King James in the Midwest
Local resident Rena Kirk talks about raising 30 animals, including a 1,000 pound camel, in southern Indiana.
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Local resident Rena Kirk talks about raising 30 animals, including a 1,000 pound camel, in southern Indiana.
Collins graduated from IU in 1985 with a double major in theater and telecommunications. She also met her future husband, Cap Pryor, while at IU. According to Sheila Everett, Scholastic’s senior publicist, Collins has fond memories of her time at IU but was unavailable for further comment due to her hectic schedule.
You’re a mountaineer based in Bloomington. How does that work out for you?
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Editor’s note: Reporter Kamilla Benko interviewed Dorina Szekeres in English, and Szekeres responded in Hungarian. All quotes are translated by Benko back to English. Freshman Dorina Szekeres bounces on her toes before she steps onto the rough surface of the starting block in IU’s Counsilman-Billingsley Aquatic Center. Her hand checks to make sure her cap is snug before the 200-yard butterfly, then she lowers the red goggles onto her nose. The water ripples below her, and around her is the laughter of teammates and the echoing voice of Head Coach Ray Looze acting as announcer for the Cream vs. Crimson meet, a series of practice races between IU swimmers before their first competition of the NCAA season.“In the fourth lane all the way from Hungary, Dorrrrrrrrina Szekeressssssh!” Dorina smiles and shakes her head. Coach Looze is having too much fun rolling the r’s and emphasizing the Hungarian pronunciation of her name. “Swimmers, take your mark.” Deep breath in. The starting horn blasts. Dorina dives. ***Dorina first slid into the pool when she was 5. Her parents thought it was important for their kids to learn how to swim, and her older brother Peter was already enrolled in classes at the local pool in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary. She learned quickly and moved fast. When Peter stopped taking lessons, she kept going. For the next 13 years, her father woke up every morning at five, drove her to swim practice, then to school, then back to the pool. By the time she turned 18, Dorina had splashed in pools all over the world, including most of the European countries, Brazil, China and Qatar. But never America. So she was pleasantly surprised when Donny Brush, assistant head coach for the IU swim team, called after watching a tape of her 200-meter backstroke. Assistant Head Coach Mike Westphal said he thought she had a beautiful backstroke. She seemed to push herself harder than the others to get what she wanted — to be first.As Dorina reached the end of high school in Hungary, she was torn about her future. On the one hand, she loves Hungary. It’s her home. But Hungarian universities and high-level swim schedules don’t mix. Staying and swimming in Hungary would almost certainly mean she would have to be a swim coach when she stopped competing. “That’s not something I want to do for my ‘real’ life,” she said. On the other hand, going to America to swim and receive an education means traveling to a city 5,000 miles away. It means living on a campus where most students are unable to locate Hungary on a map. It means dedicating more time to a sport she does not always love. “Who loves getting up at 5 a.m. and jumping into a cold pool, swimming for two hours, going to class and then going back for another two hours of practice?” Dorina said. “You’d have to be crazy to love that. But it’s my life.” Swimming is not her passion — it’s her obsession. To be more precise, the Olympics are her obsession. “There wasn’t one moment when I was like, ‘I’m going to the Olympics,’” Dorina said. “But I started improving and I realized it was possible.” In 2010, she placed 15th at the European Championships in the 200-meter backstroke and first in the Hungarian Nationals for the same race. She won nationals again in 2011.In order to represent Hungary in the 2012 London Summer Olympics, she needs to swim the 200-meter backstroke in two minutes, 10 seconds. Right now, Dorina’s best time is 2:13. Three seconds — about the time it takes to read this sentence — separate her from a spot on the Hungarian Olympic team. Dorina could not justify walking away from 13 years of morning practices, of muscles screaming with fatigue, of time away from home. Not when she was this close. While holding her thumb and index finger a centimeter apart, she said: “If I have this much of a chance after all this work, then I will do everything to try.” In the middle of August, Dorina’s parents dropped her off at the Budapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport. The 18-year-old mulled over her decision on the flights from Budapest to Milano to Manhattan. She questioned herself as the plane landed in Indianapolis. Nearly 48-hours after her departure from Budapest, Dorina arrived in Bloomington. She looked at her 12-feet by 14-feet room, and thought, “I have to live here?” Too tired to think anymore, she climbed to the top bunk and fell asleep. *** The sound of palms slapping the water reverberates around the natatorium. “Dorina Szekeres is taking an early lead!” The announcer calls out as eight girls thrust themselves in and out of the water. Underneath the