The BYU College of Humanities puts on random shows from time to time.  Films are shown in the Theater in room 250 SWKT.  If you are still taking your GEs, you may be required to watch some random cultural show that they put on.  If not, you may still be interested in the cultural sampling they have to offer.  They put on several shows each week, and you can find their complete schedule online here.

If nothing else, the shows will give you something fun to reminisce about with your friends.  My wife and I still talk about that one time we went to International Cineama and watched the first half of the Seventh Seal …

BYU Secrets reader Doug recently clued us in on a good money saving secret.  Apparently BYU gets a discount with the major parcel services, and if you know where to go you can get in on the action.  The place is NOT (surprisingly) the BYU mail office in the Wilkinson Center, but instead the Mail Services office on University Parkway.  Doug says that the discount is available to anyone, not just BYU students and Faculty.  We haven’t been able to verify this, but we personally know Doug and trust him as a source.

On Friday, I had to go make up a lecture for a seminar class.  They have recorded all of them, so all I needed to do was go to the LRC to check it out and watch.  While I was bored I started playing with the buttons on the DVD player, and I found something that everyone can benefit from.  If you hold down the “Next Chapter” ( >| ) button on the DVD player for a second or so, it speeds up to 1.4 times the normal speed!  The change was little enough that I hardly noticed the change in the speaker’s voice, (he was actually more interesting because he’d picked up the pace a little) but my hour long lecture was done in 40 minutes.  Could life get any sweeter?

We recently found a nice little secret just off campus. There is a game shop near BYU campus that offers some nice rewards for coming and competing in some of their competitions. Sanctuary Games, which is located between Sam’s Club and K-Mart, holds multiple competitions a month and offers prizes up to $20 gift certificates.

They have table-top game competitions, model painting competitions, and card game competitions. They also have a on-going competition where Dave and Josh (the owners) will compete against you and one of your friends playing Dawn of War on the networked computers that they have there. If you beat them, you will win 100 hours of free computer time.

They also boast that they have the largest playing area of any other game store in the valley.

The BYU physics department had a nuclear reactor used for research.  It supposedly wasn’t large, just enough to power a light bulb.  They took the waste from the reactor and stored it in a shed on the south side of campus.

Is this dangerous?

There isn’t much waste.  It is all stored in a single 50 gallon barrel.  It has been rumored that there is so little waste that if someone were to go down by the shed with a Geiger counter, no trace of the radiation would be detected.  So no worries, it won’t hurt you.  Just another BYU secret.

There are a lot of Campus Maps out there, and some are better than others. We found that the BYU web team has put a lot of work into map.byu.edu and we wanted to congratulate a job well done.  It’s an interactive google map with pictures and everything.  Go check it out!

We’ve all heard the rumors about mysterious caverns hidden around campus.  Are they there for protection in case of a nuclear holocaust?  Perhaps they are designed to allow campus personnel to travel great distances with little hassle?  Or maybe they have some other, more sinister purpose.  This seemed exactly the type of thing Y Secrets should be reporting on.

We found some good news and some bad news.  The good news is there really are tunnels.  The bad news is they are used mainly for pipes, wires, and other basic utilities- and students are not allowed down.

Si Min investigated the matter further, and this is what he found:

“First, BYU relies on steam and hot water for its entire heating system. Well over 100 buildings are heated from one central building (the Phys Plant) whose smoke stack is noticeable from quite a distance. These pipes run through tunnels which run under the sidewalks on campus. This explains why BYU is the only place in Utah County which has very few cracks in the sidewalks. The heat from the pipes keeps the sidewalks from freezing in the winter. This in turn attracts the skateboarders and rollerbladers who are forbidden from campus.

The real problem with getting down and exploring these tunnels is that they are still in use today and the campus police are serious about keeping people out. Rumours still persists of people who have figured out how to get down there, but no one knows anybody personally.”

So it would seem that our mystery is solved, but is this information too convenient to be the truth?  We will leave that for our readers to decide.

If you are like me, then you have a few places where you always go out to eat.  Do you want to break out of the routine?  Yelp.com can help.   Yelp is a location-based social review site.  Thousands of people with profiles have written reviews for tons of locations.  Results can be filtered by price, rating, category, or distance.  For example, a search for restaurants near Provo, UT returned 292 possibilities.

