A legendary drink and music filled night in Newcastle, told from a Durham student’s perspective.

Half past five. Closing time for most shops on Market Square. If you’re meandering to Tesco after a late lecture, chances are you’ll be greeted by the sight of waitresses, waiters and shopkeepers wrestling with black bags. Unfortunately, these bags often contain food which is perfectly edible. A lot of Durham cafes and bakeries prepare fresh food every morning and then discard the leftovers as the day draws to a close. Supermarkets are also guilty of possessing the same ‘bin happy’ mentality. Food has to be thrown out if it’s past its sell by date, even if it’s fine to consume in reality.

Our new music editor, Olly Lammas, begins his column on d21 with a review of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
You’re Kanye West on the night of 2009 MTV Video Music awards. You consider yourself to be the world’s most successful hip-hop rapper/producer, but last year was BAD: You split with your long term girlfriend and your Mother died while having plastic surgery (that you paid for). So you’re drinking heavily and Taylor Swift wins the award for best female video for “You Belong to Me”. A travesty in …

Whilst the catalyst for this article was the recently published piece in the last edition of the Palatinate, “Is there something rotten on the stage of Durham”? (Palatinate 7th December 2010) it is in fact a response to the mutterings of discontent that has existed as long as student theatre.

Ben Whittle examines what it means to be a Science Enthusiast (or ‘Geek’).

Standing proudly in attractive South Kensington, between the Natural History Museum and Imperial College, is the Science Museum, a building which has long been one of my favourite places to visit in London, ever since I was a child, and it was where I spent several happy hours last Monday. I realise that statement will raise some amused eyebrows and places me in a select group which some people would call ‘science-enthusiasts’, but which most others would more bluntly call ‘geeks’. This latter group is actually wrong as the term ‘geek’ is primarily defined as a person obsessed with computing (which I am not, despite using dictionary.com to find that definition) but I understand the point they’re trying to make: liking science is un-cool and going to a museum dedicated to it, when you are not forced to, is not going to win you any friends.

Laura Bulbeck isn’t impressed by the constant political bickering …

As May 6 looms closer, propaganda, speeches and of course great, vaguely retro-looking TV debates are everywhere. Party leaders have hopped on their tour buses, like rock stars, to travel the country. Yet the main thing I seem to have…

Stevie Martin on the pros and cons of the ‘joke’ degree.

You can be the sort of person who walks into a glass door and spills Cheerios over someone’s lactose-intolerant terrier, causing it to maul the newborn baby lying in an adjacent room whilst still being able to receive a respectable degree in English Literature. The view of those who study the creative arts as vacant and lazy…

Paul Powell-Blake takes a straightforward, direct and no-holds-barred look at how the internet has affected the gay scene…

From coming out of the closet through to cruising gay websites for local sexual encounters, there is no denying that the internet has not only revolutionised the way the world as a whole connects, but has revolutionised and perhaps re-invented the queer world. For any…

Chris Wright tackles the latest round in the BNP-DUS debacle…

Facebook groups have proliferated, emails have been sent – I feel somehow compelled to contribute to these keyboard recriminations on the subject of the second DUS cancelled invitation to the BNP.
The stirring sound of ‘Rule Britannia’ blaring from a BNP truck outside the library the other day reminded me of the phone-call I made to a local BNP activist a couple of years ago: he had…

Tom Walker on how the recent Togo assault is just another reminder of an ongoing saga…

The machine gun attack on the Togo football team bus, killing three and wounding two, is the latest miserable day to record in the heavily blemished diary of world sport. Hostility has frequently found its way into the newspapers via sporting events and the genuine possibility that Emmanuel Adebayor, a Premiership…

James Dunn looks forward to turkey, trimming and potential unemployment…

Students across the country have been heading home this week through the snow, filling the trains and buses with black bin bags full of laundry. We may look to be full of Yuletide joy, but the outlook for students this Christmas, and for 2010, is as bleak as the inevitable sprouts on Christmas Day.

With unemployment..

Michael Ashby left Durham six months ago with a First Class Honours and imparts some knowledge to this years finalists…

After years of expensive education, a car full of books and anticipation, I’m an expert on Shakespeare and that’s a hell of a lot, but the world don’t need scholars as much as I thought”. Jamie Cullum.
He may not be the world’s greatest singer but he does make a good point. Jamie Cullum released his Twentysomething in October 2003. Three years later in 2006, with the last few A-Level Hamlet quotations slipping from my mind, I made the terrifying, exciting journey to University. Even then Cullum’s lyrics rang true, so much so that they even made it on to…

Tom Walker implores you to run from The Hills…

“In order to create an apple pie from scratch,” Carl Sagan memorably remarks in his breathtaking Cosmos series, “one must first create a universe.” If time since the big bang was compressed into a year, I learned from the same programme, Homo sapiens wasn’t even conceived of until 23:54 on 31st December. On and on, a young me sat amazed, learning the incomprehensibility of a googolplex, what atoms consist of…

Stevie Martin reads about a recent technological advancement and panics slightly.

Forget the glaring headlines, it’s much more interesting to focus on the tiny paragraph-long mini stories found in the Times. Some are less illuminating than others (Man is enraged when Paper Maché Sculpture is Accidentally Destroyed by Landlord) but the other day, sandwiched between something about car theft, and knife crime (probably) there was a piece which definitely deserved a higher word count….

It’s all very well having an iPhone, but Sam Eagers wishes you’d stop going on about it…

Since 2007 a device has been released into the general population that is starting to affect its users. The Apple iPhone is the name of this new threat, and it is much more deadly than swine flu. All of you will have heard of this hellish creation, but many will not fully understand the impact..