Penn Masala, Penn’s Hindi a cappella group, has produced a fairly amusing new music video about Facebook stalking. It has some frighteningly true-to-life moments (Seriously, who hasn’t Photoshopped himself over a crush’s boyfriend at some point?), plus the best pick-up line we’ve heard in a while: “I just want to add you.”

But for a truly transcendent experience, you have to see the video for the song it parodies, Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero.” Because as usual, the least intentional humor wins. Take Enrique’s watch cap — it’s a good thing he remembered that, out there in the blazing desert sun and all. We also enjoyed the part where he rubs down Jennifer Love Hewitt with handfuls of dollar bills (as if Nelly hadn’t already explored that artistic ground in 2004’s “Tip Drill”). Add Mickey Rourke and Mickey Rourke’s aviators, JLH’s gratuitously wet t-shirt, and Enrique’s insistence on singing his last breath, and you realize why Penn Masala felt compelled to piggyback on the glory.

Allot yourself some time. These should really viewed as a double-feature:

Fifty-six comments. Fifty god-damned six comments.

Once again, you people confound us in every conceivable way. But we know when the people have spoken — or, at least, an angry mob has assembled — and so here is the triumphant return of RagTime, our daily dailies roundup. Except for now, it won’t be quite so daily. We’re gonna experiment with a M-T-F format for, like, three weeks, and then look at bumping up. Your input, as always, is treasured.

• Columbia: Students paid to look homeless, withhold earnings from panhandlers on principle [Spec]
• Dartmouth: Some Ivy student councils more irrelevant than others [The D]
• Harvard: Promising candidates continue to flock from the chance to lead Harvard [Crimson]
• Ivy League: Blog readers fucking insufferable [IvyGate]

Being the master of an undergraduate college at Yale is normally a cushy appointment. You get to host master’s teas with Philip Seymour Hoffman and other celebs/talented people; liberally fund nude pictorial calendars; and generally be the “cool professor” who has lots of personal interaction with students.

Sometimes, though, you have to be the law. A Yale tipster shares this bulletin from Prof. Jon Holloway, master of Calhoun College:

From: Jonathan Holloway
To: All Calhoun Students
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 9:10 AM
Subject: Showers Stalls are for Showering

OK, well THIS is the most awkward college-wide e-mail I’ve ever had to send….

The college showers are to be used by individuals for hygenic purposes only. They are not to be used by couples engaged in intimate activity–especially that kind of activity that leaves the showers in a decidedly less hygenic state.

Several times since the start of the spring term some Hounies have come across a couple having the time of their lives in a shower stall. Last night the shower flooded and the bathroom could not be used for over 90 minutes. To the as yet unidentified couple, this may be pleasureable and exciting for you but it is a violation of community standards. Please stop.

I really don’t want to explore this matter any further as I respect your individual privacy. But such continued brazen public displays of affection will only invite public embarrassment. I beg of you, let’s not go there.

JH

This is obvs our favorite reader tip in a long, long time. The fact that a man with a Ph.D. has to police students doing the excitement in the hall shower — wait, scratch that, is threatening indiscreet students with public embarrassment … we’re betting this didn’t come up when Yale offered Holloway the job.

The coolest part-time job in the Ivy League that we’re aware of belonged to our friend Ben, who would go into a fertility clinic on a very high floor of the Empire State Building twice a week to help sterile couples make little Bens. The second-coolest part time job we’re aware of belongs to Eric Shansby, Yale ‘07: he’s the cartoonist for Gene Weingarten, a weekly columnist for The Washington Post, of whom we are depraved, slobbering fans.

It’s hard not to like their working relationship, which in public seems to entail calling each other — well, calling them what Ben did for spending money. Shansby, Weingarten told the Yale Daily News, is “meek looking. Totally unassuming. One detects, emanating from him, an eau d’ nerd. And yet this little schmo is bootlegging a colossal ego.” Shansby, for his part, thinks of Weingarten’s columns as “long, tedious captions for my cartoons.”

