The Great Misdirect
Between the Buried and Me
Victory Records

4/5 stars

I am by no means a metalhead. I’ll listen to the odd song a friend shows me, but it’s a rarity to find me headbanging alone. For this reason I review Between the Buried and Me’s new record with a grain of salt.

Mot Dit editors would like you to judge their book by its cover.

For the fourth issue of Carleton’s Francophone literary magazine, Morgan Faulkner, one of the founding editors, and her team broke with their tradition of putting (painted art?) on the cover and opted instead for a photograph of a woman painted with bright colours to catch the eye of potential readers.

“I think this is our best issue yet,” she said.

Like a Christian may wear a cross, or a Jew may wear a Star of David, Nadia Salois wears a symbol of her faith.

Whether it’s a ring on her finger, or a pendant around her neck, Salois always displays the Raëlian symbol – a swastika within two triangles. Although the swastika has a negative connotation based on its use by the Nazis, the symbol is viewed by Raëlians as it is viewed in Buddhism or Hinduism: a symbol of good luck, well-being, infinity in time, or eternity.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer: most of us have heard these words before, but when it comes to the GLBTQ community, things become more complicated than these five simple labels.

For example, the term bisexual assumes there are only two genders. However, Renée Yoxon, a fifth-year physics student at Carleton, said it comes down to more than just a binary between the two sexes. Instead, she said she likes to use the word “pansexual” because it doesn’t put limits on how people identify themselves.

1) Khnumhotep/Niankhkhnum – ancient Egypt, around 2400 BC