Today, I feel that it’s appropriate to quote a story originally told by John W. Schlatter in Chicken Soup for the Soul:

“Mark was walking home from school one day when he noticed the boy ahead of him had dropped all of the books he was carrying. Mark knelt down and helped the boy pick up the scattered articles. Since they were going the same way, he helped to carry part of the burden. As they walked, he learned that the boy’s name was Bill…[t]hey arrived at Bill’s house and Mark was invited in. They ended up in the same high school [and when] the long awaited senior year came, Bill asked Mark if they could talk.

Bill reminded him of the day years ago when they had first met. ‘Do you ever wonder why I was carrying so many things that day?’ asked Bill. ‘You see, I cleaned out my locker because I didn’t want to leave a mess. I had stored away some of my mother’s sleeping pills and I was going home to commit suicide. But after we spent some time together…I realized that if I had killed myself, I would have missed that time and so many others that might have followed. So you see, Mark, when you picked up my books that day…[y]ou saved my life.’”

Today — April 16, 2008 — marks the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech Massacre, which left 32 dead and many more injured.

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This is the first in a four part series — my reaction to each of the opinion pieces the candidates write for The DP and finally my reaction to The DP’s endorsement. I write purely critiquing each candidate’s piece, and not from my own political point of view.

Today I cover yesterday’s piece by Senator John McCain.

To call this editorial a poor piece of electioneering would be generous. At absolutely no point does he actually say why people should vote for him to be president. The entire piece is a commentary of youth involvement in politics, and how amazed he is by it. Then again, he doesn’t need to win anything til November so I guess his campaign doesn’t really care very much about this article.

It shows.

At one point, he states that his daughter, Meghan “is proving that young people are participating in the political process without losing their sense of self and authenticity.”
No, Senator, while your daughter is our age and it is admirable that she is campaigning for her dad, young people are proving that young people are participating in the political process.

Does he really need his daughter to tell him what is plainly evident?

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Being Ivy League and elitist an’ all, we have to stand out from our Ivy sister schools. On the outside, we too have old-fashioned buildings, a rather stuffy disposition (in comparison with others such as your stereotypical state school) and, well, we can come across as rather intimidating. The same can be said for Harvard, Yale, even those Ivy League idiots in New Jersey.

So what can we do to set ourselves apart?

Invite our prospective freshmen down at exactly the same time as this university descends into a weekend-long drinking binge. With bouncy castles (moon bounces in American).

It’s the ideal way to bridge that gap between college-style adulthood and those last vestiges of childhood. It also underlines that unlike our sister Ivy universities, we can work hard and have a lot of fun (by the way — read this bollocks article in the Daily Princetonian — it’s about working and playing hard at Princeton. A quick perusal shows this guy has no idea. I especially like the bit about DJ Bob.)

Dear freshmen, we at the University of Pennsylvania have the unique ability to get dangerously wasted and then release our remarkably destructive inner children.

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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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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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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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