Episode 58: Gamers, Graduates, ‘Husky Farm Girls’

This week, we check in with students who are building a Minecraft-style graduation for UConn seniors, and learn about life on campus in 1905 from the perspective of an original women’s basketball team member.

Transcript

Tom Breen: [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to episode 58 of UConn 360, that’s the only podcast in the world that covers the university of Connecticut from every conceivable angle. Coming to you from the four corners of Connecticut. Roughly, approximately. Uh, we are your merry UConn 360 crew. My name is Tom Breen, I’m your facilitator of sorts and joining me, my colleagues Maxine Philavong.

Maxine Philavong: [00:00:32] Coming to you live from New Haven.

Tom Breen: [00:00:34] All right. Julie Bartucca,

Julie Bartucca: [00:00:36] Here in Wethersfield.

Tom Breen: [00:00:38] And Ken Best.

Ken Best: [00:00:39] From the wall of sound studio in Mansfield Center.

Tom Breen: [00:00:43] Very nice. How’s everyone doing in the, uh, this is our third coronavirus episode. Slightly slimmed down format, and obviously we’re not in our studio. Things are a little different, but I think we’re all adjusting. How’s everyone doing?

Julie Bartucca: [00:00:55] Doing well. I don’t like that you’ve turned your video off, Tom. It’s very bizarre to just hear your disembodied voice, but.

Tom Breen: [00:01:01] That’s going to be really upsetting for our listeners too. Who won’t,

Julie Bartucca: [00:01:06] who don’t get to see you? I’m doing well. I can’t believe we’re almost through week seven or week six going into week seven of this, but it’s all right.

I’ve loved all the UConn nation stepping up to help either make PPE with 3D printing and there are two emergency department doctors that have created a shield for those who have to do intubation. So there’s just people stepping up all over to keep our healthcare workers safe, which is really cool.

But yeah, it’s going okay on the home front over here. How are you guys?

Tom Breen: [00:01:34] How’s the student situation, Maxine?

Maxine Philavong: [00:01:36] I’m doing good. Well, except for, except for yesterday when, um remember last semester where my laptop crashed? Well, this time my laptop did die. Uh, yeah, so it’s, it’s fine though. I have another laptop that I can use, but it’s been fine. I think there’s only like two weeks left officially of class until I’m done forever.

Julie Bartucca: [00:01:55] I know it dawned on me that we’re losing Maxine really soon, and I got really sad.

Maxine Philavong: [00:02:01] This is my second to last episode. Next, next episodes. My last episode. We’ll lose the voice of the students.

Julie Bartucca: [00:02:08] Terrible.

Tom Breen: [00:02:09] It is terrible. Uh, we’ll have to do something special for your last episode.

I don’t know what that will be. But we’ll figure something out. Well, uh, so yeah, you’re done in two weeks. And then, uh, I mean, I guess it’s weird to talk about plans, right? Cause everyone’s plans are basically the same that wait until this is over.

Maxine Philavong: [00:02:24] Everyone’s on like a hiring freeze right now. So I’ve been having trouble finding like a full time job, but.

I think everyone, me and everyone else is just going to figure it out. I think we’ve been figuring it out this entire time, so I, I’m not worried about it. Yet. And asked me in two weeks and then tell you I’m worried about it.

Julie Bartucca: [00:02:43] We have faith in you, Maxine.

Maxine Philavong: [00:02:45] Thank you.

Ken Best: [00:02:45] And Tom, you know I’ve been busy because you’re getting my stuff.

Tom Breen: [00:02:50] Yes, it’s true. And hopefully our listeners know that too, because they’re constantly going to Today.UConn.edu.

Julie Bartucca: [00:02:56] Constantly.

Tom Breen: [00:02:57] Refreshing. It’s the lone ray of light in their bleak lives.

Julie Bartucca: [00:03:02] Oh, they’re not bleak lives.

Tom Breen: [00:03:04] I mean, cause of the cause of the pandemic, not normally. Everyone’s trapped at home, just hitting refresh over and over waiting for that Ken Best content.

Julie Bartucca: [00:03:12] Need that content!

Ken Best: [00:03:13] Well, you know, things have sort of gotten to a certain point when all the comic strips in the newspapers are now having pandemic themes and jokes.

Julie Bartucca: [00:03:22] There’s not a lot else to talk about these days.

