Walking around campus at night, you see the typical sights: darkened trees, the occasional raccoon … and, you know, Justin Bieber staring at you motionlessly from the 3rd floor of Spelman 7.
A campus trend of late is to put stunningly lifelike cardboard cut outs of gossip.com’s favorite male heartthrobs in dorm windows, turn on the room lights when night falls and let the silhouettes do their creepy business. Our current cardboard residents include Robert Pattinson adorned with a delightful mustache and delightfully menacing eyebrows, Anderson Cooper dressed in a snazz-tastic power suit and our love Justin Bieber frozen in his oh-so dashing hands-in-pocket shrug.
I disliked him at Tennessee, but ever since he jumped ship after a year of SEC football and left for the greener pastures of USC and the PAC-10, I’ve loathed Lane Kiffin. To me, he symbolizes everything that’s wrong with coaches in NCAA sports — phony smiles, good haircuts, no loyalty, and a devotion to winning only as an end to their own means.
So, why am I talking about Lane Kiffin? Just to make it clear that Sydney Johnson is no Lane Kiffin.
Because after a week+ now of having the Tiger sports fan inside me curled up in the fetal position, mourning the loss of our men’s basketball coach, I think it’s starting to all make sense. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think I would have done the exact same thing. Is this the sports fan equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome? Entirely possible! But hear me out anyways.
The Princeton Ceiling
What was Sydney Johnson’s ceiling at Princeton?
Pretty much exactly what he accomplished last year.
If you are anything like a certain Ink blogger who will remain unnamed, you spend your computing hours (known colloquially around campus as “lectures”) playing Dog Fight 2 and checking if your favorite web comics have updated yet today. In which case, we heard some very exciting news!
Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, will be giving a public lecture Monday, April 11, at 8 p.m. in New Frick (full details here). And to prove Mr. Munroe has some insight into the world of higher education and standardized tests, here are some classic xkcd comics:
Calling all math nerds, Pi lovers and Einstein devotees! If you’re staying on campus for spring break (so near and yet so painfully far), don’t miss out on the second year of a recently birthed Princeton tradition: Pi Day.
Mimi Omicienski of the Princeton Tour Company dreamed up this celebration of all things geeky last year, when she realized that March 14th coincides with Albert Einstein’s birthday. Last year, Omicienski worked with the Princeton Public Library and Joy Chen from JOY Cards (on Chambers Street, close to Masala Grill, FYI. Check it out if you want a cute alternative to Paper Source) to create the first ever Pi Day. It included pie-eating contests, an Einstein look-alike competition, and an intense pi recitation showdown. The winner? Gareth Conway, son of our own superstar mathlete John Conway.
But this year, the Pi Day people are stepping up their game. March 14th has been extended to an entire “Geek Freak Weekend,” featuring Dinky and plane rides with Einstein (as in, Einstein re-enactors. Not his dead body. That would be morbid), presentations from our plasma physics lab, pi-themed sales, more pie eating, and a math competition with a $314.159 prize.
“Think Disney, and instead of Cinderella, you have Einstein,” Omicienski said.
High school students next year will be able to apply “single-choice early action.” The application is non-binding — if accepted, the student has until the end of the regular admissions process to decide — but students who apply early to Princeton cannot apply early anywhere else.
“In eliminating our early program four years ago, we hoped other colleges and universities would do the same and they haven’t,” said President Shirley Tilghman in an article posted on the Princeton homepage. ”By reinstating an early program, we hope we can achieve two goals: provide opportunities for early application for students who know that Princeton is their first choice, while at the same time sustaining and even enhancing the progress we have made in recent years in diversifying our applicant pool and admitting the strongest possible class.”
I’ll be honest: without Jane Randall on ANTM and CDY and Jonathan Schwartz on The Amazing Race, I was starting to go into serious Princeton-on-TV withdrawal. For a couple of months, the Orange Bubble achieved the pinnacle of mainstream media fame — and then the world promptly forgot us, and I could no longer use the excuse of, “Oh you know, just keeping up with what’s going on around campus,” when a five-minute study break turned into a Hulu marathon.
