• Harvard: Harvard bans chalk, sets sights on Yahtzee, Play-dough.
• Princeton: Michelle Obama’s classified thesis leaked.
• Dartmouth: “Keep your wits about you, carry pepper spray, and above all don’t make eye contact, and you, too, can make it through the fraternity dance party in one piece.“
• Yale: Yale woos prospective students with lies.
• Brown: “I don’t like the system because it does not favor my team,” says jock.
• Columbia: A harrowing journey through New York City’s shadowy underworld.

— Compiled by Ben O’Donnell
.

It’s the #1 time to break out your adorable flowered pastel sundress, get doused in beer, and get down with your bad, white self. That’s right — spring concert season is just around the corner, and Ben O’Donnell has the scoop.

What do Ben Folds, Third Eye Blind, and Sister Hazel have in common?  They’re all musicians no one listens to anymore who were sacrificed to irony-hungry Ivy Leaguers last spring during the Ancient Eight’s spring party or concert weekends.

As spring is a season traditionally associated with graduation and, by association, with a lifetime of thankless toil capped off by cold, empty death, it is especially important for the various committees of people who do stuff with their lives at our schools to choose upbeat, crowd-pleasing concert acts.  In this way, we may all forget, however briefly, this season/lifetime of soul-crushing meaninglessness in which we are mired.

With that in mind, said committees at Brown and Cornell have already announced their picks for their major spring concerts, while those at Yale and Dartmouth have tossed around and parried rumors about theirs.

After the jump, who the artists are, obviously.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every time we publish an article about Dartmouth, we remember how totally foreign and strange the nothernmost Ivy is. Luckily, our resident Dartmouthian Ben O’Donnell is here to translate and elucidate — this time, on “blitzing,” which is Dartmouth for “email.”

When Dartmouth was founded in whenever, most people were not using email yet, but the technology was gradually becoming familiar, especially amongst teen-agers and other ne’er-do-wells. But when the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, our well-intentioned-but-emotionally-distant father, was laying the foundations for Dartmouth’s communications infrastructure, he thought the term “email” didn’t have enough of what they called in the ad industry “zazzmatazz” (he was formerly in the ad industry).  

And thus, with the 18-22 demographic in mind, he created the more marketable (until WWII) BlitzMail, Dartmouth’s beloved email client.

How is it different than regular email, skeptics wonder. It’s just better! we respond, red in the face. Indeed, it is less the program itself than its entrenchment in our culture that is remarkable. Many students use BlitzMail like Instant Messenger, sending “blitzes” back and forth in seconds. Most students rarely communicate via cell phone, at least not with other members of the Dartmouth community-until quite recently, it was even stigmatized.  

And perhaps most importantly, with BlitzMail, those uncomfortable “sober interactions” between students, which plague most college campuses, are all but eliminated at Dartmouth.

After the jump, just a few of the ways in which Blitz reduces people to types.

Read the rest of this entry »

Enraged estrogen came to a boil yesterday when 200 angry Dartmouth ladies took to the streets of Hanover to protest sorority Alpha Xi Delta’s eviction at the hands of rowdy frat Beta Theta Pi. Following decampment in 1996 for racist, homophobic, and criminally violent behavior, the Betas’ history gets complicated and all, you know, Greek to me, so here’s Dartmouth correspondent Ben O’Donnell with all the tawdry deets.

As any red-blooded administration-hater at Dartmouth will tell you, nine years ago the authority figures tried to take away that which is most precious to us students: our Greek houses.  The plan was jettisoned after students and alumni brought to the administration’s attention how lame ice cream socials and movie nights are, but many still harbored suspicions of an anti-Greek conspiracy.

The administration’s news a few days ago took those suspicions, poisoned them, shot them repeatedly, beat them with clubs as they attempted to stagger away in escape, and threw them into the ice-covered Neva River.  The headline in The D might have read “Awesome Frat to Return to Campus,” and, indeed, some may have received the news of Beta Theta Pi’s impending reinstatement that way. 

Many students, however, have been tripping over their retro-’80s sneakers with the neon laces in their rush to condemn the administration’s decision, and I’m not just talking about the half with the two X chromosomes and sometimes questionable interpretations of the concept of “fun.”  Because, of course, there’s much more to this story, which has a “permanently” derecognized jock frat moving back into the house its alumni still own and kicking out the sorority that leases the house in the process.

After the jump, the Dick and Jane version of the story, in which Dick is a network of twelve hundred well-connected and deep-pocketed ex-frat boys who passed their time at Dartmouth beating up other dudes and shouting at gays, and Jane is a beleaguered sorority widely viewed on campus as pretty OK.  

Read the rest of this entry »

Did you guys know that Dartmouth has lots of frats, and that these frats like to be really fratty? OK, to a certain extent this is global knowledge, but we’ve allowed Dartmouth’s Ben O’Donnell to describe for us the touchstone of their fratty rep: the Big Green’s version of pong. Try it out this weekend. Learn from our friends in the woods.

See if you can spot the SAT analogy: CEOs: Golf. Robots: Chess. Egyptians: Egyptian Ratscrew. And Dartmouth students? Pong.

Pong. It is not “beer pong” (as if there were any other kind!) It is a game, sure, and a drinking game, more specifically. But it is  so much more. It is a skill set, a spectator sport, a study break, a snack, a kingmaker, a heartbreaker, a bonding activity, an intensity reliever, an intensity furnace, a pick-up line, a date, as much obsession as fun, bet-you-can’t-play-just-one experience.

To your typical non-Dartmouth Hard Lemonade/Smirnoff Ice aficionado, however, pong can seem counterintuitive, unsanitary and egregiously alcoholic. It forces the consumption of Keystone Light, which tastes like a higher-quality malted beverage distilled in the bowels of a homeless person. But to understand pong is to understand us, so here it is: The Sparknotes version of our most unofficial collegiate pastime.

After the jump: the rules in full. 

Read the rest of this entry »