Every morning, approximately 2.5 million women with a “voracious appetite for what’s next, new, cool, and must-have” receive a Daily Candy e-mail newsletter in their inboxes.

I possess no such appetite, but I get DC Philadelphia anyway — mainly because I derive some sort of sick pleasure from reading about clothing and spa treatments that cost more than my apartment.

So imagine my surprise when the latest Daily Candy Weekend Guide included this — smack between limited edition “cutesy” tees and a “brunch and shopping” event:

Glock Day
What: Free rentals and range time, discounted memberships, and crazy deals on Glocks — Philly’s gun of choice.
Why: It’s how Charlton Heston, God rest his soul, would’ve rolled.
When: Sat., 10 a.m.-7 p.m.
Where: Philadelphia Archery & Gun Club, 831-833 Ellsworth St.

Shoes, gruyère omelettes, sea salt facials, and… guns? One of these things is not like the others.

But this was no joke.

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Woohoo! We have a waxing crescent moon (17% full), and it’s April 9th (4/9), 1749 is the original founding date of Penn, so that must mean it’s April Fool’s at the DP!

No pranks from me today. I swore them off after watching this.

Anyway, believe it or not, the best part of the DP’s joke issue isn’t the HILARIOUS articles that give even The Onion a run for its money. No, it’s the clueless comments that people post in response to them.

As you may know, a very small minority of commenters are stupid and belligerent. Never is this made so apparent as in the DP’s annual joke issue, which came out today.

Take this gem from a concerned Whartonite regarding a quote from Executive Editor David Lei:

Wow. “How am I going to fill my resume and get a job at Goldman Sachs…my only other source of income is some crappy newspaper job…”

I’m in Wharton, and I’m still embarassed by this guy’s comments. Hope his “creppy newspaper job” wasn’t at the DP, or he might be out of that, too.

Perhaps he should be more concerned about making sure that his clients’ accounts are secure.

Satisfyingly riddled with spelling errors, but disappointingly un-vitriolic.

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Editor’s Note: SFCU’s not collapsing. Jon “didn’t know we had a joke issue.” Luckily (for you), I have no qualms about publicly embarrassing my bloggers, so it’s staying up. But don’t worry - your PennCash is safe.

First Club Wizzards. Then Bear Sterns. Now the front page of the DP announces yet another corporate meltdown in this same academic year: the Student Federal Credit Union, Penn’s student-run campus bank, is facing “imminent bankruptcy due to heavy losses.” PNC has already offered to buy them out for $2 a share.

Usually, this kind of thing wouldn’t bother me. I’m not really a finance kind of guy; my idea of “smart saving” is my tin can of loose change that I expect to eventually accumulate millions. (So far: $10.73.) But I had a significant portion of my savings in an SFCU account, and now that money might be gone forever. Never has it been more apparent to me that you can’t spell SFCU without “F-U.”

What really irks me about his collapse, though, is that SFCU is run primarily by Wharton students.

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Thanks to Diamond, the nude magazine possibly bound for Penn in the near future, students will no longer have to imagine what that cute girl in Econ looks like naked. They’ll know.

(Of course, the same goes for the obnoxious girl in Psych and the infrequent bather in Physics.)

‘Tis the utopia that Matthew M. Di Pasquale, a Harvard senior, imagines.

Di Pasquale is the creator and editor-in-chief of Diamond, the controversial magazine that will star nude or semi-nude Harvard students. And, fortunately for us, he wants to publish a Penn edition of the magazine starting next year. If he solicits models in the same fashion that he did at Harvard, all you ladies can expect a dignified email requesting nude photos of “all hot Penn girls.”

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Should the Olympics come to Philadelphia and Penn (and I hear there is a bid in the works), a cautionary tale. Remember to never trust the French.

For those who don’t know, the symbol of world unity, the Olympic Flame, passed on from runner to runner and lit by the Sun in ancient Olympia, was extinguished. Multiple times.

Shock horror, my friends. Millions of dollars go into developing the torch. It is the uber-torch. It withstands gale-force winds, oxygen deprivation and torrential rain. You can stick the damn thing under a power shower and it won’t go out. The designer, however, forgot to protect it from one particular factor - a mistake of staggering proportions.

The French.

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A record number of people applied for FlingSafe this year, forcing SPEC to close the application window early and turn away even seniors. What is this, the wine tasting preceptorial?

