It’s a We Overslept edition of our daily dailies roundup …

• Brown: Rate of getting wasted remains constant … [Herald]
• Yale: … and yeah, pretty much the same thing here. [YDN]
• Cornell: “I imagine that if you put Facebook in charge of cracking Al-Qaeda, the War on Terror would be over like that.” [Sun]
• Penn: Emeritus Professor of Kiddie Porn Scott Ward’s bail set at $2 million; disgusting stuff found in university office. [DP]

Hey, kids! Want to wake up real early and write RagTime for an audience of, um, several? Run don’t walk to ivygate@gmail.com!

Extra! Extra! Hot off the presses! Meaning, downloaded from a Web site slightly ahead of its formal publication date! God, publishing today is boring. Anyway, here’s your first look at the Columbia Spectator‘s new sorta-Bee-less weekly magazine (click to embiggen); we’ll do an update once we’ve had a chance to read it.

UPDATE 10:30 a.m.: Breaking! Title of publication is obscure Jane Jacobs reference! Something about “eyes on the street.” Where is this damn Johnny Depp story already?

First major impression: It’s funny. The editor’s note is witty, there’s a spot-on clique breakdown (“If I go to one more party where everyone is sitting in a circle, smoking pot, and talking about Animal Collective, I will jump off a building”), and one intrepid reporter profiles the city’s best toilets.

You can get the PDF here. Ivy editors: Any other newspaper/magazine/journal developments we should know about? Email us.

If you want to feed the former president of Iran a good ol’ knuckle sandwich when he comes to speak at Harvard next week, Mitt Romney ain’t gonna stop you.

Romney, the Republican governor who wants to be president when he grows up, won’t be providing state security to protect Mohammad Khatami during his visit on Monday, Sept. 11. Romney doesn’t want tax dollars being spent on protecting a “terrorist,” he said. Wise man. Not only is he not letting the terrorists win, he’s letting our terrorists win instead! With knuckle sandwiches!

Never mind that Khatami ran as a reform candidate and fought, albeit unsuccessfully, to curb the power of Iran’s Gaurdian Council and expand press freedoms. Is it possible Romney was thinking of someone else? Mohammad, Mahmoud — what’s the difference, right Mitt?

Afterthought: Why a lecture? If Harvard knew its audience, they’d stage a steel cage match between Prof. Samuel P. “Clash of Civilizations” Huntington and Mohammad “Dialogue Among Civilizations” Khatami. We’re betting on the guy with the centrifuges.

Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963 … Challenger … the tsunami. Days that will live in infamy.

Sept. 5, 2006. Never forget.

The silver lining — if the horror of Facebook News Feed can even be said to have one — is that our generation has finally found common ground. Something to unite us, even in blackest tragedy. There are no red states today, no blue states; the pre-med knows the lit major is his brother, and yea, the state school shall lay down with the private.

Iraq, Katrina — nothing!! Black Tuesday, as it shall be known in hush’d sorrow forevermore, is the crucible in which our generation will be forged.

Last week we brought you the glory that is BK2Night, the planet’s best rap about sustainably produced organic greens. Now a Yale tipster writes in with the complete lyrics, annotated so that non-Elis can join in the fun. After the jump, follow the bouncing blue ball …
powered by ODEO

Read the rest of this entry »

Day-umm! Brown President Ruth Simmons is richer than Scrooge McDuck. The Herald reports today that Brown paid Simmons $685,000 in 2005 — up almost 20 percent from the year before. Setting aside our temporary confusion over why the school’s vice president would earn more ($709,000 — down, actually, from $781,000 in 2004), we’ve done some quick math to see what that kind of scratch buys in Providence …

171,177 hacky sacks

978 lbs. of marijuana you buy from friends

16,692 lbs. of pencil shavings you sell to friends

13,170 copies of The O.C. Season 2 on DVD

34,235 “You’re With Me, Leather” Deadspin t-shirts, inspired by Chris Berman ’77

8 semesters at Brown for your unqualified child

The escalating freakout over Facebook’s 1984-esque relaunch is so entertaining that it distracts from the larger news going on here: Mark Zuckerberg may have lost several hundred million dollars in the last 24 hours.

