Who ya gonna call? Mythbusters!

Surely you must have stumbled across the strange TV show Mythbusters in which two pyromaniacs of indeterminate sexual orientation put famous urban legends to the test and blow them to smithereens if at all possible. I caught a glimpse of it on The Discovery Channel, before the documentary on teenage conjoined twins getting their drivers license(s) and after a documentary titled “I eat 33,000 calories a day” starring people so fat that they make Louie Anderson look like Calista Flockhart (and make Calista Flockhart look like Amy Gutmann — jk Dr. G I <3 u lolz!).

Today I shall inaugurate my own Mythbusters: Penn Edition, and, though I lack the budget, mincing mannerisms, and unsettling handlebar mustaches of the original Mythbusters, I am confident I will get Penn on TLC (or at least the Animal Planet channel).

Today’s myth — Wharton students are good at math — gets put to the test in Wednesday’s DP article reporting on controversy surrounding the selection of James Baker as commencement speaker. A Wharton senior is quoted at saying “this school is liberal,” and by picking a Republican, “immediately, you are pissing off half the student body.”

Let’s back up the tape and see how this puts to rest the notion that Whartonites are quantitative demigods:

• If “half the student body” is pissed off, then you still have the other 50 percent which is not pissed off (and either way is 49 percent more non-pissed off people than Jodie Foster)




• Wait, the student body is only half liberal?




• “My initial reaction was…who is James Baker?” Okay this has nothing to do with math, but it’s still sad.

Goldman Sachs is surely tripping over itself to get to this guy.

James Baker’s greatest sin is not that he may have been insensitive to our only ally in the Middle East. I’d consider Kofi Annan’s fecklessness, incompetence, and corruption to be more worthy of protest. No, Baker’s unforgivable crime against humanity is that he went to Princeton (though that would go a long way towards explaining his love affair with Jews). I’d protest that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 4:21 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.