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(03/13/14 1:45am)
This past Saturday, the Middlebury College Men’s Cross-country team was hard at work by 6 a.m. cooking 24 gallons of chili to serve to students, Middlebury residents and chili connoisseurs at the Sixth Annual Vermont Chili Festival in Middlebury, VT. Their Wild Rumpus Chili took home first place in the overall competition, as well as the “Kitchen Sink” category.
The Cross Country team is the first student group to win the Vermont Chili Fest. In past years, the Solar Decathlon team has entered and promoted their work in the progress. The recently founded student-run business Otter Delivery also had a table at Chili Fest.
The team, led largely by Jake Fox ’15, spent months preparing for Chili Fest. They decided to enter into the competition during pre-season training camp in August 2013 and have been perfecting their recipe since. The team prepared six trial chilis before finalizing their secret winning recipe over February break.
“After every chili night, we would sit down and decide what was good or bad with the batch,” Fox said. “Our keystone ingredients are habaneros and apples—but we’ve tried one with sweet potatoes too.”
45 pounds of ground beef, 53 apples and 27 onions were used in cooking enough samples for thousands of Chili Fest attendees to try. The team was on their feet from 5 a.m., when prep-work began, until 4:30 p.m., when their win was announced.
“I think we rallied around the chili process,” Aaron de Toledo ’16 said. “We took kind of a scientific approach, dressing up in lab goggles and lab coats to cook. We even keep a lab notebook to record the recipe. We had a really good time with it.”
Chili was cooked in 10-gallon pots and carried from the Middlebury Community Church to the team’s tent at the intersection of Main Street and Merchant’s Row.
The team used a wheelchair found in the church basement to transport its chili-filled 10-gallon pot from the kitchen to their tent.
In addition to difficulties with temperature and transportation, the team faced many more logistical challenges than the average competitor. Restaurants that participated had large scale heating capabilities, whereas the College team only had one propane heater to warm their chili. Furthermore, favorites like American Flatbread, Tourterelle and Bluebird Barbeque brought dedicated clients and more experience along with their chili.
The team said its four tins were filled with chips from both students and residents, debunking accusations of ballot-stuffing by friends.
“I had two or three folks from Better Middlebury, the group that organizes the event, come up to me and say ‘You’re doing a really good thing for the College and the town,’” Fox said. “They do a lot for us so it was nice to sort of serve them back in a way.”
“It was a positive interaction with the town if nothing else,” David Russell ’15 added.
In addition to pride, a trophy and a prize-winning chili rewcipe, the team won $1,000 for their overall win and $100 for their “Kitchen Sink” category win.
“Initially, we weren’t trying to accomplish a lot with this,” Fox said. “When we first came up with the idea, we just thought it would be a fun way to get everyone together, but in the fall, we lost one of our team captains ... Donny Dickson [’11]. We noticed that [a fundraisier run for a scholarship set up in Dickson’s name] fell on the same weekend as Chili Fest and we thought it would be a good opportunity to promote the run to the community.”
The team’s winnings will go towards a scholarship fund set up in his name.
“After 12 hours on our feet, we all took long naps and I drank a beer out of the trophy we won,” Fox said.
Additional Reporting by KATIE SCHOTT
(11/21/13 5:17am)
Blackbird, a literary arts magazine, will present its new online branch, The Orchard, on Friday, Nov. 22, in tandem with the release of Blackbird’s biannual publication. The magazine’s Editing Board, which includes editors of both publications, will host a launch party at The Mill on Friday night, featuring live music and readings, to celebrate the first website dedicated to all forms of art on campus. The Orchard aims to uncover art created with little or no recognition – from intro classes to thesis work to free-time experimentation – which Blackbird cannot accomplish with a page limit.
“We think that a large portion of this campus is creating great work that hasn’t been tapped into, and these people and their art get little recognition,” said Elli Itin ’16, one of The Orchard’s online editors. “We’re really hoping to expand both the audience and the people who identify themselves as artists.”
Such is the aim of the online forum, which represents a collaborative effort by Blackbird Editor-in-Chief Jack George ’16, and new Online Editors Wendy Walcoff ’16, Elli Itin ’16 and Isabelle Stillman ’16.
