CornellWatch

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). Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, the Undergraduate Student Elections began, and, with online voting continuing until Thursday morning, you probably want to spend every waking minute contemplating what candidate will serve you best — especially considering that this is the first time that the student body at large has been privileged enough to directly elect the S.A. President and Vice President. The best candidate will be humbly intelligent, modestly eloquent, and — most important of all — wildly popular. Just to make sure your vote “counts,” why not rank the candidates based on how popular they are on Facebook? The problem that this wily blogger par excellence encountered was that almost all of the candidates were wise enough to protect their profiles, so I couldn’t access the total number of friends they had in the Cornell network. Luckily, you can still see how many mutual friends you have in common, so the game is simple:

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For years, Russell Athletics wooed the Cornell Store with cheap sportswear, adorning their children/students with Big Red sweatshirts, Big Red sweatpants, and Big Red fatsuits. Their relationship grew so strong that Russell comprised around 15 percent of the Store’s apparel sales last year — at this apex of their romance, they thought nothing could bring them down. Unfortunately for the two starry-eyed lovers, there was trouble in paradise: trouble being Russell’s death threats to newly unionized workers, and paradise being a Honduran factory. Luckily, the Store was quietly informed of Russell’s human rights abuses by COLA (Cornell Organization for Labor Action), when the workers’ rights activists displayed the curiously illuminating banner pictured at right on last Wed, Feb 19. The very next day, the University quit Russell in much the same way one quits a lover who, by golly, beats his Honduran foster kids. The press release:

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Since I’m really into alliteration and forcing myself to do things on a weekly basis, I’m introducing ‘Malgam Mondays. This start-off-the-week-on-the-informed-foot feature will, with a few exceptions, be a regurgitation/reanimation of the stuff I’ve starting posting to the News Ticker, which shows up on CornellWatch itself on the top right side but not on the main Kitsch-Ka-Blogs page. This way I can wipe it clean each week. Here’s the best of the boring things that happened since I started the Ticker. Click on for even more boring stuff.

Least appreciated Cornell alum in hot water over technicality: Ann Coulter voted in Connecticut while living in New York. In other news, no one really cares. Except maybe the person who photoshopped the image at left. [Cornell Insider] P.S. We apologize to any Nazis offended by the image.

Milstein hits new roadblock: The plans for the construction of Architecture building Milstein Hall have already taken 10 years to push through. But no! It must not go forward, claim annoying profs like Vincent Mulcahy, who doth protest the lack of accessibility to differently-abled persons: “A handicap [sic] person who might want to study architecture here, it’s impossible.” [News 10 Now]

The nerve!: Either CornellWatch is too young, too unread, and/or too unfabulous, or we got SNUBBED by USNews.com in their “Best Alternative Media Outlet 2008″ contest. Whatever. IvyGate is in dead last, so we’re going to try to be schadenfreude-y about that. [USNews.com]

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The steakhouse-loving old suits on the trustee board have brought the woeful axe of recession past Libe Cafe and Slope Day and forced Ryan Lavin/the Student Assembly into “deciding” to halt the potential creation of any and all new student groups for one semester yesterday. Well, at least they took the time and effort to consult the “Cornell community” before they “decided” on this issue! Seriously, though, this is some shit. This is a half-baked, partially aborted fetus of a resolution, a resolution that instead of arbitrarily freezes the potential creation of legitimate student groups instead of focusing on rooting out the bad eggs that eat up the S.A.F.C.’s funds.

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Buy your tickets to witness Ludacris and Shawnna’s pimping of our entire campus as soon as they go on sale Feb. 3rd, because Slope Day is going to suck: the University is cutting $70,000+ from their budget, and that’s money that probably can’t be made up elsewhere. Another victim, sort of: Uris Libe’s Tower Cafe, which Cornell Dining quietly closed over Winter Break. Nobody really cared about Tower, though, as an admin only received “a couple” emails about it. Only a couple? But as of right now there are ten (10!) whole members in the Facebook group “BRING BACK TOWER CAFE“! Apparently, there’s other “more important” scary stuff happening because of the recession too, as D-Skorts let us know in a campus-wide email:

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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.

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