Important PSA: This Sunday’s Yale Concert Band performance is B.Y.O.B.

I KNOW, a Bring Your Own Bells event might intimidate you a little. You might even be nervous, wondering, “which of my many bells should I bring?!” Don’t worry, any of the bells you have lying around will work. Cowbells, sleigh bells, jingle bells, doorbells, bluebells, Southern Belles, bells of fury, Bell(s)atrix Lestrange, dumbbells, Liberty Bells—all solid options.

You should have your various bells close at hand when Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture fires up. It’s at this piece’s grand, crescendoing finale that audience members are invited to take up their bells and ring for all they’re worth, fleetingly becoming part of the Yale Concert Band.

This Sunday at 2 PM, I’ll be in Woolsey Hall with my bells. If you’d like to join me (you do), don’t forget to B.Y.O.B. too. I won’t be sharing.

 Like any amateur myrmecologist worth her formicarium, I often say to myself, Sure, ants are majestic, but what are they keeping from me?? Finally, the truth comes out.

“The Hidden Life of Ants,” an exhibit featured at the Peabody until January 4^th, promises to bare these insects’ formerly undisclosed secrets. Paternity tests for the queen’s thousands of larvae, nectar addictions, the secret to how Diane managed to trim her thorax in only ten days, tax evasion—all of the dirty laundry that A Bug’s Life whitewashed in 1998 is at last being aired out.

Don’t miss this chance to be the entomological gossip of your friend group. In the words of the Peabody, “[Their] titanic dinosaurs and tiny ants await you!”

To enjoy St. Vincent, you have to restrain yourself from thinking too hard about the plot. An old grouch and a precocious kid become neighbors and the most unlikely friends—roll fraternal montage. Even the most casually attentive viewer could create a rough storyboard of the film after most of the main characters have been introduced, and probably with a good deal of accuracy. But they won’t want to: it would be like turning on a GPS to navigate a familiar drive home from work. In spite of the film’s predictable storyline, what saves St. Vincent is ultimately its cast.

Bill Murray is reliably excellent as Vincent. His role as a curmudgeonly drunk serving as a crude paternal figure to a young lad—waif-thin Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher)—is nothing new, but Murray’s performance rises above tired portrayals of the ne’er-do-well scrooge. Thanks to Murray’s endearing charm, this foul-mouthed gambler can believably lie back in a lawn chair and sing Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm” entirely off-key while watering a patch of dirt with a hose. This movie reminded me why I watch The Life Aquatic and Ghostbusters at least annually: Bill Murray. As for the other actors, Lieberher makes a charismatic Oliver, and Melissa McCarthy finds subtlety and wit in her role as Oliver’s mom, Maggie, which almost makes us forget Tammy. Almost.

St. Vincent will make you laugh throughout, largely thanks to these three actors. You might even embrace Naomi Watts’s role as a pregnant, amicable Russian stripper (yes, regrettably very real), or Terrence Howard, of all people, showing up as Vincent’s bookie. Writer and director Theodore Melfi is transparent in his pursuit to extract laughs and plant a lump in your throat, but between Murray’s facial expressions and Lieberher’s dance moves, you’ll probably end up chuckling and sniffling in spite of yourself.

If your family’s letting you fly solo this weekend, don’t be glum! Sans parents, you can still have the magical Weekend that you’ve always dreamed of by following a few simple suggestions:

First and foremost, adopt a parent. It could be your suitemate’s mom, or maybe his or her weird uncle who happened to come along. This will probably depend on said suitemate’s weighted value of each family member. Plan accordingly, that is, have a backup plan. Look to unexpected sources—the wait staff at your favorite noodle restaurant, Yale PD, even passing schoolchildren—and you’re sure to find someone who’ll gamely pretend to be disappointed in your midterm results.

Pay for nothing. If you’re signing a receipt, you’re doing Parents Weekend wrong. Get your replacement ‘rents to foot the bill when you go out to eat and you’ll have the most authentic PW experience. You’re also welcome to make scenes at establishments and refuse remuneration for any services.

Take awkward family photos. Find a “very Yale” background. Disrupt the paths of passersby with your photo shoot. Make sure that someone’s blinking. Nailed it.

Finally, be very embarrassed. All weekend. Maybe it’s your fake parents, maybe it’s your new friends. Either way, find a reason to use #thatawkwardmoment and you can give yourself a pat on the back. It’s just like they’re really here!

But if none of the above works for you, just spend this weekend as you would any other. The only difference being that significantly more people will be wielding cameras on Old Campus.

Talking to terrariums? Yelling at passing taxis? Passive aggressively messaging SmarterChild, your old AIM robot?

This title of this event is ambiguous enough for your hipster friends to be okay with going to an organized function, but intriguing enough to excite even the most casual fans of mystery! All that is known for sure: conversations with things shall be had.

Whatever “Conversing With Things” may be, it’s happening at the Whitney Humanities Center every Monday and Wednesday until December 10. Put down your mason jar, don your most ironic t-shirt, and ride your fixed-gear bike over there! I suspect you’ll blend right in with the other patrons. Whatever is conversing with whomever, it’s guaranteed to be obscure.

Bonus Point: pose the question, “What even is a ‘thing’, anyway?” and run from the room.

DamNation’s production team was likely spot on when guessing who would go to a screen- ing of their movie: outdoorsmen, the already environmentally conscious, and a generation of fledgling activists. Environmental documentarians Ben Knight and Travis Rummel have created a movie that affirms many of this audience’s biases. But regardless, it’s undeniable that DamNation calls for careful reflection on the environmental and economic implications of America’s dams.

At first glance, DamNation looks like a conventional environmental documentary. This Patagonia-produced film’s footage often feels like it could have been pulled from one of the outdoor retailer’s commercials, with stunning images of verdant landscapes and herculean dams that would blow anyone away. But DamNation is not filled with the kind of fire and brimstone rhetoric that have become little more than white noise in our country. Instead, viewers are exposed to the many implications of dams in a manner that feels grounded in the imperative to take feasible actions while we still can. Interviews with concerned ecologists and harrowing scenes of dam-flooded valleys, though disconcerting, are punctuated by the explosive and oddly cathartic footage of dams being destroyed across the country, flares of salmon-saving, rubble-filled hope.

The characters—a heartbreaking elder of the Elwha Tribe, a dam graffiti artist with an impish grin, and a hydropower employee who fears the loss of his job, among others—add a distinctly human element to a topic that could so easily be lost in numbers. The arguable star of the documentary has to be 94-year-old Katie Lee, an adorable, wonderfully lewd woman that everyone who sees this movie inexorably considers adopting. Her entertaining recollections of her expeditions in Glen Canyon offer an especially poignant window into pre-dam times. The energy that pulses throughout DamNationimpels viewers not only to reflect on this lost world, but to strive to resurrect it.