Author: Jordan Brown

I’m a sophomore studying economics and communications. I’m also a movie junkie who specializes in rom-coms with the philosophy that life is better at the lake.

Museums

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The University of Michigan is a large campus composed of many buildings with diverse purposes.  While the majority of the buildings on campus are used for lectures and discussions, some are there for everyone-even non university students- to use.  A good example of these is the many museums that the University has on campus.

This most popular museum on campus is the University of Michigan Museum of Art, or better known as UMMA.  Art museums are common throughout the world.  Some art museums are specific to a type or subsection of art, for example photography or sculptures. Major cities often have multiple art museums of different sizes.  Chicago has dozens of art museums, the two most popular being the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Apart from that, most of the Universities have their own art museums as well.  College art museums tend to be smaller than the others that are found in big cities.

Another popular museum at the University of Michigan is the Museum of Natural History.  The museum has exhibits that show dinosaur bones and the process of evolution. Just like art museums, there are natural history museums in most of the big cities throughout the world.  Unlike art museums, there is generally one big natural history museum per city, this could be because natural history is not up to interpretation like art is. Most of the natural history museums have the same general information with different bones and animal exhibits to show the history of that area or others in the world.  These different bones and exhibits are what make each natural history museum unique.

The University of Michigan has an archeology museum that showcases artifacts from places in history like bowls and other artifacts that people of the past used to use.  Archeology museums are more uncommon than art and natural history museums. Some very large natural history museums have an archeology section in the museum that will give guests a small taste of how people of the past used to live.  Full archaeology museums are just larger versions of the small sections in natural history museums.

The University of Michigan has a Museum of Dentistry.  This is somewhat unique, most cities do not have a dentistry museum.  Museums of trades and specific events and places are common all over the world.  These types of museums have a niche audience for people who are very interested in the topic that the museum spotlights.  For example: the Museum of Dentistry at the University of Michigan is at the School of Dentistry at the University. So this museum has its audience of people that would enjoy the museum right on campus.

Museums are wonderful places to find to new interests and to learn about a variety of topics.  There are so many different categories of museums to learn about, and small museums are great to harvest that curiosity.  College museums are great to investigate topics on a small level and form curiosities that one can apply and go to larger museums to continue looking at and discovering their interests.  The museums at the University of Michigan are no different. People should utilize them and further their interest in a variety of things from dinosaurs to paintings.

Mamma Mia!

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Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again will be coming to theaters this summer.  The new movie is set to have the entire cast from the first movie return.  Mamma Mia 2 is set to be a prequal that follows a young Donna (Meryl Streep) as she is pregnant with her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried).  This movie looks like it will bring back some of the classic songs from the first movie and hopefully a few different Abba songs to go with it.

Mamma Mia is such a unique musical when you think about the structure.  The songs blend seemlessly together with the plot.  It makes one think how was this movie made?  Was the plot created around the song?  Were all of the songs from the same album?  Did the writers just choose Abba’s greatest hits to add in the movie or did they choose any Abba song that fit in with the plot that was created?

Mamma Mia was created from Abba’s greatest hits.  This means that the plot was written around the songs, because the songs used were already very popular.  The songs that were used in the musical were not from a specific album, instead they were taken from all of Abba’s old albums.  The majority of the songs in the musical were Abba’s greatest hits.  This could have helped the musical to gain popularity because a majority of the audience already knew the words to the songs.

Mamma Mia was originally a musical that came out in 1999.  The writer of Mamma Mia, Catherine Johnson, thought of the idea of a musical from the song “The Winner Takes It All” in 1983.  The musical wasn’t expected to be a success, but it is still running today all over the world.  Mamma Mia has helped Abba stay popular well past when they finished creating music.  Even now, children as young as ten know the words to Mamma Mia and many other songs by Abba.

