So I get an email from Class Board this weekend urging me to sign the Hey Day pledge:

Because of collaborative work done between students and administrators last year, Hey Day 2007 was the cleanest and safest Hey Day in recent memory, one that was called a success even by the Associated Press (see press release below for details).

This year, we hope to build on the progress made in Hey Day 2007 to ensure that the tradition remains safe and sustainable for future years. The only way this can occur is if this year’s seniors — the members of the Class of 2008 — are equally as excited to preserve the tradition of Hey Day as last year’s seniors.

Fuck you, Class Board. Don’t tell me that a successful Hey Day means gushing praise from the administration and major news outlets. A successful Hey Day means someone getting sent to the hospital because a bag of urine explodes in her eye. A successful Hey Day means the President getting drenched in beer and thrown down the stairs.

And don’t talk to me about “tradition.” If there’s any kind of tradition behind these events it’s one of nihilistic student violence. The tradition of sucking the administration’s c*ck is both new and unwelcome.

So let me propose an alternative pledge:

(more…)

Aliza Shvarts is the grossest human alive.

As the Yale Daily News, IvyGate, and now the DP’s very own Mara Gordon report, for her senior art project at Yale, Shvarts artificially inseminated herself multiple times and herbally induced nine abortions in nine months. Film of the possible miscarriages, as well as the blood Shvarts collected from them, will constitute the art project.

The universal reaction to this news was: BLEEEARRRGH!

After everyone wiped the puke off their chins, naturally, they started arguing. “Is it art?” “Is it pro-choice?” “Is it pro-life?” Mara asks, “Is it ethical?” Her take, as I understand it, is that Shvarts’s work is unethical because it trivializes abortion and provides fodder for the pro-life cause.

My take’s a little different.

(more…)

Sunday was 4/20, widely recognized as national pot-smoking day. I managed to do all the things sober I would have done if I were high — eat an entire medium pizza from Domino’s while playing Mario Golf and Rez at the same time.

Why didn’t I smoke up? No ethical reason — I don’t think illegal equals immoral. I wasn’t particularly busy. And I can’t say it would have been my first time. No, the reason I didn’t participate in our national holiday was a little more subtle and has a lot to do with Penn’s culture.

We have a deserved reputation for “working hard and playing hard.” Even beyond Wharton, ours is an ambitious student body that seeks out practical applications of its education. One of the wallpapers on the University homepage reads, “A pragmatic love of knowledge.”

It’s clear what working hard means. But what exactly is playing hard?

(more…)

Everyone knows about the Vagelos Program, one of the hardest undergraduate tracks at Penn. With an emphasis on biological science and research, Vag has an extremely tight admissions process — only a select few have ever come inside the Vagelos Building. And given its demanding workload, students drop out of Vag all the time. Those who stick with the program spend most of their time in the dank Vag lab working with yeast.

But there’s something else about Vagelos (yes, that’s a soft “g”). Apparently, its name evokes images of the female anatomy, images one perhaps wouldn’t want to associate with a building or a prestigious program.

But don’t tell that to Roy and Diana Vagelos, who, as Bwog reports, have really outdone themselves. The new name of the Barnard student center will be:

The Vagelos Center.

That’s right, the social hub of the all-girls school will be called the Vag.

(more…)

The Fling Concert sure has come a long way since my freshman year, when about 28 slack-jawed Sonic Youth fans huddled around a makeshift stage at Wynn Commons to see their favorite band put on a memorable and really tight performance.

Friday’s show was in many ways the inverse of 2005 — thousands of students stood on Franklin Field’s bleachers, happily grooving to mainstream-approved music of no real substance. But if the performances were generally underwhelming, the crowd’s enthusiasm was truly awe-inspiring. In my four years here I’ve never seen the student body come together with that kind of energy.

Some notes:

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Ours is a culture of nostalgia. Sometimes that nostalgia is immediate, like the million-member Facebook group “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet.” And other times it’s for a time we don’t even really remember, like VH1’s I Love the ’80s.

So now, on the verge of graduation, I think it’s appropriate for me to do a little Penn-themed reminiscing of my own. You underclassmen might not remember, but things weren’t always so easy for us students. I’m talking about an era where if you wanted wireless internet, you went to Van Pelt. My memory’s a little cloudy, but I think it’s coming back to me now…

Back in my day, we had the Triangle Diner. TriDi was open 24/7, and it would deliver right to your room in Spruce or even Hamilton. The walls in TriDi were covered with Polaroids of undergrads and waiters dancing to the 50’s tunes that the jukebox would play. And the disco fries were delicious.

(more…)

This is the first of an at-least-one-part series about how awkward professors are.

Professors get awkward about even the simplest things, like their names. When introducing themselves to students, you can actually see them furrowing their brows as they debate whether to self-identify as “Professor Parker” or just “Peter.” To some extent, it’s an understandable dilemma. The formality of one might place an icy wall between teacher and student forever, while the familiarity of the other might undermine the professor’s authority until the class devolves into an orgy — cellphones ringing, kids snorting blow off the lectern, sheer chaos.

But rather than summoning the resolve to go with one title or the other, professors invariably end up waffling between the two, plunging themselves and the entire class into a purgatory of awkwardness.

(more…)