RT @tigermagazine: @UnivPressClub Maybe they were all screaming because they suddenly realized they lived in Wilson. #2012/01/21
Yes, screaming Wilson freshmen, it's snowing. It's also 3:45 am and people have been yelling out their windows for you to shut up for 20min. #2012/01/21
Expect the worst from every printer. #DeansDate#2012/01/17
Articles filed under “Musings”
Other than the occasional high-profile arrest of a professor, Princeton hasn’t seemed all that gripped by the “Occupy” movements. In Cambridge, Harvard has restricted access to the Yard over “security concerns” raised by Occupy Harvard; so far no tent cities have sprung up in front of Nassau Hall. There isn’t much immediacy to the movement here on campus in central New Jersey; it’s something that’s happening out there, somewhere else.
Well, that changed for a little while on Friday night, as the “Occupy the Highway” march came through our secluded glen, Washington Post reporter in tow, on their way down to D.C. They were met by erudite, thoughtful students who shared their divergent views on economic theory and philosophy with the protestors.
The conflagration began after Princeton student Whitney Blodgett started to yell at the marchers as they passed by the bar. “We’re the 1 percent!” Blodgett yelled at them, laughing and making a thumbs up sign. “Get a job!” his friends yelled in chorus.
Alcohol. Freshmen. Pseudonyms. (The reporter was initially given the name “Whetney Brockton.”) Light jeering. Yup, those are all the elements I would want present for the lead anecdote about Princeton students’ views on the Occupy movement. Fortunately, the Post was able to get a different student viewpoint, too. What did this other student, incidentally also a freshman and, according to the Post, the only person to show up in support of the march, have to say about the general sentiment on campus?
“That’s what happens when you come to a campus of ibankers,” the student, who did not give her name, said. “Princeton students are benefitting from this system, so why would they protest?”
In today’s inaugural edition of Debatable (name subject to change if we come up with a better name), our man on the street tackles a burning question: what hot dog reigns supreme over Princeton University?
The hot dog’s got a lot going for it. No really, it does. It’s portable. Wildly customizable (crazy Chicago with its celery salt and its pickle spears!). Unofficial sandwich of baseball and camping trips.
And it’s cheap. Like, really cheap. And, because Princeton eats can get real expensive real quick, the hot dog can be the perfect meal (or late night snack) hungry students looking to chow down on the cheap (and the success of the Free Food @ Princeton email list seems to suggest that there are plenty).
Now that we’ve spoken to the merits of this noble sausage-in-roll, where’s the best place to get your mitts on one of these bad boys in town? Our committee of one counts down his hot dog rankings, using the massively unscientific method of “thinking about times he’s eaten a hot dog and trying to recall a vague sense of the experience.” Are you as excited as we are? Then without further ado…
DEBATABLE: TOP DOG IN PRINCETON
4. Footlong Dog, Chuck’s Wings
There’s nothing wrong with the footlong at Chuck’s, per se. Basically griddled and stuffed into a normal sized bun, there’s something enjoyably cartoonish about this dog. But the wiener pales in comparison to the other offerings of this Spring St. eatery, and just doesn’t hold up to the competition. Seriously, if you’re going to Chuck’s, you’re there for the wings, or you took a wrong turn.
3. Standard Hot Dog, Studio 34
Mostly I just want to talk about Studio 34, the Platform 9 3/4 of the Princeton on-campus dining world. I have never been able to find Studio 34 in less than thirty minutes, or during daylight hours [Note: I recently discovered that this is because Studio 34 opens at 8 p.m.]. But come late night study sessions (or, you know, other reasons a Princeton student might be out and about after a certain hour), the Studio magically appears from somewhere deep within Butler College. The hot dog is standard – self-serve, cooked on the sort of rotating grills you find at convenience stores, slathered in ketchup and mustard, and eaten in the tinfoil wrapping the buns come in. This one’s all about the journey.
2. Wawa Hot Dog
You never expect too much, and it’s always a little bit better than you thought it was going to be. Plus, chopped onions.
1. Olives Hot Dog
The Olives hot dog is a thing of beauty. Toasted sub roll, a split frank on the griddle, and a world of condiments. Red onion’s nice. So’s hot sauce. Go nuts and toss in some tomatoes if that floats your boat. And it doesn’t cost a whole lot — more breakfast sandwich prices than not-breakfast sandwich prices. It’s a classy hot dog. Grab a seltzer in a glass bottle by the front door or something. Eat it in the courtyard by the library if its nice out, or wrangle a seat at one of the stools along the back wall if it isn’t. A change up? To be sure. But a worthwhile one.
A graduate student reported late last evening that a man exposed himself while she was running on the tow path between Harrison Street and Washington Road at about 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 27, 2011.
Maybe we’re the only school that takes public indecency as a serious campus-wide safety threat. But here’s something else I noticed about the “crime prevention tips” section of Public Safety’s emails (thanks LW ‘14):
When running in isolated areas, run with a friend.
Stay alert and tuned in to your surroundings. Be aware and prepared.
Stand tall and walk confidently; do not show fear.
Trust your instincts, and if you do not feel comfortable in a place or situation, leave.
Wait, are we dealing with flashers or mountain lions? (Seriously, compare the list of Mountain Lion Safety Tips to Public Safety’s. The resemblance is uncanny.)
Some additional safety tips substituting the word “cougar” with “creeper” after the jump.
Orange Bubble Syndrome is something that many of us take for granted. We get stuck in a cycle of rotating between weekends at Prospect, weekdays at Firestone and occasional excursions for late meal at Frist. We micromanage our days in GCals of rainbow-colored sleep deprivation. We might stop once in a while to read something from the Prince UPC, complain about P-Safe’s lockout policy, scoff at Dean Malkiel’s dog or laugh at the bicker plans for Cannon Club.
Read the news? Uhhh. I'll pencil that in someday, okay?
But where is the globally aware citizenship that all the admission brochures advertised? Where are the scholars in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations (aside from sharpening their get-recruited-for-I-banking skills in Robertson or Tower, that is)? A Prince column earlier this week (okay, we do read them too) called for more campus dialogue on current events. The Middle East is erupting. Japan is in shambles. Basically, 2011 thus far has reached a point where I expect a new revolution or disaster every time I refresh the NYT homepage.
I know, I know. We’re busy. We’re tired. We work really hard. Sometimes it is easier to just sit in Whitman dining hall, discussing the merits of different types of fruit-cereal-froyo combinations (banana, Smart Start, vanilla. Win!) instead of debating the pros and cons of intervention in Libya.
In the last week or so, though, I’ve become increasingly convinced that it’s actually easier than you think to break out of the Orange Bubble. Meaningful campus dialogue can exist! Even when it’s not awkwardly facilitated by Sustained Dialogue! Here, I give you five reasons why we can and should think outside the bubble:
Decision Date (March 30) for Princeton and other major universities is drawing ever closer.
So, how are you feeling? Maybe you think you’re already set thanks to a good legacy background or some killer athletic prowess. Or maybe you’ll be sitting at your computer in four days, nail-bitingly paranoid: what if my school tells me I’m accepted but then realizes they rejected me? You mean like University of Delaware’s computer glitch this year? Or the colossal mishap of University of California, San Diego that affected 29,000 applicants?
Oops, yeah, don’t think about that.
Maybe you found some spelling mistakes in your college apps (personal story). Maybe your parents are already suing your pre-school for ruining your chances of getting into an Ivy League school.
But I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be okay. Take a deep breath. Do yourself a favor and don’t log on to College Confidential forums for a while.
Check out all that cretin ivy (image source: ee.princeton.edu)
Oh, sorry, that’s “New Ways to Procrastinate.” In case you were running out of brief (?) diversions to get you through the upcoming week, or simply looking for new websites to add to your Self Control app, here’s a good one that can keep you going for a while. (If you don’t believe me, just check out today’s Tower Talk e-mails — 49 e-mails later, it’s still funny. Sort of.)
Just type in your name, a friend’s name, perhaps a mortal enemy’s name, and let the little website do its work. What you get out? Hilarious – and often terrifyingly accurate – anagrams of what you put in.
