Your daily dose of news, notes and links from around Kansas University.

• A great Heard on the Hill tipster sent me this neat story from the Washington Post.

It features Joseph Fonseca, a KU graduate from Lawrence, who moved to Charlotte shortly after graduation and landed a job as a barista and at a local bookstore.

Since then, he’s moved around to six different cities and will be moving to Seattle soon, his seventh city in seven years.

He’ll have no work lined up there, only a few contacts in his phone and a roommate he’s only talked to on email and Facebook.

“This is where you panic,” he wrote in the article. “This is where I get started.”

He wants to be a novelist and plans to live in 10 cities in 10 years as a hope to gain more insight into the human condition.

He offers advice on how to live on a very tight budget, and all in all was an interesting read — though I don’t know if his lifestyle is for everyone.

• As I was reminded by a Tweet from the all-knowing KU Info, KU hasn’t crowned a homecoming king or queen in 42 years.

According to this article from kuhistory.com, Janet Merrick was the last person to be awarded as homecoming queen in 1969, before it was decided that selecting one woman to represent all others “was inappropriate in a multicultural environment.”

Today, we have the Ex.C.E.L. award winners, a male and a female who are awarded the

Emily Ruth Lamb, a senior from Lawrence, and Hunter Michael Hess, a senior from McPherson, won the award on Saturday.

It provides a $500 scholarship to the students.

The winners are selected based on leadership, effective communication skills, involvement in the KU and Lawrence community, academic scholarship and ability to work with a variety of students and organizations.

Lamb is the director of the Center for Community Outreach and is outreach co-chair for The Big Event (a day when students go out and volunteer to help community members with projects they need done as a thank-you to the Lawrence community)

Hess is president of the Student Alumni Leadership Board and serves as secretary for the Rock Chalk Revue Advisory Board.

In addition to the $500, I’ll also give some hearty congratulations and some Heard on the Hill mad props to the winners. Those mad props are worth their weight in gold.

• James Gunn, a professor emeritus of English and KU’s resident science fiction guru, had some musings at the New York Times’ “Room for Debate” recently on how science fiction serves as a predictor for the future.

They’ve pegged a few things before they happened — rocket ships, atomic bombs and effective submarines — but we’re still looking for personal jetpacks and flying cars.

Here’s the whole bit.

• I’m off today, so no Heard on the Hill tomorrow. Still, there’s no reason that you can’t keep sending in your tips to ahyland@ljworld.com.