The night before the first Econ 1 midterm last year, I almost wished I had spent the last several hours shut up in one of those hidden libraries in the quad frantically stuffing the wisdom of Professors Stein/Spiegel into my over-caffeinated brain. The blissful release of tension that is the econ scream almost made me want to toughen up my mushy humanity-major brain. Almost.

As spring econ 1 students gear up for a weekend of studying in preparation for their midterm on Tuesday, they may feel sorry for themselves because they don’t have the econ scream. I know I did last year. However, dear Spiegelites, you are not alone, don’t fret. Utah State University recently banned their version of the econ scream, the finals week howl. Librarians in the Utah State library have the tradition despite the endorsement of the student government. How rude!

Here’s my recommendation: I say that we stand with our brethren at Utah State and as a token of our devotion establish a second semester econ scream in Van Pelt. Afterall, why should the second semester students get shafted? Their marginal stress at point exam is congruent to the stress function of first semester econ students. Also, after taking the pulse around campus, in my very inexpert opinion, a major stress reliever is in order even for non-Econ 1 students.

And here’s some more good news, melting the ice in the library isn’t unheard of in the Ivy League. Watch the success of Columbia University’s Prangstgrup in relieving stress in the library:

I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced — librarians, beware! Who’s with me?

Happy New Year, and welcome back to The Spin!

Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Julie Siegel, the editor of this noble blog for the semester. I’m excited to be back for a second dose of The Spin’s entertainment, excitement and top-notch writing.

Also returning are zany Stephen “Duct tape” Morse and former DP opiner-in-chief, Evan “you mean there’s life outside the office?” Goldin. Elizabeth “small town North Carolina” Song and Sharon “I heart Andrea Mitchell” Udasin have shed their old-school media shackles and will also be joining the blog squad. A fresh cast of cool characters including an English
exchange student and a fourth year Hill resident join these vets. Watch out blogosphere, here come Camille Hardiman, Dan Brickley, James Russell, John Kneeland, Josh Stanfield, Julie Steinberg, Ruben Brosbe, and Sarah Min.

Oh, and the blog belongs to you too! This semester we are encouraging our readers to move beyond the comments to guest blog posts. If you’d like to write a piece for the blog, please send me a paragraph pitch at siegel@dailypennsylvanian.com. Blog items are approximately 300 words.

Last semester, Eric Obenzinger took The Spin from a hokey pipe dream to one of the most widely read college blogs to date. We ridiculed, analyzed, mocked, and even scored a link from The New York Times. This semester, there’s no telling what mayhem may ensue. Brace yourself for some fast-paced, snarky, edgy reporting–The Spin has returned!

I’m a prose kind of girl but, when inspiration hits, you just have to go with it. Last Saturday night, I ventured back to the scene of many of the crimes of freshman year and the best place to ever sell sliced bread: Wawa.

I’m going to claim some poetic license here. Like I said, poetry is not my strong suit but without further adieu, an ode(ish) to Wawa:

Four tiers of mahogany. My jaw muscles lost the ability to hold my mouth closed as I walked into the cello-shaped Verizon Hall on to watch the Philadelphia Symphony orchestra on Saturday night. I chose to apply to Penn in partly because I loved the cultural resources that Philadelphia offers, so it’s pretty pathetic that it’s taken me a year and a half to venture over to the Kimmel Center.

Another confession: I know very little about classical music. But the symphony was still magnificent. For two hours I had an excuse to let my mind wonder–even for me, a boorish cynic who was fired from piano lessons in elementary school because I couldn’t sit still long enough to practice, the music still seemed beautiful.

Saturday night, Christoph Eschenbach, the internationally acclaimed music director of the Philadelphia Symphony (who kind of looks like Psychology Professor Shatte from far away) acted as both conductor and soloist. During the two hour concert, the orchestra played two pieces–Mozart’s 23 and 24 Piano Concertos–and the wind section played Mozart’s Serenade in C minor.

So what was the cost for this classy evening of entertainment by a world renowned conductor? Ten dollars.

You see, the Kimmel Center has a student rush program. The program is admittedly a little bit cumbersome, but if you arrive at the Kimmel Center 30 minutes before the show with a Penncard (depending on prior ticket sales) you can buy a student ticket. The seats are actually really good– the ushers seat you in the best seats that weren’t sold. Saturday, for example, I sat on the orchestra level. Pretty sweet, huh?