Marvel Universe

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The newest Marvel Movie, The Black Panther, is coming out this weekend (2/15).  This movie is the last one to come out before the much anticipated movie The Avengers: Infinity War.  This new Avengers movie will bring together the entire Marvel Universe to try and defeat a common enemy: Thanos.

The Avengers: Infinity War will feature and bring together characters from the majority of the Marvel movies since Iron Man in 2008.  This first Iron Man movie rebooted the Marvel brand.  In the first several Marvel movies after Iron Man each one faced a new and different villian, the movies do not seem to connect much.  As the movies continued they began to mention other Avengers and superheroes’ names to show that they are aware of each others existence and that they are indeed in the same universe.  The first Avengers movie that came out in 2012, and was the first movies that truly connected some of the characters.  At that point the main Marvel characters were Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor.  Iron Man has remained the main Avenger throughout the Marvel reboot up until the movies in 2017.

Since the start of the Marvel reboot in 2008, Marvel has greatly expanded their universe.  After the second Avengers movie they have branched out to show other characters than the major four of five with movies such as Ant-man, Dr. Strange, and more recently, Deadpool.  These movies all seem very different and to be fighting very different enemies.  As the universe expands, the villains get bigger and the audience can slowly see connections between villains through subtle comments and calls from their bosses.  This foreshadowed that there could possibly be a connection through the villians in these seemingly different movies.

There has also been many crossovers or cameos of other superheroes in single superhero movies.  The most recent example of this is Thor: Ragnarok featured Thor, but the Hulk was also a major part of the plot and the movie.  Spiderman Homecoming also heavily featured and depended on the timeline of Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ironman.  These cameos and features of other characters in each others movies show how dependant they are on one another.

This dependence on one another is a thread that was slowly entwined into the franchise since 2008.  It started out subtle and will now end with a big bang in 2018 when all of the characters come together to fight the same powerful enemy.

Winter Olympics 2018: Curling, Speed Skating

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The 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea starts this Thursday.  The Winter Olympics has less sports than the Summer Olympics and with it a smaller audience.  The names of the sports of curling and speed skating are well known, yet their rules are not.

Curling is a team sport that is played on a sheet of ice.  Most people compare curling to shuffle board, only on the ice and with a team.  The teams of four players push a 40 pound granite rock down the ice and try to get it as close to a target as possible.  Two teams compete against each other, and the team who gets closest to the target wins.  One player throws the rock and the others sweep in front of it to try and help the rock keep straight and hit the target.  If no one swept in front of the rock then the rock would curl, or veer left and right.  The sweeping keeps the rock straight.  Each team throws sixteen rocks, with each player throwing twice.  Scoring the game is the team who has more rocks closer to the center than the other team.

When people hear the sport of speed skating  they think that it is pretty self explanatory.  Speed skating is essentially track on ice with players skating around the ice arena at different distances.  The races are separated between men and women with 7 different events, 5 individual, 1 team pursuit and 1 mass start.  The team pursuit is when three athletes start on opposite sides of the oval and skate six or eight laps.  The winning team is the team who has all three athletes cross first.  The winning team moves on to the next round and the losing team is eliminated.  The mass start event is a sixteen lap race where all 24 athletes race at once instead of only having two athletes racing in elimination style.  Mass starts also have sprint points which athletes can gain during laps four, eight, twelve, and sixteen.  In each of these laps the top three finishers get extra points.  These points are added to the points that the first, second, and third place athlete get.

The Winter 2018 Olympics are starting in less than a week and there are many sports to watch that are not always in the spotlight.  Curling and speed skating are two of them that will be in the spotlight over the next two weeks.

Winter Olympics 2018: Snowboarding

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The Winter 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea are a week and a half away.  One of the most popular sports events to watch is snowboarding.  When most people think of snowboarding they think of freestyle where the snowboarders perform tricks similar to skateboarders on a halfpipe.

