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]

MetaEz predictz acceptance rate of 18.6%: The first time it’s ever dipped below 20%! But we still pale in comparison to Harvard’s 7.1% for the Class of 2012…

Location location location: Google Latitude inaugurates the beginning of an era where stalking isn’t just about obsessively reading your stalkee’s status updates on Facebook. CornellWatch inaugurates new style of posting news ticker tidbits…

The original Ticker posts:
Cornell Review blog undercovers the secret lives of frat boys. And DOES NOT APPROVE.
…Cornell has a “University Blog Service”? Curious.
…D-Skortz decides not to divest from either Israel or Gaza because, unlike Darfur, “the situation in and near Israel has been characterized by cyclic difficulties leading to violent acts by both sides.”
…Bad Headlines Continue to Plague the Sun
…Conservative rag Cornell Review enters the blogging fray, and blogrolls me! Adorbs.
…NY Daily News cares about our plight!
…Boston Globesman: “Visiting this city in winter seems crazy.”
…Big Red Hoopsmen Rack Up 15 Consecutive Home Wins
…CU’s First VP Ceases to Live
…Hockey Third in Entire Nation
…Architecture Program Ranked No. 1 by Designintelligence
…Endowment tumbles 27%
…Tracy Mitrano guest-blogs for Chron of Higher Ed

Apparently the Olympics ended yesterday. Some guy mentioned a “Closing Ceremony” or something. Good riddance, I say! Now we can all get back to watching quality daytime programming on NBC like Days of Our Lives.

Anywho, how the hell did Cornell and, for that matter, the rest of the Ivies, do in Beijing?

We had 2 Olympians in attendance, Ken Jurkowski and Jennifer Kaido, both rowers who graduated in 2003 and did not medal. But they did pretty fantastically, considering it’s the Olympics: Jurkowski finished 11th overall in the Men’s Single Sculls, while Kaido finished 5th in the women’s quadruple sculls. Congrats to both of them! Maybe we can get an interview or something?

Ivygate has an overview of the the League’s medal count, mostly culled from iviesinchina.com. The so-called “Ivy Nation” sent 42 athletes who brought back 14 medals, which they say is a really good ratio. They also say that if the Ivy League were a country, we’d have the 8th most overall medals in the whole world. Just another reason to be elitist pigs, I suppose.

DROPS: To myself, for writing a satirical piece of tripe that pissed off the majority of internet-using Cornellians. Sorry, guys… Next time I decide to write something that’s unnecessarily inflammatory, incredibly insensitive, and cringe-inducingly crass, I’ll send it off to the (now-defunct) Cornell American. (P.S.: I think I’m addicted to adverbs. And parallelism.)

PROPS: to the Daily Sun’s heavenly columnist Katie Engelhart, who wrote a wonderful piece about meeting God in the form of an “overly embroidered old hag” sitting next to her on an airplane. The column isn’t actually about the grandma who was reading Becoming God, however, it’s about religion and spirituality in the modern age:

Kids these days just aren’t interested in stuffy sermons and pushy proselytizers anymore. Please! The Facebook generation is “spiritual, not religious.” We’re yoga-worshipping, kabala-bracelet-wearing, oriental-herb-consuming horoscope readers. We’re children of the pagan earth one day and born-again virgins the next. We dress as “Slutty Santa” for Halloween, but keep it real with orthodox Jewish rap. We’re more concerned about whether or not Jesus was black than about his purported teachings.

Granted, Engelhart is making some broad generalizations, but she buffers her anecdotal evidence with a study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life stating that one in four adults has changed their spirituality or left it altogether and that three in four young adults still have some sort of religious affiliation. In my opinion, she’s spot-on in characterizing today’s youth as affiliated with some sense of spirituality, but not in the dogmatic ways of our parents and grandparents. What I wonder is if this lack of doctrine is good or bad, for example: does it lead us to fling away capriciously every set of beliefs that contains something difficult or unappealing to us? Is picking and choosing at the salad bar of spirituality liable to give us an ultimately unfulfilling, unfocused smorgasbord of beliefs?

DROPS: to IvyGate’s devilish Jacob Savage, who made some broad generalizations too, but poorly founded ones. In his recent post “What the Fuck Happened to Decency Standards at Ivy League Dailies?” he cites dodgy evidence of “shitass Ivy Dailies” printing “fuck and shit for no good or extenuating reason.”

