The astute among you may have noticed that there haven’t been any new Spin posts this year.

The more astute perhaps remarked that there hasn’t been much of a Spin blogger recruitment effort.

And I imagine that the most astute among you made use of your Penn-honed skills of deduction and guessed that the era of the Spin is, at long length, done.

The last two and a half years have been a time of great change here at the DP. After over a hundred years in print, we’ve thrown a tremendous amount of effort into expanding our online offerings, from video to interactive features to, yes, everyone’s favorite DP blogs. The Spin began featuring long posts by “online columnists” in the fall of 2006; as of this fall, it was less a virtual opinion page and much more a distinctly “bloggy” endeavor.

But as they say, all good things must come to an end. And when the DP closes a door, it opens a window.

Thus, it is my sad duty to announce that no new posts will appear on The Spin from now on — and my happy duty to inform you that the DP will launch several new, themed blogs sometime this semester.

Newly-elected opinion blog editor Abby Schwartz officially takes charge later tonight, after the annual Daily Pennsylvanian banquet. I trust that she will guide the opinion section successfully through this transition and into a new, (even more) modern, bloghappy age.

The first DP opinion blog saw many talented writers, more than a handful of  memorable pieces, and, of course, some truly epic editing. It shall be missed.

Tonight, we bid a fond adieu to The Spin.

Here’s to bigger and better things to come.

If you looked at the post below this and felt confused, you’re probably not alone.

Where’s the text? Where’s the picture? Did Abby just post someone else’s YouTube video and call it a day? Is the Spin getting lazy?

Au contraire, mes amis. Starting today, you’re going to see something new and great around here… video blogs!

Each blogger will have one up by the end of the semester. They’re doing it all — choosing topics, shooting video, writing and recording voiceover, and even most of the editing. We’re multitalented!

So when you see these popping up, as they will every once in a while, get excited. Check ‘em out. Leave some feedback, if you’d like.

Twenty-first century, here we come.

Through a complicated series of events involving roofies and an angry buffalo, the Spin has officially obtained a weekly comic! [cheering and applause]

Our new… comicist (?)…, Charles K., will be dropping by every once in a while to make sure you don’t have to waste all that brain energy reading full paragraphs. Charles’s favorite palindrome is panda here had nap; other biographical details possibly to come. (If not, extrapolate!)

The first comic will premiere in approximately… oh… six minutes. Get excited.

The days are getting shorter, I’m having hourly panic attacks, a few thousand new freshmen are hungover - gee, it must be fall! With each new season comes a new bunch of bloggers, and this semester, we’ve got plenty. All twelve of them are thoroughly overqualified, from English majors to Alabamians. Get ready for witty commentary and, for the first time ever, semi-regular video bloggers.

Without further ado, this semester’s heroic staff:

David Chang is a junior in the College and an English major. He dreams of being a writer and is looking forward to a life of overdue rent, loan repayments, and a significant other who will inevitably make more money than him. But hey, at least he’ll actually enjoy his job, something that the aspiring Engineers and Businessmen won’t be able to claim. Ha! Take that future millionaires! Now uhh, do you mind lending David some money?

Abby Schwartz has nice eyeballs and feathery-soft hair according to her friends. Her friends are also from Alabama. So is Abby, but she doesn’t have an accent. A junior majoring in communication, Abby enjoys traveling, yelling at the TV and avoiding sunburns. She is also really good at cooking chicken.

You will most often find college senior Rachel Lockwood doing one of five things: air-drumming, rearranging furniture, making lists, eating junk food or telling people that no, her hometown, Pleasantville, is not actually in black and white (seriously, come up a better line). She loves watching bad movies, making cheese scrambled eggs and sneezing louder than anyone you know. Start your week by reading her blog every Monday.

College sophomore Chaia Werger is from Attleboro, Massachusetts. Contrary to popular belief, she is not sixteen, European or Jewish. She is undecided about most facets of her life, but has resolved to write her weekly blog on Thursdays.

You might think it’s depressing, but Malka Fleischmann maintains that the most efficient way to live life is by sticking to one’s bucket list. And here are some of the most pressing to-dos on her agenda:
1. All-night police evasion, through the busy, darkened streets of a major US city, for dancing in a public fountain.
2. Taking a photo of herself hugging every lighthouse on the Irish coast.
3. Nabbing a blue whale and proudly displaying its stuffed corpse on her palatial front lawn.
4. Growing gills.

Jenna Feldman, a College sophomore, hails from New Jersey but does not have a “Jersey accent.” Her two sisters punched out every tooth she has ever lost–a fun-fact to which Jenna attributes all her failures. In her spare time, which usually falls between three and five o’clock in the morning, Jenna rereads the DSM-IV-TR and diagnoses herself and everyone she knows with various disorders. She is always right.

A nine-time Pulitzer Prize winner before the age of six, junior Susan Miller has chosen the Spin to be her latest literary pursuit. She hails from Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside the Beltway, where she carefully honed her current persona of irreverence and sarcasm. New to blogging, Susan has heard the demystifying news that the Internet is a series of tubes, so she thinks things will work out fine.

Will Steinberger enjoys eating lots of pasta and pooping in the woods. As a blogger and Senior Fellow in various things here at Penn, his research interests include the retinotopic imaging of post-triangulation politics, the quality of life of the urban pigeon, the presence of phallic imagery in post-Maoist Idaho, and the micro-financing of dysutopian organic burrito farms in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge. He is currently compiling the first-ever oral history of Randy Newman, which will appear in weekly installments here at the Spin. He dares you to sue him for libel.