Recently, we randomly stumbled across Shansby’s Wikipedia page, expecting the usual geekery of young people who have Wikipedia pages. Instead we found a parody we’re really hoping came from Weingarten himself. We know, posting this virtually guarantees some humorless gnome will come along and disinfect the page. Sorry; if it does get scrubbed, there’s an archive here. Snippets:

Notable Quotes 

“You know, look at me, I’m a genius. For fuck’s sake, what do I have to do to prove to you son-of-a-bitches what I can do, and who I am? And don’t you dare — don’t you dare fucking criticize my work like that! You who don’t know anything about it. I would say I owe everything to Peanuts, really.”
–Interview with the Hartford Courant, November 2005

“We either wait 20 to 30 years for them to die, or we - I don’t know - we can assassinate them”
–Of the older generation of professional editorial cartoonists. Quoted in Lexington Herald-Leader, April 2004

“Grab your glocks when you see e-rac, call the cops when you see e-rac.”
–From his upcoming album featuring the late Tupac Shakur, “Knee-Deep in Bitches”

“This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business.”
–Reaction to a paper read to the Moral Sciences Club, as reported by Heinrich Ng

We fully expect that, when all is said and done, Shansby will have fathered many more children than Ben.

In the latest installment of Blog Man on Campus, our woman in cyberspace watches her moral universe disintegrate.

Ivy League Chic wears its erudition and penetrating insight like most people wear tight leather Gucci pants and D&G stilettos: not at all, not ever. Authored by a Cornell senior, Ivy League Chic is the perfect destination for those who tire of, you know, ideas.

First, let’s get this out of the way: it’s a fashion blog. So keep in mind that any criticism herein might actually register as high praise. For instance, “Blonde Belle,” the writer and self-described “debutant” [sic], provides helpful tips on how to bring couture into the classroom. Couture, I’ve learned via Wikipedia, is that complicated handmade designer stuff that can be yours for the price of a small Carribbean island — but luckily Belle has distilled some more affordable ideas out of the Chanel show. Like this $498 black dress. Here you will also find enlightening regular criticism of Britney Spears, complete with pictures, plus well-intentioned tutting at the former’s association with Paris Hilton. She’s only got your reputation in mind, Brit.

The blog actually does fill a gap in the cyber-Ivy community, which is stuffed with earnest young scholars pontificating through the lens of what they learned in Cultural Relativism 101 that morning. Belle is earnest but no scholar — she uses a Capitol Hill invite-only reception to muse about the drab grays and browns the Senators wear. She also devotes a post to things that are like, so totally way more interesting than the State of the Union address, like the twist-off bottlecap. (Actually she’s onto something there; there is never a bottle opener around when you need one … particulary during the SOTU.) Her zeal can be cute, like her delight with an online quiz’s findings that the celebrity she dresses most like is the adorable Reese Whitherspoon. (Belle threatened to kill herself if she was found stylistically similar to Tara Reid.)

But Belle can also be cruel. Witness her paparazzi’ing of an unsuspecting Cornellian, whom she photographed from behind for the purpose of generalizing about the too-goddamn-cold-to-look-nice population of college girls. The young lady’s offense? Uggs, leggings, and a down jacket. Belle bravely discloses that she knows whereof she criticizes: She herself once wore a T-shirt and jeans to exams. It made her feel “icky.”

Insecure but smart ladies who slogged frumpily through high school, dreaming of one day living somewhere where they would be judged not by the color of their eye makeup but by the content of their character, will be disheartened by this blog. You did not leave the mean girls behind in high school. They are following you. And taking pictures.

People just don’t like playing for Princeton men’s basketball coach Joe Scott.

Scott, who has the unenviable role of filling the shoes of former coach John Thompson III, has been by all accounts a huge bust for the Tigers. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that his personality has something to do with it. Scott, late of the top job at the Air Force academy, tends to start each season by kicking a few players off his team. This year was no exception (although Princeton did issue this hilarious “roster clarification” to make it seem like sophomore Geoff Kestler actually didn’t leave the program, which, we’re telling you, he did).

But now players are saving Scott the trouble of booting them by fleeing the team themselves. In early January, one the squad’s top freshmen, Blake Wilson, announced he would be leaving Scott’s program to transfer to St. Joseph’s. Senior Max Schafer’s minutes were cut so sharply he quit. And last week, recruiting site Scout.com broke news that the team’s top recruit — Jeff Peterson — would break his commitment to Princeton (despite getting in early decision) and find another school to play for.