There are many different types of snowboarding events at the Winter Olympics.  There is giant slalom, cross, slopestyle, big air, and halfpipe.  Each event is separated into men and women competitions.  In giant slalom, two athletes start and snowboard down two separate courses and whichever athlete gets to the bottom the fastest wins.  The two courses are not identical, but parallel to one another.  While snowboarding down the course there are at least 18 gates that the athletes must go through.

The snowboard cross is a team event.  The teams are of four or six athletes who race down a course and the team with the fastest time wins.  After the first round, the top two to three athletes from each qualifying team compete in the finals.  The course that the athletes snowboard down has a variety of obstacles such as banks, rollers, spines, and jumps.

Slopestyle snowboarding is on a course that has various obstacles that athletes can choose to use in competition.  This event is scored by six judges who judge based on the athletes height, rotations, techniques, and degree of difficulty in their performance.  A perfect score is 100 points.  The obstacles that the athletes can choose to use are rails, tables, boxes, walls, and jump pads.  Slopestyle is similar to halfpipe in that both are not just snowboarding down a hill.

The big air event is similar to the  most popular, halfpipe event.  Athletes snowboard down a hill and perform tricks after launching off large jumps.  The athletes do complex tricks while trying to look secure and make a clean landing.  Depending on the competition, there are certain tricks that are required for each athlete in order to place well in the competition.

The halfpipe event is the most popular event that the public watches.  The athletes perform jumps, rotations, and twists in the air as they snowboard across the halfpipe ramp.  There are six judges that judge based on the height, rotations, techniques, and difficulty of their skills.  A perfect score is 100 points.  Each athlete gets to perform twice and the athletes best score of the two is used.

Snowboarding is one of the most popular sports in the Winter Olympics, with the main focus being on the halfpipe event.  While this event is very popular and skilled, there are other events in snowboarding that can be glossed over.

Winter 2018 Olympics: Biathlon

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The Winter Olympics are two and a half weeks away in Pyeongchang, South Korea.  The Olympic qualifier competitions for most sports have ended and the athletes are preparing to travel to South Korea to compete in the highest level of competition in the world.  The Winter Olympics have less sports than the Summer Olympics, and most of them aren’t as well known to the public.  One of the sports of this nature is the biathlon.  The biathlon is a mixture of cross country skiing and marksmanship with a rifle.

A biathlon is is similar to a triathlon except, as one can probably tell by the name, there are only two events instead of three.  The athletes cross country ski through a trail/course and stop two or three times to shoot at targets in different positions. Depending on how many shots it takes to hit the targets time is added to the athletes score.  The person with the fastest total time wins the race.  The two positions that the athletes shoot in are standing up and laying down on their stomach, which is called prone position.

The athletes have to hit five targets at each stop.  If an athlete misses a target then they can choose between three different punishments to do that will add time to their total score.  They can either have one minute automatically added to their time, ski a lap which is usually about 150m (it takes the best athletes about thirty seconds to do this), or they can shoot three extra times and at the end they have to complete a loop for every target they did not hit.

These two sports separately don’t seem to go together at all, they are two very different skills.  One generally never needs a rifle whenever they go skiing, unless they are hunting.  This sport reminds one of what people in the cold climates would have to do for food in a time before industrialization.  These athletes have taken what used to be a necessary skill to survive in some parts of the world and have made a sport out of it.  A Biathlon requires the athletes to be equally good at both skills.  If one is great at skiing but a poor marksman they will have to ski much more for every shot they miss which would take much longer than if they had originally hit their target.  Similarly, if an athlete is a great marksman and not as good at cross country skiing then they will get to all of the target areas late and this will negatively affect their time.  This requires all of the athletes to be excellent at both seemingly unrelated skills.

Athletes who compete in the biathlon races at the Olympic level are outstanding in both sports and could probably medal in marksmanship and cross country skiing individually.  But instead they compete together, which shows an extra ability and skill.  The biathlon will be a sport to watch in the 2018 Winter Olympics that doesn’t get much attention at any other time or place.