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Author Archives: Spencer Gaffney

Steve Forbes, Boxer. Not a graduate of Princeton University.

Steve Forbes, Boxer. Not a graduate of Princeton University.

Forbes Magazine recently named Princeton one of the world’s most beautiful college campuses. And, frankly, we’re inclined to agree with them. It is really pretty here, especially now that the weather’s getting nice and the snow is melting. So, thanks for the shout out Forbes!

Here’s what the mag had to say:

This classic American campus is “straight out of central casting,” says architect Natalie Shivers, who has been guiding the prestige Ivy Leaguer through an ambitious expansion plan. Princeton’s style is pure Collegiate Gothic; most of it executed in gray stone covered in, yes, ivy. As imposing as these old stone structures are, the campus keeps life on a “human scale” by preserving green spaces and “walkability,” says Shivers. “Everything on campus is within a 10-minute walk.” Sinuous footpaths, archways, plazas–all are designed to inspire spontaneous discussion and learning.

What’s this? You have a video for us? Aww, you shouldn’t have!

(Note: after watching the video, they actually shouldn’t have. The music is super cheesy and the thesis seems to be that Princeton is special because we have arches and courtyards. But watch it anyways after the jump!)

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iphone-unicorn-wallpaper

Such a majestic creature

Stop reading this post right now if you want to get any work done this week.

Seriously, stop reading. Close the browser and do something else.

Still here? Ok, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Robot Unicorn Attack is the single most addictive game on the planet. We discovered it around 3:30 a.m. early Sunday morning. We didn’t go to bed until 6. We just couldn’t. Stop. Playing.

The game designers describe their creation thusly on the website:

Jump into the steel hooves of a robot unicorn, prancing freely amongst the lush purple grasses and rainbow-strewn backdrops of your wildest fantasies.

Right. Anyways, the game’s delightfully simple controls and game play make it a pleasure to spend five hours at a time playing. Z makes the robot unicorn jump. X makes him (her?) crash through stars. And if you hit anything, you lose.

But the highlight of the game is the original song that accompanies the game play, performed in the style of the great power ballads of the 80s. The opening line: “Open your eyes/I see/Your eyes are open.” Poetry!

So why are we posting a flash game on a blog about Princeton? Because we’re college students. And we have stuff to do. And we need other, funner stuff to do while we should be doing the original, less fun stuff. That’s why.

(P.S. Personal best as of Monday afternoon: 45,756.)

(P.P.S. Monday night: 56,486. 87,884. Fear me, mortals. And post your high scores in the comments section!)

Princeton's other (better) basketball team

Princeton's other (better) basketball team

Well, after all the excitement around the Princeton men’s basketball team possibly going undefeated in the Ivy League, we lost to Cornell and Brown in a span of three short games. There are still a few games left in the season, but Princeton has been all but eliminated from winning the Ivy League title.

But lost in our otherwise obsessive coverage of Princeton basketball has been this year’s real story: the women’s team is good.

Like, really, really, really good.

How good, you ask? Hold on to your socks:

How about a 21-2 overall record, including an undefeated 9-0 in the Ivy League?

How about their 21 wins being the most ever by the women’s basketball team. And they still have 5 games left on the schedule!

How about the only two losses on the year coming to perennial national powerhouses UCLA and Rutgers?

How about all of this coming from a team that went 14-14 last year?

But if you want to know if a team’s really good, listen to the way its coach talks after a blowout win. Following Saturday’s 64-38 drubbing of Brown in Providence, head coach Courtney Banghart said, “That wasn’t our best game, but it was a win. We will regroup and be ready for Cornell and Columbia next weekend.”

God help Cornell and Columbia.

In other words, this is our mea culpa basketball blog post. Yes, it was fun and exciting to write about a team that Pat Forde talked about on ESPN. But at the end of the day, only one Princeton basketball team has played this season in a way that’s truly transcendent, and that’s the Lady Tigers. Sorry it took us 23 games to figure that out.

(image and statistics from goprincetontigers.com)

Woodrow Wilson: Wearer of Fascinating Glasses

Woodrow Wilson: Wearer of Fascinating Glasses

Today didn’t feel like a Monday. The line for PJ’s was out the door; people seemed happy and chipper to just be out and about in the sunshine. What’s going on?

Wait a minute! Happy Presidents Day!

Normally this would be the point in the blog post where I rant about how Princeton doesn’t give us the day off for Monday holidays. But as a college student with a three-day weekend and a grand total of eleven hours of class every week, it feels a little disingenuous for me to be complaining about, well, anything.

So instead, here’s a tribute to former Princeton and American President Woodrow Wilson, the man Nerve.com just ranked the 16th sexiest US President. (Teddy Roosevelt just beat out JFK for the number one spot. If you ask us, Taft got robbed.)