In short, Saturday night was simply delightful. Maybe it was the comfort of being surrounded by sparkly grandparents out on the town. Possibly it was just the music. Or perhaps it was that last Saturday was the first really cold night this winter, I couldn’t fathom spending the evening roaming around campus, and the mahogany felt so warm. Yeah, it must have been the mahogany.

Bloggers took credit (with some accuracy) for the downfall of Dan Rather and the death of John Kerry’s political future for his troop-goading. In the last few years there have been countless articles about the future impacts of blogging on journalism, business, medicine, politics, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness–you name it, bloggers have claimed they’ll change it.

So, take this with a grain of salt, but I think that President Gutmann should start her own blog.

It makes perfect sense: Gutmann’s infamous Halloween party showed that the few, spontaneous interactions she has with students each year can cause a lot of damage. It is obvious to anyone who has ever sat through convocation or graduation that it was Gutmann’s considerable academic and fundraising skills rather than her oratory mojo that got her the gig at Penn.

Blogs play to Gutmann’s strength as a writer. It’s also an interactive medium familiar to students and doesn’t require the time commitment of a physical forum. Since Gutmann’s image affects her and Penn, the Penn PR machine can vet any posts for blow up potential before they are posted.

And all the cool kids are doing it. The New York Times printed an article last week about several presidents who have successful blogs. My favorite: “Bob’s Blog” by Robert Caret of Towson University. Those sunglasses are priceless.

I’ve got it pretty easy when it comes to getting home for Thanksgiving. For me, returning to my Jewish mother’s nest entails is hopping on a train at 30th street station or a bus in Chinatown. I can leave Penn after my 5 o’clock class and still be home for dinner, so attending classes the day before Thanksgiving is not a big deal for me.

But for a pretty sizable chunk of Penn students, Wednesday classes are a much bigger nuisance. For example, 55 percent of this year’s freshman class lives beyond the catch-a-train-after-class Mid Atlantic bubble that stretches from New York to Virginia. They booked their plane tickets for late Wednesday night before their teachers canceled class on Wednesday. So, they are going to miss the beginning of the holiday festivities.

Then there are those pesky professors who, under the guise of giving students their money’s worth, hold classes on Wednesday. They pretend that it’s just a usual class day and ignore that there is just a sprinkling of a few brave, mainliners in an empty 200 seat lecture hall. The lecture is usually exceedingly boring because the professor can’t really teach anything new.

Why not get rid of this whole hoax? Why not standardize the whole ordeal and let students plan? If Penn wants to reach out to more students from more diverse geographic backgrounds, concessions need to made. Since there is really no value added by having class on Wednesday, Penn should just bite the bullet and cancel them.

(johnandkiras.com)

Yesterday, CNN reported that there is a chemical in coco beans that acts to reduce the platelet clumping that causes heart attacks. The effect of the chemical in chocolate is similar to that of aspirin. Doctors often suggest people with increased risk of heart attack take a small dose of aspirin every day.

Diane Becker, the author of the study, isn’t some crackpot doctor with rented office space and a mail order M.D. She is a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine. Becker was conducting a study to figure out the relationship between aspirin consumption and platelet clumping.

Dr. Becker required all participants in the study to forgo caffeinated drinks, wine, grapefruit juice and chocolate. 139 of the 1,200 participants failed this impossible exercise of self control. Instead of sending them packing, Dr. Becker continued to measure their platelet levels. In what has to be one of the greatest accidental medical discoveries since Penicillin, she found that their platelet levels were lower than those of volunteers who only took baby aspirin.

I knew chocolate had to be healthy. After all, how could something that seems so good not be good? In honor of Dr. Becker’s momentous accomplishment, I thought I’d profile some favorite chocolate spots in Philadelphia:

• Best Chocolates: John & Kira’s Jubilee Chocolates.
  Last Spring, John and Kira’s was the only Philadelphia chocolatier to make the USA Today’s list of the best in the nation. Many of their chocolates are named for the places where their local ingredients are grown. For example, their “Garden Mint” is made with mint grown at Drew Elementary School.
• Best Hot Chocolate: Rim Cafe in the Italian Market. This new French coffee shop in South Philadelphia has the best hot chocolate in the city, according to Tripadvisor.com.
• Best Fudge: Chocolate by Mueller. This candy shop is strategically located near the entrance to Reading Terminal Market; you can visit on the way in and on the way out. They sell all kinds of chocolate but the best product is definitely the fudge.