water, Dorina focuses on the movement of her body. Legs kick with arms. Feet point. Hips up. Elbows straight. Palms down. She counts the laps as she lunges through the water. Unlike a morning practice, her mind is totally focused on the moment. Now is not the time to think of her family at home. What her friends are up to. What she’s missing out on. “Dorina is playing a game of ‘catch-me-if-you-can’ ... she’s set a blistering pace ... annnnd Dorina in for the win!” When Dorina pulls herself out of the pool, she looks at the scoreboard. She raises her fists in the air and smiles. She’s never swum the 200-yard butterfly before. She only knows meters. *** The first few days were hard. Very hard. Jet-lagged and plopped in the middle of practice, she had difficulty understanding what was going on and what people were talking about. Even though American music is popular in Hungary and the English lyrics are played often (Dorina can rap the entirety of P.Diddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You”), following a conversation of native speakers is tough. “I understand more than I can speak,” she explains. “And it’s easier if it’s a one-on-one conversation. But in the locker room, it’s loud, and everyone talks so fast. That’s when it’s hard.” At the moment, Dorina is enrolled in Leadership Development, Finite Mathematics and Introduction to Psychology. She has told her teachers that English is not her first language, but she does the same work as everyone else. Yet there is a universal sign understood by all: the smile. “Whenever I see her, she’s smiling,” Coach Brush said. “Dorina came to IU at a disadvantage since she had never been here before or met the other recruits. But her personality is drawing people towards her. She’s a great listener — she has to be to take in what we’re saying, improve her swimming and adjust to a new life.” Language isn’t the only difference. Americans have the strange habit of serving bread with noodles and wearing slippers to class. Another idiosyncrasy: wet hair doesn’t bother Hoosiers. In Hungary, no one leaves the house with wet hair, swimmer or not. But because the girls don’t blow dry their hair after practice, Dorina doesn’t either. She says she wants to blend in with the team. So far, her coaches say she is doing just that. “There was one practice when I heard her teammate, Courey Schaefer, yell, ‘Let’s go, Do!’” Coach Brush said, pronouncing “Do” like “dough.” “I knew she was fitting in then.” In Zalaegerszeg, a small town with a small swim club, Dorina was the lone, outstanding talent for her team. The girl closest to her level was five years younger. Now Dorina trains with nine other Olympic hopefuls. But even in her most comfortable element where language doesn’t matter, Dorina battles culture shock. She has spent her whole life swimming in meters; she knows it takes 15 strokes to get to the wall in a 25-meter pool. But the pool at IU is 25-yards, 10 percent shorter. Dorina has no idea how many strokes she should aim for now. Pacing herself at the moment is like trying to relearn how to type on a keyboard if someone scrambled all the letters. There are also slight differences between American and European techniques — different hands are used to push off the wall, and strokes cut the water at a different angles. To adjust for this, the coaches invited Nemes, an adjunct professor for International Studies, to translate for Dorina’s first couple of individual practices. “I was just there to make sure the language didn’t get in the way of training,” Nemes said. He stayed for the entire practice, explaining English words for swimming and watching Dorina push to perfect herself. “After each lap, she would tell Donny (Brush) she had messed up on a turn, and she wanted to do it again. And again,” Nemes said. “She normally swims about 6,000 meters in an hour, but that day, she probably only did 300 meters because she was so focused on her technique.” “When I’m swimming, I have to think, ‘Now, which hand?’” Dorina said. “It’s small things that are hard to change after a lifetime. But I know it will make me a better swimmer,” she said. “At least, I hope.” ***“Go big D!” “Come on Dorrrrrrrrina!” Arms windmill in the pool as eight girls compete in the last race of the day: the 200-yard Individual Medley, a race that consists of the butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle. Though Dorina can’t hear under water, her teammates cheer her on. Then —“Awwwww,” a moan ripples through the team. They wince. “She got caught on the turn,” one says to the other. Her pacing slightly off, Dorina slipped while kicking off the wall. But her lead has vanished. She kicks harder to make up for the mistake. Her fingers brush the wall and the race is over.Second. Coach Brush greets her at the edge of the pool. He tells her he’s proud of her and that she swam really well. She just needs to keep working on the turns, but he knows they are new to her. She’s done a great job all day. Dorina listens and nods. She’s not really disappointed, yet it bugs her when she doesn’t swim to her full potential. But she came to Indiana to learn. She left her family to improve.Dorina is ready to win.
As a musical theatre major in her senior year, Charnette Batey knows how to overcome stage fright. She knows how to prepare for an audition and how to handle rejection.
