Caltech

Ditch Day! It happened!!

Ever wanted to be a member of the CIA or KGB?

Do you like PIRATES? Or maybe you prefer anime. 

No?

Then how about being a Pokemon master? Part of the U.S. army?

Indiana Jones? Or what about X-men characters?

Still not yet?

Dumbledore's Army? Covert ops? Do you like spandex? (please say no to the last one...)

Or how about just having a day of ridiculous fun?

Yup. It finally happened. Ditch Day. You know, we've been hearing "Go to bed frosh! Ditch Day is Tomorrow!" pretty much all year, but we always laugh it off, knowing "Yea right. Like it's gonna happen." But then, we started noticing things. Black tarp started appearing around campus. We hear faint hammering sounds in the night. And ever so often..seniors disappear for days on end. What's going on?

Yup, that's Ditch Day. Me? I joined the pirates stack (too bad no ninjas...)

First we started off with...a math set? Yea. We got tricked. Behind the large sign for Pirates Cove...was a sign for Business World Stack. To master our "accounting" skills, we sat there for an hour doing integrals, adding numbers, dividing numbers....at 8 in the morning. While eating breakfast.

But it's ok! We had to deliver our completed assignment to the head of our company, and ended up being chased by the FBI for fraud charges. In doing so, we got locked in this auditorium, with a suitcase, a padlock, and a laptop.

The seniors programmed this game filled with clues/puzzles that would tell us the combination of the padlock to the suitcase and the padlock to the doors, to escape from the FBI.

At this time, we learned some people had some pretty shady skills. One of the guys on our stack apparently knows how to open a master lock without knowing the combo beforehand (and no, he didn't break it). So yea. Escaping the FBI, we "realized" that we pirates aren't good businessmen, and decided to go back to our traditional jobs (YAR!) and navigate the seas.

Then...that's when we found out we weren't pirates of a ship, but of a SPACE SHIP!. (What the heck. So confused. I still don't get this). We were led to an underground room filled with LEDs. There were white ones, red ones and a single blue one. We also happened to have a custom-built master control of the entire set up. You know the game where you click on a button, and then it turns off the one you clicked, but turns on the ones around it? We had that game. Except with over 100 LEDs. And they turned off in random groups. (Seniors are cruel...)

But after about an hour of messing around with it, we turned off all the RED LEDs, and the single blue LED lit up. But what now? After a couple of seconds, another set of lights turned on, but they spelled a message (took us an hour to figure out it was a message in the lights...) leading us to our next location.

LEDs make some pretty cool effects with the right camera settings :P

Where we created our FLAG! Our pirate ship was sorely lacking in decor, so with some spraypaint, black fabric, and a couple of poles, we got ourselves a nice looking war banner.

 

To wrap it up, after getting our flag, eating a quick meal (exotic fruits!)

(Jackfruits, durian, coconuts, kiwis, pineapples, papaya, guava, you name it!),

we set out for the lake. Across the park, there were "shipwrecks," where we had to salvage pieces of wood to create three pirate ships, arm it with a cannon, and make our own cannonballs (water balloons). We were pitted against another stack who also managed to "find" three ships, and attempted a full out battle on the lake. But...the lifeguards wouldn't let us board our ships...

So we had a water balloon fight.

All in all, not too bad, eh? The picnic afterward was pretty good, but the park closed down while we were BBQing. We ended up being chased out by park security.

Can't wait for next year!

Avery Dessert Night

Avery has a tradition of hosting a Dessert Night for some of the faculty followed by a string of performances. Here's the end of all the shows with a "summary" of Caltech life by Keir (white shirt), DK (black hat), and Luke (orange shirt).

Just a little bit of quick info: Keir's a frosh majoring in MechE and minoring aerospace, DK is a bio major, and Luke is EE.

Here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2TgOBgb9kU&feature=channel_page

Have fun!

(It's really worth the watch :D )

Ditch Day - Gotcha!

Last Friday, all the seniors across campus ran around the alleys of the Houses banging pots and pans yelling "WAKE UP! IT'S DITCH DAY!"

Ok. Usually, we wake up 10 minutes before class, so for freshmen like us, it's around 9:50 and then we rush off to class. What time did the seniors wake us up Friday? 7:30. In the morning.

But being freshmen and hearing all the great things about Ditch Day (if you don't know what it is, it's one of the best days of the year at Tech), we all wake up excitedly, rush off to the lounges and search for stacks to sign up for.

Except it was fake.

