CornellWatch

Greetings, fellow Cornellian! I come to you with the news that you too have the power to vote for the undergraduate student-elected trustee, one among 64 powerful persons who control Cornell’s destiny. Mostly by consulting with Miss Cleo. The Cornell Daily Sun went down and did the normal journalistic thing of taking video at a debate sponsored by none other than themselves, but I decided to make a mash-up video of the budding politicians’ uncannily uniform rhetoric. It would’ve been longer and better, but my video editing program was being a total [expletive for female genitalia] and lost my work not once, not twice, but thrice. Voting for the Student-elected Trustee ends tomorrow at 8am, but you can enjoy this little guy anytime:

After cutting numerous lines, trampling countless fences, and getting “on the nerves” of one testy middle-aged lady with multiple Obama pins (I think we were mock-bewailing Bush’s departure or something), my colleague John-David Brown and I have returned to our friend’s place of residence after an exhausting firsthand view of what actually goes down at a Presidential Inauguration. I capitalize (italics for punniness) the P and the I incorrectly because we are now inescapably into the Age of Obama, as you obviously are aware. And there was no moment more indicative of this new era than at the end of Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” As I anxiously stood on my tippytoes to get a glimpse of the zaftig goddess on the Jumbotron, I was struck by the words she kept on repeating: “Let it rain. Let it rain. Let. It. Rain.”

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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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Republican blowhard John McCain announced that Alaska governor Sarah Palin will be his running mate in the 2008 Presidential Election. Is he trying to court disillusioned Hillary fanatics, a good deal of whom are female? More importantly, why are Alaska and Delaware, the 47th and 45th most populous states in the union, in the national spotlight? Everyone knows Delaware doesn’t exist. And Alaska? You know what they say about states with big land masses.