The blond guy in the white shirt back there is most likely Spam. I think.
There was this guy at the Monty Python activity 95.1. Everyone called him "Toilet" for no reason discernable to me except that his given name was John.
One day he wore a navy blue shirt that said SPAM in big yellow letters. People called him Spam after that.
There was a talent show on the second weekend. One of the guys from Argh! was crew on it. There were these two guys who decided that they could sing "I Swear." They couldn't. Dave, backstage, was standing next to a rope and a knife marked "fire curtain." He really really wanted to cut the rope and bring the fire curtain crashing down to end the agony that was their singing.
He didn't because that would have wrecked the rest of the talent show, and Spam had a monologue. Spam talked about CTY, his nickname (his actual name was John, but he preferred Spam to "Toilet"), and all sorts of the sort of things that were really funny and thoughtful then and would still be really funny and thoughtful if only you could remember them. I was having a bad memory day.
To illustrate something, perhaps censorship, Spam had a bleeper-box that he used to bleep out a few things. It bleeped very nicely. An act following his featured a flautist. She was pretty good, and her act would have been quite relaxing except for Spam's bleeper box, which went off a couple times and got stuck on.
Back when Hamilton College was first a CTY site in 1994, there were only Ten Commandments. I know. I was there. I have the printout somewhere if you'd care to see it? But there were the Ten Commandments. And then, in 1995, there was Spam.
If you've been to Hamilton, you remember the architecture. Whoever built the more modern buildings was a little heavy on the concrete. We have big thick chunky dorms with lots of concrete, with paint in strong primary colors here and there to make it look less like government and more like school. We have concrete waffle ceilings just waiting for some enterprising Cult of Twisted Yeeth-er to fill them up with butter, honey, maple syrup, or raspberry jam. We have wide windowledges that you could walk, stroll, stand, sit, or have a picnic on.
Now, back then in the days of ten commandments, it was not illegal to pull the screen out of the window in the main lounge and toss a paper airplane down to your buddy on the lawn, as long as the paper in the airplane didn't contain drugs or academic dishonesty. It was okay for someone on the lawn in front of the Babbitt entrance to toss a Frisbee and have it sail through the lounge window that someone had left open and have the Frisbee bonk an RA in the shoulder. And it was even okay to go take a stroll on the window ledge, although a picky RA might construe that to be a violation of commandment #10. It wasn't. You were in no danger unless the code specialist on the lawn below you started flashing a mirror at the sun to signal that this was the moment that the secret water balloon commandos were to strike, giving you an epileptic seizure.
Spam decided to go for a stroll on the window ledge one day. According to the gossip I heard in McEwen* some time after that, Spam was not the most popular guy among his hallmates. It seems that whether by error or deliberate sabotage, someone closed the window while Spam was still outside. He was stuck there until the RA came and rescued him, which had to be hard on the public image.
*Hey, my information's probably better than what you heard unless you talked to Spam himself!
I know that there are probably books and books worth of the other Notable Deeds of Spam, but I didn't hang out with him, though it probably would have been lots and lots of fun. The grapevine tells me that he was an RA for CLN.00. Keep an eye out for this guy; it's never boring near him!
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