But don't get me wrong. Even if it WAS fake, and we lost so much sleep, it was still pretty amazing. I signed up for the "Doraemon Stack" (OK maybe the name doesn't sound too exciting, but hang in there!) and we had to do the following:

We first started off with breakfast. It seemed innocent enough, eating red bean pancakes with whip cream (apparently Doraemon's favorite food). Except there were clues hidden in the pancakes. And we couldn't use our hands to eat. Some nice friends of mine thought it'd be nice to pie people with these whip bowls. Let me tell you, whip cream up your nose hurts.

DK pied poor Jackie :(

Next, they decided that we should have Doraemon equipment. In other words wear the little caps with the fan on top.

 

Yea. Imagine running around all morning with these. (Say hi to Luke if you ever see him).

Next we ran around looking for Doraemon figurines all over campus, collecting the little guys to form a secret message:

 

There's a tiny doreamon action figure on the statue in front. Millikan pond is also freezing in the morning...

The secret message said we should go to Watson lab, and arriving there, we found a homemade flamethrower (lighter with dust-cleaner aerosol can) and a large bag in the tree. We were supposed to burn down the string holding the bag with our flamethrower, but we accidentally pulled the whole thing down...

In any case, they led us through a few more sidequests and then finally we got a message written in invisible ink. We were supposed to use heat to reveal the hidden message, but the candles didn't produce a large enough flame to let us read it...so we used our flamethrower.

And set the whole thing on fire.

 

 

Yup. That's it. Apparently the message was "Go to sleep frosh! Ditch Day is Tomorrow!"

Hawaii Here We...Come?

Ever been to Hawaii?

No?

Ever wanted to?

Well, apparently Caltech decided we needed a nice relaxing atmosphere after our midterms, and decided to hold a Luau dinner for us. Since I'm not Hawaiian, I don't know what true Hawaiian food is, but Caltech Dining Services gave it a pretty good shot (I think, although if you want to ask a real Hawaiian, find David. He might even show you a couple steps of the Hula).

So what did we have?

For an appetizer, we had

Tossed Green Salad with Cherry Tomatoes
Assorted Fresh Fruit Spears and Whole Fruit

For Entrees (here's where it gets good)

Kalua Pork
Shrimp Skewers
Huli Huli chicken
Korean BBQ Ribs (...I have no idea why this is Hawaiian, but it was good, so I'm not complaining)
Steamed Rick (It says Rick on the menu..but i'm pretty sure they meant Rice)
Hawaiian Poi (I don't remember eating this. I think it was the sauce for the Kalua Pork)

And last but not least: Spam Sushi. Apparently spam was the main source of red meat for Hawaii for quite awhile. Spam Sushi sounds really weird, but give it a try. It might surprise you.

And Desserts?

Pineapple Upside Down Cake
Fruit Sorbets
Frozen Chocolate Bananas
Assorted Dessert Bars (Lemon Bars, Chocolate bars, etc.)

Then we had some nice Kern's juices, sodas and water for drinks.

Oh, and don't forget all the decorations!

Here's Peter Daily, one of the main organizers of the campus-wide dinners. They passed out leis, grass skirts, and hats to all the people who showed up.

Here's also one of the sorbets that they let us eat. This one is peach. They had mango, pineapple, and coconut as well. We all tried one of each kind. I recommend the peach and coconut if you get a chance.

Finally, here are some more pictures of the landscape. They really tried to set the mood with palm-tree umbrellas and island-ish music (although some were from the Caribbean instead of the pacific..hmm..)

I also managed to sneak a couple of leftover pineapples and coconuts away...see you next year at the Luau!

Prank Attack!

Last Friday, I woke up to a very nice message slipped under our door:

"A friendly good morning from Dead Alley"

Being half-asleep, I first thought, "Aw, how nice. They left us a nice message!" Then, it suddenly dawned on me, "It's probably a very BAD idea to walk out of my room right now. "So cautiously, I opened my door slightly, waiting for something to crash down. Nothing. So far everything's ok. As I peeked around the door, our ENTIRE doorway had been saran-wrapped and duct taped shut. 

Like this:

And if that wasn't enough, they saran-wrapped the floor:

And they covered our stairwell, our shoes, and even our markers.

If you look really closely, you might be able to see my flip flop (yes singular) in the web.

   Thanks Dead Alley. We love you guys too.

Star Trek!

Any Star Trek lovers out there?

If so, you're in luck. Tonight (actually right now, I'm late!), ASCIT, the Caltech undergraduate student body government, decided to rent out two entire theaters (900 seats) for Caltech students. What did we pay? Nothing.

Plus, in the near future, they'll be holding an ASCIT Formal. Remember high school proms? Yea. Kinda like that. Except with Caltech students (no, not mostly all guys..but getting back to the point).