If you consider yourself a connoisseur of the local scene,  just make a profile and you will have an instant fan-base.  Yelp makes your reviews instant and accessible.

The other great thing about Yelp is its mobility.  The site is simple enough that it will work on most mobile browsers, and they have a great app for the iPhone.

So give yourself a break, and yelp for something new.

Reader Gianna gave us a tip in regards to going on the cheap when it comes to eating on BYU campus.

“For a quick and cheap lunch, the McKay building vending machines sell Cup of Soup/Instant Lunch for 80 cents. They charge $2.00 for the same thing in the JFSB!”

Grab a cup and enjoy a cheap lunch. The prices of nearly all foods on BYU campus have increased the past year. It’s nice to see that the vending machines are remaining fairly consistent.

BYU testing center

It’s midterm time at BYU. Most classes will send you to the dreaded dungeon known as the testing center to take your tests. Give yourself a break and try out the music room in the testing center. It’s generally not as crowded and is above the regular testing area. Solve complex math problems, figure out the English language, and be a bubble filling master while listening to Mozart.  Studies have shown that listening to classical music aids focus and concentration. It also muffles the sound generated from those really annoying people that sniffle, scratch, or do other crazy things in the testing center.

How do you get there?  Just walk out the door after you get your test, turn left, go to the end of the room, and go up the stairs. Anyone working there can help you find this little gem.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, tomorrow is election day. And you all know what that means:  Free stuff from businesses jumping on the patriotic bandwagon.  What sort of free stuff you ask?  Here’s some of what we’ve found:

I’m sure there are a bunch more, but these are the most advertised.  If you know of some more good ones, let us all know in the comments section.

Did you know there are at least 14 corn mazes/Haunted houses in the Valley?  There are also 16 public Festivals and over 30 concerts.

Sound Good to You?  You can find out the details at the What To Do In Provo Public Wiki. This site is awesome:  It is hosted by the Provo City Library, anyone can add activities, and it even includes a public google calendar for events.  It is separated by time of year, so you can easily find some fun things for whenever you’ll have free time.

Everyone’s got them, but no one knows what to do with those old camcorder tapes and 80’s cartoons. Why not convert them over to a digital format to enjoy for many years. The information/media lab in the HBLL (BYU library) on the 3rd floor provides this free service for students with some time on their hands and a stack of blank DVDs. You can even edit, remaster, those old treasured memories. The computers, equipment, and software are all free of charge for BYU full-time students and faculty. Appointments are necessary and can be found online via the HBLL website.

We received a tip about the secrets lurking around in the special collections in the BYU library on BYU Campus.

“On the first floor of the library is the special collections room. I’m not sure what is in this room that needs to be so heavily protected, but let me explain what happens when you go there.
You get to the room and you ask for a book. You pretty much have to know everything there is to know about the book you want. So you tell them the information

Then you fill out paper work … Paper work, for a book.

Then you give them your ID card.

Then have to go put your stuff in a locker. You aren’t allowed to bring phone’s, water bottles, or pens into the room.

Then you go back to the desk where you asked for your book, and you wait for them to get your book and press the button so you can enter the secret CIA vault.

Then they slide a window open, set your book down, and you can come and get it.

When you read, there must be absolute silence. Some of the books have to be set on foam pads to protect them.

And then when you return you book you set it at the window and wait for them to unlock the door from behind the desk again.

And in addition, you are not allowed to check out a single item from the special collections… even if its just a 200 page leisure book.”

Has anyone found anything *special* down there that’s worthy of the CIA-like treatment given to everyone?

As part of BYU’s College of Life Sciences, there are 15 live aquariums in the basement of the Widtsoe building.  They are built into the walls, and anyone who would like can wander down there and peek around.  Some of the aquariums are empty, (or the fish are very good at hiding) but with 15 tanks there are still quite a few interesting things to look at.  If you finding that you sit by the same certain someone every class period, but aren’t sure how to expand your relationship, this is the sort of place that is easy to invite them to go and check out with you.  It’s close by, unitimidating, too public for NCMO, but private enough to have a good conversation.  Plus there’s all sorts of crazy fish.