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.

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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.

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?

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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.

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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:

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The surgery-suspense genre has been thriving lately, as Jessica Alba will attest. Just look at her two most recent films — Awake and The Eye. The first has something to do with a heart transplant murder scheme. The second is an Asian horror remake about the spooky history of a pair of donated eyes.

These films are popular because they exploit the natural fear of going under the knife. But sometimes fact is freakier than fiction. As the DP reports, the details of a developing lawsuit against the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania rival anything Hollywood could come up with.

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Pardon my language… but today sucks. Tomorrow, too.

For the first time in four years — and only the third time in a decade — Penn missed the men’s NCAA basketball tournament.

Did I just lose your sympathy?

Look. Maybe you’re blasé about Penn athletics or sports-illiterate. But, with our basketball slide likely to continue, let me explain why a winning team benefits the school.

(And if the cost is our ethical standards? Meh.)

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A study called “Booksthatmakeyoudumb” has been making the rounds, and I finally took the time to check it out. Created by one Virgil Griffith, it claims to map the correlation between one’s favorite books and one’s intelligence. According to “Booksthatmakeyoudumb,” the “smartest” book out there is Nabokov’s Lolita (it’s about white people), and the “dumbest” is Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (it’s about black people).

A closer look shows that of the “stupidest” 10 books, 8 are written by African-Americans. Naturally, this raises some serious questions about race and intelligence. It’s unfortunate that Griffith refuses to address them. But it’s unforgivable that his method actually invents them…

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It’s March, which means it’s not February, which means FebClub is over. As promised, here are my thoughts on the second half of the month. After receiving some Class Board death threats feedback that my “Good, Bad, and Ugly” categorization was too negative, I’m switching things up to “Great, Pretty Good, and Nice Try!”

It should also be noted that my participation kind of flagged towards the end. I finished with 20 stamps, putting me shy of the much-coveted Class of ‘08 beer stein. So if there was a particularly great or awful event that I missed, let me know. Anyway, here it goes…

The Great: If Dave & Busters is the STD-riddled skank who makes the rounds in your neighborhood, then University Pinball is the unnoticed shy girl living next door who would be really popular if people took the time to get to know her. This is an old-school arcade. They’ve got air hockey, pool, three pinball machines, the Simpsons, Soul Calibur II, Tekken 5, Mortal Kombat 3, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Area 51, and plenty of other games. The machines take quarters, not credit cards. And best of all, Class Board actually threw their weight around for once and made the event a “Free Play” night. But I’ll definitely be back even if it means dropping $5 to beat the Mothership…

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David Lei might not sound concerned that The DP missed the boat on who’s performing at Spring Fling… but secretly, all of us on the Spin are seething because — again! — we’ve been beaten to a huge scoop by other, unnamed “blogs of the Ivy League.” Or something sort of like that. Anyway, if only we’d stop writing about politics for a minute and start snooping instead, maybe we could actually break some real news.

Luckily, as I checked my e-mail today — desperate to find something to write about — I found the following press flyer, from some student group no doubt familiar with my hard-hitting work and hoping I’d be their Boswell. I could check this with Mask & Wig, but… nah. This PhotoShop looks pretty legitimate to me!

So I’m please to share that — and hold on to your hats… (more…)