Tom Breen: [00:03:25] How’s Dagwood Bumstead handling that?

Ken Best: [00:03:29] I’m thinking that may be one of the few that doesn’t have anything on it, but, uh.

Tom Breen: [00:03:33] That’s shocking. It’s usually very topical. Yeah. So anyway, it’s, it’s a, I guess everyone’s doing about the same, right? It’s funny, I, you know, I, I talked to friends or family and they say what’s new? And nothing, nothing is ever new. There’s nothing to report, but, you know, we’ll get through it right.

Julie Bartucca: [00:03:49] Keep on keeping on.

Tom Breen: [00:03:50] Yeah. Well we could all move to Georgia and open up a bowling ally.

Ken Best: [00:03:57] Well, gyms, gyms are now back on the list of places where you can start to go in some, some areas.

Julie Bartucca: [00:04:04] Don’t. Let’s not even, that’s the worst idea ever.

Tom Breen: [00:04:08] Sounds like a great idea to me. Speaking of UConn today, if you head over there, we’re talking about things that UConn nation is doing to step up. There’s kind of a neat little idea.

You can head over to UConn Today and learn more about it. But you know, people are putting like hearts in the windows of their homes or on their doors. So, um, there’s, there’s a UConn specific version of this. It’s a blue heart and you can actually download templates of it. This was an idea that UConn Health, I believe a physician’s young daughter came up with.

And so you can go and you can download templates, you can call your own, you can show your support, not just for a healthcare workers, but for you kind of healthcare workers or. Sure your support as a UConn person for all healthcare workers, whatever, however you want it to mean you can, you can download it and do it that way.

Julie Bartucca: [00:04:48] Very nice.

Tom Breen: [00:04:49] People in my neighborhood every Friday at seven or going outside to bang pots and pans, and I haven’t done it yet. The first night it happened, I had, I forgot that this was a thing and I just. We’ve gotten really scared.

Julie Bartucca: [00:05:04] I can only imagine. You’re like hunkering down in your basement.

Tom Breen: [00:05:07] Like I heard all this noise and I look out the window and like the entire street except me. Everyone out front with like pots and pans and I thought, Oh no, it’s like a Wicker man thing happening.

Julie Bartucca: [00:05:19] Did they send somebody to do a wellness check on you cause you didn’t come out?

Tom Breen: [00:05:22] No. Although a couple of days later, one of my neighbors, as I was out working in my yard came over and scolded me for not participating.

And I was like, I don’t know. I didn’t know what it was happening.

Julie Bartucca: [00:05:33] That’s pretty on brand for you. There’s a, there’s a club and you’re not in it.

Tom Breen: [00:05:36] That’s true. That is, that is absolutely true. And, uh, you know, frankly, uh, I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.

Ken Best: [00:05:43] So now we’re quoting Groucho Marx?

Julie Bartucca: [00:05:46] Always. Yeah, I took out my a, we haven’t been doing any banging on pots and pans, but I took out my Valentine’s day heart wreath and put that out on the front door for the health care workers.

Tom Breen: [00:05:57] Nice. Well, Maxine, providing our student perspective and being a senior, this is not the ideal way for seniors to get their degrees, right? There’s a, there’s going to be a virtual commencement, uh, that we’re putting online. Um, but it’s not quite the same, obviously as being there in person to, uh, walk across the stage and hear your name called.

And receive your diploma, but some students are coming up with some creative ways to, to kind of get around that. Maxine has a story about one of those creative ways this week. Why don’t you tell us a little, a little bit about it, Maxine?

Maxine Philavong: [00:06:27] So when the university announced graduation was postpone for this year, it’s safe to say everyone was disappointed. I know I was very, very disappointed being the first one in my family to ever graduate from college. But when UConn Gaming Club heard the news, they had a different reaction. They got to thinking, how can we give seniors the graduation they wanted where they wanted? After seeing other schools build replicas of their colleges, Andy Duro, UConn Gaming club Minecraft chair brought the idea of recreating commencement in Minecraft. So do you guys know what Minecraft is?

Julie Bartucca: [00:06:59] Very, very vaguely.

Tom Breen: [00:07:01] Is it? Is it a video game?

Maxine Philavong: [00:07:03] It’s a video game.

Ken Best: [00:07:05] I knew that.

Maxine Philavong: [00:07:07] Ken do you play Minecraft?

