Prez D-Skortz on LSD.

Everybody knows “The Economy” sucks. Even David Skorton, our university president (case ya didn’t know), whose Stanford-schooled super-senior son can’t even find employment despite the fact that he took an extra half-year to do an extra major! Sadface. Guess he’ll have to live off the meager $700,000/year salary that daddy earns — but let’s hope he doesn’t have too many coke parties, considering the fact that his noble father hath forgone a salary increase this year. At tonight’s “Senior Presidential Reception,” dapper gentlemen and ladies crowded around our president, trying to get a good word in, or perhaps just to snap a poorly aimed cameraphone picture (see left). And, although Skorton was both drily eloquent and soberly charming when my senior self spoke with him, he didn’t seem to have much to offer in the way of practical advice for seniors who have been fucked in the ass by a shitty job market, one that’s moreover flooded with recent laid-off bitches who are considerably more “senior” than us. “You’ll land on your feet,” he told us right before we toasted the Class of ‘09 with our recently bought $5 champagne glasses. We’ll be fine. Just fine! Right. D-Skortz had earlier told me that I still ought to consider newspapers. (Yawn.) And to talk to University spokesman Tommy Bruce, who I already know. “I often speak fairly unfavorably about the University administration,” I told him. In other words: What’s a brash blogger to do in these days? Skorton said that even critics can get jobs. You know, talking to Tommy might actually be a good option. Damn you and your good sense, D-Skortz. Maybe I will land on my feet. Also: good luck, Class of ‘09. Srsly.

Indecipherable spam jargon! On a clearly library-affiliated page! The horror! I forwarded my findings onto the tipster, telling myself that the Xanax peddlers were crazy Canadian webtards and not, as I had hoped, Johnson and Johnson or Pfizer or even Bayer. He responded back five minutes later that he didn’t see anything wrong with the page I’d sent him. I renavigated back, and thank God I took that screenshot, because the page is altogether pedestrian now:

Look at the URLs. They’re both the same. I called the library to see what’s up and talked to a guy at the Circulation Desk, who wasn’t aware of the whole Xanax thing. He said he’s send the tip on to the people upstairs. Bored by the whole matter by now, I didn’t feel like doing the journalist thing and talking to them.

Determined to fulfill the conventional narrative about drugs, dealers, and their places of residence, I ventured closer and inspected the door. I staggered backward as I drank in the mark of the devil — the circled upside down star symbol that identifies the haunts of satanists, anarchists, and angsty tweens on MySpace!

Horrified, but all the more entranced, I drew ever nearer, close enough now to read the notice posted on their door. Finally, my worst fears were confirmed: the 220-ish block of Linden Avenue plays host to not only goat-sacrificing black magacians but also to BIG BROTHER!!!!!!!

With no millisecond to spare, I collected myself and ran off, while my head swirled with dreams of blogging a cautionary tale of drugs, squalor, and lawlessness.

P.S.: Newsy narrative aside, all signs point to the fact that no drugs were found in the raid and that the “older townie junkies” (as some neighbors described him) either hid their shit really well or were merely casual consumers who’d just run out of smack. The Sun article notes that no arrests were made, and some lady at the investigations office of the Ithaca Police Department said that none have been made over the course of the week and no new information is available to the press. Maybe the Po found some paraphernalia that justified keeping 24/7 surveillance on the house? My take: Someone who didn’t like the “junkies” tipped off the IthPo, who jumped at the chance to break out their bad-ass SWAT-mobile. And can you really blame them? Oh, Po just-ta wanna have fun.

If you are a gay man who doesn’t know who Larry Paciotti is, that’s forgivable. But if you gay men don’t know Chi Chi LaRue, you might be fooling yourself — she (the drag/gay porn director persona of Larry) has directed hundreds (thousands? is too lazy to do research) of titles you may have used your dominant hand to “enjoy.” Watch on, trannies.

1) Facebook all the candidates and compile an Excel spreadsheet of how many mutual friends (mutches! myootches?) you’ve got in common. Add up the Pres and VP totals, using an Excel formula if you’re extra wily. Make some notes about the 6 friends whose profile pic thumbnails the Facebook God has randomly chosen, why not?