Today is the first day of International Education Week (or IEW, as the cool kids call it). The weeklong series of events is a joint initiative by the Departments of State and Education to celebrate and promote exchange programs where foreign students study in the U.S. and U.S. students study abroad.

(iew.state.gov)

don’t worry, you’re not out of the loop. I only learned of this obscure celebration by reading this article in an equally obscure source–The Kuwait Times.

Eighteen American Universities–including NYU and the University of Miami– participated in a college fair in Kuwait aimed at recruiting Kuwaiti students to American universities. The college fair in Kuwait City was run by a company called Linden Tours, which takes American college staffers all over the world to recruit international students. Linden runs 10 tours to different regions in the world. The Middle East tour makes nine stops in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Jordan, Turkey and Kuwait.

Penn doesn’t participate in these tours. Most of the participants are smaller schools that probably don’t have the same recruitment or publicity resources as Penn. However, prestige shouldn’t let Penn off the hook. In the 2002 Agenda for Academic Excellence Penn’s administration makes it clear that it is a priority to “Recruit those outstanding students from abroad who are likely to assume leadership roles in the academy, business, and government when they return to their home countries.”

The Class of 2010 has a record percentage of international students. Last year there was also a significant increase in applications from China, India and Korea. These are positive developments.

However, Penn should also focus on recruiting from the Middle East. This would foster an understanding among students of foreign cultures that will serve both the American and the international students when they “assume leadership roles in the academy, business, and government.”

Rumors were wafting through the heat in Radnor Hotel in St. Davis, where swarms of supporters of Democratic Congressional Candidate
Joe Sestak gathered to watch election returns.

It was a bad night for ten-term Congressman Curt Weldon. Not only had he just conceded his long-safe seat in Congress, but the ex-fireman was causing a fire hazard: I, along with a flock of supporters, reporters and (it seemed) 56 percent of Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district, was trying to fold all 5′3″ of me through the crowd into the ballroom to watch Sestak victory. I latched onto a chain of student volunteers who were shoving with gusto, but we were suddenly halted. A voice called out from behind us:

“You know how to force your way into a rock concert? Think of this as a rock concert!”

I turned my head expecting the owner of the voice to be some punk student volunteer. Instead I found a member of the other species native to campaigns–a retiree.

Donna Cassel is one such retiree who volunteered for Sestak. She first got into political activism in 1966 when, at the age of 16, she campaigned for a Democrat in Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district.

Cassel met Sestak at a campaign brunch last spring. She had just retired and was looking for something to do. As a college student, Donna had been an activist–pro-Bobby and anti-’Nam. But the need to “feed the kids” made her take a job at “the most Republican place in town,” a fund management company.

But now that the job’s in the past, Donna’s past is her future. “This is my first one back,” since retiring recently.

Generation X’s political activism will resurge over the next few years as they emerge from the constraints of raising a family and holding a job. Boomers’ mistrustful views of government–born of their college days in protesting the Vietnam War and Nixon–are clear.

That got me thinking about what our generation will have to return to when we retire in 40 or 50 years. Since politics has become so heavy on pragmatism at the expense of idealism, will we be able to return to a nostalgic, collegiate activism when we reitre?

I got up really, really early this morning to vote. I live off campus and my polling place is at 42nd and Ludlow. If I didn’t go before class, I wasn’t sure when I would make it back. I figured that missing an hour of sleep was a fair price to pay for democracy.

With the tune of Fleetwood Mac’s don’t Stop playing in my head, I hurriedly got dressed and headed to the polls with my housemate, Erika.

Voting was exciting, if uneventful (though it was funny that there were only Democratic and Green Party choices for local offices). Erika and I, two first time voters in national elections, even took a picture in front of the voting booth for posterity. Then, as we returned home and Erika opened the door to our house, I felt something on the top of my clog. I shook out my shoe and out fell a baby mouse!

I don’t know how I had ignored it. Maybe my body was numb and tingly with some sense of greater democratic/(Democratic!) purpose. Maybe I was just too sleepy to notice. But after I recovered and stopped screaming like a teeny-bopper meeting Elvis, a thought jumped into my mind:

The mouse was in my left shoe–is that a bad omen for the Democrats?