Howzat? In March, BusinessWeek reported in a much-noted piece that the Harvard drop-out had turned down a $750 million offer (from Viacom, it later came out), and was holding out for up to $2 billion. We heard — put however much stake in that as you want — that Zuckerberg turned down an offer later this summer for $1.5 billion. The guy was a true believer, the reasoning went; he really thinks the project he started in his dorm room could be worth much more than that, change society much more than that. And you know what? Better offers probably were coming along the pike.

Here’s the problem: social networking sites are only as valuable as the base of users that support them. Remember Friendster? The site your older siblings and friends absolutely swore by? Today Friendster is hanging out with Natalee Holloway and JonBenet’s real killer — it’s gone. And so’s its market value. By changing his site so fundamentally, Zuckerberg has alienated a huge chunk of his users. If he were to cash out now, no corporation or investor would offer anything close to $750 million.

Mark’s a smart guy. We’ve no doubt he’s doing some hard, hard thinking right now — deciding between sticking to his vision and listening to his users. He could make some compromises and keep the bulk of the audience. But his idea really only works as a monopoly, if everyone’s connected. For now, the longer Facebook v.1984 stays public, the more zeroes Mark Zuckerberg’s bank account is gonna lose.

Reaching out a spindly branch all the way from California, the infamous Stanford Tree has granted us an exclusive interview from the temperate, leaf-strewn hideaway where he vertically awaits his punishment from the NCAA for this colorful episode.

We knew he was our kind of conifer right away:

To: IvyGate <IvyGate@gmail.com>
From: Tree <xxxx@stanford.edu>
Date: Sept. 2, 2006 7:12 p.m.
Subject: Re: interview

Usually I shoot up before doing phone interviews, and it’s a little early on the west coast.  If you want to email me some questions I can get to them when I’m good and drunk, or we could try the phone one of your early mornings/my late nights.

-Tree

On to the Q&A, with more after the jump.

[UPDATE 1:29 p.m.: Tree checks in: "fyouri, i'm keeping my shit on legit: stanfordtree.com."]

IvyGate: So what species of tree are you?
Tree: I am a masters student that wears 35 pounds of Jo-Ann’s fabric mixed with aluminum, plastic tubes, and duct tape. What is this some kind of game to you?

If we tapped you, like for syrup, what kind of liquor would come out?
Absinthe. Straight from my wormwood.

Are there any traditions that come with being the Tree? Aside from, you know, being shitfaced 24 hours a day?
Soon as I step on the scene I’m hearing hoochies screaming. Plus hell of free gear from Nike and Converse.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s take it to the limit one more time with our daily dailies roundup …

• Brown: New students required to undergo antishitfaced, antiKaavya training. [Herald]
• Brown: Jacob Schuman ’08, we don’t want something more profound next time. This is excellent. [Herald]
• Columbia: It’s raining, and … metaphor … Minnesota … everyone except freshmen, skip this. [Spectator]
• Columbia: Is nothing sacred? Is doing lots of Jaegerbombs and puking on high school girls not sacred? [Spectator]
• Harvard: “A little-known New Jersey college topped U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of America’s best universities earlier this month.” That’s it, Harvard, just push the pain down, deep down, into a little ball where no one can ever see it. [Crimson]
• Penn: “If you don’t want anyone to ever see your information, you shouldn’t be on Facebook” — real understanding, Facebook spokeswoman Melanie Deitch! [DP]

Hey, kids! Want to wake up real early and write RagTime for an audience of, um, several? Run don’t walk to ivygate@gmail.com!

Only 24 hours after Facebook launched its “news feed” and “mini-feed” features, students have already organized a mass protest against the site’s Orwellian reincarnation. How’d they do it? Uhh, through Facebook, obvi.

It’s amazing. There’s “People who hate the facebook facelift” (16,794 members), “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” (89,284 members), and “Facebook looks shit now” (1,679 members). You can also sign the online petition here, or suck it up and sever your social spinal cord on Facebook Boycott Day. Of course, no one would have ever HEARD of these brave efforts were it not for the new features that make us all stalkers — and stalkees — whether we like it or not. (Overeager friendsters are paying the price: Now the whole campus knows when you quietly remove Footloose from your list of favorite movies.)

Congratulations, Facebook. You’ve given us the greatest organizational tool since the truncated yak horn. Too bad its first use had to be protesting you.