They met at a fraternity party.
Pop music has come a long way since Elvis Presley gyrated his hips in front of a shocked nation watching television in the 1950s.
Our grandmothers would be ashamed. Just listen to the music we’re bumping and grinding to at parties.
IDS reporter Kamilla Benko spent the morning in Boston Logan International Airport with her mother and two siblings. While they were there, airport staff honored the colleagues they lost 10 years ago.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The Mars Science Laboratory launches into space November 2011. It’s mission: to detect the planet’s habitability. Eight scientific instruments will be on the rover, two of which have IU professors behind them. Geologist Juergen Schieber helped build a microscopic camera that will take close-up pictures of the Martian surface and document some materials examined by MSL’s geochemical and mineralogical experiments. While this instrument examines the surface, the other instrument will help determine the planet’s composition. In 1989, David Bish, mineralogist, was faced with a one ton, refrigerator–sized instrument. Today, his X-ray diffractometer can be held in his hand and easily fits onto the rover where it will transmit diffraction patterns to scientists on earth. From these patterns, scientists can figure out what kinds of minerals are on Mars. “Twenty years ago, no one would have thought of sending X-ray diffractometer to another planet,” he says. Despite external doubts, Bish says enthusiasm for the project never died because the team had enough incremental progress to keep them excited. “We have bright young people coming up with new ideas that often times, more experienced people in the field said, ‘No that’s not possible,’” he says. “The graduate student doesn’t know it’s not possible and does it.”
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“There’s never been a peace there,” says Zeynep Elbasan, a graduate student from Turkey. “And it’s not because of religion, but oil and imperial ambitions. Will there ever be peace? I really want to be optimistic, but honestly, I have to say no.” But 6,000 miles away, eight active members of Hoosiers for Peace in the Middle East meet twice each month to talk about current issues and educate the community about the region through film screenings and open discussions. Most have no personal connection to the Middle East other than interest and a desire to learn more about the region. Group treasurer Antonio Golan says the club focuses on steps, not leaps, forward. “The idea that we’re going to have this huge impact that changes everything is foolish and not realistic,” he says. But he points toward the growing number of people attending each event as a reason to hope. While this might appear to be incremental progress, he says each small gain suddenly seems a lot larger once you grasp the difficulty of the situation. It’s his outlook not just on the student group, but also on the region. Understanding – like peace – can’t be accomplished in one night. “Peace in the Middle East seems impossible to us,” Golan says. “But there are situations in the past, like abolition and women’s rights, that seemed like they went against common sense at the time. “The fact that people didn’t buy into that common sense, the fact that people saw the possible in the apparently impossible is what generated change.”
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>You’d never guess Boxer, a Bloomington professor, was once a senior spy in Asia during World War II or the hero in a love story publicized around the world, says Patrick O’Meara, the vice president for international affairs and Boxer’s friend and colleague. “Charles Boxer lived what one could call an impossible life,” O’Meara says. “He never had a Ph.D. and yet he was one of the great intellectuals and scholars of the world. He was a major who escaped death and survived a Japanese concentration camp. And then there is the remarkable romance between him and his wife. It was impossible on many levels.” The spy At 4:45 a.m., a coded message interrupted the routine broadcast of Radio Tokyo. It was the message Boxer had been listening for, one that warned Japanese nationals abroad that Great Britain and Japan were at war. Pearl Harbor had been attacked. The head of British Intelligence in Hong Kong, Boxer often translated Japanese information for the military — his knowledge of Japanese (and six other languages) and their culture (he trained in kendo, the ancient martial art of sword fighting) made him an invaluable asset to the British military on the eve of war in the Pacific Ocean. In the days that followed the attack, Hong Kong fell to the Japanese troops and Boxer, shot by a sniper, was paralyzed in his left arm and sent to a concentration camp. With the help of other inmates, Boxer built a radio receiver from the tin foil of discarded cigarette packages, parts of an old car, and tubes from a broken radio. The captives hid the unit in a four-gallon can with a false bottom and buried it in the camp garden. For a time, Boxer secretly listened to the radio and disseminated news of the outside world among inmates. Then the radio was found. For any other officer this would have meant death, but the Japanese admired the British major who spoke their language. Instead of execution, they