Along with a twitter for complaining about roommates, Voice Features Editor Connor Jones should probably have a twitter for complaining about cold weather and The Corp.

Georgetown Hot Mess‘s analysis of missing socks is morbid, yet convincing. Perhaps the ghosts of the cremated socks are the ones looming in the laundry room, taking out people’s laundry to save their fellow sockmates from Death By Dryer.

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Last night, around 8:30 p.m., the entrance and main lobby of Yates Field House flooded due to the severe thunderstorms. After the storm subsided, a Voice staffer on site reported that students at the gym and members of the football team gathered to clean up the flood with buckets.

Yates remains open this morning and did not close last night because the flooding only spread to the entrance, main lobby, and second floor. The flood did not reach the bottom floor and students were able to access the facilities.

“A group of guys on the football team were finishing up workouts and about to leave but when we got upstairs the water outside Yates was almost up to our calves and it was beginning to flood inside,” Fino Caliguire (COL ’13), offensive lineman for the Georgetown football team, said this morning to Vox. ”We saw that the there were extra buckets and mops so we helped dump water off the balcony and push the water outside for about an hour until there was nothing left for us to do.”

A Yates employee reported today that most other employees were out of the office because of the flooding. He also stated that some computers were not working yet. Another employee at the front desk said that there is no more flood water and the carpets just need to be dried. Vox could not yet reach any employees who were on site during the flood last night.

According to The Weather Channel, the thunderstorm began at 8 p.m. and continued until 9 p.m., with light rain following through the rest of the night. The forecast for the rest of the week predicts a relatively thunderstorm-free week till Friday with scattered storms during the weekend.

Photo and additional reporting by Kevin Joseph

In case you haven’t seen (or bothered to read) the giant, bee-adorned poster in Red Square, today, September 26, marks the first day of Georgetown’s first annual BeWell Week, sponsored by Health Education Services and everyone’s second-favorite Georgetown publication, the Stall Seat Journal. With help from Yates Field House, The Corp, and a bevy of other campus groups, the idea behind BeWell week is, according to its website, to “[illustrate] that health and wellness go beyond physical health and also encompass emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and social health, as well.”

And aside from having the delightful endorsement of Jack the Bulldog in a bee costume (pictured above), BeWell Week also features a pretty expansive schedule of activities to encourage health among Hoyas. These include a whole bunch of yoga/meditation classes, Zumba on Copley Lawn for today’s Be Energized Monday, as well as less physical, more informational events, like Be Informed Wednesday’s GERMS ambulance tours and R. U. Ready 2011.

As part of their promotion of the healthy, BeWell Week is sponsoring a variety of health food-related events, including an energizing Leo’s lunch and a Whole Foods cooking class at Yates. Confusingly enough, though, they’re also sponsoring Be Happy Friday’s GUGS cookout on Copley Lawn. Sure, they’re giving out a limited number of healthier turkey burgers, but we find it hard to imagine anyone even slightly concerned with health care going anywhere near one of those potato-sized hunks of meat.

Update (Tuesday, 3:00 p.m.): The Office of Communication issued an update on the employee’s condition. “He sustained serious but not life threatening, injuries, is in stable condition and conscious. He has family with him at the hospital.”

Update (2:05 p.m.): The Office of Communication confirmed that the victim was a University employee. He was performing maintenance and repairs on the field on top of Yates when he fell down the shaft pictured below.

Update (1:42 p.m.): University officials, including representatives of public safety and facilities management, met on Kehoe Field next to the site of the accident (see vent in the bottom right corner of the first image) around 1:00 p.m. There is still no word of a statement from the University.

Photos by John Flanagan

At around 10:00 a.m. this morning, DC Fire and EMS reported that a man – presumed to be a University employee – fell 15 feet into a vent shaft at Yates Field House. Peter Piringer, director of public information at DC Fire and EMS, told Vox that GERMS and DC Fire worked together to extract the man and load him onto a U.S. Park Police helicopter to transport him to the hospital. He could not confirm whether the victim had been taken to George Washington Hospital or Washington Hospital Center, both of which have level I trauma centers. The victim has been taken to Washington Hospital Center, which has a level I trauma center

The University was not available for comment at the time of writing.

Today, at 5:41 p.m., Todd Olson, Vice President of Student Affairs sent a campus-wide email, here below, saying that 28-year old doctoral student Evan North had died in Yates Field House last night.

In an email from Colin Brody (COL ’11), president of GERMS, “GERMS did respond to a medical emergency at Yates Field House this afternoon. Unfortunately, due to HIPAA laws, I cannot make a statement beyond that.”

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First Lady Michelle Obama will film an anti-obesity public service announcement in Yates Field House tomorrow.

5:00 p.m. update: Katie McCormick Lelyveld (COL ’01), Obama’s press secretary, released the following statement to the Voice:

Georgetown is providing a venue to the United States Tennis Association for tapings that include First Lady Michelle Obama and the Let’s Move! initiative, along with Andre Agassi and Stefi Graf.  The First Lady will only be there for a short portion of the day.  More details will be released at the end of the month.

Lelyveld noted that the additional recording on campus is related to USTA filming, not the First Lady’s “Let’s Move!” initiative.

Original post: “This filming is for a health and wellness public service piece,” Judy Harvey, assistant to Yates Field House Director Jim Gilroy, wrote in an email.

Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, which launched in 2010, aims to end childhood obesity.

According to whispers around campus, she’ll be joined by the U.S. Tennis Association’s Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf. USTA will film another part of the PSA on the first floor of Healy Hall today.

The University’s Office of Communications, which approves all on-campus filming requests, directed our questions about the filming to the First Lady’s Press Office. When we contacted the White House, we got this vague non-denial:

“We’re not allowed to release any information.”

Yesterday, an email sent to members of the Yates Field House announced the “limited access … due to commercial filming.” The filming schedule will affect access to the tennis and basketball courts, track, stretching area, varsity weight room, ergometer area, and the cardio/general weight area –  in other words, almost the entire gym.

So, don’t be surprised if you spot Secret Service around Yates tomorrow. But by now, you should probably be used to it.

Additional reporting by Geoffrey Bible.

Photo: Max Blodgett

Two unidentified men allegedly robbed a Yates employee early this morning, assaulting him and locking him in a closet after entering the building through unknown means, according to a Department of Public Safety PSA. From the PSA:

On Monday, November 30, 2009 at approximately 2:00 a.m, a contract employee at Yates Field House reported to DPS that at approximately 1:46 a.m., two unidentified males entered the field house through an unknown means, assaulted him, took his car keys and cell phone, forced him into a closet, and locked him inside. DPS notified MPD who responded to the scene. The investigation determined that in addition to the theft of the keys and cell phone of the complainant, two safes and petty cash were stolen.

The PSA said that the employee was treated for minor injuries by GERMS, taken to the Georgetown Hospital, and released. There was also damage to property and office equipment in Yates.

The PSA describes the suspects as “[t]wo unknown black males wearing ski masks” and said that DPS is cooperating with MPD’s continuing investigation.

Nathan Srinivas found out what Georgetown’s being a “global university” really means.

Kelsey Ryan was not impressed by the programming at Yates.

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The University is formulating its 2010 Campus Plan, which, once it passes ANC and D.C. Zoning Commission muster, will dictate how the University can expand over the next decade. Previous Campus Plans excluded neighborhood input in their planning stages, much to the neighbors’ dismay. So this summer, University officials will hold a series of meetings to gather community input. For those of you who aren’t here, Vox will be attending all meetings and recapping them here on the blog. Keep in mind that the proposals under discussion are only tentative. At the same time, they do comprise, as University architect Alan Brangman told Vox, Georgetown University’s “wishlist.”

This Saturday, some Georgetown administrators, including Vice President of Student Affairs Todd Olson, Vice President for External Relations Linda Greenan, and University Architect Alan Brangman, were lucky enough to spend nearly five hours in the cafeteria of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts’ cafeteria presenting the skeleton of Georgetown’s 10 Year Campus Plan to a group of about twenty neighborhood residents and their Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners. It was the second of such meetings, the first having taken place in November, that will occur before the University must present a plan for review near the end of the calendar year.

Aside from a handful of miscellaneous issues, the bulk of the meeting was spent on often heated discussions about student housing and the effect the University’s plan would have on traffic and human congestion (two posts, one about the University’s housing proposals and one about transportation, including GUTS buses, will follow this week).

For their part, the neighbors were present to insist that the Campus Plan address the perennial issues that they feel plague the neighborhood, such as trash and the number of students living off campus. And the ANC commissioners who were present, Bill Skelsey, Bill Starrels, and Ron Lewis were clearly advocates of all the neighbors’ proposals (Georgetown University’s student ANC commissioner, Aaron Golds, attended a wedding yesterday but wrote in an email that he plans to attend subsequent meetings).

Among these is the demand that the University cap its undergraduate enrollment at its present maximum number, 6,016. University administrators plan to do so, they said, largely because they anticipate the expansion of their graduate programs instead.

The incomplete state of the University’s 10 Year Plan—it is currently more a collection of suggestions than an actionable plan and lacks some of the studies that will be critical to it finalization—visibly upset the neighbors in attendance.  They were dismayed, for example, to hear that the University would like to build a “whole new hospital facility more internal to the campus” but could not specify the location or coordinate its affect with other aspects of the plan, like traffic, until negotiations with MedStar, the company that owns the existing hospital buildings, had concluded (The preferred location for the new hospital is on what is currently the hospital parking lot).

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They say D.C. is the Hollywood for ugly people, so if you’re sick of gazing at the pulchritude in US Weekly while you work out at Yates, try looking around the gym instead for some political heavyweights.

Adrian Fenty, for instance, has been a member of Yates for quite some time. Though his attendance has dropped off since the beginning of his mayoral campaign, he still occasionally shows up for an early morning swim, accompanied by an imposing-looking but friendly security detail. His crawl isn’t quite as smooth as his political maneuvering, unfortunately.
If the objects of your star-gazing lie along the other end of the political spectrum, then you might want to drop by the natatorium when the Hoyas have a home swim meet. Justice Samuel Alito often comes to cheer on his daughter Laura, a freshman standout butterflyer.

Keep looking–I’m sure there are more politicos sweating it out at Yates. Who knows, maybe you’ll see our own Madeline Albright bouncing along girlishly on the elliptical next to you, or perhaps spot George Tenet showing off one of his famous slam-dunks in a game of pick-up basketball.

Posted by Noreen Malone, Contributing Editor