Ken Best: [00:07:09] No, but I know that, uh, many of our composition music students like to create music for games. It’s a big thing according to our Grammy winning music composition professor Kenneth Fuchs.

Maxine Philavong: [00:07:22] Yeah, so creating music and all that stuff is one of the things you can do in Minecraft. Ryan Marsh describes a better in the interview, but it’s basically a video game or that allows users to recreate or create whatever they want in the game using blocks. Andy, Ryan and other,UConn gaming club members spent more than two weeks building a two to one almost exact replica of Gampel in Minecraft.

I talked to Andy and Ryan about the project and how students, so anyone really can take part in the virtual graduation.

For a lot of people listen to this podcast they don’t know what Minecraft is. So for someone who doesn’t know how Minecraft works or what Minecraft is, can you kind of summarize what they could expect from Minecraft or what Minecraft is?

Ryan Marsh: [00:08:16] The simplest way to consider a game like Minecraft is if you take the analogy of like working with Legos.

So if you’re, if you have just a bunch of Legos and like a, a big bin. Then you have a bunch of different pieces and you can combine it with whatever you like, make whatever you like, build it up, break it down, play with your friends. Build something together, play alone, build on your own time. And Minecraft is sort of like that where it becomes a virtual world that lets you build whatever you want with the blocks that it provides.

So Minecraft itself is based on everything’s in blocks. Sometimes they are a little bit different shaped like you can have a fence that’s not a complete block, but. Things like dirt as just a whole block and you can build it up into a bunch of different things. There’s like bricks, clay, concrete.

Any basic materials you can think of probably are there. For our purposes, we’re just using the creative mode, which lets you get any blocks that you want. And spawn as much things as you want. So in the normal game, you’d have to keep collecting dirt or wood if you wanted to make something. But in this we can just grab from a unlimited supply of wood and put it wherever we want.

So for example, I think Gampel’s mostly made out of a, let’s see, I think it’s concrete. And then the Union is a bunch of brick blocks. So the game has pretty much unlimited potential for what you want to create. And it’s an easy way for anyone to join, play, and download the game. There’s no complicated tutorials on it.

It’s basically install the game, enter the server address, which will be public later and join in to play.

Maxine Philavong: [00:09:52] So Andy, how’d you come up with this idea?

Andy Duro: [00:09:55] I’m the UConn Gaming Club Minecraft community manager. The very first thing I saw was like the virtual commencement that a UConn itself was gonna organize. So it made me think like, are other schools that are doing things in Minecraft too.

There are other schools that are doing things in like Roblox. So like what could we do for UConn that would become like a special thing for people in this time? Because a lot of my friends are seniors too, and I know they were really bummed about not being able to attend commencement and stuff. I figured Minecraft would be like a natural connection.

That people could use because most people like know what Minecraft is at least, and they would be able to attend if they wanted to. And so that was, that was like the main inception. And then Ryan sort of showed me some other stuff where like some DJs were holding concerts of Minecraft and some other schools, like RIT have built their entire campus in Minecraft.

So I figured like, why don’t we just do the same thing?

Maxine Philavong: [00:10:44] So it’s a huge expansive game and it takes a long time to even build anything. So I’m wondering how long did you guys work on this? On just Gampel itself and then everything outside of it.

Andy Duro: [00:10:59] Well, it’s actually really interesting because Gampel took the least time than out of anything that we expected.

So we have a great team. Um, we have a few UCGC members and a few people outside of UCGC who are volunteering their time to help build. So when we first started, our first goal was to actually find a place in the world that we could place Gampel down. And then we got to engineering Gampel. So the way we build Gampel was we actually looked up floor plans from UConn websites and the architecture firm that built Gampel like way back when.

So we were able to find out roughly like what the radius of the dome is and how tall it is. And then we did a bit of math to convert that to Minecraft units. So our version of Gampel is actually a one to three conversion of Gampel. From then we built the original circle that was like the bottom layer.

Then we built the walls. Uh, and then we started building the dome. And while we were building the dome, we also started building the interior with the court and the bleachers. So our version of Gampel isn’t perfect, but it’s like very close to the original, almost like a one-to-one copy. And for that, we used a lot of Google maps imagery.

We used a lot of interior pictures that were taken throughout various basketball games. And so it was. It was a pretty fun endeavor in terms of being able to look at this, all of these images and all of these videos that we found in real life Gampel and using that to sort of cross-reference where our block should go.

