Good evening!
I hope everybody who came to the Icebreaker enjoyed themselves - I definitely did! Lots of interesting people and I had some great conversations - I really do hope you come back again, and that we didn't manage to scare you off.
This week, we will be back in Buchanan B215 at 5:30pm, kicking off the month of October by taking a (brief) retrospective through Monster Movies, with the theme of Unexplored Regions and the Creatures That Live There... So if you feel like engaging with some unknown beasties and taking a voyage to distant lands, then this is the night for you! (There will almost certainly be snark, never fear!)
Our first offering, starting about 6pm, will be the 1954 classic Creature from the Black Lagoon, starring Richard Carlson, Julia Adams, Richard Denning, Antonio Moreno and Whit Bissell. The Creature itself is played by Ben Chapman (on land) and Ricou Browning (underwater); I confess to not actually having seen this film, so I cannot shed any illumination on why this is so.
The film begins with a geology expedition in the Amazon uncovering a Devonian period fossil that suggests a link between land and sea animals. This fossil is a hand with webbed fingers, and as the leader of the expedition manages to gain funding and convince a bunch of other people to venture back into the jungle with him, it perhaps isn't a surprise that this turns out to be somewhat unfortunate...
As an aside (because I am incorrigible) while the Devonian is sometimes called 'The Age of Fishes' because of the huge diversification of fish that occurred, it was also a pretty good period for the diversification of other life - including the first tetrapods, which was good news for you and me, as these guys ended up the ancestors of all four-limbed animals today. While life was already terrestrial before the Devonian period, with arthropods and insects having made it to land previously, the Devonian was the period in which tetrapods evolved from lobe-limbed fishes and began to walk on land - so the film is not entirely incorrect right on that front!
One of the most famous fossils from this era is Tiktaalik (which also has a great name) which is a key link between land and sea tetrapods: it had a crocodile-like head, and strong front fins that are postulated to have been able to allow it to raise its head out of the shallow seas that covered a lot of the planet at the time. To prevent me getting too carried away with enthusiasm for fossils and palaeontology, let me just drop off this website all about Tiktaalik, for those of you you get excited by fossils: http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu
And now back to the actual point.
There will be a 30-40 minute break between films in case people want to get food (alas, our budget does not stretch to providing food at all events) or talk, and then our second offering of the evening, and the one that will be particularly snarky, will be Man Beast, starring the Yeti! At least, I hope so. Made in 1956, on the human side it stars Rock Madison, Asa Maynor and George Skaff. The action begins when Connie Hayward mounts an expedition into the Himalayas to find her missing brother, who has not yet returned from his efforts to find the Yeti...
In other news, we are gearing up for our Treasure Hunt to be on Friday the 17th of October. It will be entirely on campus, and will be conducted in teams. After running around madly(ish) we will cap the night off with a movie. If you would be interested in participating in the Treasure Hunt, please do email sfssoco@gmail.com (replying to this email works) to let me know how much interest there is. More details will come at a later date!
I shall sign off by wishing everyone 'good luck!' with midterms, and I hope to see you soon,
Catriona
Your Friendly Neighbourhood SoCo