sentenced him to solitary confinement. For nearly two years, he shared a room with rats and endured torture in silence. But his waiting came to an end Aug. 15, 1945, when, reeling from atomic bombs, Japan surrendered and released the POWs. Boxer rarely spoke of his time in captivity and declined military decorations from the British government. In his mind, he was no hero. He was just lucky to have survived. With the war over, Boxer had only one goal: He had to meet up with Emily Hahn. The playboy With movie star looks (think Leonardo DiCaprio), Boxer had a reputation as an international playboy — even though he was married. But in 1938 he met a woman with a reputation even more colorful than his. “Emily was called the ‘Scandalous Miss Hahn,’ you know,” O’Meara says. “Cigarsmoking, tequila-drinking feminist in the fullest sense of the term. And an incredible writer.” Hahn traveled around the world as a single woman, supporting herself by writing books and columns for The New Yorker. She lived with a tribe of Pygmies in Africa, smoked opium in Shanghai, and tiger-hunted in India. Her openness about her promiscuous encounters on her travels shocked both readers and acquaintances. At some point in their relationship, Hahn recalled in her memoirs, she mentioned she’d like to have a child some day. “Let’s have one,” Boxer replied instantly. “Just to make things all right, if I can get a divorce and if it all works out, we might even get married.” Unsure if she was even capable of becoming pregnant, Hahn remained hesitant and told Boxer so. “Yes you can,” was the empathetic response. “I’ll have you know that I always get girls in trouble.” Carola Boxer was born in Hong Kong on Oct. 17, 1941. When the war ended, Boxer followed his lover and their daughter to New York and — after attaining a divorce from his first wife — married her. “It was an interesting combination, perhaps an impossible combination,” O’Meara says. “This very elegant, British military person with a great mind, and Emily, the feminist who did an engineering degree because it was there.” Their marriage lasted until Hahn’s death in 1997. The Hoosier “Charles leaves England tomorrow for Indiana via Boston; he changes over and goes to Indianapolis where some trusty friend awaits him with a car for Bloomington. Bloomington, of all places. NOT what I would chose,” Hahn complained to a friend in a 1976 letter. After WWII, Boxer retired from military life and developed his passion for academic study. The colonial expansion of Portugal was his specialty. Though he never attended college, universities off ered him many honorary degrees and traveling professorships, including one at IU. Though Hahn deplored the lack of French restaurants in 1970s Bloomington, Boxer found the town wonderful. “I much enjoyed my stay,” he said after his fi rst semester. “I am already looking forward to returning there.” Every spring for 10 years, he taught a history course and advised the Lilly Library on its collections. But he would only visit Bloomington in the spring because he abhorred football season. “It was too disorderly for Charles,” O’Meara explains. Ironic, considering Boxer lived a relatively wild lifestyle in Asia (parties, alcohol, and lovers galore) but O’Meara explains, “It’s the unexpected that is so important with Charles. There are many sides to him. The soldier, the scholar, the person who was disciplined in so many ways, but was really quite the adventurer in others.” Instead, Boxer preferred to throw elaborate dinner parties with strawberries fl oating in the champagne. While he sought elegance, he was never one for pretention and enjoyed spending Friday afternoons at Nick’s English Hut with graduate students. (Though O’Meara says Boxer probably never played Sink the Biz, the popular drinking game. “That just doesn’t sound like Charles.”) Boxer left IU in 1979, but not before he sold his collection of rare manuscripts to the library, which also houses his wife’s extensive letter collection. He died in 2000 at the age of 96, leaving behind two daughters and a long list of titles: major, spy, prisoner, playboy, and scholar. Was it an impossible life? Maybe. But impossible was not in Boxer’s vocabulary.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Private ventures and governments might mine on the moon and Mars. “We’re running out of many of the basic elements that we need for industrialization,” says Lisa Pratt, a professor of geological sciences and astrobiology expert. She predicts that mining will begin on the moon in the next 40 to 50 years. ''“Lots of people are interested in Mars as a place where you could potentially have human outposts,” Pratt says. One way to do that is by terraforming — changing a planet so that it would resemble Earth and sustain plants and animals. Chris Mckay, planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, says there are fi ve steps to make Mars habitable for humans: 1. Explore Mars to determine the total amount of CO2 and H2O. 2. Produce “super” greenhouse gases. 3. Introduce hardy life forms such as alpine plants and mosses. 4. Grow trees at the equator. 5. Wait for plants convert CO2 to O2. While this is possible, McKay says there is no serious terraform plan as of yet. However, “We are already doing the first step,” he points out. “And we could get as far as trees if we tried.”
