End of Semester, December 23rd.

Winter Break, December 23rd through December 29th.

Join us this Saturday morning for a screening of Pee-Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special. This hour long TV special incorporates everything fun, bizarre, and unique about Pee-Wee Herman's 1980's children's telelvision program. Featuring the regular Playhouse puppets, claymation, word-of-the-day, and Gary Panter's colorful set design, as well as a dozen timelessly dated celebrity cameos. Guest stars include: Frankie Avalon, Whoopi Goldberg, Joan Rivers, Charo, the Del Rubio Triplets, Annette Funicello, Magic Johnson, Dinah Shore, Grace Jones, Oprah Winfrey, k.d. lang, Little Richard, Santa Claus, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Originally broadcast on December 21, 1988. Nominated for 3 Primetime Emmys.

University of Chicago's Dan Wyche will be leading us in an overview of ritual sacrifice; its components and meanings, as well an invocation of the concept of sacrifice in contemporary contexts.

Discussion and sacrifice to follow.

University of Pennsylvania's Lex Kravitz will be giving a neuroscience lecture on "Information Processing in Reward Circuitry." Begins at 8:30PM. Dress is casual and warm.

From blow-up space stations to radical politics, inflatable habitats and vehicles on land, sea, and air are part of the dream and promise of the Space Age. In this talk Mathew Lippincott will sketch the recent past and exciting present of do-it-yourself inflatable technology. Experience temporary structures, low-cost flight, inexpensive construction techniques, and the advances in common materials that are opening aerospace up to artists.

8pm.

Join us for LESSONS IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE with Herr Professor Nathan Holt this Monday evening at 7:00pm. This week, we will be watching the excellent film "Good-bye Lenin!" followed by post-film discussion in German. Film is in German with English subtitles. German-Teenager beverages will be served: Radler (lemonade-beer), Colawein (coke and wine) and Diesel (coke and beer). As always, it doesn't matter whether you speak German or not, only the desire to learn is required!

Film begins promptly at 7:08pm. German word of the day: "Puenktlichkeit", meaning "punctuality".

Thomas Storck will discuss the lexical and common modern uses of nature and natural, exploring how the philosophy and forms of human construction, primarily landscape architecture, places humans and human products within or beyond these.

Stephanie Chiorean, Philadelphia Watershed Planner and Philadelphia Orchards Project board director, will further explore the subject beginning with:Does "nature" still exist?Are humans "natural" and therefore, is all we create nature?Open discussion will follow…. How does architecture address this issue? Technology? Emulation? Instinctively?

Join us on Monday evening for the first revival of LESSONS IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. As always, it doesn't matter if you're a seasoned speaker of if you don't know a single word. Herr Professor Nathan Holt teaches. GERMAN FOR BEGINNERS: 7pm GERMAN CONVERSATION: 8pm (Beginners are encouraged to stay for conversation) Please remember that punctuality is an important German virtue, as are guilt-ridden reminders from teachers to be punctual.

A solo exhibition of the work of painter Shawn Thornton, with performances by Thornton and Hunter Stabler