When Bill Nye came to campus in December 2013, he sat down with Jemma Wolfe (Silhouette executive editor) and Lindsay Hamilton (CFMU community outreach coordinator) to share personal thoughts and stories on his life and work. Every Sunday at 6 p.m. throughout January and February we’ll be releasing a new video for you to enjoy.

In this second video, Bill talks about why he loves dancing and his experience on Dancing with the Stars TV show.

In an effort to identify more suspects connected to the Nov. 30 murder of McMaster student Tyler Johnson, Hamilton police have released a series of surveillance camera videos and have appealed to the public to name the men caught on camera.

All of the footage is from the area around Tim Hortons and Vida La Pita on King Street West in between Caroline Street and Hess Street.

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In this video, police are “looking to identify two suspects described as white males walking in the video, one white male wearing a blue jacket and red hoody, second white male wearing a black hoody jacket.”

[youtube id="lKMM7ZcScZY" width="620" height="360"]

In this video, police are trying to identify "the two persons described as white males walking out the door, one white male wearing a white shirt, dark colored vest and baseball hat is considered a suspect, the second white male is a person of interest and wearing a black jacket, blue jeans and white shoes."

[youtube id="fhP5xaUUrvY" width="620" height="360"]

In this third video, police need to identify "the suspect walking through the door wearing the white shirt, dark colored vest, baseball hat, blue jeans and dark colored footwear."

[youtube id="L_iGPbC16JM" width="620" height="360"]

In this last video, police are looking to identify "a person of interest at the cash counter described as a white male with black short hair, wearing a Puma shirt, a black jacket with the lettering GRRC on the back, blue jeans and white shoes."

[youtube id="NJ5qzfMtapg" width="620" height="360"]

Only one arrest has been made so far in connection with the early morning shooting and slaying of Johnson. Brandon Barreira, 19, has been charged with first-degree murder and more arrests are expected as police search for further suspects.

Anyone with information about the suspects and persons of interest in the above videos is urged to make contact with Detective Jason Cattle of the homicide unit at 905-546-4123 or to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.

 

 

 

An arrest has finally been made following the Nov. 30 murder of a McMaster mechanical engineering student.

Brandon Barreira, 19, has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with the early morning shooting and slaying of Tyler Johnson, 30, in the parking lot of Vida La Pita and Tim Hortons on King Street West near Hess Village.

Police, who now identify the fatality as a targeted murder, are using surveillance video to try and identify more suspects involved in the incident.

The following video has been released in an effort to identify remaining suspects. Police are "looking to identify two suspects described as white males walking in the video, one white male wearing a blue jacket and red hoody, second white male wearing a black hoody jacket."

[youtube id="lKMM7ZcScZY" width="620" height="360"]

Anyone with further information is urged to make contact with Detective Jason Cattle of the homicide unit at 905-546-4123 or to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.

Grief counselling is being offered to students affected by the death of their peer at the Student Wellness Centre in McMaster University Student Centre room B101. Appointments can be made at the Centre or by calling 905-525-9140 x27700.

 

 

Last updated: Dec. 5

In the early hours of the morning on Saturday, Nov. 30,  McMaster student Tyler Johnson was shot during an altercation on King Street West and died on the scene from his gunshot wounds.

Johnson, aged 30, was a fourth-year mechanical engineering student planning to pursue his Masters at McMaster next year. At approximately 3 a.m. on Saturday morning, Johnson was involved in an incident between two groups of men outside of Vida La Pita restaurant near the corner of King Street West and Caroline Street, one block east of Hess Village, Hamilton's popular bar district.

Hamilton police detective Paul Hamilton said in a news release that the conflict occurring between the two groups, "quickly escalated when one man produced a handgun and shot the victim."

Johnson's body was found in the nearby Tim Hortons parking lot and was pronounced dead at Hamilton General Hospital. This is the second homicide in a two month period for this parking lot on King Street West. On Sept. 15, David Pereira, 18, was stabbed to death at 2:30 a.m. Raleigh Stubbs, 49, has been charged with his murder.

Ishwar Puri, Dean of Engineering, spoke on behalf of McMaster regarding the tragedy. "The University is expressing its condolences to the family and friends of Tyler. Of course, this will be upsetting news for those who studied with Tyler, those who many have taught him and known him," he said.

Details about the circumstances leading to Johnson's death and those responsible remain sparse.  Police are interviewing witnesses at this time and urge anyone with information to make contact with Detective Jason Cattle of the homicide unit at 905-546-4123 or call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.

Johnson's family is holding a visitation at the Marlatt Funeral Home at 615 Main St. East on Thursday, Dec. 5, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The funeral service will be held in the same location on Friday, Dec. 6, at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).

Grief counselling is being offered to students at the Student Wellness Centre in McMaster University Student Centre room B101. Appointments can be made at the Centre or by calling 905-525-9140 x27700.

 

For two summers during my undergrad, I worked at an office in the Hamilton downtown core. I took the bus from Westdale Village every morning, and rode the HSR home every afternoon. And every day, I resented having to pay for a service I used endlessly for a small flat-fee during the regular school year.

Call me entitled; in many ways, that’s an accurate description of my attitude towards the absence of a summer bus pass. But when McMaster graduate students have a year-round agreement with the HSR and the summer pass is only available to Mac undergraduates enrolled in summer classes (and still only saves students $16 a month), my disappointment in the current MSU agreement is warranted.

Now that the MSU-HSR contract is up for renegotiation before renewal, I hope to see some changes.

David Campbell (MSU President) and Jeffrey Doucet (MSU VP Finance) have been pushing hard on the student transit issue since August, and an announcement regarding a new agreement is expected for next week. Major points the new agreement is expected to address include summer service and expanded hours of service through campus to cater to late-night student activity.

I hope the powers-that-be sit up and take notice of the argument that summer and late-night service is important not only to student life enhancement but also to stimulating the Hamilton economy.

Graduate rentention in a city notorious for appearing heavily unattractive to prospective McMaster students, and for those students then staying within the “campus bubble” while at school, is an important issue for the City to address.

One step towards keeping educated, energetic grads in the city is to make Hamilton more welcoming when they are students, be that encouraging them to stay and work through the summers or to simply explore the city at all hours.

Hopefully the new MSU-HSR agreement reflects students needs and the potential students have for rejuvenating the Steel City.

 

Jemma Wolfe
Executive Editor

Q: Why MSND? 

A: I think it is one of the funniest plays ever written. I also felt it would be a good vehicle to explore issues of gender and sexuality in our times.

Q: Why do you think Shakespeare’s work continues to resonate with modern audiences? 

A: Shakespeare wrote for his time, not for all time. His work has lasted because throughout history theatrical buy cialis producers have edited his plays to suit the tastes and morals of their day. In 18th century productions, Hermia and Lysander were accompanied into the woods by a chaperone because no respectable lady would go alone to the woods with her lover. We are simply following in that tradition. Shakespeare’s plays are also particularly complex representations of his society’s social attitudes and this complexity makes it easier to find resonances between his text and our own very different world. Their complexity leaves them open to various interpretations.

Q: Why mix up the genders of the characters?

A: Through our research on the project we came to the conclusion that the categories male and female were inventions of Western culture that limited our understanding of the complexity of gender identity and sexualities. We also wanted to disrupt the more conservative, patriarchal elements of Shakespeare’s text. In Shakespeare’s play, Titania submits to her husband’s will, in ours the significance of this moment is somewhat changed.

Q: Was there anything that surprised you along the production process? 

A: The openness of the cast and creative team to quite radical ideas has made this project a joy. I have learned so much from the students on this one and I am filled with hope about our future.