And I’ll say the actual gamble building took about maybe two or three weeks of about a few hours every day where we would just go in and add a few blocks here and there and use some commands to make stuff easier.

Ryan Marsh: [00:12:36] I’m surprised for doing even more than Gampel. I didn’t, I didn’t anticipate it. I can say, cause I’ve been, I recorded, uh, most of our gambles stuff.

It’s about like 12 and a half hours for the Gampel recordings that I have. I missed a few sessions, I think. And that’s also with multiple people working on it at a time.

Maxine Philavong: [00:12:55] Can we go on Minecraft and you guys can kind of give me a tour? Cool.

Ryan Marsh: [00:13:00] Yes.

Maxine Philavong: [00:13:00] Do you guys want to describe kind of what we’re saying right now?

Andy Duro: [00:13:04] Sure. Yeah. So this is the front entrance. If you walk in through here, you can go and see your bleachers. So we have this sort of area fenced off. So this is going to be for the people who are graduating. We’re going to set up a booth over there, um, where they can actually sit in the middle of the field. And so the idea is we’re actually gonna have two speakers.

Ryan Marsh: [00:13:22] And we can’t say who yet.

Andy Duro: [00:13:23] But yeah. So we’re going to have two speakers. We’ll sort of, uh, introduce the class, uh, and then we’re going to have each person sort of walk up to the stage, one by one. We’ll hand them a Minecraft book, which will serve as their a proxy diploma. And so we’re anticipating the graduation ceremony to last maybe 30 minutes.

It’ll go pretty quick. And then once we do that, we’ll have everyone go out in Gampel and then they can sort of spread out and start doing the other activities. So we’ll have different volunteers at each activity and they’ll be able to sort of guide people and control what’s going on. And we also have a little surprise that we’ll give everyone at the very end of the ceremony, but I’m not going to spoil it right now.

Ryan Marsh: [00:14:04] Some of the side activities can they mostly automated, but, we have a, our volunteers and other staff to make sure everything goes smoothly.

Maxine Philavong: [00:14:12] How can people participate in that in new graduation?

Ryan Marsh: [00:14:14] All of our information is pretty much on our social channels. So Facebook and Twitter and Discord. The Discord link should be on those as well.

Um, if you’re looking to volunteer, uh, to help build the map or help run the event, there is the volunteer forum. I don’t have a short link for it, but it’s also on our social channels. If you’re looking to attend either as a graduating UConn student or just as an attendee, whether or not you know a graduating student, UConn student, you don’t have to know one. Attendee forum is also on our social channels.

They’re still open. We might close the volunteer form eventually if we get enough people. But the attendee forum should probably go up until pretty close to the event.

Andy Duro: [00:14:58] I believe we currently have a 13 new volunteers or 13 attendees, Ryan, uh, we’re always looking for more people to join, so that would be a really helpful, if you want to go to, I think it,

Ryan Marsh: [00:15:11] We’re higher than 13 now.

Andy Duro: [00:15:14] That’s good. Twitter.com/uconngamingclub. I think.

Ryan Marsh: [00:15:18] If you don’t have Minecraft, it’s I believe $25. You need the Minecraft of Java version. Uh, not the Minecraft windows store version. They are, they look very similar, but they work differently. So you need to make sure you have the Java version. And then download version 1.15.2. For the day of it. There’s nothing special about like you don’t need to pay more for different versions. It’s just they let people download different versions because there’s different things in each version. And if you aren’t comfortable with buying the game or just don’t want to buy the game, we will also be streaming out on our Twitch channel, which is twitch.tv/uconngaming.

And we’ll be showing off the, the main ceremony and other events for people to see and appreciate that. Don’t want to get the game cause we understand not everyone can fly the game or run the game or just wanting to play the game but still want to be involved.

Maxine Philavong: [00:16:28] Ryan said commenced and will take place May 10th the day after UConn’s official virtual graduation. He doesn’t, he said the club doesn’t have an exact time yet, but it’s going to be sometime in the afternoon because no one wants to wake up in the morning and it will be about a half hour long. If you want to learn more, you can go to their Twitter, @UConnGamingClub or join the discord server discord at discord.gg/ucgc.

Tom Breen: [00:16:55] That’s awesome.

