Recent findings by a National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism study: Students with a history of binge drinking and who play drinking games tend to have higher blood-alcohol content at parties.

Well, duh.

Here’s something less obvious: not only is there more drinking at “themed parties,” but women actually out-drink men at such events.

The study, “Person and Environment Predictors of Blood Alcohol Concentrations: A Multi-Level Study of College Parties,” has been hailed because researchers actually ditched the office and, Dianne Fossey-style, tracked college students in their natural habitat: They followed 1,300 partygoers around 66 parties at San Diego State University, testing attendees’ blood-alcohol content on the spot. Assuming the researchers didn’t kill the mood with white coats and clipboards — unless it was a “dress like a scientist” theme party — it’s a stronger methodology than asking students to ‘fess up about their drinking habits days or weeks later (the traditional strategy).

One of the big conclusions: do away with drinking games, say the authors, since they cause dangerous amounts of alcohol to be consumed too quickly. The authors also claim to be testing “interventions” hosts can use to cut drinking games. Like… not having a party in the first place.

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What does a sorority girl put behind her ears to make her more attractive? Her ankles. Ouch. 

Sorority girls are victims to the poor reputations that precede them. This is unfair. (Full disclosure: I’m in a sorority.) But I thought long and hard, and came to the realization that a bunch of other things are also misjudged: broccoli, lice, anchovies, nap time, baths, etc. Still, by the time we turned eight, we had understood the errors of our ways. Antioxidants save lives, and what kid doesn’t enjoy mom meticulously combing through their lice-infested hair? 

So since parts of you have finally grown/dropped and you bathe regularly, I think it’s time to give sororities a second chance. I’ll get in the mindset with my favorite hypothetical: what if I were on the other side? What would I think?

1. Sorority girls are vain: Granted, this is true. We are vain. Yet a quick look in the thesaurus clears things up a bit. Vanity is synonymous with pride. We, as women of the 21st century, should be proud of ourselves. 
2. Sorority girls are fake: So we’re a little fake, but honestly, don’t hold us to a different standard. Fake is popular: Madame Tussauds’s is a popular tourist attraction, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter is popular/delicious/calorie-free butter substitute, and Michael Kors used a lot of fake, environmentally-conscious fur in his widely successful winter collection. 
3. Sorority girls are moronic clones: Not true. We put entirely different ingredients in our Gia salads.
4. Sorority girls are dumb: There’s more than a 50% chance that we have a better GPA than you — and that’s good enough for me. 
5. Sorority girls are shallow: Hey, we do a lot of community service. 

Think not only about what I’ve just said, but also of Penn’s other on-campus groups: every a cappella group, Mask & Wig, the football team, Tabard…

Open the DP today to find an article about Jews, Arabs, and Muslims coming together through music. Like so many other initiatives on and around Penn campus, it’s sweet, a little sappy, and very PC. That’s the way we do it at Penn, and that’s the way we do it — for the most part — in the US at large.

But in Brazil, where the nation is celebrating 100 years of Japanese immigration, samba celebrity Angela Bismarchi is doing things a little differently. She’s going to bridge the gap between Brazil and Japan not through art, sport, or faith, but through… plastic surgery.

That’s right. As Fox News reports, Bismarchi is “having nylon wires implanted in her eyes to give them an oriental slant.” What better way to celebrate the Japanese than by superficially mutilating one’s face to look like them? (Video after the jump.)

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If you’re like me, then you spend most of your waking hours daydreaming about a world where squirrels and humans coexist in peace. For one thing, it’d be a place full of hilarious rodents like the one below. And for another, it’d be devoid of people like Mike Huckabee — who said he used to fry squirrels in a popcorn popper back in college. (Seeing all those folks around him eating squirrel meat was probably what convinced him that humans haven’t evolved.)

But echoing what countless relatives, psychiatrists and elementary school teachers have told me in the past, there aren’t many people like me. In fact, it seems that my pro-squirrel views put me in the vast minority on campus, as Penn is overrun with people who’d love nothing better than to see our squirrels die.