But on Tuesday, Princeton will be back for another fifteen minutes of reality TV fame when our very own House of Cupcakes will compete for a sweet $10,000 prize on the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars. Ruthie and Ron Bzdewka, HOC’s owners, will battle three other master bakers in a series of elimination challenges until just one cupcake genius remains.
Go on ... you know you want one!
Don’t let the sugar and cute factor fool you — this is war, and may the best cupcake win. So grab some of HOC’s creations (the red velvet flavor is their most popular, and perfect for a post-Valentine’s Day screening) and tune in to the Food Network channel at 9pm on Tuesday, 2/15 to watch the Bzdewkas battle for cupcake glory. And in case you needed another reason to root for the home team, if HOC wins they’ll donate the prize to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.
UCrime.com (which is kind of a funny name … UCrime. You crime. You! Commit crime!) compiles crime data from universities across the country, and each category of crime–from arson to shootings to vandalism–is graphed on a map of the university campus with adorable themed icons.
Icon characters include Graffiti-Can-That-Looks-Remarkably-Like-Pepper-Spray for vandalism, Money Bags for theft and Man in Trenchcoat for robbery. I wonder if they have names.
Princeton crimes seem to be pretty ordinary: fewer trench coats, more money bags. There is some bicycle theft here, some underaged drinking there. However, there’s one true gem of campus crime that will never cease to amaze.
See, when Prometheus came to Earth with fire from Mount Olympus, he must have stopped in Princeton seeing as our lovely school has clinched the “Most Arson Award” in the Ivy League three times in three years. The last incident occurred on October 9th, 2010 in Frist Campus Center.
This couple has been competing together for 12 years straight. Could our town get any cuter?
When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to the New Jersey Oyster Bowl on Sunday, he looked confused for a second – “What, is that like, an ocean science competition?”
Typical Princeton kid. Unfortunately, the Oyster Bowl isn’t related to marine biology in any way. It is, however, a perfect example of the small-town charm that surrounds our university. For the 12th year in a row, hundreds of townies gathered at Blue Point Grill on Nassau Street this Sunday (if you haven’t been there, I can now vouch for their amazing oysters and clam chowder, and I’m sure the other dishes are great too. Dinner only, though) for Princeton’s 12th annual Super Bowl Sunday oyster-slurping contest!
Highlights included a surprise appearance by Congressman Rush Holt, a competitor who’d been on Hell’s Kitchen with Gordon Ramsay, and a thrilling one-minute slurp-off between the two women’s finalists – one of whom had cut her finger on an oyster shell in an earlier round, but still slurped her way to victory with blood dripping into her cocktail sauce, refusing to take a band-aid in case she accidentally ate it. Hardcore? Yeah. Fo real.
Maybe someone from our undergraduate student body should compete next year – the grand prize last year was a trip for 2 to Cancun, and this year’s was a vacation in the Caribbean. Plus, all the proceeds went to support the Susan G. Komen Foundation for breast cancer research. If your eating club serves oysters, start practicing now.
Another bicker season has come and gone, leaving a trail of PrincetonFMLs in its wake. But have you ever wondered: what were eating clubs like back in the day? Could you have joined Key and Seal Club? And where were all the chicks?
For our wistful alumni and amusement-seeking readers, look no further:
Photos taken by Robert Joyce '13 and Prathik Root '12 (Middlebury College).
Study abroad took on a whole new level of intensity for Robert Joyce ’13, one of five Princeton students who were supposed to spend this semester in Egypt.
Joyce, who was on a program with Middlebury College in Alexandria, just returned to the United States a few days ago. His story of what he and fellow students saw during the Egyptian protests involves tear gas, burning trucks, and staying up all night to fight off thugs with a nail-studded 2×4. Basically, like something out of an action movie.
The other four students were Oren Samet, Michael Gibbs, Kelly Roache and Tal Eisenzweig, all juniors who were on a Woody Woo task force in Cairo. All of them are safely back in the U.S. now, and meeting with a dean today to discuss options for the rest of the semester.
