Underground tour of UCLA

Director of facilities management Leroy Sisneros leads a Daily Bruin reporter and photographers through the tunnel system hidden deep beneath the UCLA campus. Tours of the underground system are given monthly to deter student adventurers from navigating the dangerous tunnels on their own. The tour began around Murphy Hall, but there are multiple entrances on campus, all of which are illegal to access alone. (photos by asya tabdili, samia zaidi)

Poets of darkness

In a quiet residential neighborhood in Encino, there is a room where five young men convene to make deafening amounts of noise. This room is on the second story of Sean Sykes’ home, at the end of a wing, as if the architect knew that someday the rest of the family would need some peace and quiet in the rest of the house.

The air smells vaguely of dust and marijuana smoke, and a banner for a 1994 Thin Lizzy concert hangs on the wall. In this room, Sykes and the rest of the extreme metal band Statius gather for practices, joined sometimes by Sykes’ Irish wolfhound mix, Hayden.

The standouts: Henry Szeto

The whole week prior to the race had been raining and windy. On race morning, the UC Davis Sprint Triathlon was still on. When Henry Szeto arrived, he wrapped his gear in a garbage bag to keep it dry. Before he started, his two friends who had started the race in earlier waves had already quit. Another competitor had to be taken away in an ambulance for hypothermia.