I was putzing around on-line looking up the current French presidential candidates when I remembered I ought to check my campus e-mail. So I hop over to the ISU site and pull up the Portal which has pretty much everything on it: e-mail, midterm grades, campus announcements, class schedules, etc. The campus announcements are just headlines until you click on them, and I saw a headline I found interesting. “Change in Commencement Regalia.” Curious as to what this meant, I clicked on it and read that they’re changing the graduation caps and gowns from black to royal blue. I find this interesting because ISU’s particular shade of blue is officially listed as “Yale blue,” but it beats out our original colors of salmon pink and white any day.

So they’re changing the caps and gowns, eh? Interesting. I wonder if there was a particular reason or if people finally up and decided we should at least wear one of our school colors (albeit altered) because it’s not an offensive color (like salmon pink). At my high school, it was easy to wear the school colors at graduation: black and gold. What commencement goes without those? I guess I just find it interesting that we’re changing over from traditional colors to school colors. Random tidbit.

Another random tidbit which is wholly unrelated: Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday.