Common $ense

Despite our self-proclaimed Ivy-League pedigree, Penn students are no less susceptible to get caught up in incredibly silly, yet popular trends.

This past summer, the influx of Facebook albums entitled “Party Like a Rockstar” almost made me move to Amish country and give up electricity. Getting buzzed at a bad frat party and heading back to the Quad at 2 a.m. is by no means rockstar behavior.
If I hear one more person even utter the phrase “Superman that…,” I make no promises as to what I will do. (Warning: I am surgical with the sharp edge of my Penncard).

But the granddaddy of all unnecessarily popular movements has been the “Green Movement.” This is a timely issue to revisit with oil prices cracking $80 a barrel.

According to anonymous sources (aka, the Facebook Newsfeed), many Penn students are members of groups entitled “Help Make Gas Prices Go Down (This could really work),” and other similar offshoots. The groups’ creators give specific instructions for buying strategies on how to “stick it to the man” and lower prices at the pump.

Offline, Kings Court/English College House’s new “environmentally friendly” roof recently graced the cover of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Despite these well-intentioned efforts, I can assure you that the price of gas is going higher and there is nothing you and I (or the cute penguins from Happy Feet) can do about it.

Now before you label me a cold-hearted tree killer, I urge people to think with their pocketbooks, and not so much with their hearts. While I am naturally inclined to be skeptical of any cause with such strong celebrity backing, people need to remember exactly what moves the price of oil in the first place.

Supply and demand.

As much as Penn students tout themselves as being internationally minded, the belief that our individual behavior could single-handedly lower prices is an extremely America-centric way of thinking. Global demand, as well as buying from the major investment firms, has an enormous impact on where prices are heading. It will take years for energy companies to increase their collection capacity, increase supply, and thus ease prices.

So with the year barely underway, let me save some environmentally-conscious undergraduate precious time. Instead of complaining about high energy prices, buy some stock in energy companies such as Apache Corp. (Ticker: APA) or Exxon Mobil (Ticker: XOM).

If you still aren’t convinced, turn off CNN and turn on CNBC. Sadly the march towards $85 a barrel will not soon be derailed by celebrity concerts, hybrid cars, or dancing penguins.
Common $ense appears every Tuesday and Thursday.

Beckstreet’s Beck (Alright!)

In simpler times…

O.J. Simpson was arrested for armed robbery this past Sunday. To sum up the events, some people stole some of O.J.’s memorabilia so he and his buddies got together and stole it back. It seems the major point of contention is whether people in O.J.’s posse (I feel like this constitutes a posse) carried guns or not.

Here’s what the Juice told the Los Angeles times, “I’m O.J. Simpson. How am I going to think that I’m going to rob somebody and get away with it?”

Don’t know, O.J. Maybe the whole getting away with double murder thing might have something to do with it. Just a guess.

Setting aside the obvious irony in Simpson’s quote, it would seem at first that there is some truth behind it. Simpson likely lives under increased scrutiny, and there’s probably no one the Los Angeles police would rather arrest for armed robbery. So it does seem logical that Simpson would realize he’d never get away with the crime.

The problem with that reasoning is that Simpson isn’t logical - he’s full on crazy. And it’s our fault. He’s probably been called a murderer by some random stranger nearly every day for the past 11 years. Every time he goes out in public he knows what everyone staring at him is thinking.

Now 60 years old, I think this constant notoriety has squeezed all the pulp out of the Juice’s brain. If you look at the past couple of years he’s really started to act irrational - like his decision to write a book titled If I Did It. Even if the motive behind the book was monetary, he couldn’t have been all there and still think it was a good idea.

If he were thinking clearly, why would Simpson subject himself to appearing on a local radio call-in show? You almost feel bad for him watching his reactions to those prank calls - but he had to have seen them coming, right? Who knows, maybe he really is senile, this whole robbery was a mistake and he was just looking for the real killers.

Beckstreet’s Beck (Alright!) appears every Tuesday and Thursday.

Under the Button

She clearly hasn’t read my list.

We’ve all done it. Woken up early on a Saturday morning, hair tousled, breath that probably counts as a form of chemical weaponry, half- (or fully) naked, with the realization that you don’t recognize those walls. Then, of course, you roll over. Someone’s looking at you from the other side of the bed. And you know that you have a Walk of Shame rapidly approaching.

My male friends never seem to mind this situation; between the lower standards for male grooming and the wonderful double standards about female sexual activity, all they need is a strut and a smile to be on their way. Penn women, on the other hand, know that we’ll see everyone we’ve ever met, including professors, future employers, and random exes, during that never ending walk.

So here I present you the Walk of Pride Kit, full of useful schtuff to calm that moment of panic. A friend suggested that I hang out on Locust at ten a.m. on a Saturday morning to get the scoop from real live Walk-of-Shame-ers, but, luckily, I’m not quite that mean. (Or, fine, awake and coherent at that time of morning.) Thank your favorite deity.

Without further ado:

Mini mouthwash - because it’s weird to bring a toothbrush.

Travel hairbrush - because complicated Friday night hair will not last the night

Cute flats - because the heels always give it away.

Ipod - because then you look like you actually want to be awake and dragging your ass across campus.

Mini deodorant - because dancing and sexing all night probably did away with your ladylike fresh scent.

So there you have the basics. This should all fit in a medium-sized purse - as useful as it would be to fill a rolling suitcase with a full change of clothes, shampoo, and every beauty product you own, it’s pretty hard to pass that off as a party accessory. Throw back some mouthwash, change your shoes, and walk across campus with your head held high - after all, whoever might be judging you certainly didn’t have a night as good as yours.

Under the Button appears ever Tuesday and Friday.

Dear Danny

Mm mm good.

I’m not the only one who saw it. People swarmed to it. The palpable air of intrigue hung around it, accentuated by gasps of excitement. Some students were unsure at first, but they quickly figured out how it worked.

The farmers’ market is here.

Every Wednesday from now on, Penn Diningwill sponsor afarmers’ market in between Harnwell College House and 1920 Commons on Locust Walk from 3 to 7 p.m. Now, all the students who live in the high rises can walk right past fresh, local food on their way back from classes. If any one else is like me, they took a second look at some freshly baked pies, stopped to buy some delicious red bell peppers, or put off that trip to Fresh Grocer.

Everyone has heard about the benefits of eating local. The shorter the distance between farm and market, the less (carbon based) energy expended to move the food. Supporting nearby agriculture means supporting the local economy. And smaller, locally focused farms use far fewer pesticides and wreak less havoc on the natural environment than the factory farms Fresh Grocer buys most of their produce from.

“Penn Dining and Aramark have been interested in bringing some form of
produce market into the core of campus for quite some time,” said Barbara Lea-Kruger, Director of Communications and Project Management at Penn Dining in an e-mail interview. “We worked with an organization called Farm to City to extend the operating hours of the farmers market that was already located at 36th and Walnut [streets] and have the farmers move onto the Locust Walk location at mid-afternoon.

But here’s the kicker - students can buy the goods with dining dollars.

Penn Dining deserves major props for this decision. Not only did they bring this local food to campus, but they made it very accessible to their customers. Hopefully this commitment to sustainability and fresh produce continues to find its way into the dining halls as well.

As long as this farmers market keeps going strong, I just might be able to forgive Penn Dining for putting salt instead of sugar in their apple pie last week.

Dear Danny appears every Monday and Wednesday.

BeatNick

Now that’s what I like to see.

It was just about a year ago that I started to feel homesick.

I was studying abroad in London, a whopping 3,500 miles from New York. But it wasn’t the distance that made me long for home. It wasn’t England’s funny currency, or the funny way English people talked. It wasn’t even their funny way of driving on the wrong side of the street.

It was baseball.

See, the UK follows baseball like we follow Buzkashi. The playoffs are coming, and people just don’t care.

Sure, there were some options. I could Skype a friend and have him give me a play-by-play, but my friend was no John Sterling. I could go to the one sports bar that claimed to show baseball games, but thanks to the time difference it closed before most games even started.

So I settled for my only other option: I bought MLB.tv, baseball’s expensive and buggy online service.

In theory, MLB.tv gave my laptop live access to all games. But in practice, it only gave me access to a frozen image of A-Rod striking out and a never-changing caption that read “Buffering… 5%.” Trying to get MLB.tv to work was the bane of my study-abroad experience, and probably my life. I still have nightmares.

So it’s kind of a downer that now, only about 100 miles from Yankees Stadium, I’m having the same frustrating experience. Baseball fans know that these two weeks are the most important in the entire season - whether your team makes it to the playoffs or not gets decided in the next dozen or so games. And baseball fans who aren’t “phans” know that practically none of these games will get televised. For Yankees faithful, a game against the Devil Rays is just as crucial as one against the Red Sox. Unfortunately, Philadelphia cable providers don’t feel the same way.

But there’s some hope. The Fox & Hound, located at 1501 Spruce Street, is a sports bar chain that prides itself in showing “national, regional and local sporting and other televised events.” Does that include Yankees games? “Oh yeah,” said a perky F&H employee. “I feel like whenever I’m here the Yankees are on. We definitely have a package or something.”

And if you want to stay on campus, College sophomore Adam Mandelsberg insists that MLB.tv is reliable: “It freezes up sometimes, but AirPennNet has pretty good reception.” All I know is you want to stay away from it if you’re a Mac user.

As a last resort, Yankees fans can fashion a tinfoil antenna/helmet, go to the rooftop lounge of High Rise South, tune into 880 AM, and face whichever direction the Yanks are playing.

Through all that hissing static, you might just hear a little piece of home.

BeatNick appears every Monday and Thursday.

A Shot of Hennessy

What do you mean I can’t join Penn Masala?!

Being a white, non-Jewish, straight girl at Penn sucks.

I can’t take off class for high holidays, I can’t join half of our a capella or dance groups, and there is certainly no “cultural center” or special celebratory month/week dedicated to me.

I am so jealous.

Coming from a Catholic family with no particular devotion to our church or our mish-mosh European heritage, I often envy my peers who share common bonds of culture and religions.

The cultural communities here at Penn are well-developed enclaves - a veritable home away from home for students who join. They offer a social starting point for new students and a valuable networking resource for jobs, internships and, often, romance.

Hillel, especially, is a prime example. Probably due to the combination of the high density of Jewish students and the fact that the group shares both cultural and religious bonds, from the outside it looks rather appealing. Not to mention they have a bad-ass building to chill in.

The LGBT center is equally awesome - if I were a lesbian I would definitely hang out there all the time. Another of the most interesting buildings on campus, The ARCH, is home to Makuu, PAACH, and La Casa Latina.

So what am I to do?

I guess I could have joined a sorority, but it’s a little too late for that - anyway, it’s not really my scene. A gender-specific group might offer companionship, but how am I supposed to meet guys in Wharton Women?

The number of culture-, race- and religion-specific groups on campus is astounding. There are so many, in fact, that it leads to self-segregation and a narrowing of the diversity of our social circles.

Of course like will want to be around like, and I’m not suggesting that we dissemble any groups, but one of the things I most looked forward to when coming to college was meeting people who are unlike me - who have different perspectives on the world.

We need to mix it up. If these groups truly want to spread awareness of their cultures, issues and ideas, they should take a more active role in creating opportunities for people of all sorts to come together, rather than excluding them.

Maybe Birthright will even let me have a free trip to Israel - because God knows, no Catholic in their right mind would hand out free visits to the Vatican City for liberal college students.

A Shot of Hennessy appears every Monday and Wednesday.

CommenTATE

Several of last year’s winners congratulate each other.

Many freshmen running for the class board or UA are frantically searching The Daily Pennsylvanian archives (or a tricked out Google search) for what past candidates wrote. Yep. I know that perfectionist instinct.

These freshmen are given candidacy statement space in the DP this week via an NEC. And most freshmen will skim through them. I hope they all choose to write it wisely. Here are some recommended elements to include or not (based on what others in the past who have won and lost have written):

Do:

-Write a clear one sentence platform
-Include a link to a campaign webpage (if one exists)
-Give location and date of a press conference
-Use proper grammar and spelling
-Emphasize your ability to execute and get the job done
-Make it into some kind of narrative that keeps us reading
-Commit yourself to getting HBO on the Penn Video Network

Don’t:

-Open your statement with the word “Yo”
-Patronize your audience (you’re not above us)
-Toss in too much humor (you’re running for class office not class clown)
-Rhyme your name with any adjectives
-List your high school leadership positions
-Write a poem (or a rap)
-Claim your goal is to “have fun”
-Use trite buzzwords like “change” and “experience”
-Tell us what you like to do for fun
-Include where you went to high school
-End each sentence like “!!!!!”
-Hint that you’re from New Jersey (I mean, what?)

Just make it stand out somehow. The majority of statements say the same thing.

CommenTATE appears every Monday and Friday.

Under the Button

Here’s the solution - condoms in the vending machines!

From what I can tell, finding condoms as a freshman on Penn’s campus is a bit like finding WMDs in Iraq in 2003: everyone knows they’re all over the place, but no one can tell you exactly where.

Penn students, and their sex education experience, differ greatly in background due to parents, school, and religion. So some freshmen get to Penn with years of bio and health education experience, while others show up with only the message, “Sex is bad, don’t do it.” Kind of like alcohol, right?

However, while Penn requires tedious hours of alcohol education in the form of AlcoholEdu, the school apparently expects the freshmen to figure out sex all by themselves. The freshmen I talked to all agreed that, if they really needed the information, they’d turn to their RA or GA. But no one has told them exactly where to find condoms or where to go for contraception, and no one seems sure exactly how much the freshman class knows about safe sex.

“We’re all from difference places, with different experiences,” said Engineering and College senior Dhinakarau Chinappen. Upon entering Penn, “We’re small fish in a big ocean.” He thought that everyone had the information by the end of their first year, but felt that there should be more of a “formal approach” to disseminate it. College freshman Yana Toporovskaya commented, “based on the people in my hall, I doubt [freshmen] are really well informed.”

Penn must spend large sums every year buying condoms and maintaining the Office of Health Education, an amazing go-to source for all your sexual health issues on campus. But do signs on Locust really count as informing people?

Penn needs a program similar (but not identical) to AlcoholEdu to educate Penn kids before school. If that’s not feasible, one session of sex ed during NSO could do some good. As a sorry last resort, an information session simply listing campus and Philly resources could help keep the number of unplanned pregnancies and interesting diseases down to a bare minimum.

Without passing on this important knowledge, we essentially leave the freshman class up a creek without a rubber. After all, no one can deny that Penn students subscribe religiously (or, well, not) to the motto, “Work hard, play hard.” The school teaches us how to work safely, so why not how to play?

Under the Button appears every Tuesday and Friday.

Off the Beat

Wahlberg is fast becoming a Philly boy.

Alright, Lord of the Rings fanatics. Here’s your chance to stalk Peter Jackson.

The latest movie buzz reports that shooting for Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lovely Bones, will be done on location in Norristown, PA in the suburbs of Philly. Along with its star director, the movie harnesses A-list talent like Susan Sarandon, Rachel Weisz and Ryan Gosling. Plus a full-time crew that will pump serious money into the local economy.

Sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

In fact, making movies in Pennsylvania just got a whole lot easier. This summer, the state passed legislation to deliver $75 million in tax credits to filming crews. A new production studio is slated for construction in the Philly suburbs.

Philly itself was ranked 5th in the country by Moviemaker magazine on its list of top places to make movies. You can even check out what’s shooting around town now.

To a certain measure, Philadelphia is making inroads on the silver screen. We’ve all heard of Rocky (I-VI), Philadelphia, and Witness. Classic movies, often with A-list actors, set in Philadelphia–one even here at Penn. In fact, six films shot in the city have broken the $200 million box office mark.

Yet apart from a few major films and others not worth watching (like the aging Nicholas Cage in National Treasure), Philly today isn’t much of a movie capital.

“It’s an alternative choice with a different flavor from New York,” said Penn Cinema Association chair Andrew Mangano.

To change that, city officials can reel in producers with more financial incentives. We also need to bring back local talent like Will Smith, Bill Cosby, and M. Night Shyamalan.

Shyamalan (of Sixth Sense fame) has shot most of his films around Philadelphia. Right now, in fact, he’s filming his next flick, The Happening, with Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel. It’s set–you guessed it–in the Philadelphia area. Yet Shyamalan has also stated that he may choose to shoot in locations that offer better financial incentives. .

Sure, big pictures create jobs. But we also need something to catapult Philly back into the national psyche as an American travel destination. And what better way than through another Rocky climbing the art museum steps, another Detective John Book trawling for clues around 30th Street Station, and another director taking us on a cinematic joyride through the streets of Philadelphia?

Off the Beat appears on Friday.

CommenTATE

The class of 2011 is looking outstanding.

It includes a College freshman who blogs under the alias The Frosh Prince on Making It Count’s Year One: A College Blog, owned by Monster.com. That’s hot.

I ran into him because I chill in different common rooms during the evenings at Hill College House. I talk about random topics. I hear crazy stuff. I’m curious about what kind of stuff people do - who knows, maybe I’ll run into someone working on the next Facebook. Last week in a common room, I mentioned blogging. This freshman claimed he also blogged. I lucked out because I wouldn’t have known otherwise: The Frosh Prince must anonymously blog his freshman year due to legal issues with Monster.

Let’s see if he can stack up to some of his competitors. Universities across the nation have recruited students to blog their college years. Johns Hopkins. Cornell. Dartmouth. MIT.

Right now, Penn doesn’t sponsor students to officially blog on their college life. But, wew should follow suit. Prospective students love these blogs — Johns Hopkins declares student blogs “helped the university boost applications by 31 percent over two years.” A fast paced blog from the “Social Ivy” would reveal a freshman’s thrill of attending this academic super power while immersed in the streets of Philadelphia, where it seems every other car is blasting Soulja Boy.

We need to harness this new communication technique. Penn could receive more than just a rise in applications. The blogs would be a booster engine to rising Penn’s name recognition. Unlike Cornell and Dartmouth, we’ve got more than just classes or clubs.

CommenTATE appears every Monday and Friday.