Here we are, wrapping things up for the school year, and what more Ivy way to do it than with a big ol' dose of gazing lustily in the mirror? Here's three ways of measuring the year's top content.

I. COMMENTS As of this moment, we've written 572 items this year, and you've posted 5,751 comments -- almost exactly 10 per, a really outstanding number for which we are truly grateful. We want to thank the vast majority of you for keeping things lively, and in the interest of limping past the finish line without touching off a shitstorm, we'll leave unsaid our thoughts on the distinct minority that amplified the stereotypes of the Ivy League.

Without further ado, the Top 10 Most-Commented-Upon Items:

• Lord of the Lies: Aleksey Vayner Outdoes Himself (228)
• Calling Aleksey Vayner's Bluff (156)
• Barbara Bush Displays Remarkable Commitment to Drinking (126)
• Harvard-Yale Rivalry Escalates to Beef, Now With A Soundtrack (114)
• How Not to Apply for a Job in I-Banking (107)
• We'll Be Sure To Show This To Our Lawyers When They're Out Of Class (99)
• Introducing Tasty-Ass Sandwiches of the Ivy League: An Eight-Part Investigative Series (76)
• More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About the Dartmouth Fraternities (73)
• Apparently Third Eye Blind Still Exists, Is Popular (65)
• Skull and Bones Member Burns American Flag (63)

(God, we're a one-hit wonder band. Subtract Aleksey and you get these extras:)

• Cornell So Proud Of Itself For This (61)
• RagTime, RagTime, Wherefore Art Thou, RagTime? (56)
• J-Schooler Sure to Be Put on the Hard-Hitting Investigative Beat Now (54)
• Dartmouth Sororities Made Easy (51)

II. TRAFFIC The most objective look at what people consumed most, according to Google Analytics.

• How Not to Apply for a Job in I-Banking
• Calling Aleksey Vayner's Bluff
• Lord of the Lies: Aleksey Vayner Outdoes Himself
• Barbara Bush Displays Remarkable Commitment to Drinking
• Goodness Gracious
• We'll Be Sure to Show This to Our Lawyers When They're Out of Class
• Fact-Checking Yale's 50 Most Beautiful
• Alright, We're Just Gonna Say It: He's the New Kaavya
• Shower Stalls Are For Showering
• The Dartmouth Redemption 

(Wow, we're worse than Right Said Fred and The Knack put together. Subtract Aleksey and you get these extras:)

• Naked Pictures. Of Ivy League Students. Thousands of Them. Famous Ones. Spanning Decades. We Dare You Not to Read This.
• Kitchen Sex Is the New Shower Sex
• Princetonian Joke Issue Shows Knack for Subtle Social Commentary
• Box in a Box Singer Unboxed
• 8th Graders vs. 9th Graders: It's On 

III. PERSONAL FAVES And then there's the items closest to our own shriveled, blog-black hearts. In reverse order of appearance:

• Yale Alumni Magazine Rather Regrets the Error
• Fact-Checking Yale's 50 Most Beautiful
• Introducing Tasty-Ass Sandwiches of the Ivy League: An Eight-Part Investigative Series
  
• This Is Everything We Have Ever Wanted IvyGate to Be
• Evan Gogel Should Get Beat Up More Often
• Is That an Inflated Grade in Your Pants?
• Harvard Economists Visibly Dead Inside
• These Will Come In Handy at the Confirmation Hearings
• IvyGate Index: Calibrating Hegemony Since 2006
• Prof. Charles Nesson Now Permanently High

Aaaand that should do it. Final notes: 1) We never got sued, WTF? (Knock on wood.) 2) You know that scene at the end of The Paper Chase where Timothy Bottoms realizes what it's all about and paper-airplanes his grades into the sea? This does not feel like that whatsoever. 3) If you're interested in reanimating our corpse, aka guest editing, get in touch.

"Hey, looks like one of our deans got blitzjacked (his email account got hacked, to normal people)," a reader at Dartmouth emailed us yesterday. One look at the attached message, and we had to agree:

Date: 14 May 2007 16:16:53 -0400
From: Stuart C. Lord
Subject: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
To: (Recipient list suppressed)

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

I have amazing news to report to the student body! In just a few months as the Interim Vice President for Institutional Diversity, I am delighted to report that the Campus climate is repaired and we have achieved a standard of excellence other schools only long to attain!

