Frequently Asked Questions
Every Friday during the term, 3-5 students and faculty spend all night Thursday cooking a lot of food. The food is placed on tables in the 8th floor playroom and a funny message with a start time is announced to the GSL mailing list. Fifteen minutes before the start time, senior graduate students begin serving themselves and everyone else follows.
This is the way it's supposed to work. If you eat at GSL, you add yourself to the GSL mailing list (/com/mailer/gsl), and you volunteer to cook on some Friday. If you are on the list and you don't volunteer, you will be assigned to cook on a random date with random other people. If you aren't on the list and eat anyway, then you are a bad person and should be ashamed of yourself.
Look at the signups for this year and pick a free spot with your friends, and send mail to the GSL Czar.
Look at the GSL Instructions for ideas to get started. Also check the GSL Cookbook
for ideas on what to cook.
Ordering from restaurants is strongly discouraged, for a number of reasons. It's usually more expensive than cooking yourself; it's a hassle to make the order tax-exempt; and, most importantly, it violates the Spirit of GSL, the wonderful glimpse of nirvana seen at 6am over the eighth gigantic, boiling pot of pasta.
If you are seriously time- or culinarily-impaired then catering food is still an option. Talk to the GSL Czar first, though.
This can happen for many reasons including travel, too much work, and automatic assignment to a bad week (shame on you for not signing up early enough!).
When this happens, don't punt on gsl. Remember, people are counting on you to bring them food, and when there is no food, I get in trouble.
First, do your best to avoid this situation by checking your schedule and signing up early!!! If your week is still a conflict, let me know ASAP, and try to find a group to switch with. Please do not tell me the morning you're supposed to provide food. Finally, although discouraged (see above), ordering food is an option in dire circumstances. Again, contact me fist.
From the GSL tables they go to the GSB fridge. Then they are dragged out for GSB, and later redistributed between the GSB and seventh floor fridges. They are scavenged for about a week until they go rancid and finally are disposed of by some unfortunate soul, usually me.
Mark A. Foltz (mfoltz@ai.mit.edu)
Last modified: Tue Nov 21 11:56:58 2000