CornellWatch

This week, we debut another new feature: Dear Aunt Edna! It’s CornellWatch’s answer to years upon years of constructive advice by the tyrannically helpful and unceasingly good-natured Uncle Ezra. If you’d like a question of your own answered, please email watch@kitschmag.com with “Dear Aunt Edna” in the subject line. Dear Aunt Edna will appear Thursdays.

Dear Aunt Edna,

I am a 21 year old male who has been smoking nearly 2 packs a day for four years. I read somewhere that smoking takes an average of 20 years off a person’s life, and I was wondering if that means it takes off more than that from other smokers’ lives, depending on how much they smoke. In a nutshell, if I quit smoking now, should I worry that I could get cancer at, say, age 25? Can people that young get cancer from smoking? I’m currently in the process of quitting. Can you tell me whether or not it’s too late?

Quitter

Read the rest of this entry »

What’s GXC? Pretty much the most important thing to ever happen to the Ivy League since Facebook. It’s short for Go Cross Campus, which is not asking you to visit other colleges but rather to participate in an online game similar to Risk where colleges battle one another for control of territory and shit. Like Facebook, it started at the Ivies only to be later opened to the lowly masses. So please go help Cornell the fuck out: as of right now, we have the 2nd highest out of any Ivy (308, Penn leads with 367) out of 1,700 players total. And Brown, even though it has only 198 players, is “winning” with the most “Energy” (1,513, us in second with 1,423).  Stats in full after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, the non-partisan group Americans for Informed Democracy held a roundtable discussion on Net Neutrality led by Tracy Mitrano, director of Information Technology (IT) Policy at Cornell. The dinner-discussion is the first in a six-part weekly series* aimed at raising students’ awareness of issues pertinent to the 2008 Elections.

What is Net(work) Neutrality (NN)? It’s kind of complicated, but PCMag.com says it “states that all traffic be treated equally… that packets are delivered on a first-come, first-served basis regardless from where they originated or to where they are destined.” Basically, NN would have Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Time Warner not be able to discriminate torrent-downloading traffic from mp3-downloading traffic from whatever. Unfortunately for us ‘Nets-lovin’ kids, Mitrano suggested that Net Neutrality and other internet issues — most notably archaic copyright laws — are not really election issues.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey kitschfolk (schfolk?): Today we present to you our newest feature: The Week in Kitsch. In which we volley ill-informed judgments upon Cornell-related happenings that occurred within the last 7 days!

Exhibit A: Kitsch finally is a dictionary.com Word of the Day

Validation, yeah! We’ve been waiting a long time for this, except we didn’t really think “kitsch” was esoteric enough to merit Word of the Day status, but lo and behold, dictionary.com LOWERED ITS STANDARDS. And now we feel our name is terribly becoming and perhaps even inspired to start this new feature. Bad taste, check. Pretentious, moi?

Read the rest of this entry »

After a marathon 17-hour session of bargaining, negotiators for Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit and representatives for Local 2300 Union of Auto Workers reached a tentative agreement for a new 3-year contract yesterday, the exact day that their previous contract expired. Had they not reached an agreement, TCAT bus service might have been suspended until a new contract was agreed upon. Thank god, because the drunk freshmen coming back from Collegetown tonight seriously need bus drivers to harass.

Read the rest of this entry »

For those freshmen who had the misfortune of matriculating one year too late, I’ll inform ye that Jenna B. was last year’s sex columnist, a blondie with an orange glow who became infamous for her cuttingly honest and colorfully slangy description of her escapades in slutbaggery. We say slutbaggery with (sl)utmost respect, because, in case it wasn’t painfully apparent, we kind of love her. This fall, she’s Jenna Bromberg (Hotel ‘08), works at a webmag/blog called HotelChatter writing reviews and shit, lives in Brooklyn, and has an agent for a book that she can’t/doesn’t want to talk about. Suffice it to say that her “literary aspirations don’t go beyond writing some shit that you can read on a beach.” We caught up with her via AIM–yeah, we keep it classy–and found out that, contrary to whatever parting shots that “Cunnilingus Cowboy” bastard might’ve taken in the Daily Sun, she gives GREAT head.

