Reliving the good ol’ days by Bryan

Now everyone raise your hands if you used to watch Saturday morning cartoons.

This week, I had the opportunity to relive some of the good ol’ days of my childhood all in ways related to MIT.

Exhibit A: TOMB presented by 5-WITS

Childhood Reference: Legends of the Hidden Temple, Blue Barracudas anyone?

So I got to go to Tomb last Friday for a friend’s birthday, and I honestly had not had that much fun in a very long time. 5-WITS is the brainchild of a MIT course 2 alumnus, and it’s basically an interactive puzzle adventure that you do in teams where you go from room to room solving puzzles to return the pharoah to his tomb. Not quite as challenging as MIT Mystery Hunt, but it was a lot of fun nonetheless.

Exhibit B: Hip-Pop in French: Contemporary Theater, Film, Dance, Comics and Graphic Arts presents:
Comic strips of Belgium or the big success of a small country

Bet you didn’t know that Hanna Barbera was not actually responsible for the first appearance of Smurfs. The Foreign Languages and Literature department presented this talk this week:

Comic strips of Belgium or the big success of a small country
La bande dessinee belge ou ce qui fait la grandeur d’un petit pays

Willem De Graeve
Deputy Director, Belgian Comic Strip Centre
Directeur Adjoint, Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée

Date: Thursday, November 2, 2006
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: 32-155
Talk is in English.

Belgium is the country with the highest concentration of comic strip artists per square kilometer in the world. As much as Belgian beer and Belgian chocolate, comics represent a great source of pride for this small country! Willem De Graeve will discuss the history of Belgian comics, from Hergé to Franquin, Morris, Peyo and Vandersteen, reasons for their success as well as their importance in Belgium today.

I used to watch Smurfs as a child; I even had the video game on Atari. OK, I think I’m dating myself. Since my mom and grandparents were big proponents of education as a child, saturday morning cartoons were actually a learning experience; while everyone else was watching Wolverine beat up on Magneto, I had to write new vocabulary words that I learned from every episode, but I guess it helped me on my GREs.

On to another topic, this week was also Halloween and appropriately, we celebrated. My fraternity put on a haunted house for the kids of our local neighborhood. While I did take a lot of pictures from the event, there is one that I think above all takes the cake. This is quite possibly the best halloween costume…EVER.

And this is quite possibly the best advertisement ever:

Trick or Treat!