This is the end, my only friends, the end. After two amazing weeks of laughs, tears, and yes, a few other bodily fluids, my time at IvyGate is finished. I'm glad we had this time together. Thanks to all my friends for leaving nice comments, and everyone else for displaying the intellectual rigor and insight that I've come to expect from Ivy League students who didn't go to Columbia.

If you can't imagine life without my blogging, I suggest you start visiting The Pacific East. It's me and some other jerk raging about politics and shit. Go to it now and read an awesome post on Mongolia by my co-blogger that I wanted to excerpt on IvyGate but never managed to condense properly.

Mike Bechek'll probably have a sign-off for ya too, but I'm out. Robyn Schneider and Juli Min are up next, and I can say with certainty that they will both do a better job than me.

-- ANDREW MARTIN

UPDATE: I'll just add yet another exhortation to send the next guest editors tips. Coming up with stories over the summer is a tough business, as Andrew and I have demonstrated all too well. On the bright side, the plague of guest editors is almost over, so keep your heads up. It's been real.

-- MIKE BECHEK

This morning, at 12:01, The Dark Knight, which is a movie about the detective Batman, came out in theaters. I waited in line starting at 9 o'clock to watch it with lots of people who were way weirder than me. Some of them had painted their faces to look like clowns, and they were talking very loudly. The movie was playing on like thirty screens at Lincoln Center in New York, and you got to go inside based on what theater you were assigned to. One of my friends is an idiot and bought a ticket to a different theater than us, so I had to wait outside while she gave someone a blowjob to trade tickets so we could all sit together.

At the theater, all these kids from Columbia University high school summer camp or something ran into the auditorium and their counselors yelled about the greatness of Columbia summer camp. I think the campers don't understand how stupid it is to do the high school Columbia summer camp. The NYU summer campers are much better dressed and, hey, maybe you could even get into NYU.

When we were all sitting in our seats, the person in the seat in front of me was watching "Batman 1" on DVD and it was so funny to be watching a DVD on a computer in a movie theater. I thought he was wearing a Dartmouth hat, so I yelled, "Hey, did you go to Dartmouth?" and I think I've never felt like a bigger douchebag, ever, especially when he said, "Naw, dog, it's a Dallas Cowboys hat." I really love the Cowboys, so we could have been friends, but no, he thinks I went to Dartmouth.

The seriously good part of the night was when I watched Batman the real movie and I was crying blood because it was so crazy and awesome. There's this part where the Joker kills this guy, Hong Kong style, so hard. Then, Batman makes his truck flip over when he's riding his motorcycle. Then, he's got to save Gotham before it's too late, but everyone is corrupt and evil is the way of the world, so will he stop the Joker in time? There's no love only fear and anger so the movie is never boring. You might have a headache when it is over because you have to be upset for a whole movie but the point of art is to make you very upset. I think Heath Ledger should have won an Oscar for this movie, so he wouldn't have to kill himself.

Batman 2 is better than the ride Batman and Robin at Six Flags because the lines are the same length, but the movie is a lot longer than the ride and a lot more people die.

Harvard University, which I guess is a college in Massachusetts, is continuing its proud tradition of accepting dubiously qualified celebrities and musicians into its ranks. Following in the (significantly bigger) footsteps of Tom Morello, Rivers Cuomo and Natalie Portman is guitarist Mike Einziger of mediocre rockish band Incubus. Incubus is that band on the radio that sounds like other bands on the radio. The acoustic K-ROCK version of "Pardon Me" kicks ass though. Congrats to Mike and to everyone at Harvard, who will hopefully be treated to many years of very boring concerts.

This leads me to wonder: which musician or band would YOU most like to have attend your Ivy League school? Most creative answer wins an IvyGate gift certificate!

Well, we've all suspected it for some time, but now we have it directly from the horse's mouth: IvyGate founding co-editor Chris Beam is a Republican operative intent on destroying the reputation of America's Greatest Hope for Survival.