Click through to find out how the banging goes in NYC, who this damned Cowboy is, and whether his linguistics are quite as cunning as he claims.

Read the rest of this entry »

Radar, the magazine for “smart people” who dabble in pop culture, has recently, in one fell swoop, both insulted and inspired starry-eyed Cornellians. A lot of people are up in arms, to say the least, about the magazine’s “unfavorable” ranking that dubs Cornell the runner-up to the “most overrated” college in America (Harvard took that honor… overachieving bastard), among other meanish things. Consider Sun columnist and possible crab person Tony Manfred, who decided the best way to rage against the rankings machine was to fight fire with fire: “Imagine dumb people trying to be smart, perverts trying to be sexually mature, bush-dwelling paparazzi giving journalism a try — this is Radar.”*

And then there’s those brave souls who have said pish posh to Radar’s snarky commentary and transcended petty adversity. Like blue-blooded** Eclipse (the supplementary section of the Sun that has been converted into a pull-out “magazine”) editor Leigha Kemmett, who embraced the magazine’s “unique and engaging content, content that [she] actually wanted to read” despite the fact that the issue she picked up was the one that slighted Cornell.

In any case, I’ll stop this crappy-trend-story-lede nonsense and cut to the chase, sort of: our feelings about Eclipse magazine. It wants to be like Radar, kind of? And the cover story, the unfortunately headlined “Rating the Rankings,” is basically a rumination upon the current status of Cornell’s rankings poo-poo (dropped from 12 to 14 in the U.S. News & World Report, the most overrated item in Radar).

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re very sorry to have to tell you that the well-meaning people over at the Ithacan ran a story in the Accent Section about us. Somehow they just kinda snuck up on me and asked some questions, and I’m really at a loss for how they got that picture. In it, I think I was saying something to the extent of, “What are you people doing here? Please, our little rag is not worthy!”

In all seriousness, though, we’re indebted to the Ithacan, especially to Accent Editor Edon Ophir and writer Maggie Hibma, for covering us. Now maybe we merit a Wikipedia page. Last time we tried to put one up some meany-poo editors called us a “non-notable student publication” and promptly deleted our page. We’ll show them now!

Your heroin’s not coming this week, sorry.

Ruh roh! Seems like the liberals on campus are pissed off about something… what’s new? Just kidding! That’s the kind of joke only a writer for the Cornell Review (or the defunct Cornell American, which joined forces with the Review last year) would make, which brings me to the point: a diverse array of campus liberals marched around Barton Hall today at Clubfest armed with signs* and indignance because of some nasty little racisty things the Review said in their welcome back issue.

After the group snowballed up and down the rows, they made their way over to the Review’s table and chanted a little about how Cornell must make them go away. And then some guy with a loudspeaker started talking, but I wasn’t really listening. There was a CoPo keeping the peace WHILE sucking on a lollipop (such talent!), and I tried to take a cell phone picture of him but I fucked it up. Anyway, their specific gripes (which a sweaty guy with a clipboard distributed before the “march” to random tables including Kitsch’s, urging us to fight the good fight with him) are after the jump. Also after the jump: why their gripes don’t really make too much sense.

[UPDATE (9/13): Before I get a flood of angry commenters, I want to let people know that I do not support in any way or form the Review. I am sorry that this post comes off like I’m shitting on activists, I’m not. I respect what you’re doing here but believe that it’s a bit misguided and needs to get its facts straight concerning the Cornell name and ask the administration to do something about the Review with a legitimate claim (aka please check their masthead for a disclaimer, I don’t have a copy handy). Please take this into consideration before you post comments.]

Read the rest of this entry »