Princeton has a decent record overall, but they’re 0-2 in Ivy play so far, including a loss to Cornell in which they scored just 35 points, the school’s fewest ever in an Ivy game* since the introduction of the shot clock. For audio evidence of how grating Scott is, check out the sound of his voice here. Jesus — we thought we’d never find another Princetonian as annoying to listen to as this guy.

The backdrop to the New Year’s Eve Yale a cappella brawl is finally taking shape — and not, apparently, thanks to the police, who have all but botched the investigation. The San Francisco Chronicle ran an absurdly comprehensive* recount on Friday, using eyewitness accounts that “supported the Yale singers’ contention this was an attack on them, not a fight.”

The story is sprawling, with some key background on the Catholic school rivalry narrative that a few earlier stories have only alluded to. Our favorite detail: instigator Richard Aicardi (the Chron gave him anonymity, but that’s him pictured above) arrived at the party wearing a Santa hat — an unpromising start for a guy who, to say the least, comes off very poorly. A couple of snippets:

One of the Baker’s Dozen group, Sharyar Aziz Jr., went to the kitchen to take a beer from the 30-pack the guest had brought and said the guest told him curtly, “That beer is not for you.” …

[Aziz] said the group of young men “was expressing we were a bunch of ‘fags’ and ‘homos’ and said they wanted to fight. They were saying, ‘We are in the 415′ ” — San Francisco’s area code — “and this was their territory. It was like something out of ‘West Side Story.’ “

Aziz said he told the young men, “There are 18 of us, and there are five or six of you, and we’re not going to fight you.”

A lawyer for the Aicardis, Frank Passaglia, disputes the media’s characterization of the incident thus far:

“There was no attack,” he said. “There was nothing planned. There was a lot of alcohol. The Yalies were drinking. Other people were drinking, and it was a mutual combat situation.”

Passaglia said he was “really upset about the fact you have a bunch of influential people from back East from a very influential university who have gone out of their way to hire influential lawyers and political people who are exerting a lot of pressure to charge somebody.”

“If this had been a party involving African Americans or Hispanics,” Passaglia said, “I just don’t think this kind of influence would have been exerted on the police and the DA’s office, and the press would care less. But because these are Yalies, all of a sudden, it’s been distorted.”

Food for thought. But you know, if Passaglia wants to see distortions, he should take a look at Aziz’s face.

(*but regrettably, does not further the Evan Gogel Bruise Hottie angle)

Only a few things can shock us. Lena Chen entering a convent, perhaps, or Larry Summers getting a Mary Wollstonecraft tattoo.

But yesterday, we were shocked as if by a lightning bolt from the finger of God Himself, right after God had put on a fleece jacket. Spake a commenter:

Uh, we were kind of assuming no one would even notice we’d discontinued that. As we moved to our new publishing sked of two items/day, RagTime would have become a full third of our posts, and that would be ridiculous. Right? But now we’re looking at the week’s news, and there appears to be some fun headlines we missed.

So we’ll just throw it out to you — does anyone care / want RagTime back? Maybe do it as one weekly recap? We’re assuming there’ll be a resounding “no,” but let us know in the comments.

Grad students are, pretty much by default, creepy. Not undergrads, not yet professors, they’re caught in the murky gray zone that’s home to both legitimate career academics and social misfits with no job prospects.

Oh, and child molesters. A couple weeks ago, Penn discovered that Kurt Mitman, a first-year economics grad student, lived off-campus. In fact, he’d been commuting to school all year. From prison. Mitman was convicted in March 2005 for molesting a 14-year-old boy, and was attending classes as part of a daytime academic release program. Penn had no reason to suspect (unless, of course, they’d bothered Googling him): Mitman graduated from UVA with a dual degree in 2004, before going on to study econo-physics at Oxford as a Marshall scholar. It wasn’t until Mitman’s mother discovered on a sex offender database that her son was enrolled — six months after he’d started taking classes — that corrections officials told the university about Mitman’s history.

Other than Mitman’s little slip-up at genius camp — the boy was a camper, he was a counselor — his record is totally clean. That said, there was some ominous foreshadowing in an old UVA puff piece titled, “Curiosity drives Mitman’s pursuits.”

No word yet on whether he’ll get to continue his studies at Penn. But if he does, you won’t want him as a TA: Bucks County prison is a schlep, even for office hours.

Zing!!