Floor 9 and their winning entry to the Clothing Drive Fashion Show, modeled by Jen Jarvis

Each year, amidst the regularity of hall dinners and the sporadic joint hall event drawing but a few floors, there is the House Cup, a collection of zany events which draw together all halls for blood, sweat, tears, team-building, and rallying against a common enemy: all the other halls.

The setup is simple. Roughly once a month during the academic school year, there is a House Cup event for which the 13 Hall Councilors lead their halls in fierce competition for bragging rights, eternal glory, and swanky prizes. The events themselves are diverse in topic ranging anywhere from and beyond cooking, donating a ton of food (this year’s House Cup food drive collected 1967 pounds), painting, sprinting around campus taking pictures, carrying giant bags of flour (3-North’s secret recipe), and dressing up in garbage bags and cardboard boxes (Floor 9’s ace in the hole for this year’s fashion show). The hope is that diverse events draw diverse crowds and perhaps even teach residents some fancy new and occasionally useful life skills.

Some desserts from the Pi Day Dessert Showdown.

And we try to reward participants handsomely. A random sampling of this year’s awards includes movie tickets, Toscanini gift cards, large square plates, USB sticks, and glass mugs. And the hall that aggregates the most points across each year gets etched into a trophy so that thousands of years later, when someone enters the SP lobby, she or he shall see the winner from the 2011-2012 academic year engraved eternal like an epitaph on a tombstone.

After taunts were shouted, votes were cast, peer rankings were submitted, and Japonaise cake was eaten, Hall Councilor Jen Jarvis led Floor 9 to glorious victory this year. Trailing in second and third place were Jon Malmaud of 3-North and Becky Asher of 5-South, respectively. For a full listing of this year’s House Cup events along with event descriptions, photos, and outcomes, please visit: http://s-p.mit.edu/about_sp/house_cup.php

Teams 2N & 5S grab a drink during the scavenger hunt.

Michelle, the interest groups chair, and I recently co-organized a trip for SP residents to the “Boston Flower and Garden Show” on March 17.  The flower show is a relatively new event, started by the Paragon group in 2010 after the end of a 137-year-old major flower show in Boston, hosted by MassHort. The show mainly consisted of three parts: gardens, market places, and competition.

Source: http://www.bostonflowershow.com/

When we arrived at the show, I was surprised by beauty of the gardens; it surpassed all my expectations. The exhibitors had set up expansive gardens, complete with brick paths, bridges, fountains, and gazebos!  Each garden told a story, from the one with a stone path leading up to a bottle of wine on a picnic blanket to the garden with a kids playhouse.  As people were interested in different types of gardens, our group slowly split off into smaller groups as we wandered through the exhibits. By the end, I was in a group with Boris, Michelle, Steven, and Stephanie. In addition to the elaborate gardens, we were inspired by the educational amateur floral design and horticulture competition. We were so immersed in the experience that it took us more than 3 hours to browse all the displays. In the end, I, as the Plants Chair, bought some beautiful begonia for Sidney-Pacific. I would like to thank Boris and Steven in particular for carrying those plants all the way back to SP. Hopefully many of you have noticed the new flowers in the lobby and 8^th floor common kitchen!

Source: http://www.bostonflowershow.com/

Source: http://www.bostonflowershow.com/

Courtesy of Michelle Chen

Courtesy of Michelle Chen

As the experience of the show was fabulous, I encourage you to follow the information about the next event on the website:

http://www.bostonflowershow.com/,

and hopefully we will see each other (again) next year!

By Dawsen Hwang, SP Plants Chair

The Cinderella story of the New York Knicks’s new point guard, Jeremy Lin, has surely drawn a lot of attention from the mass media lately. Sidney-Pacific also met “Linsanity” on March 4th. A group of more than 49 residents from Sidney-Pacific visited TD Garden to watch the game between the New York Knicks and Boston Celtics and to experience this world-wide frenzy personally. It was one of the largest interest group outings of the year, and that is only counting the number of residents who bought their tickets via interest group – many more residents went by themselves.

The game between the New York Knicks and Boston Celtics was one of the largest interest group outings of the year.

