Annual February tradition sweeps campus To most, Valentine’s Day is the holiday, which is popularly considered to be the bane of the single person’s existence. To others, it is the reason why so many people are born in November. February 14 takes Grinnellian awkwardness to another level. The weeks leading up to it can end up being a nasty Russian roulette of finding love. To take away from the frustration, students have taken somewhat ingenious approaches to embracing the holiday. Some students find single to be sexy. After experiencing two Valentine’s Days in a relationship and one year clinking glasses in Spain with her “single ladies”, Asia Sample ’10 will be taking herself out to the movies to see Valentine’s Day. “I think that the movies that come out on Valentine’s Day are exciting,” Sample said. “I’m excited to see Ashton Kutcher, fellow Iowan, on screen.” Sample’s choice reflects the tasteful perspective that seeing a movie alone can be self- rewarding. Whoever said you couldn’t be your own Valentine? Others have taken a more daring approach—confessing their love. Harpreet Singh ‘12 will be inserting a dozen roses into the mailboxes of those he finds closest to his heart. According to Singh, during high school he kept up a regular practice of giving roses to people who had effected his life positively due to a father figure advising him to let people know he cared about them. “I’m gonna show them, ‘Thanks. You’ve been a good friend to me,’” Singh said. He also will be leaving a note for a special someone. Singh wouldn’t reveal the person’s identity—he wanted to keep it off the record. “One person is gonna get that note that says, ‘I’m feelin’ you,” Singh said. “‘I hope you feelin’ me.’” Jerl Fields ’11 is also writing letters to special someones— his mother and grandmother. Every year, Fields sends cards back home. “Those are the first ladies,” Field said. But one Grinnelian has taken Valentine’s Day and given it an entrepreneurial bent—a lesbian dating service. Bateman calls his quasi-business CLIT—Crazy Lesbians Introduced by Thomas. Bateman operates under the opinion that sooner or later, throughout a women’s four years here, she eventually becomes queer. But she doesn’t know who’s queer, so in comes Bateman. “I know a lot of people and have taken several GWSS classes. Lesbians are very likely to be found in GWSS, Theatre, Environmental Science, the Birkenstocks section of shoe stores and the flannel section of Second Mile,” Bateman said. “So, between these five general locations, I am able to find quite a large dating pool and start to introduce lesbians.” According to Bateman, he’s had a few successful matches. Two of his friends, Erica and Becca, were CLIT’s first success. He’s now taken pride in his new subspecialty, lesbians with the same name—such as Anna and Anna. After graduation, Bateman hopes to expand his faux-business in the big city and expand the CLIT franchise. “I’m gonna host scissor suarees,” Bateman said. “Lesbian ski-getaways at Lodge Lesbo. My lesbian lodge in the Alps!” Whether you’re at the cinema, writing a secret on Plans, going on a CLIT-arranged date, getting ready to spend your work- study money at the Phoenix or settle in with a bottle of wine and your friends, the S&B urges you to be your own Valentine if you don’t have a person to share it with. This third year couple put it the best—“All kinds of love can be celebrated on Valentine’s Day,” said Maia Larson ’11. Charlie Zimmerman ’11 corrected her—“Conglomerate love,” he said. Gas station/munchie spot reopens Kum & Go, located on 5th and West reopened with new features like a milkshake machine but less condiments. - Ami Freeberg On Oct. 10, 2009, the Kum & Go, located on the corner of 5th and West, was demolished. Students, perhaps faculty, and community members alike were left with limited options from which to procure their light night slurpees or packs of chocolate doughnuts for the dark winter months, including the entirety of Hell Week and finals week. After returning from Winter Break, however, all can delight in the new, improved and finally open Kum & Go, which officially opened its doors to the Grinnell Community in mid- January. But WTF is the difference between the old and new Kum & Go? “In all honesty, it feels like you can’t go in there drunk,” said John Burrows ’10, Kum & Go aficionado. “It’s a lot brighter and has more cameras.” “It looks too fancy. I feel out of place,” said Kum & Go frequenter Dylan Naylor ’13. “I feel unwelcome. I’m not classy enough.” This description