Take, for example, a small controlled experiment done on the site to elicit its true feelings about the Ivies. Inputs of each university’s name yielded the following:
Here at Princeton, we all love to play something I call the Sleep Deprivation Game. You know what I’m talking about. The one where you nonchalantly throw statistics about just how tired you are and just how little you slept last night into conversation. The one where you one-up your friends by saying that you pulled more all-nighters than them last week. The one that leads to exchanges like:
A: Hey what’s up? B: I’m so tired dude. I slept 3.5 hours last night. A: Ohhh my God that’s crazy … I totally know how it feels though because I’ve gone like three days on 2 hours of sleep each. B: Oh yeah that’s intense. But last week I pulled two all-nighters in a row, AND I had 9 a.m. lab the next morning. A: Aw I’m so sorry, but you know during discussions I just didn’t sleep at all, for like four days straight! (At this point, B stops talking. A is gloating and thinking, “YES I WIN I’m so exhausted and hardcore haaaa.”)
It is twisted and masochistic. But you know you play this game all the time. With that in mind, consider this statement:
“So I get up at 3 a.m. to work. Usually I keep going until around 7 in the morning … then I take a quick nap and get back to business at 9. As for sleep, I get a few hours here and there. It’s enough to keep me going.”
Would you rather be staring at a few hundred of these or at your thesis?
Sound familiar? Surprisingly, this quote doesn’t come from a Dean’s Date victim. It comes from a little-noticed minority group, whose constituents are even more sleep-deprived than you: the local public works crews.
When UPC ex-prez Brian No ‘10 offered me the title of The Ink’s ”Editorial Director” a little more than a year ago, this here site was but a couple of awkward posts, written by the members of a rather obscure club, that also happens to be really, really old. So I figured, Taking an ancient institution into the 21st century should be fun and not big a deal. And then apparently people started reading us. A lot of ‘em. Which, I mean – What? Really? We like it though, so thanks.
I should say that The Ink started as an effort to expand the Press Club’s presence online in the midst of a changing media landscape, but it quickly became something more than just an extension of our work with publications. Yeah, I guess we became “bloggers,” but even more than that, I think we became a voice. Over the past year or so UPC has emerged as a campus institution students can count on for news, commentary, and the occasional laugh. I’m glad to have had a part in shaping that and UPC history.
But my time’s up now. Yes, after writing north of a hundred posts of varying wit and quality, editing countless others, and losing a bit of my sanity the whole time, I’m hanging up the ol’ keyboard and getting kicked out. Good riddance, right?
At any rate, a round of thanks are in order for making The Ink what it is today. So, I want to acknowledge the newsmakers, the personalities, and the ridiculous that make Princeton great: Sabra hummus, Four Loko, Jane Randall, Connor Diemand-Yauman, freshmen, alumni who make bad decisions, Bros Icing Bros, campus printers, Firestone, PrincetonFML (and The Mod), The Economy, Princeton Reunions, USG, long walks to Forbes, Chatroulette, senior theses, Cannon Club, Dean’s Date, Shirley Tilghman, Nancy Malkiel, Yale, the Prince, the cold, IvyGate, the U-Store, Small World, Rap Music, and of course, the Princeton Masturbator.
And of course, we’re thankful for you — our readers. A lot of times people come up to me and say they’ve been reading The Ink and love it, or that something we posted was kind of insulting, or that it was spot on, or that your blog isn’t funny bro, or that it’s really just pretty asinine, et cetera. And honestly, we take that to heart and try to make our site better for you guys since, well, we’re not writing it for ourselves. Please keep the (constructive?) criticism coming; we really do listen.
So before I overstay my welcome (and before, honestly, I lose any more time remaining to scrounge up a thesis), I’ll hand the mic over to Giri Nathan ‘13, your new Editorial Director. He’s a fine individual. Address any and all hatred/criticism/concern to him now; I’ll still be accepting praise.
And with that, I’ll be taking my leave. It’s been fun, and I’m glad to have been along for the ride. Here’s to another 100 years of crazy things happening at Princeton, to the imminent repeal of grade deflation, and our enjoying it all together in some gaudy orange and black. See you at Reunions.
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?”
The Princeton January is a strange beast. All your friends at home have occupied a clean empty happy space in between terms, while your semester has been grotesquely severed by the calendar year and you gotta deal with the nasty little end of it when you get back to campus. So while your pals are only maybe halfway through their vacation frolicking, you’re packing up and returning to the grind. Dean’s Date is a ticking time bomb and exams loom just after that. But alas, a twist: there are (with the exception of the occasional sadistic language course) no classes!
Imagine that!