Allison Rutland spent her time at McMaster’s campus as many do: she lived in Hedden Hall in first year, submitted comics to Incite Magazine, went frequently to the Downstairs John - the TwelvEighty of yesteryear - and made “a lot of fun memories just hanging out with people from my class.” But the career she pursued after graduation is rather extraordinary. Allison Rutland is a character animator at Pixar’s animation studios in Emeryville, California.

After graduating with a bachelor’s in fine arts and multimedia in 2002, Rutland went on to Sheridan College to pursue a diploma in animation. It wasn’t long after that Rutland found a home first at a studio in Toronto, and then made the leap across the pond to a studio in London. There, she worked on visual effects for such well-known films as Where the Wild Things Are and The Tale of Despereaux.

But Pixar had always been at the back of her mind. “A couple of friends of mine had got in [during Ratatouille], and they’d been at Pixar for about two years, and I thought, ‘Ah, you know what, I think I wanna try’ and applied,” Rutland said from her California office.

She then flew from London to San Francisco to compete in an intensive interview process.

“It was very intimidating. It was like a full day thing,” she said. “You meet with several different people - I think there are five or six mini interviews. Each one’s a half an hour, and it’s with four or so people from the animation department, some real animation suits, and some just animation guys, or animation directors and stuff.  Everyone was really nice, but it was just kind of a very intimidating process.”

It paid off in the end, though, and Rutland made the move from English rain to California sun to begin work in April of 2009. Since then, her life has been any aspiring animator’s dream come true. As a character animator, she has worked on Toy Story 3 (she animated Woody and Buzz), Brave and most recently, Monster’s University (which was released on DVD earlier this week).

Character animation is no walk in the park. In this role, Rutland is responsible for every aspect of a character’s movement during a scene. “Before I start a shot, there’s like whole day of research,” she said.

For the sequels she worked on, much of Rutland’s prep-work was in the form of reviewing older material. “I had the DVDs at home [of Toy Story and Monster’s Inc.] and I would just watch them over and over again,” she said. Rutland would make extensive viewing notes and would study frame-by-frame what her predecessors had done in order to maintain the same style in Toy Story 3 and Monsters University as in the original movies.

After her research is complete, Rutland can get down to her detail-oriented work. “I’ll get a shot where the audio’s already recorded and some layout is already there, which means that the camera’s already set up and stuff,” she said. “I’ll open that shot up, and basically, I get to design all the movement.”

Storyboards, the pre-recorded character audio file and daily meetings with the director to go over his vision guide Rutland for the shot or scene that she’s working on. Her day involves acting, studying movements and imagining herself into different – often impossible – kinds of bodies to better design how they might move if they actually existed.

For Monster’s University, Rutland was the primary character animator for Sulley, the huge blue and purple monster voiced by John Goodman. “I did a couple of shots at the beginning of the show that the animation directors liked, so they kind of kept giving me Sulley animation, so I ended up with a big chunk of Sulley’s shots,” Rutland said.

“There’s something kind of fun about his body style, because he’s big and heavy. His attitude’s pretty clear, and the director’s words and recordings were really good, so there was a lot of really fun stuff that I could do with him.”

For a character as central and intricate in his design as Sulley, this means that Rutland spent a lot of time at her desk, getting every tiny movement just right. “It depends on the complexity, but each shot can take a while,” she explained. “[I] generally do, I don’t know, maybe, three or four shots a week.”

And with each shot lasting only a second or two, that amounts to only about one second’s worth of footage being completed each day. It’s painstaking work, but Rutland still had encouraging words to offer for those looking to get into the animation business.

“You have to be willing to be constantly learning,” she said. “I think animation’s one of those things that you don’t ever really feel like you’ve totally mastered it. You kind of have to be humble about your work, and just be willing to always be critiqued on it, and always be learning. I think that’s part of it.”

Allison Rutland’s work as a character animator can next be seen in Pixar’s forthcoming feature Inside Out, due for release in spring 2015.

One of the tensest moments of my first year at McMaster didn’t happen when I was writing exams, or fighting with my roommate, or handing in a late assignment. It happened on Nov. 11 when I was sitting in the basement lecture hall of Togo Salmon.

