The Wake

The Mafia Club doesn’t sit around in three-piece suits. Its members don’t tote around guns, rope or wire, either. They do kill people though–figuratively speaking.The Mafia Club is a group of students, currently all Frontier Hall freshmen, who gather in Coffman room 305 every Wednesday from 8-10pm to play the party game “Mafia.” The game is best played with eight or more people. Players are labeled as mafia, civilian, police officer, or as a moderator nicknamed “God.” During the game, only the mafia knows the other mafia members. The rest of the players only know their character’s identity. The game takes place during “day,” when the civilians try to eliminate mafia members by choosing a person to kill the next day. But at “night,” when the civilians close their eyes, the Mafia wake up, choose …

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Lauren Aurelius, Maggie Boeck and Rachel Willems, seniors at the ‘U,’ have been friends since their freshman year in Territorial Hall. Aurelius, Boeck and Willems live with four more of their close friends in a cozy upstairs complex on 6th Street in Dinkytown. So far, they say it has been a great experience having seven friends under one roof, but that might change.Due to the recent “housing sweep” by the Minneapolis City Inspections Department, the tight-knit group of seven might be two less if the city has its way.“(According to city zoning), we are over-occupying this house,” Aurelius said. “There are seven bedrooms in this house, but only five people are supposed to live here.”The friends settled on the house last April when they saw the listing advertised in the Minnesota Daily as a seven-bedroom …

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The ‘U’ campus is full of shady legends: one in five students claims to live in Bob Dylan’s old apartment; a labyrinth of steam tunnels supposedly runs underneath campus; and, of course, rumors of ghosts and haunted houses run through the student body like a streaking frat boy on Thirsty Thursday.Hadley Anderson believes in ghost stories, though. In fact, she lived with a ghost for a semester. And she swears she’s not crazy.Anderson, a senior studying French and global studies, first met the ghost last semester. Soon after moving into her Dinkytown apartment in January, she started hearing some strange things.”I would hear these noises like someone was walking around upstairs,” Anderson said. “But no one else was home.” The two-bedroom apartment, which she shared with another girl, was on the top level of …

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The clerical workers on campus are not striking alone. Across the country, 98,000 workers are involved in labor disputes over health coverage, according to Ken Jacobs at the University of California Los Angeles’ Institute for Labor and Employment. According to a report issued by the nonpartisan Washington-based Center for Studying Health System Change, health insurance premiums have gone up more than 10% each of the past three years. This fact, combined with the cyclical economic downturn, has caused employers to shift costs aggressively to employees. Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, said that he is concerned the shift in the burden of health costs onto the backs of employees, combined with layoffs and cuts to programs like Medicaid, will cause many Americans to join the ranks of the uninsured. This year, the University of …

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I think I’ve figured out why people drink: there’s a lot to hate about this world.’Hate’ sounds a little bleak. Maybe it’s better to say there’s a lot to hide from. Drinking’s just an acceptable way to escape from the more pressing life issues. And it’s excusable. Think about it: if something doesn’t get done, saying “I was going to mow the lawn, but then we started drinking…” is somehow more excusable than a simple “I didn’t feel like mowing.” Why is that?I thought about that while we toured the West Bank bars a few nights after my 21st birthday. As I passed through those saloon doors that once contained so much mystery, I couldn’t imagine how one liquid could bring together so many different people in such a small part of the city. What …

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When night falls, Coffman Memorial Union begins to look like a shopping mall that’s about to close for the evening. The gates come down on all of the storefronts. A vacuum hums along the dining room carpet. Lone security guards make their rounds through the often-empty corridors. Perhaps beer could turn this humdrum vacancy into a 1980’s Budweiser commercial, one of those ads that they don’t make anymore because they were just a little too unrealistic. This is a debate that has been pouring through the halls of Coffman for years: should alcohol be sold in the university’s student union?Coffman already has a slew of nighttime activities for students. About two or three nights a week, the movie theater shows free films that haven’t been stacked onto video store shelves yet. The Whole Music …

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“Gutter Punk”
Hard Times Cafe
1821 Riverside Ave.
The Hard Times Cafe is the kind of place where you would ask for your drink in a dirty glass…if you were a 1940s gangster, that is. The music’s a little too loud, they smoking is allowed and black coffee is cheap. “It’s a hole in the wall,” said Katie Tharp, a junior at the ‘U.’ She comes to Hard Times because it’s open 22 hours a day and she likes the “tons of cheap vegan food. There is a downside, Tharp, 20, admits: she often gets asked out by 60-year-old men while hanging out there. Joe Schaedler, 26, said, “It’s a cross between what I imagine Brooklyn to be like and Mos Eisley from Star Wars.”
Flavored Latté: $3.00“The Blank Slate”
The Purple Onion
326 14th …

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Walking into the parking lot for the Gophers tailgate party on Sept. 20th, I expected to see a crowd of maroon-and-gold-wearing college students hitting beer bongs and attempting keg stands. When I got there, however, I found there was much more to tailgating then students and booze. Grandparents, children and grandchildren brought lawn chairs and charcoal grills to relax and spend time with family and friends before the game. Students grilled burgers, hot dogs and chicken; drank beer; and played games. Several tailgaters brought Gopher-inspired maroon-and-gold horseshoe and beanbag toss set-ups for themselves and passersby; others stuck to Frisbee or pickup football games. Tailgating not only brought together a group of Gopher fans before the game against Louisiana-Lafayette, it gave a needed respite to students and families after a hectic week. Besides showing up …

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Sweatpants: You know them. You’ve worn them. You’ve skipped class in them while eating day-old pizza and watching bad John Cusack movies. Now there is a chance to appreciate sweatpants on a whole new level.There is a student group whose entire purpose is to lounge around and do leisurely activities while wearing the comfortable cotton leg wear.Their name is the Sweatpant Club.“It’s a club about nothing,” said Mike Langland, coordinator of the Sweatpant Club. “It doesn’t really have a particular purpose.”The group isn’t entirely about nothing. It serves a much-needed purpose for the stressed-out student seeking a break from the hectic pressures of college life. It’s a time to get away from homework and anything else school-related, Langland said.The club tries to meet bi-weekly to do a variety of low-pressure activities. On September 24, the …

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The makeup of the Minnesota Student Association has changed quite a bit recently.But new Vice President Jeff Nath thinks these changes won’t hurt the MSA’s core goal of being a voice for the student body.“MSA still has the same over-arching goals as it head before all of this happened,” Nath said. “We want to do what we can for the students to make their lives better.”Nath’s references to the “changes” in MSA stem from the recent resignation of Vice President Gina Nelson.“Gina had great internship this passed summer (that focused on her career goals), and she got an offer to work through the school year,” Nath said. “She felt it was a career opportunity and she made a very smart decision knowing that she wouldn’t have enough time to do both MSA and her internship. …

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A dead horse resides at 603 Fifth St. in the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood.The home in the historic Fifth Street district used to belong to women’s suffrage activist and writer Charlotte Van Cleve and her husband Horatio, a general in the Civil War. Horatio Van Cleve and his beloved warhorse, Bessie, both returned wounded from the war. They were nursed back to health at their residence in the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood, where Bessie became Charlotte’s prized carriage horse and a family pet to the couple’s 12 children. When Bessie died at a ripe old age, legend has it that her family buried the horse in the backyard. Penny Peterson, the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood’s unofficial historian, says she’s not sure she believes the story, but agrees that it is intriguingMarcy-Holmes, easily the oldest neighborhood in Minneapolis, is “a great place …

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