have a show reserved specifically for their parents and families.
Carson Hope, a senior early childhood special education major, is the treasurer of BAM and has been in a previous semester as well. Hope is responsible for the finances of the club and makes all of the costume purchases, fundraiser orders, and proposes the budget BAM will need for the year.
Hope has been a member of BAM for five semesters now and has made many close friends throughout her time in the club. “BAM has really brought me all of my closest friends that I have here in Farmington,” she said. “So I just have a great collection of memories of dancing with the people that I get to call my closest friends now.”
“I have danced on and off my entire life, I started dancing when I was five or six but I took several years off because I did gymnastics growing up too, and I got back into dance my freshman year here,” Hope said. “Dancing in BAM has given me a way to express myself, and to be able to have an artistic outlet, so that I can express my myself in a way that words don’t.”
“When I came here my freshman year I did not have a lot to do, but now I have this thing [BAM] that is a priority in my life, and plays an important role,” she continued.
Sierra Huff dressed as Sandy and Portia Hardy dressed as Danny from Grease the movie (Photo courtesy of Sierra Huff)
“We typically fill Emery for all of our shows, sometimes the Wednesday show doesn’t fill up, but for our Friday and Saturday shows we have people getting in line at 5:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. to get a seat for the 7:00 p.m. show,” said Hope. “We typically have people that are turned away at the door. If we had a bigger space that would be great, but we don’t.”
Sierra Huff, a sophomore biology pre-med major, has been a part of BAM for three semesters now and is going to be in six dances for this semester’s performance. Huff’s favorite part of being a dance member in BAM is “meeting the new people I wouldn’t have a chance to interact with otherwise.”
“I would say the most challenging part is making sure you dedicate time to practice for each dance,” said Huff. Most of the dances that the members are in only have practice for one hour a week. “A lot of the time just the one hour rehearsal is not enough to memorize the dance if you are in close to 10 of them,” Huff said.
For bigger dances, in which most of the members are involved, there are longer practices held each week. Huff enjoys these practices and said, “It is always interesting when we cannot use the North Dining Hall because it is unavailable, so we have to practice in a Roberts classroom.” She continued on, laughing, “So we have roughly thirty people trying to move and dance together in a tiny room.”
BAM also hosts a costume contest for its members during their practice on Halloween. “It is always interesting to see what costumes the other dancers come up with,” said Huff. “This year I went as a vampire with another member of BAM. Last year I went as Sandy, and my friend Portia went as Danny, which are the main characters from ‘Grease’ the movie.”
“I also enjoy some of the other fun events that we do like Secret Santa, where members give a gift to another member that they randomly picked,” said Huff. “And the end of the semester banquet where we give out our secret santa gifts and everyone brings different food and drinks for us to enjoy together.”
Portia Hardy, a sophomore Earth and Environmental Science major with a minor in editing and publishing, has been a member of BAM for three semesters. She began dancing when she was three and a half years old at the Kennebec Dance Studio. “I really like taking part in the performance and being on stage in front of the audience, getting to be in the show makes me really happy,” she said.
“Last spring semester I choreographed a dance with my friend Matt, it was to ‘A Lovely Night’ from ‘La La Land’ and it was a really cute, fun, sweet duet,” said Hardy. “It was my favorite moment being on stage. The last show that [Matt and I] did we both smiled at each other because it was our last one together… there have been so many good memories.”
“This semester I’m doing the smallest amount of dances that I have done, I’m only in three. Last spring semester I was in six and that was the highest that I have done,” said Hardy. “Some people do like eight dances, ten dances. They really like to dance. I personally can not fit a lot into my schedule but I know that others can.”
The showtimes for BAM’s performances are on Dec. 4-7 at 7 p.m. in the Emery Community Arts Center. The doors will open at 6:30 p.m. for all of the shows.
Nov 21, 2019 | News |
Zion Hodgkin Contributing Writer
As Maine Gov. Janet Mills recently signed legislation replacing Columbus Day day with Indigenous People’s Day, perspectives on Thanksgiving are changing too. The ethics of the holiday’s very existence as well as the traditions in the celebration of it are now in question.
The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621, and now, nearly 400 years later, it is celebrated in much the same manner. People get together with their loved ones, eat a ton of food, and feel happy about what they’ve achieved- but should we?
“The story goes,” writes one Business Insider article, “friendly local Native Americans swooped in to teach the struggling colonists how to survive in the New World. Then everyone got together to celebrate with a feast in 1621.”
However, the true beginning of Thanksgiving celebrations is believed to start instead in 1637, “owing to the fact Massachusetts colony governor John Winthrop declared a day of thanks-giving,” continues Business Insider, “to celebrate colonial soldiers who had just slaughtered 700 Pequot men, women, and children in what is now Mystic, Connecticut.”
Though the exact specificities and dates of this “First Thanksgiving” event may not be well known, most people, “are more aware that the story isn’t just what was taught in school,” proclaims Austin Kieth, former UMF student. “I just think people are more politically and historically involved. We are more aware of what Indigenous people went through.”
Katrazyna Randall, Associate Professor of Art, speaks about how she feels the holiday isn’t celebrated for the right reasons, but also why she thinks it isn’t celebrated in the right way. “One of the first things that strikes me, is how much it’s become about the idea of the nuclear family. In its origination it was about the harvest and about the community,” says Randall. “We don’t recognize ourselves as part of a community anymore, so that whole concept of it that is something worth celebrating doesn’t really exist anymore, it’s now about getting together with your family to have a dinner.”
Randall continues by thinking about how to shift the way a holiday born from a story of massacre is viewed and celebrated. “I sort of feel like things like Thanksgiving could go away, and that we need to invent new celebrations that celebrate our current civic reality,” Randall says. “I think that we should move more towards community celebrations and more civic engagement. I don’t think that we should be celebrating anything that represents the brutalization of another culture.”
Keith, however, believes that the reinvention doesn’t need to happen on such a grand scale. “I think it can still be a reason for family to come together and eat food and be happy together,” he says. “It’s a good moral thing, but it shouldn’t be associated with the event in which we killed so many people, to take and keep the land we grew the crops on that we ate during the ‘great feast’. I think they should be fully separate, one is a horrific massacre that we shouldn’t celebrate, the other is just a day to be grateful and to be with family.”