Item #1: A post from Daily Sun’s 2007 Halloween joke edition: “I’ve evolved to fuck, shit, and eat, but it’s odd that while I’m doing these basic things I have the ability to think.” Doesn’t a parody edition cover that “extenuating reason” idea? They even have a disclaimer in boldface at the top of the story saying that the story is “intended for entertainment and parody purposes only.” Pretty hard to fucking miss, shithead!

Item #2: An editorial in the Harvard Crimson from 1969 (“The End of Obscenity”) about how “recently ‘fuck’ has been thrown around publicly in all kinds of ways, and it has suffered accordingly.” First of all, 1969? Savage makes it seem like this is a new sensationalist trend sweeping college dailies, but apparently someone else beat him to the idea that fuck is being used for no fucking reason 40 years ago…

IvyGate is always being such a vanilla preppy little bitch, about Jenna B.’s “ickiness” and about “obscenity.” Stop being such fucking prudes!

PROPS: to the Daily Sun’s Jenna B. and Julie Block, for writing a cleavtastic piece that “plunges into the implications of our boob fixation.” After seeing a girl whose “chest was ostensibly on its milky way to exposing a bit of her caramel-colored niblets,” the fearless femme fatales show some cleavage themselves in order to gauge the reactions. They also explore the Western world’s obsession with boobage as well as its social and political “showings.” Classic, gals–I’m a big fan.

DROPS: This week’s “The Bias Cut” with Martin Ambrose. A couple preliminary notes: first, we don’t get your column’s name and we never will; second, looking like a transgender MTF is not fashionable; lastly, we think the Sun’s copyeditor hates your column so much they won’t touch it. I have to admit—this week’s column is not terribly bad content-wise. Martina discusses swimsuits in preparation for Spring Break, recommending decent brands no one has ever heard of (Ralph Lauren, J. Crew, etc.) and providing the unheard-of advice not to wear Speedos like “your sixty something year old dad who passes out by the pool with the New York Times in hand.” What really annoys me about his column isn’t its insufferable banality but its awful lack of a copyeditor… some “gems” follow:

“Let’s start with the men out there. You’re job isn’t so bad.”

“And no, a speedo isn’t a bathing suit unless you’re an athlete whose sport requires it, European and over forty, or you’re name is Arnold and you’re a politician in California.”

No, no, no! I think this is an apropos time for a “And you go to Cornell?”

Might we add that we heart the lascivious Jenna B. (Bromberg). Jenna has received a lot of flack from various sources for her sex column, but she seduced us with her seemingly bottomless pit of imaginative sex terms. (In the words of one fan, “She had me at ‘wrinklebeast.’ “) Students resent that she goes there with flair and confidence, calling her a “big slut with an over-inflated ego” and hating on her “ugly” sorority. She was even derided on IvyGate as “icky” for various reasons, among them admitting that the condom got lost in “the murky depths of [her] vag” the first time she had sex. We can understand that not everyone takes to devilishly raunchy turns of phrase (taming the one-eyed trouser snake, anyone?) or cuttingly honest treatment of squeamish subject matter (having sex while you’re menstruating), but do what everyone else does when they see something they’re not into–turn the page!

It has become almost a cliche to hate on Jenna B., and we’re tired of it. It says something when you’re so “disgusted” by someone that you go to lengths to bring it up and when it’s up, you go to lengths to make sure your fully disgusted opinion is heard, loud and clear. The girl is clearly not for everybody–namely Christians who are “saving themselves,” pansexuals, or your parents–but give her a break!

Too bad they didn’t read Kitsch’s article on gay Craigslist entries (“Hooking Up”), which is infinitely more relevant given that m4m ads comprise up to 25 posts a day, paling in comparison to the m4w’s 5 to 6 average and w4m’s 3 to 4.

IvyGate suggests the Sun do another of their devilish underground “investigations” as a m4m pretender in order to scare Cornell’s closeted population, but is it really worth the trouble? The result will be an assemblage of questioning freshman, closeted frat brothers, and unattractive grad students—not to mention the occasional self-debasing “fat pig” who urgently “needs to be used.” (Bacon, anyone?)