of “classy” stems from the freshly tiled linoleum floors that grace the entire inside, along with the significantly larger Kum & Go clothing selection, possible due to the increase in square feet of the actual space. “They offer a wider Kum & Go apparel section, which is nice,” Burrows said. “I’m saving up to buy the PJs.” In addition to clothing, the beverage selection has been vastly expanded, offering an array of coffee blends and flavors. The massive soda machine allows a customer not only to add flavored syrups, such as cherry and vanilla, to a carbonated beverage, but also added a mysterious dispenser marked “lean,” which one can only assume helps boost fat- burning while sipping your 64-oz mountain dew and chomping down on your low-fat frozen burritos. If frozen treats are your jam, in addition to burritos and burgers piled high in the freezers, the new Kum & Go also comes complete with a milkshake machine. Initial reviews of this machine, however, are shaky at best. “They don’t taste like milkshakes,” said Emily Evans ’13. “I strongly doubt there was any milk product.” Naylor agreed, “They really could be more milky and more shake-y. They were neither.” However, the new Kum & Go, despite its advancements in milkshake technology, lacks the extensive selection of hot dog accoutrements that the Kum N Go of yore boasted. Seriously, I just want some jalapeños. Great Pie just a stone’s throw from Grinnell 20 miles southwest of Grinnell and 30 minutes away by car, Sully is a town of a little under a thousand with a small downtown dwarfed by the massive grain elevators of the Sully Co-op Exchange that rise to the south. The Coffee Cup Café, however, has earned a reputation that outgrows this town’s small size and relative anonymity, in no small part because of its pie. Ed Levine ’73, a Grinnell alum and founder of SeriousEats.com, lists the Coffee Cup as one of 10 great places in the United States to eat pie in a recent article in USA Today (he discovered the Coffee Cup while attending Grinnell). When RAGBRAI (Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) passed through here in 2006, Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong was at the Coffee Cup eating a piece of pie, as the many photographs and newspaper clippings on the bulletin board at the restaurant can attest. The Coffee Cup’s local and national reputation is built on more than just pie though—as their menu says, they take “extreme pride” in all their “made-from-scratch cooking.” The café is ranked by the Des Moines Register as one of 100 places to eat before you die and named one of 500 best places to eat before its too late in the book Road Food. Tucked into a short row of businesses on one of Sully’s main streets, the Coffee Cup is a small place, a few booths and tables squeezed into the main dining room, well-lit by a wide front window. In the sort of industrial furnishing that you might be familiar with from The A&M Café, indicative of the building’s relatively recent past (the Coffee Cup was founded in 1970), the ceiling and the front of the bar are made of sheets of gray corrugated metal. There is further homage to history in the walls filled with framed black-and-white photos of turn-of-the century Sully. The café was full of the local, lunch-time crowd when we arrived. Vegetarians should take notice: this is a meat- centric restaurant. We discovered that even the seemingly meat-free Dutch Lettuce (one of 100 foods to eat before you die, according to the Des Moines Register) had bacon in its homemade dutch dressing. Other highlights on the menu include a Garbage Salad, ground beef and carrots over lettuce, and the 3 lb Cowboy Burger served on Texas toast for $7. In fact everything on the menu was $7 or less, and all the appetizers were $4 or less. After our main dishes, we got straight to the pie. We tried healthy slices of banana cream (purportedly their best kind), German chocolate and rhubarb, $2.25 each, hoping to get a good sampling of their pie variety. The banana cream was a slight disappointment for its lofty reputation, but the German chocolate, and especially the rhubarb, were fantastic. I think the Coffee Cup is worth visiting multiple times just to see what pie they’re offering. The cheap menu, great pie and comfortable, local feel make this an excellent place for an out-of-Grinnell excursion, for breakfast, lunch or dinner (make sure you check their hours and remember to bring cash). Plan on going there soon, if not before you graduate, than at least before its too late.