The professor was lecturing straight through the 10:30 a.m. class. When 11:00 a.m. rolled around, the time traditionally reserved as a minute of silence in respect for those affected by war – through combat or collateral, a student raised her hand. “Shouldn’t we stop lecture for a minute right now?” she said, and outlined her case: that would be the most respectful thing to do.

There was a long, awkward silence. Then, the professor said no. I don’t remember her reason; it was long and convoluted, and very passionately against recognizing the moment. But then the student argued back, and more students jumped in, until finally, several minutes past the 11:00 a.m. mark, the room lapsed into 60 seconds of awkward silence.

While that particular minute was spent more in embarrassed quiet for the uncomfortable circumstances than in thoughtful contemplation, it has come back to me every November since, as I dwell on war and peace, Remembrance Day, poppies, and everything this time represents.

The squabbles of that morning seem petty in comparison to what it was viagra jelly like to be on campus in the war-torn days of yesteryear.

There was a time on McMaster’s campus when the impact of war was not a once-a-November focus, but rather a daily occurrence. Old Sil headlines from World War II call for blood donors during a European shortage. In desperation, they appealed to women to donate, as men were traditionally the exclusive donor group.

One front-page article from Nov. 3, 1944 warned that the military status of all male students would now be checked, and “every student must have on his person at all times either a postponement, a discharge, or a rejection paper.” If it was found that any men were “unable to produce these necessary qualifications, their names will be turned in to N.M.R.A. immediately. Within a few days they will receive their military call-up.” (The N.M.R.A. was the National Resources Mobilization Act, which recorded and policed conscripted Canadians for military service at home and abroad.)

The paper from that time period is also peppered with lists of fallen alumni and students. It serves as a sombre reminder for all we take for granted today as students.

For the first time in several years, I’ll be in a position to actually attend a Remembrance Day morning ceremony. But if you’re in lecture (and whether or not your professor pauses), at work, at home or elsewhere, I still encourage you to stop what you’re doing for a moment. Not to glorify war but to be thankful for all that we have today, the people we owe that to, and what we want tomorrow to be.

 

I write this as a cisgender, heterosexual, white woman who has never known what it is like to face hate for what I look like, how I identify, and who I love. I acknowledge that I’m writing from a position of privilege, and do not claim to speak for or represent McMaster’s queer community.

 

Recently, I went to an LGBTQ+ focused event for the first time. Never before had I been in an environment where my sexuality was a minority, and where I couldn’t identify with the lived experience of most of the people in the room. I felt awkward about it. I was uncomfortable with occupying queer space. It reminded me that this, in the tiniest possible way, is the daily experience of marginalized queer folk. And I think being reminded of my own privilege in this way was a really healthy thing for a straight white girl.

 

Learning to be an ally to and within the queer community can start with being present and acknowledging and reflecting upon one’s own privileged awkwardness in order to show support and solidarity. And there’s no better week than next week to start that journey.

 

From Nov. 4-8, 2013, McMaster will be celebrating MacPride, the week-long celebration of the Mac LGBTQ+ and trans* community put on by the Queer Students Community Centre.

 

Major events include Tuesday’s MacPride March at 2 p.m. outside of Commons, Wednesday’s Steel Cut Queer Movie Night at The Factory Media Centre (228 James St. North) at 7 p.m., and Thursday’s Drag Show (time and place T.B.A.).

 

If you’re a tentative ally, know that you’re encouraged to participate. Anyone and everyone is welcome to attend. There are some things you can keep in mind over the course of next week (and beyond), though, in order to be a particularly effective ally.

 

Make a point to consistently check your privilege and be aware of the bias and perspective it gives you. Don’t try and speak for the community you’re advocating for; this week is about celebrating their voice, not yours. Own up to your mistakes as you make them, and don’t be defensive if others point out your shortcomings. Try your best to create community and support systems by speaking out against oppression when it’s the right time for that, but more often just being quiet and listening to oft-suppressed queer voices.