I know this because I had invited students to Campus Climate lunches, and out of the entire student body, only 20 (yes, just 20!!) students responded. I am certain this must be because we have accomplished complete diversity and harmony and almost no one thinks there are any discussions left to be carried on.

However, in the event you think there is still need for discussion, and still need for healing, I would invite you to sign up for one of the lunches. There is plenty of room. There is also probably plenty to discuss. Tomorrow Tuesday May 15 or Next Tuesday May 22, 2007.

Stuart

To RSVP respond to the email and say ___ Yes I will be at Lunch this Tuesday or Next Tuesday.

**************************************************
 We Must Be The Change We Wish To See In The World
                                  ~Mahatma Gandhi
**************************************************

Dr. Stuart Calvin Lord
Vice President for Institutional Diversity & Equity (Interim)
and the Virginia Rice Kelsey '61S
Dean of the Tucker Foundation
Associate Provost
The William Jewett Tucker Foundation
Dartmouth College

Has to be a "blitzjacking" stunt, right? No administrator would joke about diversity with a sarcasm sledgehammer like that -- and certainly not a guy whose name is, terrifyingly, Dr. Vice President Dean Associate Provost Stuart Calvin Lord. And no one seriously has that Gandhi quote as their signature. We were all set to bemoan the continued devolution of the college prank into all-digital form when we got an update: Lord really had sent the message in question.

Date: 14 May 2007 23:43:20 -0400
From: Stuart C. Lord
Subject: Regarding Mission Accomplished
To: (Recipient list suppressed)

The goal of the e-mail I sent earlier was to generate publicity and increase attendance at our campus climate luncheons. In addition, The Office of the Vice-President for Institutional Diversity values the hard work that many members of this community have devoted to raising awareness about issues of diversity. The purpose of the Campus Climate Lunches is to provide a forum [blah blah blah]...

Stuart

Ooooookay then, Stu. Our tipster gets the last word: "Sorry for the false tip. I guess I just never expected a college-appointed dean would be so flippant about a serious campus issue. ... Evidently our vice-president for institutional diversity just thought diversity was a joke."

If you haven't noticed, The Office is multiplying at a lapine rate. First there was the British version. Then NBC's remake. Then some French and German versions. Extrapolate this trend and you get a parallel universe consisting entirely of Office remakes, one for every corporate culture on earth. The Onion: "CBS To Release Own Version Of NBC's The Office." It was only a matter of time before Office fever spread to academia.

This time the story is set at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, an institution that we imagine buys red tape by the mile. These are students training to be parts of bureaucratic machinery. Navigating the school's rigid hierarchy, financial aid office, and shoddy advising system -- that's just part of your education! At the very least, a few students saw enough similarity between their school and the existential mudpit of The Office to write and shoot their own remarkably faithful remake. It's got the same characters as the NBC version, only everyone is Columbia-fied: Michael Scott burns time surfing J Date. Dwight denies students financial aid. The deans award fellowships by picking out the cutest applicants' photos and throwing darts at the finalists to determine the winner. It's worth a gander, but you'll have to fill out a permission request first.

Part 1:

Part 2:

As most of you no doubt have noticed, we've been phoning it in for quite some time now. (Seriously, YouTube's on speed dial.) And this Friday, by which time five-eighths of y'all will have finished for the semester, we'll make it official, putting IvyGate into a suspended-animation summer schedule. We're taking the month of June off; then guest editors will host two-week stints through July and August. So whether you're building houses in Honduras, poring over foundational texts on the alternative minimum tax on Capitol Hill, researching the first annual Let's Go: Anbar, or finding personal fulfillment on Wall Street, we'll still be helping you find new ways to waste time. And come fall semester, we're looking to shuffle off this bloggy coil and hand the keys to the site over to a new pair.

So, two things: 1) If you've been sitting on a tip, email it now or never. We know you're in finals -- traffic has been super-high lately, but our inbox is pretty dry; remember our stuff is only as good as you give us.

And 2) If you're interested in either guest-editing for a spell this summer, or even (God save you) taking over in the fall, get in touch soonish.

It's practically a ritual for seniors to get righteously pissed off about their Class Day speakers. Jim Lehrer? Too stuffy. John McCain? Too conservative. Soledad O'Brien? OK yeah, she's actually pretty lame ...

So after seeing how the Ivies stack up in terms of musical guests, we thought a Class Day speaker-measuring contest would be in order. Who scored the hot shots? Who got stuck with duds? Your call:

• Brown: Craig Mello, Nobel Prize-winning biochemical researcher
• Columbia: Matthew Fox, actor (Lost, Party of Five) 
• Cornell: Soledad O'Brien, CNN anchor 
• Dartmouth: Henry Paulson, Treasury secretary
• Harvard: Bill Clinton, former U.S. president; Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft 
• Penn: James Baker, former secretary of state 
• Princeton: Bradley Whitford, actor (The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip)
• Yale: Fareed Zakaria, editor, Newsweek International

It seems clear Harvard scored the jackpot this time around. You'd think just one of the two most famous Bills in the world would have been enough. (Maybe Harvard wasn't sure which one was more prestigious, so they invited both just to be safe.) But don't rule out some dark horse performances. Who knows, maybe Bradley Whitford will deliver one of those rousing paeans to American values and soft backlighting. Maybe Matthew Fox will share anecdotes about his own sexiness back when he attended Columbia. If you get video, let us know.

(Re the Fox uproar: Now is probably a good time to tell you that in March, we read at Bwog that the actor Robert Maschio -- aka Scrubs's "The Todd" -- had offered to give a counter-Fox commencement speech at Columbia, opposite Fox. We emailed him to offer IvyGate as an official sponsor of the greatest speech ever; Maschio was totally into it, until it came time to commit, and then he backed off. Something lame about t-shirts. We were crushed, but regardless, now we can tell our children that we discussed going halfsies on kegs with the greatest actor of his generation, and no one can take that away.)

We've often wondered what might have become of Aleksey Vayner had he never made his hit film "Impossible Is Nothing." Where would he be in five years? What levels of success would he have achieved?

We're pretty sure the answer has arrived in the form of Timothy Ferriss, Princeton '00. Currently a "guest lecturer" at Princeton (sounds a little misleading to us; he's not in the official directory), Ferriss has honed self-help guruship down to an art -- he's good-looking, well spoken, and he knows you initially assume he's a fraud. His new book, The 4-Hour Workweek, explains how to work very little (check e-mail twice a day, outsource all your work to Asians for $5 an hour) and still live your dreams. Among the dreams Ferriss has already lived: Motorcycling across China. Dancing tango in Argentina (and on Regis and Kelly). Kickboxing. Skiing in the Andes. Gaining 34 pounds of muscle in 4 weeks. In other words, impossible is nothing.

The book already seems to be taking off. It's currently ranked in Amazon's top 10. The site's reviewers have given it five stars, nearly across the board.

And that's where it gets weird. The Amazon comments are absurdly positive. Frighteningly positive. Eyebrow-raisingly positive. Just look at the slew of reviews left all on the same day, April 24:

C. Ashenden, April 24: I don't give away compliments easily but I guarantee that this book will change your life. Don't wait.

Brian Page, April 24: I'm not a reviewer of books. In fact, this is the only one I've ever commented on. So as the first person to review The 4-Hour Workweek, I'm going to make a prediction. Remember, I called it first. This book WILL be a best-seller.

Sherwood Forlee, April 24: Because of this book, I would have to say that my dreams will soon become reality.

Matt, April 24: I don't know Tim, nor do I have any financial connection to this book. ... I have never written a review on Amazon before, but this book compelled me to write my first. I highly recommend you get it, and I guarantee it will get you thinking about making changes in your life.

Lindsay, April 24: I have always been a little wary of books focused arond life-improvement, but "The 4-Hour Work Week" book strikes the perfect balance between practical guidebook with real-world suggestions for how to maximize the work/life balance (something everyone needs to learn to do) and inspirational encouragement that yes, the life you want is just around the corner.

Michelle Bartakova, April 24: I believe this book is going to be a bestseller, will inspire many, and I would go as far as to say it will save lives. ... The revolution has began.... If this review sounds little bit over the top, well it is and so is the book. This is my first review on amazon, and who knows my next one might be written by my virtual assistant:)

(Hilarious commenter exchange on that last one is here.) When a tipster pointed out the unbroken slew of over-the-top raves to us, we saw this comment among them:

Smells fishy!, April 26, 2007
Reviewer: cyan (Sydney, Australia)
There are 18 reviews beneath me. Every single one was written on the same day. This is the only review of every single reviewer bar one. I wonder what the odds are of 18 individuals who never review on Amazon logging onto the site on the same day and giving the book 5 stars?

