“Da Brick” on assignment with the rest of the Brickley clan and the His Highness, the King.

My Michigan childhood taught me to appreciate winter. Plenty of snow means building snow forts, rolling up huge snowballs, and making snowmen. But sledding is winter’s benevolent king.

And if sledding is king, the University’s top architect, David Hollenberg, is the evil tyrant. His plan for the postal lands includes acres of green space, pedestrian friendly streets, increased retail, and additional housing. It says nothing about a decent sledding hill.

Skiing is too expensive and too far away for Penn students to experience a legitimate, fast winter thrill. When winter snow hits, as it did on Wednesday, the responsibility for fast, fluffy, friendly fun falls on sledding.

Sure, some peasants attempt to sled on College Green, near the library. I may be sledding hill nobility, brought up on 30 foot drops, but that hill sucks. Adding jumps or turns to a sled path there is impossible.

Penn’s kingdom is vast and varied. With students hailing from all over the world, a duty &mdash ney, an obligation! &mdash exists to provide students with chances to experience Philadelphia’s semi-snowy winters. Imagine the poor student from Santa Monica or St. Croix or Siberia that has never before lived through a winter. Providing College Green as an example of sledding slaps the noble sport of sledding in the face.

The postal lands present the perfect opportunity for Penn to correct its biggest royal weakness. We claim to be a top tier academic institution, but we don’t have a respectable sledding hill. That’s worse than Princeton claiming to have a respectable basketball team.

It’s time for a revolution. Mr. Hollenberg, give me sledding or give me death!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.