A Moving Experience

Andrew Dobrowolskyj

Patricia Walsh takes a breather during move-in day on August 24. Walsh, who plans to study math at McGill, was one of 600 students who moved into the former Renaissance Hotel, purchased last spring by McGill and adapted as a residence. While students won't have valet parking or room service, there's a kitchen and entertainment lounge on each floor. Every room has its own bathroom and is wired for high-speed Internet access. Because the conversion from hotel to student housing happened under a very tight deadline, a few finishing touches still need to be added, but residents already give the new digs high marks for comfort and proximity to campus.

"Basically we're just spoiled rotten here," one student told the McGill Tribune. "It's awesome."

Captured Flag Comes Home

Owen Egan

In 1946, during a McGill Redmen football game against visiting rivals the Toronto Varsity Blues, an ambitious electrical engineering student from the University of Toronto named Walter Edward Emon shinnied up the flagpole at Percival Molson Stadium to capture the McGill flag. While Toronto lost the football game, they did successfully make off with the flag at the end of the day.

Now, some 57 years later, the hand-stitched flag has been returned to McGill by Mr. Emon's family. The return was made in time for the flag to be displayed during Principal Heather Munroe-Blum's recent pre-game Football Reception held in Tomlinson Hall in September. Senior Development Advisor and longtime friend of Athletics Tom Thompson, BSc(PE)'58, MEd'78, suggested that "perhaps the flag has made its return after all these years because our newly anointed Principal has also recently arrived from Toronto."

However it made its way home, the historic flag will be placed in the McGill Archives for safekeeping.

Titillating Television

Paul Drinkwater / NBC

Actor Colin Ferguson's new television series, Coupling, started making waves months before its debut this autumn on NBC. Critics have certainly taken note of how Coupling tackles sexual themes in a manner that is surprisingly frank for a show airing on a mainstream TV network in prime time. In its first episode, the new series about the complicated romantic entanglements of six urbanites featured jokes about oral sex and shaved pubic hair.

"It certainly is provocative," says Ferguson, BA'94, who likens the series to the first few seasons of Sex and the City. Coupling takes its name and subject matter from a popular BBC comedy in Britain. Major American networks have generally avoided material that is so overtly risquÈ, but Ferguson suspects that the widespread success of such adult-themed HBO shows as Sex and the City, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under can't help but influence competitors. "These shows are making HBO a lot of money and winning them a lot of awards."

On Coupling, Ferguson portrays Patrick, a smooth ladies man. "He isn't a cad," Ferguson insists. "He's a nice guy who just has no problem with having one-night stands. He is so charming and upfront about it, women don't mind - kind of a Colin Farrell-type guy. He is quite the counterpoint to the neuroses of the other male characters."

As a student, Ferguson appeared in McGill productions at Moyse Hall and performed with McGill Improv. He went on to co-found the award-winning Montreal improv troupe On The Spot, and took time off from his McGill studies to join the Detroit Second City ensemble.

Ferguson believes his improvisational experience toughened him up considerably. "If you can do improvised comedy in a bar full of aggressive, drunk people, doing [a standard play] is like a walk in the park."