Even more fishily, that last comment is now gone. We have to agree, it's hard to see more than a dozen glowing, similarly-argued raves spontaneously cropping up all at the same time -- from people who have never before reviewed another title. If indeed Ferriss had a hand in arranging them, that's not necessarily wrong -- just really off-putting, really douchey, really ... Aleksey.

Ti dose fele a littel mena ot mkae fnu fo Corlenl's yeabrook, teh Cornellina, fro eon mitsake otu fo na netire voluem.

Btu hten agani, we'er tlaking abuot hte ufcking ocver.

UPDATE May 11: Forgot to mention that the clip above is from the Snu.

Some a cappella groups are at their best when they're not singing. That's not to say the Cornell Hangovers, a sub-group of the Cornell Glee Club, can't make the sun shine and the bras unclasp with their dulcet tones. (You can judge for yourself here.) All we know is, if stardom eludes them, they can always fall back on careers making intro films for other a cappella groups.

Of course, it's nearly impossible to make a bad film with the X-Men animated series theme song at your back. (Click that link, by the way. You won't regret it)

After the Great RagTime Insurrection of Aught-Seven, in which you people bizarrely fought to revive the feature from the dead, we knew our daily(ish) dailies round-up had somehow become more than the sum of its rag-parts. Now, with the Ivy papers shut down for the semester, what can its cold calculations tell us about the performance of the Ivy League's tabloids and broadsheets?

Well, probably very little. There you have the raw numbers -- give or take a few times we forgot to tag an entry properly, that's the number of stories the Herald, Spec, Sun, The D, Crimson, DP, Prince and YDN landed in the 90 installments of our roundup. But our calling this a scoreboard aside, this really has a lot more to do with our own reading habits, and those of the faceless serfs who wrote the column between September and February, than the relative quality of the newspapers. Nevertheless, we hand the information over to you and your ever-tasteful commentary to interpret as you will.

When Cornell booked Georgia rapper T.I. to play its annual Slope Day, it must have known his reputation. Possession charges, gun fights, parole violations -- Clifford Joseph Harris Jr.'s record is no secret. (We do admire his work with the Make-a-Wish Foundation.) But even they must have been surprised when, mid-song, the emcee stopped the music and went on a two-minute diatribe against a kid who'd apparently thrown a water bottle at him.

Instead of politely asking the student to refrain from throwing projectiles, T.I. took the next logical step and put $50,000 on his head. At a club or arena, this would be notable but uninteresting. At Cornell, it's surreal.

The video below is spotty, so we've included an abridged transcript. You may notice the DJ gets a little carried away with the gunshot sound effects: 

Don't motherfucking play with me, homeboy ... You don't throw nothing at me, I won't throw nothing at you, you dig that? [gunshot sounds] ... I respect your school doing your thang [Ed. note: Can this blurb please be engraved into stone on Ho Plaza?], but I'm a real street nigga, I don't play that shit, homes. ... Anybody else throws something up on this stage, I got 50,000 on his head, I ain't bullshitting. [gunshots] [guns cocking] [more guns shooting / cocking] ... That's the way it goes ... Don't motherfucking play with me man [gun cocks] ... Y'all see what it going have to be , right? ... [cocks] Hey, we need to continue this show. Throw something up here and you're getting thrown out, you're going to jail tonight. ... Let's do this [cocks] ... I need some head busters out there in the crowd. ... I need some plainclothes out there. ... If you see someone throw something, you know them out, come on and get your money.

It's hard to know where to start. First off, is it just us, or is T.I. really telling Cornell to snitch on its own? For shame. Plus, all that gun-cocking gets a little excessive. Everyone knows you can only cock a gun once in between rounds. It also makes you wonder how many "head busters" actually attend Cornell, and whether T.I. is aware of the likely scarcity.

P.S. We're actually not positive it's the original bottle-thrower that T.I. puts the bounty on -- it could be a hypothetical reward for violence against any subsequent hurlers. Close textual analysis appreciated.

UPDATE 5:30 p.m.: Nooooo! T.I. has pulled one over on us for the last time!