“It’s a partnership that came from a convergence of ideas,” Stillman said. “Wendy, Elli and I had this idea in the spring and Blackbird was having it at the same time. When we realized we were trying to do the same thing, we thought we might as well partner.”
Though Blackbird provides an exemplary literary outlet, the team is taking on this new endeavor in order to broaden the stage for student art beyond the pages of a literary magazine, by including more mediums and welcoming more submissions.
All content featured in Blackbird will appear on The Orchard, but because of the space that the online format provides, the website will feature additional content, branching out into a wider variety of mediums including music, film and dance.
For Walcoff, Itin and Stillman the idea was born out of the notable lack of such an online publication on campus.
“It was shocking to us that there was no online forum for art at Midd,” said Walcoff, who has spearheaded the graphic design of the site in collaboration with other Blackbird staff. “Making the website was not hard to do, it just hadn’t been done. I think some of the reluctance comes from the attachment to the print edition, which is great and important to continue, but there are so many more forms of art that it was just crazy there was no place for that.”
The magazine’s team sees the new online component as a natural extension of Blackbird.
“The key difference is that the online section will be updated regularly,” George said. “We’re looking to do the same thing online that the literary magazines does here, which is to source and promote the best creative content on campus.”
The Orchard will function much as Blackbird does: as a student run organization with a reading board that reviews submissions. The content deemed the best will be printed in one of Blackbird’s biannual publications, and the rest will be handed over to The Orchard for review.
The Orchard is outlined to function as a blog of a myriad of creative work, rather than a selective handful of pieces.
“It should be more accessible, celebratory and inclusive rather than elite,” Itin said. “We think there’s tons of wonderful work being produced and we want there to be a more inclusive forum for it to be published.”
The Orchard and Blackbird editors erased the boundary between the two groups as their ideas merged, and the two Boards have worked in tandem to bring this new branch of the arts publication to life.
Both Walcoff and Stillman served on the Blackbird reading board last spring, and from their experience, hoped to create a publication that served a different role on campus than the print magazine.
“I felt the board was quick to judge in a way that disrespected the artists’ work,” Stillman said. “We decided to diverge with this a bit because we felt that anyone who makes art deserves more attention than a brief glance and a quick judgment.”
Walcoff agreed, pointing out that the majority of student work gets overlooked by the subjective eyes of a literary magazine reading and art board.
The mission to expand the body of work that can be published and appreciated on campus embodies the online publication’s vision to expand what it means to be an artist at the College.
“A large portion of this campus is creating great work that hasn’t been tapped into, and these people aren’t really seen as artists,” Itin said. “We’re really hoping to expand both the audience and the people who identify themselves as artists.”
As of now, the editors have rounded up enough creative content to go live on Friday, and hope the site will develop overtime with the help of the student body.
“We think once it’s up and running, it will be more or less self-propelled,” Walcoff said.
Everyone involved in the project shares an overarching goal of broadening the reach and scope of creative content at the College.
“We are united in this process because there is a lot of creative content on this campus,” George said. “There are a lot of incredible people here; they just need a uniform platform on which they can express themselves. The Orchard will be more accessible, more open to everyone.”
“Blackbird’s goal of highlighting great art is something that we share,” Stillman added. “The Orchard will be a platform for the student body, not for a select group of people. Even though we will filter and organize things so that it is conducive to having it on a website, it is a site for students to see each other’s work, share their work and be inspired by each other.”
(10/17/13 1:02am)
Eight contestants had four minutes each to compete for the chance to be a speaker at TedxMiddlebury next month. After four minutes, an alarm rang, but most students talked through it.
The competition, held last Thursday on Oct. 10 at Crossroads Café, was the preliminary step towards the conference themed, “Research, Re-imagine, Rebuild.” Talks ran the gamut from “The Lord of the Rings” to hair removal in American culture.
A panel of three judges deliberated over the eight mini speeches, designed to be teasers of the talks that contestants hope to give at the event on Nov. 9. The final event will feature 12 speakers from across the country, one of whom is the winner of the student competition, yet to be announced.