The Social Executive Committee of Caltech, which is formed from the individual Social Directors of each House (Avery, Blacker, Dabney, Fleming, Lloyd, Ricketts, Ruddock, and Page) and headed by the IHC Social Director helps to promote Campus-wide activities. In this case, the IHC Chair really pulled everything together and all we had to do as a committee was hand out tickets.And from the looks of it, the entire campus has gone to see the movie.

Shoot, gotta run! Hope the movie is as good as people say it is :D

Frosh Party!

This past weekend, Ruddock decided to host a frosh party. Now, even though it's exclusively for "frosh," a ton of upperclassmen hang out with us as well. All of us really like to have some gambling every now and then (not with real money of course), so Ruddock let's us hone our skills by pitting us against each other in poker, craps, roulette, the whole works. They lined up stacks of chips for us, and we can take as many as we want.

(Ok, for those people who really like gambling...this may have been a little fake, but hey, it's still pretty intense!)

Plus, we got a dance floor set up outside with the Ruddock DJs and a couple of..hammers...

Ok, you can't really see what it looks like in this picture, but this thing is taller than I am (although I'm a short person, so that's not saying much...)

And bottom, here's one of the Ruddock DJs, getting the party started!

Oh and did I mention the food? Ruddock organizers are called "iguanas," and the food iguana laid out a pretty impressive array of food. Unfortunately, by the time I remembered to get my camera, all of it was gone...

Hope to see you guys here next year!

P.S. Oh yea, one of the great things about Caltech? If people throw things out, (like speakers), there's always someone who knows how to fix it. Ruddock got some pretty nice surround sound from "junk" that was just thrown out a couple of days before. One of the other DJs figured out what was wrong, patched it up, and got it ready for Frosh Party. Pretty intense.

Blacker Interhouse

Caltech parties. Seems like an oxymoron, right? Maybe..but we try to break that stereotype every once in awhile, and one way we do it is with Interhouse Parties.

Each House (Avery, Blacker, Dabney, Fleming, Lloyd, Page, Ricketts, and Ruddock) gets a chance to hold an Interhouse party during the school year, and each House goes all out in constructing a dance floor and entire theme for it.

Avery had its Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy Theme, Ruddock had Atlantis, and Lloyd had Go Go Tokyo to name a few. Blacker this time had Trojan War as the theme, building a two-story Trojan horse and a two-story battleship to go with it. They even flooded their courtyard for their battleship!

Here's a couple of pics. Also, really sorry about the bad quality; my flash wasn't working properly.

The following three are pictures of the mural that Blacker painted on their Hovse wall:

 

 

 

Trojan horse anyone? This guy was looking down at us the entire time...O.o

 

Talk about watching your back while you dance. He seemed so much more intimidating up close though...

Wait, but there's no people!

 

Oh, we're good. The design was pretty nice. For the people who wanted to chat (aka not dance) we could just go up to the second level and look down at all the dancers. Maybe this was intentional?

Interhovse parties are always the highlights of the year. Really, if you come to Caltech, don't miss out on these chances!

Medieval Fair!

So, this event happened completely by accident. I'm actually not sure who hosts this event or if it was even publicized, but I happened to walk past a Medieval Fair on Beckman Lawn right in the middle of Caltech.

At first, I only saw one lady wearing layers of petticoats and "traditional" Medieval-style clothing, and then a pair of knights in full-body armor with metal shields and broadswords. They actually started dueling right in front of my eyes...and finally a huge crowd of Medieval era aficionados discussing their wares, costumes, and the history of that time period. It was pretty amazing.

Plus, they had a small madrigal choir singing medieval hymns and tons of handmade crafts such as belts, beer steins, fabric, and all these medieval looking artifacts.

Unfortunately...I had to go take my midterm and I accidentally left my camera back in my room, but if I find anything more about it, I'll definitely post it up here!

International Day

Ever try any Korean bulgogi? What about squid balls? Or some Chinese Shao Mai (steamed dumpling variations)?

No?

Then International Day would definitely be fun for you. It's hosted by all the ethnic clubs of Caltech and boasts food from Korea, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Romania, Thailand, and Turkey.

Plus, we got to see a ton of great performances, ranging from drum cadences, Chinese pop songs, and even a mixture of the east and west with some beatboxing with Korean traditional instruments.

Let's take a quick look:

 I forgot the name of this dish...>_<* but so light and fluffy though. Definitely worth a try if you get the chance.

 Shao Mai! Favorite chinese dish by far :D

Kyung-ha playing Pachelbel's Canon in D with Keir beatboxing in accompaniment. 

Here are the squid balls! They look and taste much better than they sound.. (Yes. That's a toothbrush. A clean one...I think)

We also had about thirty of these flags strung around the courtyard. It had a nice effect.

Hope you guys can participate with us next year!