Here’s what Nerve had to say about Wilson:

Tall, fatherly and only a little bit creepy. He might be a bit too Mr. Rogers for some people, but he has some good bone structure.

And, if the above picture is any indication, a rocking pair of rimless glasses.

Should we be proud? Probably not. Are we? Yep.

In tangentially related news, applications for Woody Woo are due tomorrow at 1 p.m. Maybe someday Nerve will say that you, too, are really, really, ridiculously, sort of good looking.

(Hat tip to Daily Intel for posting the Nerve story.)

(image source: http://royalromania.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/president_woodrow_wilson_po.jpg)

Keep the faith Pat Forde!

Keep the faith Pat Forde!

Pat Forde, ESPN.com columnist, actually mentioned Princeton in his most recent edition of the men’s basketball column “Forde Minutes”! Not only that, he thinks we could go undefeated this year!

Well, only kinda sorta. He thinks we could go undefeated in Ivy League play, since, at 4-0, it’s still technically possible. But we’d have to beat Cornell twice, who’s also undefeated in the Ivy League.

How does PF Flier (Pat Forde needs a nickname!) handicap the odds? Umm, well, he gives Cornell an 80% chance of going undefeated and Princeton, err, a 1% chance.

Jim Carrey, bring it on home!

(image source: http://assets.espn.go.com/media/motion/2008/1201/dm_081201_cfb_forde_bmoc.jpg)

Free, and apparently epicly terrible

Free, and apparently epicly terrible

Anyone noticed the shrink-wrapped box sets littering dorm hallways, mysteriously titled “Wild Animus”? We did, and our fancy was struck, so we decided to do a little digging. What are these bizarre boxes? How did they get here? And what do they want with us?

We took to the information superhighway in search of answers. Our first stop was an old blog post by a fellow truth-searcher, one Robert Nagle of the blog idiotprogrammer. It turns out Wild Animus’s author, Rich Shapero, made his fortune doing something with technology and decided to use his fortune to publish and give out free copies of his book.  Over time, he’s added CDs and other media to create a sort of immersive literary experience (an experience someone recently decided Princeton students needed to have).

But here’s the thing: apparently, the book sucks. Like, really sucks. Here’s a collection of reviews from around the web:

“Deficating [sic] onto a page does not count as writing a novel.” – anonymous, idiotprogrammer

“This is easily one of the worst books I have ever read.” – Patrick Burnett, amazon.com

Worst book ever.” – cade, goodreads.com

And, to be fair, a slightly more positive review:

I haven’t read the book yet, but the spoken word CD series is worth a listen to anyone interested in psychedelics or survival journeying or vision questing.” – Janto, idiotprogrammer

So there you have it. Apparently this thing has gone global, with people receiving and ignoring the book in Europe, North America, and possibly Asia. But since Princeton students have so much time for pleasure reading (and a vibrant psychedelic community), I’m sure “Wild Animus” is going to catch on here in Central Jersey. Or, you know, not.

(image source: http://www.richshapero.com/images/store_boxset.png)

Mmmmm. Bill Bradley.

Enjoy it, Cornell. We've been here before.

After the boys from Ithaca crushed their Crimson cousins Saturday night by a score of 86-50, Cornell moved into the top 25 in the ESPN/USA Today coaches’ poll for the top teams in college basketball.

This is a big deal for Ivy League basketball. The Ancient Eight haven’t had a ranked team since back when I was in the second grade, otherwise known as the 1997-1998 season.

(And who was that team? The Princeton Tigers of course.)

It’s been a good run for Cornell basketball. They’ve made the NCAA tournament the last two years, and it looks like they’ll be headed back to the big dance.

We’re actually  a little intimidated. Basketball used to be our thing, our defining sport. Cornell has now officially seized that mantle. And we can’t even take comfort in our new(er) sport of dominance, lacrosse, because Cornell bounced us from the NCAA tournament last year.

So instead we’ll do what we always do in these situations: hearken back to our glorious past, and remind the young up and comers who still stands dominant in the annals of Ivy League Basketball history (other than Penn).

(This also gives us the opportunity to make fun of Harvard’s impressive ZERO men’s basketball Ivy League titles. And making fun of Harvard always makes us feel better.)

Full feel-good historical standings after the jump!

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The Princeton Crier/Toddler, announcing P/D/F reform

The Princeton Crier/Toddler, announcing P/D/F reform

The Princeton Faculty voted late Monday afternoon to approve substantial reforms to the P/D/F policy.

Ben Lund ‘10, the USG Academics Chair, called the reform “a huge win for the student body.” Lund and Helen Chen ‘10 wrote the new policy and then presented it last spring to the USG Senate and Deans Malkiel (Dean of the College) and Quimby (Deputy Dean of the College. Lund and Chen brought the reform to the Committee on Course of Study and the Committee on Examinations and Standing, both of which approved the measure. The faculty was the final group that needed to approve the reform before it could be put in place.