Beam, who is a Columbia grad, has a prominently placed item at Slate today in which he claims responsibility for widely circulating the phrase "terrorist fist jab" as a possible interpretation for the fist-bump shared between Barack and Michelle Obama on the night that Obama clinched the Democratic nomination. Like so many things in our Internet-crazed lives, it seems that the trouble originated in an anonymous comment on a website:

The morning after Obama locked up the nomination, I was writing a "Trailhead" item that mocked the media's difficulty in figuring out what to call the now famous gesture. "Fist-pound," "knuckle-bump," and "fist-to-fist thumbs up" were among the funnier examples, but one of them—"Hezbollah-style fist jab"—was particularly risible. It came from the Web site for Human Events, a hard-right weekly. Unfortunately, I failed to note that its provenance was not the magazine itself but a reader comment posted below an unrelated column by Cal Thomas. I linked the phrase to the column but didn't explain that the words weren't Thomas'

A couple miscommunications later and the phrase ended up on Fox News, causing a great deal of hand-wringing about how low the Republicans are willing to go to paint Obama as a the scary "other."

As usual, the left has proven that the only thing more dangerous than the vast right-wing conspiracy is the vast left-wing ability to fuck itself over unnecessarily. Beam's confession coincides with day 3 of the mass hysteria provoked by the cover of the latest New Yorker, which depcits Barack in traditional Muslim garb terrorist fist-jabbing a machine-gun toting Michele while an American flag burns in the fireplace. The cover has led to cries of umbrage from Obama's camp, a great deal of shouting on cable news, and mumblings of "Didn't New Yorker covers used to be funny?" from sane people.

Meanwhile, real terrorists killed more real people, but I'm not sure how you make that into a cartoon. Oh, right.

As reported in the estimable Bwog of Columbia University yesterday, Columbia President Lee Bollinger's son, Lee Bollinger Also, has gotten himself hitched to a pretty third grade teacher named Jennifer Ellis. Having barely survived an in-class cross examination from Lee the Elder myself in his constitutional law class, I have sympathy for Jennifer in what is sure to be a long and happy life filled with tear inducing Thanksgiving dinner interrogations.

Also earning my sympathy are the legions of Spectator staffers, past and present, male and female, who have now lost their last chance to "bag a Lee Bollinger." I guess those photoshopped naked pictures of Prezbo in the old Eye office will have to do.  The Silver Fox does NOT commit cruel and petty infidelity, and, one assumes, neither will his doppelgang-banger spawn.

There I was this morning, reading my LA Times over coffee like most New Yorkers, when suddenly I was struck with a bolt of recognition. Nestled among the garbage about the impending war with Iran and the collapse of the US economy was a brilliant opinion piece about Facebook by IvyGate's very own editors, Maureen O'Connor and Jacob Savage! Did they plug IvyGate? Do Yale kids season their steak with cocaine?

Our intrepid editors come to the happy conclusion that all those incriminating photos of us on the internet won't actually be much of a problem because there will be incriminating photos of EVERYONE doing EVERYTHING. Not mentioned in the piece is the notion that, God forbid, one NOT post pictures of oneself drunkenly screwing a dog, but at this point, it's probably fair to accept heedless exhibitionism as the natural order of things and work our way out from there.

The full article, including a disquisition on the morality of printing salacious, though possibly irrelevant material, is after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

It's Monday morning, chappies. Maybe this week you'll do a little more work and spend a little less time screwing around on the internet. But why would you do work if the internet exists? Would you still exist if the internet didn't exist? It's an existential dilemma.

Last night New York was a good place for young rock and rollers and genial lesser- Ivy bashing. The Mercury Lounge played host to Glen Rock, New Jersey heroes Titus Andronicus, along with spazz cuties Ponytail and the recently Pitchfork-approved Abe Vigoda. It was just about the most fun one could have on a Sunday night without going to church, especially when Titus Andonicus crashed into their song "Titus Andronicus" and everyone almost had a heart-attack.

Andronicus's lead singer, Patrick Stickles, who is very tall and has a beard, was seen outside of the club slagging off Columbia prior to his band's set, wondering aloud if it was ranked 13th (try 9th!) and noting the inferiority of its students and events. As a point of comparison, Harvard's graduation ceremony was highly praised. It apparently included a gaggle of trombones and a resplendent JK Rowling "emerging from beneath her invisibility cloak." Columbia's graduation, it should be noted, featured Joel Klein (!) and , uh, lots of students not protesting for a change.