2) Compare the total mutual friends of each Slate and begin to create an arbitrary ranking system. You can even install an optional weighting system with Excel formulas — multiplying by 1.5 if you really liked all 6 of those random thumbnail people, or maybe by 0.1 if the candidates’ FB pic kind of sucked.

3) Decide which Pres and VP candidate to vote for based on who has the highest Excel-calculated number.

Here’s my (unweighted) results, with some commentary and followed by the Top 10 Emptiest Campaign Promises:

1) “Winners”: Chris Basil and Nikki Junewicz (Team “You don’t know us? Do you even go here?”)

2) Runners-Up: Rammy Salem and Ola Williams (Team “Yes we can, Superman”)

3) Bronze: Scott Purdy and Emlyn Diakow (Team “ALL CAPS”)

4) Fail: Tony Miller and Emily Cusick (Team “We wrote our campaign pitch in the third person”)

5) Epic Fail Part Un: Andrew Brokman and Andy Gindy (Team “We recorded a fireside video chat in earnest”)

5) Epic Fail Part Deux: Jeff Rehberger and Ruslan Gudnyy (Team “One of us didn’t even show up to the WVBR debate”)

7) UNSUBSCRIBE: Murtza Manzur and Jon Dobrin (Team “Our 2-ply toilet paper crusade is not a mockery of Cornell’s election system”)

Just FYI: As of 9:19am today, I had 1,117 total friends on Facebook — which is above average in general but pretty subpar if I want to call myself a budding socialgay. Out of that thousand+, 538 (about 48%) are from the Cornell network. Also FYI: I’m going to vote for the toilet paper guys, just because their Youtube video was hilarious and because I like to “subvert” ranking systems — even my own.

TOP 10 EMPTIEST CAMPAIGN PROMISES

10) “If there’s enough money left over, we may just put it toward an underground tunnel system (but don’t hold us to that one).”

9) “A vote for Tony Miller and Emily Cusick is a vote for the best candidates.”

8) “Address student life issues such as the Ithaca Noise Ordinance and develop a Leasing Policy for students in Collegetown.” (Sadly.)

7) “ensuring a free SPORTS PASS for all undergraduate students”

6) “Integrating Cornell with the Ithaca community”

5) “Free Bus Pass to All Cornell Students”

4) “creating a CAMPUS PUB for interaction beyond the classroom”

3) “I have a voice.”

2) “If elected, I promise to make the club funding process easier and more comprehensive [sic: comprehensible] so that any freshman can understand it. Vote Brokman and Gindy. We’ll get you your funding.”

1) BB2P

CornellWatch Covers Big Red Relief 2K9 from Evan Mulvihill on Vimeo.

We urge users to report posts that are any of the following:

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Unfortunately, it seems that the lofty ideals to which ACB aspires are undercut by the petty lowliness of its denizens. Take, for example, this mildly sexist, intentionally harmful, and fairly incomprehensible post about one “Katie Bard”:

HOTTTT HOTTT HOTTT

Posted by anonymous guy 02/07/2009 05:56 PM | Last Reply 02/08/2009 12:06 AM

omg Katie Bard is such a horny easy sleezy biotch. she’s so loose its i feel like im wearing wants and i lost 200 pounds. She has more STDs than she has white bloods cells. Theta! She asked me to have butt sex.

More venereal diseases than white blood cells? If one were to indulge “anonymous guy” with any level of seriousness, one would have to hope Ms. Bard has a terminal case of leukemia. Despite these minor pitfalls, head admin Peter Frank claims in his grand opening press release that ACB “is quickly becoming the central hub of college campuses around the country, giving students the freedom to voice their opinions and ask questions about any facet of college life… the ACB is a website that helps build community and engenders the open exchange of information.”