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Bush’s brain. Boy genius. The Architect. Turd Blossom.

Call him what you want, but there’s no denying that Karl Rove is one of the most brilliant and sought-after speakers in the world. An overwhelming sense of merriment was palpable on Penn’s campus on Monday, when SPEC officially announced that the former Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush would be the spring keynote speaker.

Many Penn students acknowledged the value of a Rove address on a SPEC online survey. SPEC Connaissance co-director Elana Wilf said there was great student interest in a speaker who is “controversial and political.” Ms. Wilf and her colleagues rightfully translated this to mean “Karl Rove.”

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Or is it State of the Unions?

Anyway, as a senior, I can breathe a sigh of relief now that Emeril Lagasse, renowned Food Network star (”It’s more than a cookery show, it’s relaxing!”), will not be sending me off into the real world with his Crab Remick recipe. By the way, when you watch the YouTube clip I want your opinions on whether the cameraman was drunk.

Nevertheless, I wonder what Lagasse’s speech would have been like…

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Breaking all self-imposed rules, promises, and general personal preferences, I did something awful a few weeks ago. Something self-righteous liberal College students with useless-but-fascinating majors should never have to do. Something I did for you, dear readers. Yes, both of you.

I, Wharton-mocking, anti-Event Planning 100, “Who-Needs-a-Job-When-You-Have-a-Soul” Lindsey Stull, attended management training. For six hours, I stared at PowerPoint presentations and role-played (er, not the fun way) and heard the seconds tick by on the clock behind my head. Worst of all, I was subjected to this in the Death Star, which just added insult to injury. (And yes, it has its own website.)

I stress-ate my way through two sandwiches, handful after handful of chips, and 18 mini candy bars. I then carefully folded the wrappers into perfect little rectangles, wrote out a to do list, saved it on my desktop as a “do me” list, and looked around for the bag of chocolate. I discovered that I cannot, in fact, levitate objects and mentally pull them toward me.

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As The DP reported on Friday, terrible actor Kal Penn will go by the moniker “Kalpen Modi” during his stay here as a Professor of Asian American Studies. I guess that’s probably his real name. Maybe the dude’s trying to get back to his roots after brutally stereotyping them for feeble laughs in so many mediocre films. (I know, I know. The Namesake. Whatever. Can’t make up for Malibu’s Most Wanted.)

Anyway, the name change means that we won’t get to see any of these gems in future DP articles:

“Penn said he was excited to be working at Penn.”

“The Director of Asian American Studies will be overseeing all of Penn’s classes to ensure they meet Penn’s criteria for excellence.”

“Penn will benefit from Penn.”

“Penn is 100% Indian.”

Honestly, reading old DP pieces like this one must have been a total mindfuck for everybody involved — the writer, the editor, and all the readers. So thanks, Professor Modi. Your classes will probably suck, but at least now it will be easy for us to refer to you without implicating the entire University.

Last Friday, a teen sex scandal hit Allentown, PA involving two girls, one cell phone.

The girls, 14 and 17, are students at Parkland High School, and the cell phone was used to take photos of both in pornographic poses. The images were subsequently spread via text message to approximately 40 Parkland students and then to the “wider world.”

Those are just the facts. I’ll pause for a second so you can laugh, cry or call your Allentown-area little sister to make sure she’s just a recipient.

But moving on, this story disappointed me for a few reasons. The first is that it reinforces the voyeuristic nature of adolescents, something we’re all too familiar with here at Penn. You probably remember about two years back, when an Engineering student posted photos on the Internet of two students having sex by an open window in the high rises (in the process redefining the term “glass blowing“).

This high school porn outrage isn’t much different, and both stories prove our incessant need to study biology outside the classroom. One Parkland student even created a Facebook group (”Parkland…Where Porn Stars Are Born”) to canonize the event. Good luck on internships, kid.

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[Movie trailer voice] Coming this November…

Two candidates. Two heroes.

In a world of uncertainty, bloodshed, and UberIslamoFascism. Only one hero and one presidential candidate can survive. [/Movie trailer voice]

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