Another good reason to go to the women’s basketball games (despite the fact that the last one was Saturday night). Just in case the game, the cheerleaders, and the dance team aren’t entertaining enough, the band is now offering a post-game show: tuba racing.

I know I’m intrigued.

They’ve now been spotted at Levien several times, as well as on one memorable occasion at the Dodge track. Very impressive, band, very impressive.

Move over, Keith Richards, the cool new thing to snort is no longer your father’s ashes, but good ole vodka!

Apparently rehab is like going to Vegas–what happens in rehab, stays in rehab, including sobriety.  Amy Winehouse, who has run out of productive things to snort, spent the weekend at London’s Bungalow 8 playing the game “Gas Chamber,” which is where a circle of people go around snorting vodka shots.  (At least it wasn’t crack?)  Prince Harry was caught playing last year (hopefully while not in his Nazi Halloween costume)  She was playing with her merry group of super-duper role models, Kelly Osbourne, Kimberly Stewart, Miquita Oliver and Mark Ronson.

It’s pretty obvious that “Gas Chamber” is really dangerous because it shoots alcohol directly into the bloodstream, so as tempting as it sounds, please don’t actually try it out tonight.  And can we also acknowledge just how painful snorting vodka sounds?

Curse World of the Week, 2/18-2/24 Edition:

MOTHERFUCKER!  (Which, incidentally, does not attract the red squiggly lines of Word spell-check.) 

The literal meaning of this word is “one who engages in sexual intercourse with his mother,” but please, don’t let this definition limit you in all your mother-fucking endeavors.  Feel free to have sexual intercourse with anyone and everyone’s mother whom you might encounter.

Personally, my favorite time to yell “motherfucker” or simply engage in motherfucking, is when I trip (on a daily basis) on all those damn bricks on this campus and wipe out in front of a pack of elementary school children being herded along a giant leash singing “The Wheels on the Bus.” 

But apparently there is a long and fascinating history of the phrase, beginning in the Roman Empire under Caesar Mel Brooks, when Josephus meets Oedipus and warmly greets him with, “What’s up, Motherfucker?” Since its ancient inception, people have been throwing this thing around all over the place, from movies like Pulp Fiction (ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER!  Do you speak it?!), to Die Hard’s catchphrase (Yippie-kai-yay, motherfucker!”) which was censored in the third sequel in order to obtain a PG-13 rating. (I prefer the Unrated DVD, personally.) 

Urban Dictionary contains a plethora of abbreviations for motherfucker, most of which were evidently written by drunk freshmen who most likely were drinking an Adios Motherfucker or a Mongolian Motherfucker (CU Bartending will teach you that one and if you can make it in under two minutes you don’t have to take the practical test.  Incidentally it has like every liquor invented in one glass and will, appropriately, fuck you up.)  These shortenings include: Mofo, Mofofo (mother fucker AND father fucker, a flexible feat involving a twister board and very limber participants), a Magic Mofo (don’t ask), and the Little Italy version, Mofiglio.  (Personally I think this refers to Famiglia’s Pizza, because that shit tastes motherfucking nasty!)

And that, my friends, concludes an even bigger waste of time than reading Pop Smut, which, incidentally, will be wrapping up this weekend’s stupid crap that celebrities did while we were all working our asses off in Butler later today.  Stay tuned…

More on Manhattanville from our buddies in New Haven, but the mystery persists: what the hell is this doing here? While I wouldn’t stock this latest effort alongside Zapana’s botched job from a couple days ago, the YDN’s basic philosophy when covering Manhattanville hasn’t changed, or should I say hasn’t improved–they don’t explain what a story about Columbia is doing in Yale’s newspaper. They still haven’t talked to anybody in the Yale administration. And they still haven’t given Manhattanville the sort of breadth that would justify its discussion in the Yale Daily News.

Of course the YDN can cover whatever it wants, but journalistic privilege doesn’t  exonerate them, and should never exonerate anyone. Again, the crucial unanswered question is why–why is the YDN writing about this? What do they care? And most importantly, why are they concerned enough with Manhattanville to dedicate two reporters to it, but not concerned enough to, y’know, get the story right?

I have some ideas.

-Jealousy. The Yale angle is self-evident: Columbia is about to overcome its one obstacle towards unseating Harvard, Princeton or Yale atop the Ivy League totem poll; meanwhile Yale has seen its acceptance rate go up as Harvard, Princeton and Columbia’s has declined, while New York City is on top of the world right now and isn’t lookin’ back any time soon. So coverage of Manhattanville is an implicit smear born of an almost unconscious sense of institutional insecurity–we have to keep up with the Jonses, who, PS, are overweening exploiters of the poor (see my discussion of journalist balance in my last YDN post).

-Boredom. There probably isn’t much going on at Yale right now, and the YDN has to report on other school’s scandals instead of reporting on their own. There could be some truth to this, but I think the real reason is,

-A rather unprofessional double-standard as far as rival schools are concerned. Newspapers tend to get lazy when they aren’t directly accountable to their readership–I know what’s going on at 116th and Broadway right now, but if you dropped me in the middle of Norwalk and told me I was in New Haven, I’d have no choice but to believe you. The editors of the YDN haven’t been to Manhattanville. They probably don’t know an awful lot about New York City land use procedure, and their apparent failure to contact members of CB9 suggests that they’re unaware of this body’s existence. In short, they haven’t given Manhattanville the kind of scrupulous journalistic attention that a sensitive issue like this one deserves.

The YDN’s failure both to cover the issue and to justify its interest in it means that one of the nation’s top college papers has refused to give Columbia’s defining issue anything but the most reductive and cursory of treatments. If the rest of the college and mainstream media follows suit, we could see a dialogue on expansion–both at Columbia and throughout higher education, where an increased number of students will mean major capital projects at several top-tier universities–that’s even more polarized and, if it’s possible, less informed, than the one we’re having now.