Colin Marshall

February 16, 2006

New G-Bay Will Enliven Enrollment

By Colin Marshall

It's a stressful time of the quarter. While contending with midterms, we're simultaneously required to register for the next round of classes. Who among us hasn't had to flip a textbook's pages with one hand while clicki...

February 10, 2006

Free Ride Along Ocean Side

By Colin Marshall

Cast your mind back to - if you've got them - the days of riding an ancient, rattling bus to your crumbling public elementary school where, after stopping by the filthy bathroom, you'd sit down at a desk encrusted with t...

February 2, 2006

Time Well Managed Means Excluding Edward Forty-Hands

By Colin Marshall

"Edward Forty-Hands" is played thusly: The participant's buddies duct tape a pair of cheap malt liquors to his hands. Said participant cannot, until the combined 80 oz. are imbibed, remove the bottles. This simple rule s...

January 26, 2006

Utilize Your Utilities

By Colin Marshall

College life, though a cut above living by your wits in the abandoned subway tunnels of New York, is not without its dangers. There is, for instance, a nontrivial chance that you'll be done in by massive credit card debt...

January 20, 2006

America, the Liberator

By Colin Marshall

"We should pull the troops out right now," asserted a hunched, eighty-year-old woman. "If some other army told you how to run your country, how would you feel about that?"

January 12, 2006

Gift Exchange Forges Societal Black Hole

By Colin Marshall

The bulk of you have spent the past few weeks vegetating at the parents' place, enjoying late December's reprieve from busywork and dead-end employment while wedging in a few holidays as well. Kwanzaa, Festivus and the l...

November 17, 2005

Teachers

By Colin Marshall

We'd all go to our graves happier if we never had to argue about teachers' salaries again. Nowhere else are fallacious appeals to emotion and images of impoverished idealists who just want to help the kids thrown about s...

November 9, 2005

Dining Commons Blatantly Maximizes Its Bland Utilities

By Colin Marshall

As you may have noticed during Parents' Weekend, the folks tend to be impressed with odd aspects of our school. Particularly noticeable are their expressions upon entering one of UC Santa Barbara's finer dining halls; it...

November 3, 2005

Steve Wonder | A Time to Love | Motown

By Colin Marshall

Having been repeatedly delayed since its original release date in the summer of 2004 - and nearly a decade in the works had it even made that deadline - A Time to Love can objectively lay claim to the designation "long-a...

October 13, 2005

Del Playa Residents Get Off on Danger

By Colin Marshall

It's the closest thing UCSB has to a tradition: every so often, someone - sometimes an out-of-towner unfamiliar with the perils among which we live every day - imbibes a bit heavily and takes a death plunge straight off ...

October 5, 2005

Just What We Need, Another Restaurant

By Colin Marshall

Zoning law aficionados have no doubt been captivated by the recent troubles of The Spot, an upcoming "on-sale beer and wine eating place" (as the posted note described it, casting serious doubt on the proprietor's comman...

September 29, 2005

Paul Hardcastle | Hardcastle 4 | Trippin ‘N’ Rhythm

By Colin Marshall

Despite their somewhat unimaginative sequential titling scheme, having listened to electronic music producer Paul Hardcastle's previous three self-titled albums is not a prerequisite for the enjoyment of his brand-new fo...

September 28, 2005

Housing Lottery Lacks Economic Sagacity

By Colin Marshall

Every year, students apply for on-campus housing and parking. Busy praying that they'll be granted a place to sleep and a patch of asphalt where their car will be keyed less, they don't think twice about it.

May 26, 2005

CD Reviews: The Rippingtons | Wild Card | Peak

By Colin Marshall

Ah, it's good to see the Jazz Cat again. Despite numerous changes of style and personnel over the years, the grinning visage of cover artist Bill Mayer's stylized feline has remained a solid constant throughout the Rippi...

April 21, 2005

The Amittyville Horror | The Horror, The Horror

By Colin Marshall

Out of all possible film subgenres, the horror movie remake is almost certainly the least promising. History has shown that two approaches traditionally work, or, given the context, work as well as can reasonably be expe...

April 7, 2005

Acoustic Alchemy | American/English | EMI

By Colin Marshall

My, what one can do with a nylon-string guitar these days. Originating from the simple concept of two classically trained players taking a stab at melding all sorts of disparate musical genres, Acoustic Alchemy has, over...