 

There’s even Ally Training happening on Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. in MUSC 213 (registration required) to aid in this process.

 

I am not trying to make Pride week about viagra pfizer canada allies. It’s not. It’s about celebrating the LGBTQ+ community at McMaster. Allies can be part of creating space and platforms for LGBTQ+ voices, but they’re not the focus and by outlining positive allyship I’m not trying to make them out to be.

 

I am by no means particularly good at being an ally. I don’t know that anyone would claim to be. Rather, I would say that I am constantly learning, trying, supporting, and growing. And really, that’s what I’m encouraging in others.

 

I’ll see you at the march.

 

"Sexy Indian Princess" and "Eskimo Cutie" are words I never thought I'd see in a university campus bookstore. And yet under their new-and-improved Campus Store moniker, McMaster's bookstore is now selling Halloween costumes - and very offensive ones at that.

Every year I see cringe-worthy concoctions in line for TwelvEighty’s ever-popular Halloween club night. Aside from the revealing choices of many club-goers and the frequent rude joke outfits (ahem, six-foot-tall penises), the worst offenders continue to be the racist and culturally insensitive.

Perhaps it’s a tired request: dress with some respect on Oct. 31 and the party days that surround it. But based on the “costumes” that continue to proliferate the last week of October, and the merchandise being sold on our very own campus, it’s clearly a conversation worth rehashing.

First Nations costumes are probably the most common of the most inappropriate found around this time of year.

Donning the traditional dress of First Nations peoples because you like moccasins and hipster clothing ads have made it cool to wear feather headdresses is not okay. Doing so stereotypes and appropriates the culture of a diverse group of peoples, erases their identity, and ignores the history of colonization and genocide that is regrettably intrinsic to their relationship with Caucasian settlers (and that includes you, even now, even “after all these years”). Their culture and practice is disrespected through parodic – and always hypersexualized – costuming.

Apparently this is news to Campus Store, who offer three sexed-up First Nations costumes for women: Indian Princess, Sexy Indian Princess, and Eskimo Cutie (complete with a disgusting "faux chocolate popsicle").

Many other Othered and marginalized groups also get “put on” for a day every October. Under no circumstances is sexualizing and insulting Indian, Mexican, Arabic or Asian cultures an acceptable thing to do. Not even for a day, not even if you “mean it as a joke,” not even if you have one <insert ethnic group here> friend who thinks it’s really cool/funny/acceptable.

An ignorant celebrity culture helps normalize this kind of overlooked racism. In recent history when Paris Hilton dressed as a scantily-clad First Nations woman, Heidi Klum as Hindu Goddess Kali, NHL player Raffi Torres as Jay-Z (complete with blackface) and Chris Brown as a Middle-Eastern terrorist, it made cultural appropriation and stereotyping seem totally passable.

A great campaign put it succinctly last year with posters that read, “We’re a culture, not a costume. This is not who I am and this is not okay” along with people from marginalized groups holding pictures of people in costumes of their heritage. The examples it gave of costumed people in blackface, or mustached with sombreros, or wearing turbans – all inappropriately boiling a peoples down to one stereotypical image – were powerful, albeit oft-parodied since.

All it takes is a quick stroll down a costume aisle at a big-box party store to see that these costumes are as popular as ever, are readily available, and are clearly not being questioned or criticized enough to create change. Even here at McMaster, in 2013, on an educated and progressive campus.

This isn’t about being “politically correct,” or any other kind of buzz-word rhetoric. This is about being a decent human being. And it’s a perspective and mandate we need to wear and internalize this Halloween – and every other day of the year.    

The Campus Store has since removed the "Sexy Indian Princess," "Eskimo Cutie" and "Tackle Me" costumes discussed in this article. A full story on the developments will be published in this week's edition of The Silhouette. This article is updated from the editorial originally published in print on Oct. 24, 2013.