Julie Bartucca: [00:16:56] Very cool.

Tom Breen: [00:16:57] Yeah. You know, obviously this is not what anybody wanted, but I’m glad that students are, are doing some creative things to, to try and at least provide some kind of camaraderie and shared experience.

Ken Best: [00:17:06] I generally find that when students put their mind to it, they’ll figure it out. And they usually do.

Tom Breen: [00:17:13] Especially seniors, right? Like, that would be bad if after four years of UConn, like people just are like, I don’t have any way to solve this problem.

Julie Bartucca: [00:17:20] Yeah. That’s kind of one of the goals of a UConn education, right? That’s awesome. I can’t wait to see what it looks like.

Tom Breen: [00:17:25] So, uh, if you remember our last episode, and I’m sure that, uh, all of our listeners do. Uh, in every detail. Uh, Julie requested a happy story.

Julie Bartucca: [00:17:34] Yeah.

Tom Breen: [00:17:34] Of UConn gone by for the history corner because, uh, you know, we’ve been some doom and gloom recently. So I don’t know if this is a happy story, but I think it’s kind of a quirky, it’s a quirky look back on a bygone era. On a Friday, November 21st, 1980 Kayleen Colgan of the daily campus interviewed at an alumni, alumnae, Elizabeth Donovan, who had graduated as one of 13 people in the class of 1905.

Julie Bartucca: [00:17:58] Wow!

Tom Breen: [00:17:58] So, uh, she was 97 years old at the time. And, uh, the story is basically just about what life was like at UConn in the first years of the 20th century. And, uh, it’s kind of a delightful story. You can go online and read it yourself. I’ll just, I’ll just read some highlights. Tuition was $8 a semester, which is lower than it is today.

You know, inflation, and I’m sure that, you know, works out.

Julie Bartucca: [00:18:22] Totally.

Tom Breen: [00:18:23] It’s funny reading her reminiscences because like all of her professors were people who now have buildings named after them, like her favorite was Monteith.

Julie Bartucca: [00:18:29] That’s so weird. So cool.

Tom Breen: [00:18:32] She was in a class with a Benjamin Koons’ son, and she took a horticulture from Gulley. Like it’s just like every, every building name.

Julie Bartucca: [00:18:40] Wow.

Tom Breen: [00:18:41] Mrs. Donovan had that class. She, and here’s something else that’s interesting about her. She was, um, the very first women’s basketball team. Oh, she played with Marjorie Monteith, among others. Marjorie Monteith was the daughter of HR Monteith. Quote, this is what Elizabeth Donovan said, “Marjorie started the team. I was just a substitute because I was only a little bit of a thing and the others were Husky farm girls.”

Julie Bartucca: [00:19:05] That wouldn’t fly today,

Tom Breen: [00:19:06] that would not fly today. By that point, none of them were around to like contest that description of them.

Ken Best: [00:19:13] Is she in that photo we’ve seen so often of one of the early basketball teams?

Tom Breen: [00:19:20] I believe so. Yeah. Yes, she is. Cause that was I think 1901 is the photo that everyone sees. I don’t know which person she is in the photo cause there are no names.

But I assume she’s one of the, the players. That was an undefeated season too.

Julie Bartucca: [00:19:32] Did we play high schools at that time?

Tom Breen: [00:19:35] Yes. Yeah. We did play high schools. And she didn’t live on campus, but she had a roommate and rented a farmhouse nearby. They would take a horse and buggy to class every day. And they would, uh, there was a horse barn, uh, as you can imagine.

And the students would just like put their horses in the barn. And parked the buggy out, and then when classes were over, they would get in the buggy, get the horses out and go home.

Julie Bartucca: [00:19:56] Oh my God. I wonder if they claimed or complained about parking constantly with that situation.

Ken Best: [00:20:02] I, I’m not sure there were tickets given out for the, for the buggy.

Julie Bartucca: [00:20:05] For the buggies. Oh, this is so great, Tom. You really delivered on my request. I’m like, can you see my smile? I’m so excited.

Tom Breen: [00:20:13] Uh, and so her graduation, she remembered there were 13 members of her glass. And there were small enough that to have their class photo taken on the steps of the dairy building, which is no longer on campus, but it was the first brick building on campus.