Since College senior Zachary Noyce finally figured out how to turn on a computer, he will be making the jump from the opinion page to blog. Don’t you fear, though; this old man will not let the series of pipes that make up the Internets corrupt his puritanical ways. Look forward to tirades against freshmen baggy pants and tributes to Calvin Coolidge.

Yuliya Rebrova is a Wharton and College junior who does not like long walks on the beach. You can usually catch her reading Victorian literature and struggling to catch musical theatre performances. She’ll be abroad this semester in Spain so don’t plan on stalking her anytime soon… that is, if you don’t come bearing cookies.

Taehoon Kim is a senior in the College. The only interesting facts about him are that he is Canadian, lactose-intolerant, and intolerant of Canadians. Please bring him non-Canada-themed cakes (but God help you if you bring ice cream cake).

When the cool kids need coaching on how to be even cooler, you’ll find them consulting the one and only Anthony Cirranello. Raised in a quiet town in the Poconos, Anthony has since fallen in love with Philadelphia, and tries not to think about his many (many) years away from civilization. When he isn’t watching tennis or singing with the Loaf, he spends his time trying to convince himself that he is somehow a good person, despite his general disregard for others’ feelings. Also, he is a boy.

Last year’s darling Jon Wroble will still be blogging as well — from France. His trip to Europe should be full of mischief, mayhem, and complicated foreign syntax; luckily, he’s agreed to record it all for posterity here at the Spin. Mais oui, mon cheri!

And last, but not least…

College junior Lindsey Stull is me. If you really need to read my bio, there are two in the archives. I’m still your friendly neighborhood opinion blog editor, and I might even pop in with a post or two every once in a while. As per usual, email stull at dailypennsylvanian dot com with questions, comments, or concerns.

Let the blogging begin!

Finals are over, professors are panicking about submitting grades, and seniors have been in an alcoholic coma for weeks in a futile attempt to avoid the swiftly-approaching reality of graduation — yep, it must be the end of the spring semester.

These four months have really flown by here at the Spin; we’ve had all sorts of escapades with almost an entirely new group of bloggers and myriad interesting events on campus and in Philly. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the insanity.

Good luck living without us for a full summer; you can always read through the archives if you’re really jonesin’.

And in the next few months of valuable internships (read: brewing coffee without pay) and barrista-ing (read: brewing coffee for hourly dough), think hard about next semester — and your irrepressible, inescapable urge to be a Spin blogger.

It’s a great way to get your voice out there and hone your writing skills, and you’ll quickly find yourself in a great a community of smart, funny people with something to say. And yes, we bake brownies and have sleepovers on weekends*.

The application’s hanging out here (dailpennsylvanian.com/opinion); it’s due on August 10, 2008. If you have any questions, just email blogapp@dailypennsylvanian.com and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Have a great summer!

– Lindsey Stull, Spin editor

*Pillow fights not guaranteed.

The Pennsylvania Democratic primary is tomorrow, so today marks the end of Eric’s week-long political takeover of the blog. That said, I’m suffering from a bad case of politics fatigue, and I’m itching to play with our new poll feature. I hope my bias doesn’t show through anywhere.

Please, dear readers, guide us in the right (topical) direction in these trying red, white and blue times.

If you have the urge, explain your reasoning more in the comments.

It’s that time of year again. Sometime between the relaxation of spring break and the all-consuming fun of finals, we get Mental Health Awareness Week, brought to you by Penn’s own Active Minds. (Full disclosure: I get regularly spammed by their listserv. I’m not really sure why.)

While they have actual events planned to help you learn to cope with stress, I thought I’d share a few tried-and-true methods from a nonprofessional with no real claims to mental stability.

1. Glare at someone. I recommend anyone serving food at Commons. As Philadelphia has apparently outlawed smiling in the service industry, you might as well take out your annoyance on someone who hates you anyway.

2. Exercise. Nontraditional options include running from muggers, improving your upper body strength by holding your door shut, or taking self-defense classes. Do it the Penn way.

3. Eat right. Food pyramid be damned. Stress eating doesn’t involve anything green. Hit up the brown and the red instead. Spring florals will disguise any unflattering side effects, and a chocolate eclair will make you forget all about whatever you’re supposed to be doing.

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Coming out of a haze of birthday celebrating, I glanced at the calendar, and apparently it’s almost April. Wait, what?

That means it’s spring! A time for reproduction! Or even just production.

I’m sure you know where this is going (and no, I’m not using the Spin like a certain part of craigslist): a call for guest blogs.

Whether you want to oppose something uberpublicly, feel an overwhelming urge to give everyone some useful advice, or just have remarkably random Penn factoids to share, the Spin might be your place to do it.

200-350 words, humor suggested, wit required, opinion infinitely preferred to none, pictures/YouTube/inventive media always appreciated. If you have an idea for a post or already wrote something out, shoot me an email me at stull@dailypennsylvanian.com and we’ll see what happens.

Because even if you have that paper due tomorrow, wouldn’t you rather write 300 words of entartaining wit than 2500 of that “academic value” crap?

At Penn, we value our technology. We use clickers to answer questions in class. We Facebook stalk. We even tackle tough technology-related bioethical issues.

So why can’t half our profs check their email without crashing the system?

In my almost-two years at Penn, I’ve taken four language courses in the Department of Romance Languages. I’ve also watched four professors waste class time - that could be better spent mispronouncing the names of primary colors - engaging in a futile battle with such overly complicated technologies as BlackBoard, Windows, and the touch-screen insanity that lurks in every Williams classroom.

Similarly, a professor from another department once accidentally clicked on an ad of questionable nature during a lecture, which resulted in general hilarity and a lot of blushing from both sides of the classroom. It was like watching porn with your mom on a big screen — wildly uncomfortable and really, really easily avoided.

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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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