Okay? The fact that JuicyCampus redirects to ACB assumes that the audience will be the same gossipy malicious bunch. Somehow, I fail to see how following in this salacious tradition will ever breed the positive “exchange of information” to which ACB aspires. But good luck, ACB. If anything, you give me something to blog about. I look forward to writing your elegy in the same poetic tradition as Juicy’s.

CornellWatch: How did you, Jonah, and Jess come up with the idea?

Jonah and I were gchatting during work, complaining about what a bad time it is in the book/magazine industry and various more superficial complaints (my junk-food-binge-induced achey body, his alcohol-and-salt-induced puffy face), and the idea grew really organically and almost instantly out of that.

The basic rundown was this: Jonah said “I thought Obama would end all this suffering,” I said “I thought Obama would make my body stop hurting,” he said “I thought Obama would get me laid,” I said “We should buy ithoughtobamawouldgetmelaid.com and make a website like the bicycle one listing our unreasonable complaints,” he agreed. The tough part was that neither of us knows how to code something like that. So I gchatted my sister, Jess, who has a bunch of computer geek friends, to see if she knew anyone who could do it. While she asked around about that, the three of us started a Google doc with all our ideas for the site. When Jess found out that we needed to find someone who knew PHP to code the site, I emailed my ex-boyfriend, Lee, who’s an IT guy, to see if he could do it. I also changed my gchat and Facebook status to “Anyone know PHP?” About an hour later, Jess’ husband Dan gchatted me and said “I know PHP.” He hadn’t even know at that point that this was for a project Jess was part of! So Dan got to work setting up the site, and in the end it was Lee who wrote the code, which Dan then implemented. A big ol’ group effort. And oh so webby the way it unfolded.

CW: What volume of traffic does the site drive on a daily basis? How has it varied throughout the months it’s been around?

The site launched on December 19, and was picked up by The Huffington Post and Digg and a few other places almost immediately. In the first two days alone we got 110,000 hits. Things settled down after that. By comparison, we only got about 210,000 hits for all of January.

CW: How are your unrealistic expectations of Obama different from those of BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle.Com?

We wanted to be sure we didn’t overlap with BOIYNB too much, so our general rule of thumb was that they deal with Obama being a total nice guy (remembering your birthday, making you cupcakes) and we deal with ridiculously unrealistic expectations of him (fixing the economy, curing diabetes, getting rid of your crow’s feet). We wanted to take it beyond satirizing the fact that everyone’s in love with Obama and ascribes all these wonderful traits to him, to the more recent issue: the degree to which we expect him to tackle the impossible.

CW: One Cornell-sanctioned blogger said this about an MLK rally in LA: ‘Today’s parade was like the fifteen or so I went to before it, but at the same time it was different… On hardened faces one would not consider friendly beamed signs of laughter, smiles, and hope…  While Obama might not be the complete savior we all imagined, one thing is for certain hope/faith is the evidence of things not seen, and while America might face problems you couldn’t tell that by the faces of the crowd.’ Obviously the guy doesn’t really expect Obama to be the Messiah, but he kind of hoping for it. Is this desire for a politician to be some sort of ’savior’ indicative of what you guys are trying to push against?

I wouldn’t say we’re trying to push against it, necessarily, so much as point it out and snicker. But yes, it’s that whole feeling of “Obama is a superhero! Obama can do anything!” that initially got us joking about him being able to fix the publishing industry or get Jonah laid or whatever. And I know we weren’t the only ones making those jokes; my mom said it was eerie seeing the site once it launched, because apparently my dad had been making “I thought Obama would…” jokes for weeks!

CW: I’ve noticed you guys have asked for more submissions to the site. Now that Obama’s president, where do you plan to go with it?

We don’t have any real plans, other than to let it float out there and keep getting discovered anew.

CW: How has Barack personally failed you today?

He actually did fail me today! Or, I guess it was yesterday. I felt kind of played by his whole “I screwed up” media blitz after Daschle pulled out, as I blogged about this morning on Slate’s XX Factor.

Samantha Henig ‘06 got her degree in sociology and, after a long journey through the NYC media landscape, is now the associate editor of Double X, a women’s web magazine that Slate is launching in the spring.