Remember GoodCrush? Well, newcomerLikeALittle.com bears a striking resemblance to Princeton’s last “missed connections” website.
Started by students at Stanford and expanding to schools across the country, LikeALittlecombines ease of use, anonymity, and mild stalker tendencies into one Internet platform, making compliments to that cute girl in Frist much easier to make. (We all know the community was sorely lacking an outlet for awkward anonymous flirting since GoodCrush was taken down.)
Presumably, LikeALittle could be used as a dating site: there’s a feature that lets you message the author of the flirt post if you think it’s about you. But in reality, this would only work if a substantial percentage of your school’s student body uses the site. Given the number of posts on the site, that’s not entirely true right now.
Have any tips for us? Drop us a line at pressclb@princeton.edu
5:00 PM — Everywhere
Brian Wilson, after pitching the winning game of the 2010 World Series, expresses all your emotions perfectly in a single sentence.
Congrats guys, another Dean’s Date managed. Now please, for the sake of your sanity, either go to bed or start having fun.
– WAS
4:47 PM — Underneath the invisibility cloak
Did you see us make it disappear? We thought we’d do Princeton a solid and rid it of one more procrastination tool during the final stretch, so we put the invisibility cloak over the Dean’s Date post. Some may call this a “technical glitch.” Semantics…
If you missed it, keep clicking the refresh button to see if the magic happens again…
– SJP
4:42 PM — McCosh Courtyard
There is currently an insanely long line for these sweatpants stretching from the mouth of the cathedral to (last I checked) to around Murray-Dodge. Good luck if you’re planning on getting a pair. I just did. They are silky smooth.
As we head into the final painful stages of sleep deprivation and prolonged mental activity, we can use some tips from others trained to push their bodies to the breaking point—marathon runners. While DCW may insist on a divide between the cool sporty kids and the dorks who wear their allnighter badges like Olympic Gold medals, I maintain that we share some common ground with our athlete friends.
Here’s what Mary Wittenberg, president and chief executive of the New York Road Runners, the group that puts on the ING New York City Marathon, has to say about competitive marathon runners:
“Mental tenacity — and the ability to manage and even thrive on and push through pain — is a key segregator between the mortals and immortals in running,” Ms. Wittenberg said.
You can see it in the saliva-coated faces of the top runners in the New York marathon, Ms. Wittenberg added.
“We have towels at marathon finish to wipe away the spit on the winners’ faces,” she said. “Our creative team sometimes has to airbrush it off race photos that we want to use for ad campaigns.”
If you’re covered in slobber and waiting for your towel at the end of this finish line, you’ve done us proud. Keep kicking.
–SJP
3:19 PM — Cafe Viv
So I was looking for a little inspiration (for this blog post, not for my actual Dean’s Date papers, mind you – I am an upstanding follower of the honor code, and let’s face it, if you’re still looking for inspiration at this point you have no business being on a blog site. Just kidding, we want you here anyway.) A little poking around the dark recesses of the Internet brought out this gem: EssayGenerator.
Type in any phrase, and it gives you a more or less grammatically correct, albeit very short, essay on the subject of your choice. Fun! Let’s see what it has to say about Dean’s Date…
“As soon as a child meets dean’s date they are changed.”
“Though I would rather be in bed I will now examine the primary causes of dean’s date.”
Don’t let me get your hopes up, though. It goes downhill pretty fast:
“Let us consider the words of that silver tongued orator, that most brilliant mind Elijah Bootlegger ‘A man must have his cake and eat it in order to justify his actions.’ [2] I argue that his insight into dean’s date provided the inspiration for these great words. To paraphrase, the quote is saying ‘dean’s date wins votes.’ Simple as that.
The question which we must each ask ourselves is, will we allow dean’s date to win our vote?”
It sure doesn’t have my vote…and neither does this essay machine, for that matter.
Two hours – it’s go time.
