Josh Meredith's Blog

Josh Meredith

Comm 208

Paper #1

The Hickman-Johnson-Furrow Learning Center, also known as the Morningside College Library, first opened in February 1914, as the Alumni Gymnasium. The architect William Beuttler designed the building for the Morningside College Campus. An increase in enrollment at Morningside College following World War II amplified the need for reference materials as well as study space for the students attending the college. So, in 1956, renovations were done to convert it to a library. In 2005 more renovations were done to make the learning center more inviting and supportive for the entire campus community.

So, I am standing here today observing this building full of Morningside College history. The outside of the building is made of layers and layers of brick. One can realize that the building has three stories in it by simply looking at the windows from the outside. The brick is brown/burnt red in color and even though it has been in the summer sun all day, it is still fairly cool to the touch. Not like a tub of ice cream but more like the feeling you get when you jump into a well temperature pool. Unlike the inviting water though, the brick is rough like the everyday sand paper you would find in a shop class. If you ran you fingers along in long enough, they would become raw quite quickly. The roof is covered in a red, rounded tile that looks smooth and slick from three stories below.

There are three entrances that are used to enter this building full of knowledge. Two are located in the back of the building. One is for the KMSC and MCTV students and the other is probably the most popular way to enter the library. In fact, it is the entrance I always use because it is the closest to the dorms and café. To add to the doors popularity among the student body, it has the main sidewalk that runs through the heart of the campus wind right up to it. The main entrance, located in the front of the building, has the original entrance to the building back when it was a gymnasium re-set off to the side of the structure. This old entrance is made of stone and is smooth to the touch like a baby’s butt. But unlike a baby, it is very old.

Around the building, the grass is green, and thick. Sidewalks run every which way like a maze around the building so that a student could easily get from the Learning Center to any building or parking lot on campus. Tan, extremely over weight squirrels that have the habit of not hibernating during the winter run around the grass and from tree to tree. These trees spot the open grass on the main entrance side in the same way that students spot the library an hour before closing time. I have been told that they are non-hibernating heavy set squirrels because the Morningside College biology department insists on feeding the confident rodents.

The learning center is a hot spot for almost every student on campus, but not just for hitting the books. Inside this building is classrooms, a radio station, a TV station, a circulation desk where and awesome guy named Josh Meredith works, and the Spoonholder Café. The Spoonholder is located near the front entrance and is always a temptation when walking by. This is because the smells of Starbucks coffee assaults one’s nose immediately, while the smell of muffins and cookies slowly wafer through the air as if you were back in grandmas kitchen. It is a quiet place there on the first floor. But then again, it is a library so you would expect that. Most of the first floor is lined with tables were students can sit to study. There is a back area full of reference materials that are as old as dirt and most students refuse to touch them because the internet has everything they could need for references. There is also a magazine section where almost any magazine that matters in the world today resides in the area in alphabetical order.

The library now.

The library back in the day.

Like most college students across America, Peter Swanke likes to participate in the drinking of adult beverages. This is where most the similarities stop though. Swanke is from Chadron, Nebraska. I have absolutely no idea where that is on the Nebraska state map but that is not the important part. The important part is that in Chadron, Peter picked up the habit of drinking at the age of 16. Yes, he was just a young rebel doing what most everyone else in Chadron was doing at his age. Now, Peter is 23 and is working on the six year college plan. He spent his first five years at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where instead of going to his gen eds classes, he went to the bottles of scotch. Now scotch is his favorite drink. Peter’s dad got a job as a professor at Morningside College and so Peter followed him here to Sioux City, Iowa.

The first thing that stuck out to me when starting to interview Peter was how wonderfully, beautiful and awe inspiring his hand writing was. He is obviously a direct descendent of one of the best scribes in the history of ancient Rome. If Will Ferrill’s voice is like a mixture of Fergi and Jesus, than Peter’s handy work with the ink pen must be like a mixture of Pablo Picasso best painting, Beethoven’s best finger work while tickling the ivory, and Jesus. There is a saying that goes, “a picture says a thousand words.” Well, right now Swanke’s cursive handwriting is saying probably about 2000 plus to me. Maybe even 2500. Don’ believe me, check it our yourself in room 111 in the Morningside College Library from 1:45 PM to 3:30 PM every Tuesday and Thursday this fall semester.

Peter is not afraid to speak his mind, or swear while doing it. During our Comm 208 (Fundamentals of Journalism) class, it is frequent for him to let slip 5 words everyday that most mothers would deem quite unacceptable. If you need help on his favorite word, start rhyming with the word “duck”. If you can’t figure it out then, you are too young to be reading a blog anyways. If he had to pay a quarter to the Josh Meredith Foundation every time he let a naughty word slip out his mouth, I would be rich or at least definitely quitting my day job.

