Euchre is sophomore Maritza Mestre's all-time favorite card game, but until she arrived at Uni, she thought virtually no one outside of her own family still played it. So when as a subfreshman she saw Euchre offered as an Agora class, she was amazed. Now she's a Euchre regular, battling it out with others who share the secret language of Bauers, bumps, and loners. Come inside for a tour of the game that once ruled America's card tables.

Jack Snyder took Polyominoes and Soma Cubes when he was a subfreshman. He took it again this year as a sophomore, and he found it just as challenging. "After arranging and rearranging my pieces for what seemed to be the thousandth time, I gave up and took a break," he writes. "Another student, senior Julian Hartman, finally solved his puzzle. His feat was the first time that anyone at my table had solved it. What I’m trying to say here is, polyominoes were not a piece of cake."

[AUDIO included] Junior Kareem Sayegh won first place in the Poetry Out Loud regional competition held Saturday at the Champaign Public Library. Sayegh will compete Thursday in the state finals at the Springfield Center for the Arts. The state winner will advance to the national finals, to be held April 29 in Washington, D.C. Check inside to listen to Sayegh perform the two poems he recited at the regional contest, Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" and Aphra Behn's "Love Armed."

We've gone through the health classes, participated in the elementary school programs, seen the frightening commercials and billboards, watched the celebrities withering away, and paid six bucks to see the shocking films, and yet some of us still think doing drugs and getting drunk are good ways to spend the weekend. Lauren Piester is disgusted, and she has a few things to say.

Belegarth is medieval combat with foam swords. But don't try to tell those in the class that the weapons are made of foam. Chris Yoder tried taking this class for the first time, and he realized that success in the class takes more than physical skill: It takes a completely different mentality.