The three judges, Director of The Project on Creativity and Innovation Liz Robinson, former governor of Vermont and Executive in Residence at Middlebury College Jim Douglas and Dean of Faculty Andi Lloyd are chosen as “an independent body from the organizers. They represent diverse points in Middlebury life,” board member Hudson Cavanaugh said.
“Last year we had Dean Collado, we had someone from the faculty of theater. We’ve even had a parent,” Cavanaugh said.
“The Project on Creativity and Innovation (PCI) helps us out with a lot of stuff, we get a lot of our money there. We honestly wouldn’t be able to do this without Liz Robinson,” said TedxMiddlebury board member Anna Jacobsen ’16.
With help from campus organizations like the PCI and the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB), a board of eight students organize TedxMiddlebury, meeting once a week to plan the 400-person event that will take place in Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts in November.
Between now and Nov. 9, board members will be busy advertising, selling tickets, organizing housing and transportation for speakers, training volunteers and supporting their speakers.
According to Jacobsen, these board members choose speakers, “by word of mouth [and] by things we’ve read in the paper. We use the Times list of 100 most influential people and we try to use the Middlebury alumni network to bring people in.”
The board has not yet released their list of speakers for this year’s conference, though they have decided on a group.
The slot for the student speaker, in contrast, is filled through this competition format, in which contestants submitted a short application in order to participate and the board “essentially let everyone on. It’s not a highly selective application process, but it’s a self-selecting group,” said Jacobsen.
Competing for the slot, Alec MacMillen ’14 spoke about the biological differences between introverts and extroverts, and how these differences take shape in a college setting.
“The inspiration for my TEDx talk proposal was the book “Quiet” by Susan Cain,” he said. “Reading the book was an eye-opening experience because I felt like when she was describing introverts she was describing me.”
Several of the talks struck a similar chord of taking risks — Alia Khalil ’14 discussed the limiting nature of self-consciousness, and John Hawley ’14 used his experience on the rugby team to relay the importance of vulnerability — an appropriate theme in this setting of public speaking.
Anna Carroll ’15 in her talk, “Smooth: American Hair Removal and the Unconscious of Cultural Conditioning,” took a different approach to the discussion of risk taking by challenging our ideal of “hairlessness” for women in society. “Why are all these girls getting Brazilians?” she said, going on to express respect for those women who defy expectations.
But there was variety in the messages sent in the eight mini speeches. Ben Kramer ’14 used his four minutes gave an homage to J.R.R. Tolkien and the universe he created with “The Lord of the Rings.” Lizzie Durkin ’15 discussed a project she took on: creating picture textbooks about developing countries.
The broad range of topics covered on Thursday reflects similarly diverse preparation techniques among the competitors. MacMillen spent eight to ten hours preparing his speech while Kramer said, “I had no idea the lecture was that evening. I was in the middle of dinner and I got a text from my friend saying they were bummed I wasn’t going to speak because I missed my original time slot. I literally got up that instant and dashed down to Crossroads. I had absolutely nothing planned.”
As the main event approaches, Jacobsen has high hopes for this year.
“We sold out last year. But I think our speakers are even better this year … one of our goals for this year is to facilitate even more discussion about our speakers and connect them more to the student body,” she said.
This goal fits well with the role for TEDx on a college campus envisioned by those involved.
“What makes TEDx so great in the context of college is that college is about intellectual pursuit and TEDx is really the embodiment of that, its ideas worth spreading” Jacobsen said.
“TEDx is supremely important because it indicates not only an intelligent community but one that’s open minded, one that’s willing to listen to its individuals. We all have a lot to learn and this helps us teach each other,” Kramer said.
Listen to four of the competitors describe their speeches in about thirty seconds.
[audio m4a="http://middleburycampus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Logan.m4a"][/audio]
Logan Randolph
[audio m4a="http://middleburycampus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/John-Hawley.m4a"][/audio]
John Hawley
[audio m4a="http://middleburycampus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BenK.m4a"][/audio]
Benjamin Kramer
[audio m4a="http://middleburycampus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Oliver-.m4a"][/audio]
Oliver Wijayapala