Behind the cover up of fancy hand writing, swearing, and drinking Peter Swanke has a passion and love for theater. This love came from a trip to Europe. He was in London when he decided to go to the theater and saw “Les Miserables.” From then on, he has been hooked. He is currently majoring in Theater and has the dream of working for the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has already starred in many plays including “A Mid Summers Night Dream” and “Dylan”.

Best of luck Mr. Peter Swanke! I can’t wait to hear about you rocking the theater scene in Chicago and New York City.

With the NFL kicking off its season tonight, I decided that and NFL news comment would be appropriate.

According to the NY Times, ESPN and NFL have reached an agreement to extend their Monday Night Football deal. The deal also includes an option for the NFL to put a wild card playoff game and possibly a Super Bowl on the mother-ship (Dan Patrick of Fox Sports Radio calls ESPN the mother-ship to describing how ESPN dominates sporting news).

The deal means that MNF will be held on ESPN through the 2021 season. ESPN is not getting the show for cheap. It will cost the 1.9 billion a year, but in the minds of the top men at ESPN “We do not have a more important deal than the N.F.L.” The Deal also provided ESPN the right to show 500 more hours per year of NFL shows, including NFL LIVE and NFL Sunday Countdown. Only NFL Network will hold more air time for the NFL than ESPN.

Elwood Olsen Stadium, formally know as Roberts Stadium is home to Morningside’s football, soccer and track and fields teams. In 2005, more than $2,500,000 worth of renovations were completed giving the stadium the look it has today. In order to make in to the field you have to walk down the biggest hill on campus, through the stadium parking lot, and through the gates to get to where I am standing now.

The first observation I make is that it is hotter on the field than it is on normal grass. The field is a turf that fells squishy under my feet. When i reached down to feel it with my bare hand, the turf felt like it could give a great back scratch. When I pulled my hand back up, it was covered in these little black pieces of rubber. The field is green with maroon end zones and white lines every five yards for football and yellow lines to make an outline of a soccer field.

Surronding the field is a track the is 400 meters or a light maroon track that can make most men tired just looking at it. The stands, like everything else, are painted maroon and have shiny metal stands in them that are boiling hot in the summer heat. If one had an egg, I am sure it can be fried up on the stands. There are Morningside Mustang logos everywhere, including the very middle of the field.

When the ice cream was first brought into the room, I had one thought run through my head, “Fulgsang is softening us up because he is about to drop and eight page paper on our heads.” I was wrong with my first assumption. In actuality,  all I had to do was eat the ice cream and describe to you readers (which amounts to zero people). At first glance, I thought that the ice cream was half chocolate and half vanilla. My oddly shaped spoon was able to carve into the ice cream like butter meaning that the ice cream had either been in a freezer that was not set to its max cooling capabilities, or it has been left out for a little while. While bringing the spoon up to my mouth, I fully expected the taste of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. To my surprise, my taste buds detected a root beer float taste. I could neither fully taste the vanilla or the root beer it mixed together perfectly. It was not the highest quality of root beer taste that one could get. In fact, it tasted more like the cheap great value type of root beer that you can a 2 liter bottle of for 64 cents at Wal-mart. To make sure my taste buds were not deceiving me, I smelt the ice cream and sure enough, it had a slight smell of root beer. As the ice cream continued to decrease in the the circularized cup it is in, it also began to become more liquid. Soon enough, the ice cream had disappeared and my spoon was only making contact with the plastic bottom of the container. Thus ends the best part of my  Fundamentals of Journalism class today. I now have to fully prepare myself for the next hour and a half of class with nothing but an empty ice cream cup and a weird spoon. If there are any readers of this blog out there, feel free to comment on what I should do with the cup and spoon.

For my news comments I went to the New York Times website and found an article about how the White House wants to observe 9/11. In the article it said that Obama wanted the media to minimize references to Al-Qaeda. The article said that Obama thought that the killing of Usama bin Laden is evidence that the terror group that plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks is becoming “increasingly irrelevant.” The article also stated other things that the White House wants done on the anniversary but this was the one that caught my eye. The article didn’t go into why he didn’t want references to Al-Qaeda. I just considered this pretty interesting because it seems we are not too shy about talking about Japan when the attacks on Pearl Harbor are mentioned even though the militaristic government that Japan had during WWII is much more irrelevant than Al-Qaeda is. This will probably be something that the media does not pay attention to for I feel Al-Qaeda and Usama bin Laden will probably be mentioned a lot in the coming weeks. None the less, it will be interesting to see how the media handles this.