So what does the reform actually change? Under the old policy, students could choose to Pass/D/Fail a class until the beginning of the fifth week of the semester. You could rescind the P/D/F later in the semester and take the course for a grade, but the course still counted as a P/D/F (students are allowed to P/D/F four courses over their Princeton career).

With the new policy, students don’t elect to P/D/F a course until the seventh week of class, and have until the ninth week to decide. That means that everyone is technically taking the course for a grade for the first seven weeks, even if they plan on ultimately P/D/Fing. Because you can choose to P/D/F a course through the ninth week of the semester, you will no longer be able to rescind the P/D/F option once you elect to do it.

“The USG’s proposed PDF policy was extremely popular,” said Connor Diemand-Yauman ‘10 in an email to The Ink. “I am extremely pleased with the outcome of the faculty vote and proud of this administration for pushing through the first major reform in grading policy in over a decade.”

Analysis after the jump!

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Remember that post a few weeks ago about the impending Princeton FML site? Well, it’s here, and so far the posts have been less than stellar.

Look, college-specific FML sites are a great idea. The best moments on sites like FML come when you’re nodding your head while you’re laughing, because the comment rings true. And having a common set of experiences to draw from should mean more of these moments.

But too many of the posts are hyper-generic, in the mold of, “I’m a Princeton student and have a lot of work. FML.” It seems like people are using Princeton FML as a place for mundane complaints, which fundamentally misses the point. FML is meant to celebrate the absurd moments, the times when life gets so ridiculously bad that you can’t help but laugh. And we, in turn, get to laugh with you, a wonderful combination of cathartic venting and schadenfreude at its very finest.

It’s still early, and the rate at which people are posting is a good sign – the more we post, the better we’ll get at FML. And we’re really looking forward to the inevitable moment when we’ll be able to identify the author of a particularly funny FML. But for now, there are only a couple real gems in the otherwise lackluster crop so far.

Our favorites after the jump.

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We use laptops instead!

We use laptops instead!

The USG just released the list of candidates running in the winter 2009 elections (full list here). A couple quick things worth noting about this year’s candidate pool:

The majority of positions will not be contested!

Seven positions (ULC Chair, Academics Chair, Treasurer, and both Senate seats for the classes of 2011 and 2012) have only one candidate running. This is going to make it really tricky for the USG to mess up these specific elections. But if anyone can do it, the USG can!

A sophomore is running for USG President!

Michael Yaroshefsky ‘12 is one of four candidates running for USG President, but he’s the only one who isn’t a junior. Leslie-Bernard Joseph ‘06 was famously defeated when he ran his sophomore year and won his junior year.*

The entire freshman class is running for Senator!

Not really. But 19 candidates are running, more than all the candidates running for all the other positions combined! It seems like this happens every year – lots of kids run, lots of hopes and dreams get smashed, and the crushing inevitability of incumbency begins its slow and deliberate process.

The take-away? Unless you’re a freshman or passionate about the presidency and vice-presidency, your vote isn’t really going to matter. You will, however, get to use the super-sweet new voting system, which for us is incentive enough. Yay democracy!

*Correction: An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly stated that Leslie-Bernard Joseph ‘06 had won the presidency in his sophomore year.

(image source: http://artupton.com/newtom/newsflashes/images/voting_booth.gif)

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Roger Hughes will have to return the headset. He'll probably get to keep the sunglasses.

Princeton has fired head football coach Roger Hughes, the Associated Press reported Sunday.

Hughes was 47-52 during his ten year tenure at Princeton. The Tigers finished this season 4-6 after beating Dartmouth Saturday.

Princeton went 9-1 in 2006, winning the Ivy League. But Hughes had only two other winning seasons since coming to Princeton in 2000.

Athletic Director Gary Walters said he would meet with Hughes to figure out the now ex-coach’s role as he finishes his contract, according to the statement released by the Princeton Athletic Department.

Stay tuned for the new-coach search. Last we checked, former Steelers coach Bill Cowher, P ‘08 ‘10, was still looking for a job…

(image source: http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/state/new_jersey/20091122_ap_princetonfiresfootballcoachrogerhughes.html)

A towel very similar to the one I was left wearing after fire safety locked me out of my room

A towel very similar to the one I was left wearing after fire safety locked me out of my room

I’ve got a bone to pick with Fire Safety.

This is new territory for me. See, I’ve never really had a problem with Fire Safety. Sure, it was a little disconcerting to return to my room last year and find a little note telling me someone had been there, looking through my stuff trying to find anything potentially unsafe or any “obstructions” to my “means of egress.” But since I never painted my room or did anything else to my living space that required much effort, I wasn’t fined, and Fire Safety inspections just seemed like a mysterious but ultimately benign event.

That all changed this morning, when the actions of Fire Safety left me feeling exposed, chilly, and embarrassed.

Here’s what happened:

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