I guess back in 1980 it was a tradition for students graduating classes to all take a photo on the steps of the student union in back. Which is not possible today given,

Julie Bartucca: [00:20:37] how many students are in the class in 1980 roughly? Do we know?

Tom Breen: [00:20:40] I don’t know. I’m sure that’s something that somebody could track down.

If you find a, and send it to us on Twitter, we’ll, uh, we’ll give you a prize. And the prize is a, the virtue of a job well done. But I’m guessing it was significant. I mean, now it’s around 9,000 degrees being held out. And I would not be surprised if in 1980 it was closer to 3000, which is still a lot of people.

But anyway, apparently the, a UConn graduation back then was a, it was like a big social event for the whole area. And students could invite up to 10 people, but lots more would just show up because it wasn’t a whole lot to do maybe in 1905? Or in that era. And so apparently there was like one of the big days and the social calendar and people who had no connection to UConn would just show up and say like oh I’m with one of the graduate.

Julie Bartucca: [00:21:22] I’m amazed that they still limited it to 10 people. Like, yeah. Like now you have to do that cause you wouldn’t fit everybody. But that’s pretty funny with was so few.

Ken Best: [00:21:32] They needed parking for all those buggies.

Tom Breen: [00:21:34] That’s right. Exactly. Yeah. Where are you going to put all the buggies? But yeah, so that’s a, that’s a neat little, a slice of UConn life daygoneby. Liz Donaven, she seemed like quite a character after she graduated and she, uh, had a long career as a teacher.

Julie Bartucca: [00:21:45] Nice. I’ll have to look that story up.

Tom Breen: [00:21:47] And she, uh, received a special alumni award in 1980, which I think is why the story was written. But, uh, she seems like quite a character. Of her award, she said at the time, I was very honored and I think the picture of me came up quite flattering.

Julie Bartucca: [00:22:01] The important stuff. That’s great. We have to find some,

Ken Best: [00:22:05] I’m thinking that, uh, with all these Tom’s history corners stories, we might be able to create a, an illustration class to present them.

Tom Breen: [00:22:13] I, I’d love that. I’d love, uh, you know, any way to get more Tom’s history corner out in the world.

Ken Best: [00:22:18] Could be,

Tom Breen: [00:22:18] We could have a lot of fun.

Ken Best: [00:22:20] We can give that away as a prize.

Tom Breen: [00:22:22] Ah, that’s a good idea. Yeah.

Ken Best: [00:22:24] I’ll have to talk to the folks in the illustration department.

Tom Breen: [00:22:27] Let me know, because

Julie Bartucca: [00:22:28] I want them to, I want them to do our first episode, the one with the, uh, the shooting. What was that guy’s name?

Tom Breen: [00:22:34] Oh, gosh. I forget, but yes.

Julie Bartucca: [00:22:36] That was the best story.

Tom Breen: [00:22:38] I would want them to do Bill Lax Carlson.

Julie Bartucca: [00:22:40] Yes, absolutely.

Tom Breen: [00:22:42] With Uncle bear.

Julie Bartucca: [00:22:43] Uncle Barry. Uncle Barry’s blogging about a coronavirus times.

Tom Breen: [00:22:47] All right. Shout out to Uncle Barry.

Maxine Philavong: [00:22:49] I want the class to just be. I want the class to just be different rendition drawings of Tom every week.

Julie Bartucca: [00:22:56] What they imagine he looks like?

Tom Breen: [00:22:58] Yeah like different eras, like the 1905 Tom, yeah. Tom in 1970 I’d be fine with that.

Julie Bartucca: [00:23:06] Come on. Twitter followers. You got this.

Tom Breen: [00:23:09] Yeah. I know, I know there are some talented artists among our followers on Twitter.

Ken Best: [00:23:12] We’ll have to have the haberdashery uh, department, uh, provide some material. To different, different hat for each, each era.

Tom Breen: [00:23:22] Yeah. Why not? Honestly,

Julie Bartucca: [00:23:24] We’re losing our minds.

Tom Breen: [00:23:27] You don’t say? It’s the, it’s the quarantine lifestyle.

Julie Bartucca: [00:23:29] All good.

Ken Best: [00:23:30] It’s a lifestyle now?

Tom Breen: [00:23:31] It’s the only lifestyle right now.

Julie Bartucca: [00:23:33] Yeah. What else is there?

Tom Breen: [00:23:35] What else is there?

