Going all-in

To the other 60-odd residents of Hudson Hall’s fourth floor, James Mackey was something of an enigma. An MU biology major in 2004, he went to his classes on a daily basis; his goal was to become a doctor. He led a reserved lifestyle in a subpar dorm with no air conditioning. But aside from the occasional encounter in the hall or sighting in the dining room, the diminutive, strawberry-haired freshman was relatively unknown to the remainder of the Honors Learning Community. Two years later, Mackey would be a millionaire.

A touch of early success

Las Vegas promises that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Unfortunately, digital cameras and gossipy ex-boyfriends have ensured my Sin City exploits joined tacky souvenirs on the voyage home with me. In fact, the only thing that did manage to stay in Vegas was my money.

A Major event

Major Jackson wants you to drop the remote and start engaging.

It’s the end of the world as we show it

Rather unexpectedly, two wildly different predictions on how the world will end have emerged within a month of each other. University of Sussex astronomer Robert Smith concluded that as the sun loses its fuel, it will expand and suck in Earth with its increased gravitational pull. Unfortunately, we only have 7.6 billion years to prepare for our imminent demise.

Dish of the week

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Video and DVD releases

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Within a day's drive

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The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

The Good: Doggie disaster averted

Columbia: the new drama queen

(Web Exclusive) Last August, Charles Willis, Shawna Kelty and Ross Taylor brought to life a new type of theater in Columbia. They had discussed the possibility of producing plays that were different from the usual family-oriented productions. Over whiskeys at the Heidelberg, the three decided they didn’t want to bring just one play to Columbia; they wanted to build a community of actors that would continue to push the limits of Columbia’s idea of what a play is. Willis, Kelty and Taylor were determined to introduce Columbia to contemporary theater’s love of harsh reality, despair and sex. They were going to bring the drama. “We tend to like things a little darker in life,” Taylor says.

Off-the-cuff gambling

William Coblentz, an MU senior, has been unknowingly breaking the law at least once a year for the past 12 years. He filled out his first NCAA bracket during March Madness as a 10-year-old and joined his family’s pool.

In sync with volunteering

(Web Exclusive) Anne Heine, a nurse at MU’s Sinclair School of Nursing, thinks the city of Columbia makes volunteering easy and enjoyable. One of the programs she and her husband volunteer for is the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), which meets four times a year to train citizens to perform basic emergency response procedures to use during a possible disaster. “CERT gives you good skills that you can use in your personal life, neighborhood and also in the community,” says Heine. “It also provides good training for your professional life.”

Red invasion

Shaggy hair, trendy vests, catchy hooks and a foursome armed with instruments are invading Columbia. No, it’s not the Beatles. It’s The Redwalls, a British invasion-influenced band that hails from Chicago suburb Deerfield, Ill., performing at Mojo’s March 29.

Music review: Trouble in Dreams

(Web Exclusive) Dan Bejar has big shoes to fill after his 2006 album Destroyer’s Rubies, which was Destroyer’s best work to date — and the Vancouver native has decided to preserve many of the same elements that made the last album so provocative with this month’s release of Trouble in Dreams.

The art of the question

(Web Exclusive) “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life,” Pablo Picasso once proclaimed. Picasso wasn’t the only one who came up with a response that doesn’t definitively answer the age-old question of what art is. Philosophers dating as far back as Plato and Aristotle have theorized about what concrete rules classify this abstract subject. Defining art has become a more local topic, as the MU Theatre Department presents French playwright Yasmina Reza’s play, Art.