The next few weeks are a blank slate, marred by a big ugly red X next Tuesday and a some more diffuse ones sprinkled in after that. I’ve got no rigorous daily schedule; I’m carving out my own day. And if you play your cards right, this can, ironically, be a kind of relaxing month, a weird reprieve from the day-to-day toil. This is not to say that I’m good at this — last winter’s reading period was a staggering burst of non-productivity for me. But it is theoretically possible. January is the existential crisis of the Princeton semester: it is exactly what you make of it. This, accordingly, brings me great dread. Sure hope I do it better this time around, even if it makes the next iteration of the liveblog a little less interesting for me. Godspeed to errybody out there.
[Oh, and because I know your Dean's Date (and mine) will inevitably still suck, no matter how well you (or I) think I'm planning ahead, still read our liveblog!!!]
So, as I stood in line outside the Garden Theater last Thursday around 11 p.m., waiting to see The Social Network FOR FREE, with FREE popcorn and a FREE soda, it occurred to me that credit ought to be given where credit is due. So here it is:
The free UFO movies at the Garden Theater are the best program the USG has ever enacted.
Now, this probably isn’t news to a lot of you — according to a Prince article, 2,700 students have gone to the free showings already this year, up from just 1,500 at this time last year. But it’s still worth going over why the initiative makes so much sense – lessons the student government can apply when thinking about other ways to spend school funds.
1. It’s Simple
Free movies. Every weekend night ( the college weekend includes Thursday, much as the baker’s dozen includes a 13th bagel). With snacks. First come, first serve. Easy, self-explanatory, and sells itself. Genius!
2. It’s Late
Princeton students stay up late. Really late, a lot of the time. And unless you’re going out to the Street, there aren’t all that many obvious late night choices. USG events often happen when there are a ton of other things going on – the night owls of Princeton are the perfect audience for activities.
3. It’s a Really Good Deal
Movies are, like, expensive yo! Tickets are at least $10 most places on a weekend night, and snacks hit the wallet hard, too. This is one case where “free stuff” is actually pretty valuable (unlike, say, kettle corn or those drawstring bags, as popular as those seem to be). The USG spends $17,500 on the movies, and in my book, it’s money well spent.
So, in other words, spend money on things students want and will use, preferably late at night. Here’s the thing – I didn’t even get in to the movie last week. They ran out of tickets a few spots ahead of me in line. And I wasn’t mad – other people had obviously gotten the memo earlier in the semester, or last year. Next time, I’ll just show up earlier. An hour of my time for a free movie? When it would take me half that time anyways to drive to the nearest non-Garden theater to pay for a ticket? Sign me up. Great job, guys.
Hey Columbia! Congrats on the $100 million donation! 100,000,000 is a rather large number and you can probably build a lot of stuff, maybe even a 450,000 square feet expansion to your business school (to be precise). But not everyone’s happy. In fact, some think this is all downright “loathsome.” Gawker took this opportunity to decry the general phenomenon of the Big Fat Ivy League Donation, and they raised some worthy points along the way.
The point is, elite universities are terrible choices for huge donations. Supporting education in America is a worthy cause; but there are many, many more effective ways to help the masses than giving millions to Ivy League schools. No matter what those schools’ endowment officers tell you, they do not really “need” that money, not in the same way that, for example, clinics in sub-Saharan Africa need it. Furthermore, most rich people do not give money to fancy schools out of a desire to improve education in America. According to academic research, hey [sic] give in order to make it easier for their own children to get into those schools. Or, in the case of people like Kravis, they give in order to have a building named for themselves at their alma mater, so that the legacy of their Gilded Age travails may be spread to generation upon generation of bored business school student.
It’s an argument worth listening to. After all, we are sitting pretty at a cool $13,386,280,000 in endowment as of 2009 – and there’s no doubt a lot of that was received in colossal chunks just like this one. So are we just complacent witnesses to this “moral crime”?
<3 The U-Store
The hot dog’s got a lot going for it. No really, it does. It’s portable. Wildly customizable (crazy Chicago with its celery salt and its pickle spears!). Unofficial sandwich of baseball and camping trips.
Hey Columbia! Congrats on the $100 million donation! 100,000,000 is a rather large number and you can probably build a lot of stuff, maybe even a 450,000 square feet expansion to your business school (to be precise). But not everyone’s happy. In fact, some think this is all downright “loathsome.” Gawker took this opportunity 