Anyway, I got in and earned my free ticket to the very same concert that I earlier expressed no interest in. Does this make me a hypocrite? I don’t think so. Seeing an artist whose best work — which itself was overrated — is behind him for free is different than paying $25.

Our otherwise tedious FlingSafe orientation did have a few key facts that everyone should know. Read this stuff — it’ll make your Fling safer and my job easier so that I won’t have to be sober on duty worry about all my fellow students.

• Stay away from parties with jungle juice. A favorite among frat brothers, JJ is incredibly potent and easy to spike with date rape drugs. For those reasons, RAs and House Deans will be breaking up parties without warning if they contain the red stuff. As FlingSafers, we’re supposed to report any sightings of jungle juice immediately so the real authorities can swoop in.

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A few weeks ago, The New York Observer ran an article called “Nerds of Steel” — suggesting that the “new nerd is a beast” and pointing to celebs like Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Carell as proof. Evidently, the great American geek has gotten bigger and stronger in what appears to be a statistical attempt to garner the attention of the ever-elusive female sex. Is it working? Ha, that’s like asking if pi is finite.

But all joking aside, I think the rather toned study body at Penn serves as further evidence for this phenomenon. Just last Thursday, for example, Pottruck held another annual bench press competition — where University Hospital employee Richard Scarlett put up 425 lbs (!) before growing extremely angry and bursting into flames.

(To put things into perspective, 425 lbs is approximately equivalent to 8 sorority girls.)

Scarlett wasn’t the only standout at the event; College senior Kaelin Ainley put up 95 lbs, the most among female participants, and Engineering junior Michael Provenzano won the sub-150 group by benching 235. Again, the idea is that Penn’s geeks are in the gym while its athletes excel at academia.

This is unlike, say, Penn State — where the only athletes in the library are there for entirely different reasons.

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I had a rather rambunctious night last night with my friend Jose Cuervo, and ended up making an extended offering to the porcelain god. So extended was my act of worship that I think I killed it.

What does this have to do with you?

Well, when it comes to trying to resurrect your god, especially when you have another kind of offering to give it, Philadelphia’s plumbers are rather indifferent. So we come to the first part of the title: Plumbing.

I called no less than fifteen plumbers in the local area. The best they could do was Monday. Monday. That’s 2.5 days of going from my apartment to Huntsman to use the goddamn toilet. By the tenth plumber I was pretty irate —

“Would you like it if you had a clogged toilet for three days?” I cried. By the fifteenth, I was livid.

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When I was in elementary school, I was enrolled in DARE — the mandatory drug awareness program where cops would come to class and warn students of the dangers of illegal substances. DARE left me absolutely terrified of drug use, though comically ill-informed: in my final essay, for instance, I wrote that I would never take a sniff of marijuana. (I still haven’t.)

Now, more than a decade removed from my anti-drug “education,” I still remember DARE’s main arguments against substance abuse: it would leave you friendless, physically weak and unsuccessful in all life’s endeavors. And given today’s celebrity climate — with more and more stars falling in and out of rehab — I think we’ve all learned that same lesson.

Or have we? I don’t think it would come as a surprise to say that drugs have a new face in America, and it’s not as scary as it used to be. What might be surprising, however, is that Penn and other universities are helping market the drug makeover — including our esteemed professors.

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This is the second in an at-least-two-part series about how awkward professors are.

Last time, I claimed that professors are so awkward they don’t even know how to refer themselves. Today, I want to talk about that most sacred and awkward institution: the professor marriage.

Professors often marry other professors. There’s nothing so inherently awkward about that — why not marry your grad-school sweetheart? But the uncomfortable saga that ensues is truly cringe-inducing. Distant-cousin Bwog has a nice article that tries to minimize the awkwardness of academic marriages, but don’t be fooled.

Professor couples will only admit their marriage when cornered, and even then they’ll do so gruffly, as if confessing to a drinking problem. Husband and wife might be working three doors down from each other, but for all anyone else knows, they’re total strangers. As for PDA? Forget it. All that means to professor couples is some kind gadget that’s too hard to use.

Example #1: I had no idea that Linguistics professors Gillian Sankoff and Bill Labov were married, even when Labov guest-lectured one of Sankoff’s classes.

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