All comments were spoken in good humor, of course (probably), but I can't help but feel that someone should step forward to defend Columbia's honor against marauding young lead singers with no respect for tradition and gentility. I'm trying to think of an indie rock band who went to Columbia that has enjoyed some degree of success recently. I think it might rhyme with Campfire Beacon.

But seriously: VW vs. TA. If anyone's going to Chicago next weekend for the Pitchfork fest, let us know who wins. TA is certainly louder and more ass-kicking, but don't underestimate Vampire Weekend's... connections.

The Ivy League has had a rather complicated relationship with the military in recent years (see Sanchez, Matt-- or better yet, don't). Despite the ideological gap that has alienated many liberal Ivyfolk from their country's adventures in Iraq, the Schools have produced a few good military men with a penchant for writing about their experiences. A couple years back, Columbia's magazine The Eye ran recurring dispatches from Lt. Josh Arthur, CC ’04 in Baghdad. Now Princeton alum Capt. Nate Rawlings is providing commentary and answering questions about his current deployment in Iraq for NPR.

Rawlings comes across as extremely hesitant to cross party lines and doesn't say anything even remotely controversial, but it's hard not to have some affection for a guy who's writing a bafflingly eclectic advice column from a war zone. In yesterday's installment, his three questions were: a heart-tugging letter from a soldier who will likely miss his son's birth, a scathing anti-war screed disguised as a question, and a jaunty inquiry about being an Ivy Leaguer in Iraq. I wonder which of these we're interested in? Read the rest of this entry »

To some people, a cop without a gun makes about as much sense as a college town without a decent bar. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Princeton University, located in fun free Princeton, New Jersey, has recieved permission from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to keep its public safety officers gun free. According to an article in the Daily Princetonian, the Public Safety Fraternal Order of Police union complained that not having guns was an occupational hazard, and OSHA was like, naw.

The university says that the Township and Borough police have plenty enough guns to protect the eating clubs and croquet matches, and I can't help but agree. Having lived a solid percentage of my life in Princeton, I can attest that there are about 30 police officers for every one citizen, and that they are more than happy to chase you if you are drinking beer in a graveyard. I mean, I heard about that happening. To someone I know. Who isn't me.

James Lanzi, the president of the Public Safety FOP, who filed the gun complaint, has some genuine concerns:

I think that it's a philosophical approach on the University. If you looked geographically, the Borough and the Township police do not know our buildings sufficiently to respond. It will take them more time to respond," he said. "Time is life."

Of course, after Virginia Tech, one can be forgiven for wanting to have more security on campus, though it is far from certain that having more GUNS on campus is really the solution we need to prevent disaster. Now that the DC gun ban has been overturned, and even Barack Obama agrees that everyone and their cousin should be allowed to keep a gun in their house, it is almost gratifying to see a University maintain its autonomy as a gun-free zone. Nevertheless, it seems that Princeton will lose the benefit of at least one future genius. Pity.

In a story sure to provoke equal parts sympathy and schadenfreude among the Wes Anderson loving, art-school rejected smart set, the New Haven Register is reporting that Annabel Osberg, a 19 year old painting prodigy, has been dismissed from Yale's prestigious graduate program in art.

Osberg, who has the looks and skill set of Margot and Richie Tenenbaum's (adopted!) incestuous love affair, graduated from California State University at San Bernadino at age 18 and spent a year in the Yale MFA program before being dropped for an apparent lack of maturity. Apparently, someone realized that the TEENAGER in the YALE GRADUATE PROGRAM was immature only AFTER collecting her $52,000 for the year. They do say money changes people.

Osberg sounds surprised that the teachers and administrators at Yale are unfeeling bastards:

"In my previous educational experience, the teachers (at Cal State) were very helpful and I expected it to be that way at Yale. In reality, their actions indicated that they are not concerned about their students, only about their own reputation," Osberg said.

She said two top Yale administrators, meeting with her in April, "indicated that they believed that I was too young to receive an MFA. Several times, they emphasized the fact that I would only be 20 when receiving my terminal degree and challenged me to think about what I would do with a terminal degree at such a young age.

So: unfairly wronged or just not ready for primetime? A sampling of the precocious artist's work after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »