It’s Secret Society tapping time at Cornell! And while the only thing I’d personally like to tap is a keg, some vaguely important people are gathering in their towers and other assorted secret places to decide who will be the next batch of elitists to prance around campus wearing pins on their collars.

Now before the commenters rip me to shreds, I’m gonna let you in on my own not-so-secret. I ran the Cornell Concert Commission in 2009––a position that is normally welcomed into these organizations and allowed to view Slope Day from a higher vantage point. However, someone or other didn’t like me and so I was shut out of the club.

In fact, I was rejected by the lesser secret society too. Yet despite being given the negative nod by them, the Sphinx Head Society needs my help. Into my mailbox yesterday afternoon I received the message below from the 119th Tapping Chair (but shh – it’s a secret!).

from            Shayna Gerson <[REDACTED]@cornell.edu>
to
date            Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 1:32 PM
subject            ************* nomination
signed-by            gmail.com

hide details 1:32 PM (11 hours ago)

Hello,

You are being contacted because *********** has been nominated for membership in the Sphinx Head Senior Honor Society and you have been identified as a reference for him/her. Though *********** has already been identified as a candidate, we are still in need of a letter of recommendation to complete his/her nomination. If you are interested in writing a letter of recommendation for him/her, we would greatly appreciate it. The letter does not have to be long, we are just looking for a glimpse into the nominee’s leadership and character from someone who knows him/her well.

We will be reviewing all nominations starting Monday, so we will accept letters until Sunday at 9pm.

Thank you for your help,
Shayna Gerson
Sphinx Head Tapping Chair, 119th Tapping Class

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There was something about Rumpus’ recently released 50 Most Beautiful list that seemed a little off. No, not the typos, falsifications, or numbers accidentally written in Arabic (seriously). We couldn’t quite put our finger on it. Something about the gradient: white after white after white. Maybe their printers ran out of black ink? If only…

Apparently, in the gossip rag’s esteemed opinion, a disproportionate number of Yale’s pretty people are, well, of the Caucasian variety. We’ll let the ‘50 most’ numbers speak for themselves.

For comparison’s sake, here are the racial demographics of Yale as a whole, courtesy of Questbridge:

(FYI, 20 out of the 29 Rumpus-ites who worked on the issue are white… yup, about 68%)

So, using the power of math, our crack quants at IvyGate HQ have calculated that Rumpus’ 50 Most Beautiful List is 21.6% whiter than Yale in general. Ouch.

So much for the post-racial America, Barry.

Yale’s cruelest and least copy-edited “publication,” Rumpus, just dropped its trademark issue: the much-heralded and uber-nepotistic Yale’s 50 Most Beautiful. And inexplicably, there are 52 people on it. (Oh, and the cover mistakenly advertises 49, see below.) The rarely published and never fact-checked gossip rag also alludes to the exploits of a certain promiscuous “Cock Goblin,” public masturbation in Zeta, and more “truths they couldn’t prove.” Hot off the presses!

But don’t kid yourselves, you tasteless pamphleteers; we’re here for 50 Most. Best ways to get in? Know/hookup with Rumpus staff, make a public fool of oneself, (check, check) be a twin… or be beautiful, too, we guess. IvyGate’s got the list, and the balls to fact-check (stay-tuned).

Stats: The hottest Residential College is Davenport (mine, baby), with nine beautiful people, and the worst represented, Ezra Stiles, with a measly two. There are 11 freshmen, 12 sophomores, 18 juniors, and 11 seniors.

The actual hotness of these snarkily profiled folks is soon TBD. For now, feast your eyes on Movement for Beauty and Justice founder and professional airhead Justine Kolata, who made the issue alongside an exploited and confused horse above. After the jump: the full 50 Most list.

(Photo courtesy of Miranda Lewis, list graciously compiled by Joe Satran)

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“Two houses, both alike in aggregation,

in fair Columbia where we lay our scene.

From ancient grudge break new mutiny,

Where civil link makes civil comments unclean.”

Okay SO! Some weird stuff, and a debate about the borderlines of both censorship and advertising, is going on in the Bwog comments thread for the article “Freaking Out? Free Roti?.” Someone — maybe a Spec staffer? — posted links to the new blog Spectrum, which were quietly expunged from the site. At 1:40am, a commenter wrote: “why are you deleting comments of most of the things people say about spectrum like that’s weird.” At 2:00am, site Co-Editor Anish Bramhandkar wrote: “Bwog routinely removes comments that advertise other web sites.”

And then it was ON! Bramhandkar started outing commenters’ IP addresses to reveal they were posting multiply at 2:18am. At 2:50am Bwog’s Webmaster Hans Hyttinen commented “Again, we are only removing comments that do not add to the discussion in any way, such as a comment which was, in its entirety, ’spectrum’.” So I guess we know what the comment said! Their true feelings on the subject may be revealed in the first comment in the thread — “Spectrum: MORE LIKE RECT’UM.” [sic] What a great conversation this is, on all sides! [Spec, you are not immune.]

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• Brown: “Brown Dining Services’ new Club Plan meal option, which allows seniors to enjoy gourmet food at the Faculty Club, kicked off this year and attracted four subscribers.”
• Columbia: This blurb on an Italian restaurant has — so far! — 51 comments. Welcome to the internet, Spectrum!
• Cornell: “Wind turbines. PRETTY WIND TURBINES.” -Cornell Daily Sun
• Harvard: Faust indicates that she is literally the opposite of Larry Summers — like, if they were in the same room, the room would explode.
• Princeton: The image accompanying this article, of a Princeton girl buying Cheerios at the supermarket in lieu of an eating club is poignant. Very penultimate-scene-of-Hurt Locker. It’s after the jump!

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Hide your co-eds. Noted badass, saxophonist, and first black president, Bill Clinton, LAW ‘73, will be delivering Yale’s 2010 Class Day speech.

His wife (also a Senator) Hillary did the honors in 2001. This year, Harvard, having settled for Christiane Amanpour, has definitively lost the fame-game.

But after Christopher Buckley’s deliciously sassy 2009 speech, the former prez will have his work cut out for him. Maybe he’ll bring those two cute Korean journalists he rescued. Maybe he’ll inhale.

At the very least, he’d better not fall asleep.

Harvard Magazine brings us the very special story of a group of people who don’t get the credit or respect they deserve. We’re talking about Harvard undergraduates. We connect you to their second-person singular, for some reason?, account of the life of Becky Cooper ‘10, pictured.

You wake up each morningwith a fever; you feel like a shadow of yourself. But no time for sickness today—the Adams House intramural crew has one of its thrice-weekly practices at 6a.m., and you…will…row. Some mornings, you watch the sunrise from Lamont Library after hitting your study groove there around 11 the night before and bushwhacking through assignments during the quiet time between 3 a.m. and 5.

Good thing none of “your” commitments sound as if they’re exactly… um… non-skippable. The indefatigible Cooper has

hosted a two-hour weekly jazz show on WHRB, and as a freshman acted in Ivory Tower, the long-running Harvard TV soap opera viewable on YouTube. (Last summer, she also acted in an independent film shot by a friend in Miami, learning American Sign Language for the part.) In the summer of 2007, Cooper tasted some ravishing ravioli di zucca (pumpkin)—“I was in heaven”—and determined to learn Italian and cook in Italy.

Where does she find the time… to be totally self-indulgent, all the time! Like, ugh, maybe if you’re “constantly sick,” take it as a warning sign and call off your food column in the Crimson rather than bragging to an alumni magazine about how scattered and distracted your attentions constantly are? You’re already into Harvard. There’s nothing to prove, dear. And this continues for SIX PAGES. I think I’m the one with the fever — I am out of things to say, so I am but a shadow of the blogger I once knew. And I slept the normal, human amount last night!

Via Priceton Alumni Weekly: Yes, that’s General David Petraeus. And former Congressman James Leach. What kind of power does certified big man on campus Connor Diemand-Yauman POSSESS?! How many ridiculous pictures of powerful people can one college senior possibly have? Please email us everything you know, tipsters!

The Columbia Spectator launched its new blog Spectrum last night around 3 a.m., a launch heralded with a full-page banner ad on the cover of today’s paper. “We’re trying this blog thing again,” an all-caps headline pronounces, and trying they are! The new blog takes up the entire left side of the page, granting, as of this reading, equal visual precedence to an article, by the news editor, on the permanent appointment of a Dean of Student Affairs and an article beginning “What happened to you, Columbia? You used to be cool.”

This is bloggy, no doubt! And aggregatey! Spec’s site now grants a great deal of visual presence to a blog whose content promises to be less dry, if less newsworthy, than the daily paper itself. If the site maintains its current pace of uploading new posts — past blogging efforts, including “Spec Blogs,” the Opinion blog “Commentariat,” and the Arts blog “Spectacle” died a somewhat protracted death — it could become a go-to place for Columbia students. It’s certainly attractive! Really nice looking. This gives us pause, though: “Unlike Spec’s previous efforts, the new blog, Spectrum, will be supported by a dedicated blog team, meaning that it’ll be updated around the clock.”

And that’s kind of the problem, right? News worth reading isn’t constantly happening — the Spec, like every college daily ever, has to do a lot of stretching just to make its daily eight [or whatever] pages relevant. Minute-by-minute, what can Spec’s voice add to the discourse? Spectrum is a shot fired in Columbia mainstay Bwog’s direction, perhaps, but Spec and Bwog will end up fighting over the same stories, and Spectrum is at a disadvantage given how long Bwog’s had to establish its voice.

Well, hm! It’s not so much contributing a Spec voice to the discourse as letting the discourse change Spec, maybe! Right? It seems that opinion columnists will play a large role in the day-to-day workings of Spectrum, as will “daily editors” [a la Bwog, itself the well-defined internet outlet of monthly magazine The Blue and White] who will edit the site one day a week. Which gives them about as much power to define Spectrum’s voice as the editor-in-chief and managing editor have to define Spec’s? And both, Spec and Spectrum, are, again, equally prominent on the site. Which one is the cart and which the horse?

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Watch out Bonnie and Clyde. Princeton Prez Shirley Tilghman and former USG head-honcho Connor Diemand-Yauman ‘10 are obviously a pair of unapologetic BAMFs. And matching ones at that.

The unlikely snapshot was taken just before the well-coiffed matriarch awarded young Connor the Pyne Prize, Princeton’s highest undergraduate honor. And don’t forget the scrilla: the prize comes with a year’s-worth of tuition, which we can only assume was paid out in unmarked Franklins.

This picture is just begging for a sassy caption. Commenters: Find us the perfect one and we’ll credit you. Eternal glory awaits.