For me personally, the whole experience started the night before the game. Michelle, Yu-Han, Dawsen and I decided to make some signs and posters to show our support – but our real motivation was to get onto the Jumbotron (the large TV in the center of the court) during the game. After some discussion, we came up with the slogan, “To Linfinite Corridor and beyond.” Yu-Han and Dawsen were working on the posters and Michelle and I were making two signs, one for Rondo and one for Lin. It turned out that trying to print enlarged photos of Rondo and Lin was much more complicated than we had imagined. We started making the posters at 10:30 pm, but ran into all sorts of computer trouble; by the time we had our posters and signs made, it was already 2 am and we were completely exhausted…

The game was intense and physical because the two teams were so well matched.

On game day, the sold-out stadium was packed. Thanks to our secret weapon, the sign of Rajon Rondo, our group had two Jumbotron appearances during the game. We learned a strategy to be featured on the big screen: 1) make a sign for the host team, and 2) dance like crazy with the sign whenever you see a cameraman looking your way. The game itself was intense and physical because the two teams were so well matched, their ranks differing by just one place in the Eastern Conference. Supporters for each team were cheering eagerly throughout the game. I, however, had a dilemma: I would prefer to see the Celtics winning, but I also did not want to see Jeremy Lin deliver a poor performance. Thus, it was really hard to decide which team to cheer for. Rondo, however, did outperform Lin by achieving a triple-double in the game. Then Lin made some big plays in the 4th quarter to help the Knicks regain the lead. Finally, Pierce made a game-tying 3-pointer and sent the game to overtime where the Celtics prevailed against the Knicks. It was a great game to see the two teams battle until the final minute, but this game together with all the other stories of Linsanity begins to make me wonder what my take from the Linsanity story is.

Thanks to our secret weapon, our group had two Jumbotron appearances during the game.

Jeremy Lin’s emergence is probably one of the most dramatic stories in the recent NBA history. Just when the Knicks were on a 6-game losing streak and the former head-coach, Mike D’Antoni, was on the verge of losing his job, Jeremy Lin stepped out from the deep end of the bench and delivered a 7-game winning streak. The story of Linsanity occupied all sport headlines throughout February as Lin’s outstanding performance right off the bench dazzled the world. Just as people thought the Knicks would play even better when Carmelo Anthony returned to the team, the story took a turn for the worse. Different conflicts surfaced as the Knicks lost another 6 games in a row. Mike D’Antoni was forced to resign and Linsanity seemed to meet its untimely end. People thought Lin might no longer play a big role, especially when Mike Woodson, the new head-coach, stated that his game strategy will mainly focus on the two star players, Anthony and Stoudemire. Lin, however, still managed to play a dominant role by averaging 14.8 points and 6 assists per game as the Knicks snatched another 5 victories.

Although generally applauded by the media, Lin has also been facing a lot of criticism since his emergence regarding his high turnovers, tendency to go right when dribbling, etc. It is true that his stats cannot match those of other star point guards such as Derrick Rose or Rojon Rondo, but let’s not forget that this is the first time that Jeremy Lin is playing for significant minutes in the NBA. He needs time to learn, adjust and improve, which he is already doing – he has significantly reduced his turnovers in the past few games. More importantly, what makes his story inspiring is more than his basketball performance. I admire his story not because he is the first Asian-American of Taiwanese descent in the NBA, but because his story teaches us that in a time of uncertainty when no one recognizes your talents and nothing seems to be going your way, you just have to be persistent and faithful and you will prevail in the end. No matter what situation he was in, whether that was winning 7 games in a role or being blamed for losing 6 straight games, he remained the same humble player who did not desperately try to prove or disprove anything to anyone. The importance of remaining confident despite adversities, and yet not becoming arrogant after successes, is a life-long lesson that we can learn from Jeremy Lin.

Returning from TD Garden that day, we all felt a bit of Linsanity. Although it has cooled off in recent weeks, the Linsanity story continues to have many interesting aspects no matter how one looks at it. So what is your take on the Linsanity phenomenon?

By Steven Chang, SP Newsletter Chair