Something odd has swept over the McMaster team this year. The guys can't stop playing mario kart, the girls can't stop posting things about cats, and every verbal or text sentence is ended with a #hashtag. The McMaster Cross Country team has gone geek. It's gotten to the point where a night out is everyone meeting up to play Settlers of Catan. Where every workout we taunt each other by saying "risk, risk, risk". Even now that we are in exams, we study only for breaks from reddit. That on the living room wall of one of the team houses is a giant map of Middle Earth. You know, in case we needed to navigate between Helm's Deep and Hobbiton.
Speaking of Lord of the Rings and related Tolkien fantasy, seemingly endless debates sprout up once a week about one of the many characters. The opening of the Hobbit is looked forward to far more than Christmas as some even go so far as to say that the Mayans were counting down to its opening. Even for Halloween, Lord of the Rings was the theme:
Moral of the story is simple. If you are a friend or family of someone on the team looking for a gift idea, you probably want to head over to something like thinkgeek.com instead of buying another v-neck sweater. Above all else, stay 1337 my friends, and may the force be with you. #nerds