-LEZ
3:10 PM– Second Floor Frist
As the final hour draws ever closer…
Still have a bajillion words/pages to write?
All the nearby print stations are broken?
Operating on less than .5 hours of sleep?
Embrace it.
–VC
3:03 pm – Delirium is a funky place
If you’re like me, you’re anal about saving your work. You ‘save as’ your essays multiple times, hoping that the extra copies will ensure that the labor of your love/desperation won’t suddenly get up and disappear.
Sounds good and all, but the problem with this approach is that you get a folder full of papers titled:
‘Yoga in Prisons’
‘Yoga in Prisons, second draft’
‘Yoga in Prisons, updated for reals this time’
‘Deans Date copy’
‘FINAL JRN paper!!!’
‘NO PICK THIS ONE. FINAL FINAL COPY’
‘JRN story HERE LOOK HERE’
Don’t ask me why I don’t use the streamlined system of titling them ‘Draft 1,’ ‘Draft 2,’ and so on. I assume my mind doesn’t think in such ordered terms early Tuesday morning. I like my titles to have Punch. Energy. Pizzazz!
So anyways, here’s what happens. I open ‘FINAL JRN paper!!!’ ready to edit and submit. Shocked to find gaping holes (read: at least 5/18 pages) in essay. Wonder, “OMG, did I fall asleep and not finish the paper like I thought I did? Did I really not finish it? I DELUDED MYSELF into thinking I finished?!?” Panic ensues as I frantically start writing, anything- anything really, to fill up the space.
Twenty minutes later, for some reason, I go through my notes, and revisit my alternate drafts. Realize that ‘FINAL JRN paper!!!’ is not, in fact, the final one. ‘Deans Date copy’ is. Everything is there.
All is well.
-SG
2:33 PM — Firestone Trustee Room
Guys, you’re so close! But, I know the last stretch can be grueling. Are you lacking motivation? Let this guy rev you up.
If HE can do it, YOU CAN TOO.
– WAS
2:30 pm –Back to the hallway with the Turkish Alphabet poster.
So, when professors say that we must include our signature of the Honor code with the electronic copies of our papers, they mean that we can sign in Paint, right?
Right.
Here are some of my greater samples.
–LRW
2:17 PM — The Internet
Like us on Facebook. Don’t pretend like we’re not friends by this point, we’ve been up all night together.
– UPC
1:33 pm — In my room (uh, still…)
The only workouts I ever manage to squeeze in on Dean’s Date are a few chairside jumping jacks to break up the blood clots in my legs.
Thankfully, a tipster sent in this video from the Princeton Crew Team. It’s a first-person view of some strenuous-looking speed gauntlet, and it’s pretty (vicariously) invigorating.
Sayeth our tipster: “You feel like you’re actually getting dizzy with him in the beginning, and if you go to 1:18, the guy FALLS and skins his hands. I feel like I just exercised.
– DCW
1:21 p.m. – The minds of LMNT
It was the A-Teens last night, LMNT today. I fear that I will forever be known as the girl-who’s-obsessed-with-teeny-bopper music, but please, this is as good a day as any for flashbacks to my junior high glory days.
I couldn’t find the official music video, but this is so much better. How old are these kids, anyways?
*TRIVIA: LMNT, pronounced “element,” was chosen as a band name because the musicians liked the symbolic meaning. The four basic substances that make up the universe – earth, wind, fire, and water – are completely different, yet coexist in harmony…wait for it…just like the band members themselves!
Gotta love diversity.
-SG
1:00 PM — Cafe Viv
Time’s getting pretty tight, but can you spare three seconds? You’re here, so I’m guessing yes.
For extra giggles: Open the video in YouTube and keep pressing ’2.’ Repeat ad nauseam.
Try not to fail as hard this Dean’s Date.
– WAS
12:55 — Still in bed, still working, still living, still blogging
According to Brian No ’10, while the liveblog post may have 1,250 views, the homepage here at www.universitypressclub.com has over 2,100.
“So, like, wouldn’t it be accurate to say that something along the lines of half the school has read the liveblog?”