Martians could exist. Just don't expect them to look like the tiny green creatures from Toy Story.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Tired of being a poor college student, senior Lia Saunders started searching for freebies and product samples. Three years, thousands of dollars, and a bottle of free BBQ sauce later, Saunders created a blog, The Broke Student’s Guide to Stretching Your Dollar, to share her freebie-gathering tips with fellow students. How do you learn about all these free deals?I kind of pick it up everywhere. I absorb it from classes, like marketing and economics, and learn how the market works. I started researching how to get free products from companies. You can find a lot of stuff online by just Googling and clicking around. And every time I hear about an opportunity on campus for free, I go check it out. I mean, we pay tuition, but people don’t seem to realize how much they can get for free.What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten for free? I really love the $50 from MyPoints.com where I can spend the money wherever I want. It’s a paid-to site where they basically pay you to do nothing. You just click e-mails and advertisements and you get like 5 cents for each click. I fill out surveys and play games online and I get points that I can redeem for gift cards. Usually I get a Macy’s gift card. And Restaurant.com had a promotion where a $25 gift card cost $2. I bought them for everybody’s Christmas presents. Have you used other promotional things for gifts? For a friend’s birthday, I signed up for 50 offers and wrote 50 companies for free coupons. He basically got a present for each day of his birthday month. I took him out to dinner with the gift cards and would hand him an item, like a bottle of BBQ sauce. Random, I know, but it was nice because he wasn’t expecting anything because he knows I’m broke.What’s the most random thing you’ve ever gotten for free? Lots of random grocery coupons. I wrote every company that was on a list of companies that respond to letters and got products I had never tried — like microwaveable pretzels. They were pretty good!What do you estimate is the total amount of money you’ve made and saved in the last few years? Money from paid-to sites, about $500. As far as free products, about a value of $1,100 since I started college. And savings wise, I’d say at least $4,000 a year. I’ve been consciously saving for only about two years though, so that’s a total of $8,000. Adding everything together, I’ve saved roughly $9,600 or so since I began college.That’s a lot! Well, since I have to pay for my own stuff and I don’t have a real job, everything is more or less up to me. And it’s always nice to know there’s a check coming.Will you keep doing this after college? Oh yeah, I think so. I think I will always enjoy getting free money.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>With his parents’ credit card in hand, Tyler Churchward took a risk and clicked a pop-up banner advertising a free iPod. After completing the requirements, an iPod arrived in the mail. Figuring it worked once, he tried again. And again. Five years later, Churchward, a senior accounting major now with his own credit card, has accumulated more than $22,000 in merchandise, gift cards, and checks from online offers. And he got it all — more or less — for free. How did you get into this? In 2005, I was just kind of browsing the Internet and found this article online that said freeipods.com actually works. You will actually get your iPod. I looked into it more and found some online messaging boards, which are basically communities that talk about this kind of stuff. They share links and different information on offers, like which ones are scams or legitimate. So I did my first offer, and I have been doing it pretty much ever since.What are some of the most random offers you’ve had to sign up for to get a gift?There was one called Latavi. It was a breast enhancement cream. There have been plenty of weight loss pills and wrinkle creams. There’s been some jewelry club where you get a ring or necklace every month, but it was just the biggest piece of crap. It’s like something you’d get out of a vending machine.Tell us about some of the cool stuff you’ve gotten. Toward the end of my senior year (in high school), I found this link on a message board that was for a 42-inch plasma TV. You needed to sign up for 12 offers plus get a referral to do 12 offers. I asked some of my friends if they wanted to get a line going. We all signed up as each other’s referrals and started rotating in. I think like seven or eight people from my high school got the TV. I got a MacBook in June right before my freshman year of college, which was pretty good because I needed a computer for college anyway. And I’ve only paid for one iPod, and I’ve had four or five.Does the effort of signing up pay off?I mean, this is pretty much my only job. I had a couple part-time jobs in high school, but it was never for more than six months. And I haven’t had a job in college just because I’ve been able to live off of this money. But what about scams?I’ve never been scammed. I mean, I’ve not met the requirements for a program before and lost the money I had spent on the offers. And I’ve gotten charged for offers that I’ve forgotten to cancel. But it’s perfectly legitimate. You even file a W-9 form, which is sent into the Internal Revenue Service with the reported amount of the gift. So is it really free?You have to pay when you sign up for offers that are required. I’ve probably spent about $3,000 to $4,000 on the offers, but that’s over the course of five years. You put in $40 or $60 now and in two to four months you get $500 plus. So it’s not really free, but the profit is huge. I pretty much view it like a business. Do you still do these offers?I did some last summer, but the last website that you could really do changed their terms around, so it doesn’t really make it worth it. And really in the last year or two, a lot of the offers just disappeared completely because of the recession.