Ken Best: [00:23:36] Well, on that subject, we are, our alum Mike Soltys, who is been with ESPN almost from the very beginning. To a related, the story that was in the news that the ESPN folks have built a studio for the governor so that he can do his, uh, media interviews from the comfort of his home and look very well set up when he does. And they had a picture in the paper about it and it’s apparently what they’d been doing all along with all their around air folks. That’s how they’re broadcasting 24/7 with with sports that really are not happening right now.

Julie Bartucca: [00:24:11] I saw that it is really fun to see. Just all these celebrities from their houses all the time. They’re just like us.

Ken Best: [00:24:18] I’m just wondering if all those books are actually real in the background, and most of those houses. They all have bookcases. I have bookcases, but I’ve actually read the books.

Julie Bartucca: [00:24:28] You’re being degrading to celebrities now.

Tom Breen: [00:24:32] Celebrities are our most important renewable national reports.

I wonder if a telecommuting will be more common after this is over. I mean for some people obviously, but like. There are people who can’t telecommute obviously, and. But I wonder if, you know, office workers and stuff will be telecommuting more? I kind of hope so. I would welcome the opportunity not to, not to drive so much.

Julie Bartucca: [00:24:51] Same. I think it’s going to change a lot.

Tom Breen: [00:24:54] I’m a skeptic on that.

Ken Best: [00:24:56] The price of oil went negative last week.

Tom Breen: [00:24:59] That’s true.

Ken Best: [00:25:00] First time ever.

Tom Breen: [00:25:01] There’re oil producers are paying people to start the oil for them. And I would like to, um, I don’t know if this is legal with the state’s laws on, you know, private business or whatever, but I would just like to extend an invitation to Exxon. I have a garage. Okay.

Julie Bartucca: [00:25:13] I did read an article that you can’t just do that unfortunately.

Ken Best: [00:25:18] I’m sure there’s some zoning.

Julie Bartucca: [00:25:19] You thought they’d be banging on your door?

Tom Breen: [00:25:22] There’s a lot of room in my garage.

Ken Best: [00:25:25] I’m not sure that there’s a a a zoning permit that you can get the store that much oil in one place.

Tom Breen: [00:25:32] There’s no more laws anymore. Everything is falling apart.

Maxine Philavong: [00:25:35] No rules. No rules, just rights.

Tom Breen: [00:25:38] It’s like mad max out there.

Julie Bartucca: [00:25:39] We are off the rails. Let’s bring it back.

Tom Breen: [00:25:42] Yeah. Uh, if you, uh, liked this, if you savored this heady intellectual discussion today. Follow us on Twitter @UConnPodcast or @main_old, where you will find old photographs and snippets of life from UConn and days gone by. Individually, you can follow me @TJBreen. Maxine, where can the good people of listener land follow you?

Maxine Philavong: [00:26:05] You can follow me on Twitter @MaxinePhilavong. And if you are an employer, who is hiring, I’m on LinkedIn.

Tom Breen: [00:26:14] So Julie, what about you? What kind of things do you want people to know?

Julie Bartucca: [00:26:18] I’m @JulieBartucca. I’ve been very happy that you’re a back on the old main account tweeting some amazing old pictures of UConn.

Tom Breen: [00:26:27] There’s some good stuff out there. Ken, what’s your Tik Tok?

Maxine Philavong: [00:26:30] We haven’t made that yet.

Ken Best: [00:26:32] Around the clock. Tick tock around the clock. That’s what it is.

But my adventures can be followed at today.uconn.edu. As long as Mr. Breen allows me to continue to write for them, and 91.7 FM, WHUS, you can sound alternative streaming online at WHUS.org. Saturdays, now from 3 to 6. We’ve expanded the show by an extra hour for the first time we’ll be, well, it would have been last week by the time you hear this, and the show is going to rotate, I believe around the schedule, and of course the episodes, a slightly recast of the UConn360 Podcast, Fridays at 11:00 AM. And we’re in the process of figuring out how to continue through the summer with your favorite episodes of, or at least our favorite episodes of the podcast.

We’re going to, we’re going to discuss that soon. So I’ve got a lot of editing to do.

Tom Breen: [00:27:27] All right, everybody, that’s it for us this week. Be sure to come back in a fortnight and we’ll have more excitement for you. And in the meantime, uh, wash your hands, cover your mouth, stay safe out there everybody.