It’s Thursday night, you’ve once again been sexed in by your roommate (walk-through doubles are baaad news), and you’ve got a good hour to kill. Here’s a project for you. Pour yourself a scotch and sink into the online archives of Rumpus, Yale’s inimitable tabloid, which we are completely derelict in not covering a lot more. Part trashy gossip, part genius prose, Rumpus lies at the intersection of two highways that don’t meet often enough. What they lack in substance, they make up for in complete disdain for anyone who considers substance a requirement for college journalism. Aleksey Vayner? They slammed him first, in like 2002. Dr. Susan Block? Same. We’re pretty sure it’s run by a group of self-absorbed fuck-ups, but what great publication isn’t? Rumpus‘s primary flaw is that it doesn’t publish often enough.

With that preamble, we feel comfortable piggybacking on their proudest (only?) tradition: Yale’s 50 Most Beautiful People [PDF], the 2007 edition of which is out now. Every year, Rumpus turns its already astonishing superficiality up a notch and dolls up a few dozen passable-to-smoking students for the noblest of purposes: to stoke Yale’s collective fantasy furnace. 

But last Friday, on the eve of our journey, while compiling our initial draft on this, we found ourselves in an unprecedented schism — at each other’s throats over blonde vs. brunette, decolletege vs. prim, bulging obliques vs lattimus dorsi. With intra-IvyGate strife threatening to rend the blog in twain, we tabled discussion. No hot-or-not civil war would divide and conquer us. Besides, as every Facebook airbrusher knows, the camera lies. We investigated, and these people are not worth the infighting. So we’re calling this issue of Rumpus out for the Photoshopped fiction that it is: it’s time to fact-check Yale’s alleged 50 Most Beautiful People.

Upon inspecting their Facebook photo records, the women acquitted themselves quite well. But to paraphrase Derek, the male models are really, really, ridiculously … ridiculous-looking. Rumpus has a cute tradition of always referring to Yale’s paper as the Yale Daily “News,” even abbreviating it YD”N.” Well, we’re starting our own little tradition here. After the jump, enjoy our fact-checking of Yale’s M”B”P …

Originals are the black and whites, new improved Facebook pics in color.