KU links: The end of the line for the Crunchy Chicken Cheddar Wrap; update from Topeka high-schooler who received KU scholarship offer
Your weekly set of KU tidbits from around the Internet, which I’m afraid must begin on a sad note:
• The chicken tenders were perfectly aligned. The ranch dressing was well-distributed. The cheddar cheese was ready with its sharp kick. And the underrated but dependable tortilla was always there, holding it all together. It felt like destiny. But sometimes, in the cutthroat world of the Cooking Channel Best College Eats tournament, you run into something that looks like a shovel filled with spaghetti and chili, and you lose. You know you gave it your all, but it hurts just the same.
In the bracket of the best college food, or at least in this particular one that the Cooking Channel put together this spring, 31 food items have to go home unhappy. They’re left to hold out hope for next year, or whenever someone else has the idea to put together an online bracket for college-campus food. This is the fate of the Crunchy Chicken Cheddar Wrap.
But, wrap fans, consider: Just because it lost to that chili-spaghetti thing from Marquette in the Elite 8, by a count of 4,192 votes to 3,309, that doesn’t mean that its whole year was a failure. We’ll always have our memories of its glorious tournament run. Let’s savor them.
• As the Journal-World’s Sara Shepherd notes here, the KU Wind Ensemble earned itself a some glowing words in reviews by The New York Times and a New York music website after its performance at Carnegie Hall last week. It will make an encore performance for free at the Lied Center on Tuesday.
• We’ve got an update on our old friend Leobardo Espinoza Jr., the Topeka high-schooler blogging about his college choice for The New York Times who received a scholarship offer from KU. He writes today about the experience of receiving a rejection from Washington University in St. Louis. “I’m one step closer to KU,” he told his friends, and he says he considers KU “a fantastic school.” He’s still waiting to hear from Brown, Stanford and Yale — or at least he was when the post was written — so he’s not sure where he’s going yet.
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cited the research of William Elliott, an assistant professor of social welfare at KU, on the subject of college savings accounts for children. We reported earlier this year on the research he and others at the School of Social Welfare have done on the subject.
• This story on Yahoo! News reports that Steven Hawley, a KU professor of astronomy and astrophysics and a former astronaut, is helping the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson conserve and display a NASA rocket engine retrieved from the ocean floor by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com.
Perhaps you’re now adrift, having assumed you’d be spending all of your time this week clicking to vote for the Crunchy Chicken Cheddar Wrap. But don’t worry; you can expend that energy sending KU news tips to merickson@ljworld.com instead.