You might wonder, why do we always see Ivy League characters in books, movies, and on television?  Well, when you get 7 of the country’s most prestigious schools together with Cornell, their combined influence and effrontery is bound to influence pop culture.  Here begins IvyGate’s 2-part “investigation” of Ivy League schools and their fictitious alumni.  To begin, Brown University:

The first person we’ll examine is Hermione Granger…oh, wait…that really happened.

Okay, let’s move on to our next, and certainly most famous and relevant Brunonian: Brian Griffin.  No student could typify Brown University more with his contrarian nature, sickeningly left-wing agenda, air of superiority, and casual (causal?) use of alcohol, pot, and various other drugs.  Most notably, however, he didn’t graduate, rounding out the underachievement of all Brunonians!  Like most Brown students he has very little to put on his résumé, besides things like a hydroponics lab and that one summer in high school spent working to cure Koalas with an extra nipple. Read the rest of this entry »

Forget money: all you need to buy love these days is an Ivy League diploma. At least that’s the word according to IvyDate.com, a new online matchmaking site for (you guessed it) Ivy League alums.

IvyDate was founded by two graduates of Harvard Business School, which–given that school’s sheer abundance of white-collared yuppies with $500 glasses and $2,000 laptops and ten cents of common sense and zero percent compounded interest in the sex department–frankly surprises no one. Beri Meric & Philipp Triebel, both former investment bankers (which also explains a lot), have thrown themselves into the business of Your Sad Pathetic Love Life with a blessed fervor characteristic of coked-up, laid-off wheeler-dealer types. Their big sell is to help you have the social life you never had because you were too busy being an Ivy Leaguer:

We developed our idea for IvyDate based on the fact that exceptional singles often sacrifice romance for their careers and community. So we set out to create a simple, easy-to-use, members-only platform that makes outstanding romantic connections a reality for highly driven men and women who value intellectual curiosity, love of learning, drive, and determination.

Meric, Treibel and their dedicated team of Harvard-grad lackeys do all the work for their clients: there are no databases to peruse, no sketchy emails from Bob@ILoveNathanHale.net. Instead the folks at IvyDate spend hours mysteriously matching up “likeminded (sic) individuals” in dark smoky rooms behind closed doors in the dead of night at the top of the Tower of London. Or something.

The site, which is based in New York, London and Boston, has expanded its list of qualifying schools to include MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics. That says a lot about the sorts of people involved in this Ivy-League-Yenta trading-card game: not only are they very choosy about college sweatshirts, but they’re also quite keen on dental health care and 401(k)s. They also don’t mind pimples and robots. Hey, there’s no way we’re getting dental in this line of work–where do we sign up?

Oh, wait. You have to be accepted before you can meet your future Daddy Warbucks:

We review all prospective members, and award membership to a diverse range of exceptional individuals with truly engaging profiles.

Well shit. Guess that excludes everyone who isn’t a former investment banker from Harvard Business School.

Remember the time that Cornell students were all awkwardly in-our-faces about how much sexy sex they had with their vag rings and pink betties? (Oh wait. That was yesterday.) Judging from this Valentine’s-Day-themed page at the official site for Cornell alumni, they’ve got a lot of sexy sexless babymaking to look forward to.

The page invites Cornell alums to share their “Big Red Love stories” about other Cornell students. Big red love sounds like the kind of love you should probably see a doctor about, because it might turn out to be chlamydia. But for anyone who still thinks that Cornell sweats are the world’s most effective chastity belt, we now have real evidence that not all of them die virgins alone:

Priscilla and I were both new Freshmen when we met during orientation. We stayed in the same dorm and always had a connection. That connection blossomed into a wonderful relationship and we have now been married for almost 10 years. Our first date was on Valentine’s Day when she invited me to a movie and bought me a Ring Pop. To this day, we watch The Wedding Singer on Valentine’s Day and reminisce about our first date 13 years ago in Ithaca.

How quaint and 1990 of them. We haven’t used Ring Pops as sex toys since the third grade, but hey, we were advanced for our age. Or this one:

I was struggling with my German class and knew Nate was also taking German. I innocently asked if he would be my tutor and he not so innocently agreed. After a few tutoring sessions we starting hanging out more. Nate being a Vermont boy and me a city girl I asked if he would take me on a night walk to see some deer. Lucky for him we spotted some on the golf course near North Campus. And that is where it all began. We have been married 7 1/2 years and have a 2 1/2 year old son who only cheers “Go Cornell” no matter what sporting event he is watching and no matter which teams are playing (usually not Cornell at all).

Attention world: if someone ever asks you to go on a long walk in the middle of the night in a forest to go “see some deer,” bring mace. At least they’re raising their son to be a good Cornell student–he’ll know how to cheer for nonexistent victories, which is indispensable.

One thought predominates when we read this stuff: Christ on a bagel, are we supposed to be meeting the loves of our lives right now? Why are we in our sour little rooms writing this crap when we could be having big red love? …And then we remember that there’s nothing to do in Ithaca but go on long deer-watching walks, and we feel better.

CBS News has figured out why the whole world is going to pieces: people don’t have enough Ivy League role models, duh. They’ve posted a slideshow on their website of 33 celebrities who clearly think about their Ivy Education at every moment of their waking lives, or at least every moment that they aren’t waxing their upper lips and their Oscar statuettes.

IvyGate agrees that we all need some people to look up to–but as any Ivy League grad will probably tell you, there are “people,” and then there are “qualified people.” So for your benefit, we’ve decided to rate each of CBS’s featured celebs on his or her role-modelability, on a scale of 1 (might as well be Demi Lovato) to 5 (awesomer than three cans of Four Loko at the Harry Potter premiere).

1. Natalie Portman, Harvard ’03. Hangs out with Danny Aronofsky and manages to look a lot taller than she actually is. Also, way more Israeli than Bostonian. And she can rap. 4 out of 5.

2. Emma Watson, Brown ’13. Cute and sparkly, but has been known to burst into tears at the slightest incitement. Likes being a celebrity who hates being a celebrity. May at one point have been topless. Eh, not a lot of life skills there. 2 out of 5.

3. John Krasinsky, Brown ’01. Was an English major, thus showing all English majors that there’s hope for a future career that isn’t (a) librarian, (b) teacher at inner-city high school, (c) sulky Germanic Literature grad student, or (d) smug useless schmo. With a little luck, you can play a smug useless schmo on television. 3 out of 5.

4. John Legend, UPenn ’99. Graduated from high school when he was 16, cut an album with Kanye West, won a whole bunch of awards, and still gave enough of a damn about Penn to make a killer commencement speech in 2009. The man has soul, kids. 5 out of 5.

5. David Duchovny, Princeton ’82, Yale dropout. Former alien intelligence crusader, now just cruises for blond chicks with tits. 1 out of 5 or 5 out of 5, depending on your opinion of blond chicks with tits.

Lots more ratings after the jump!

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• Yale: Can’t stopping stop talking about how Blumenthal won.
• Cornell: Boasts about their seven alumni winning congressional seats.
• Dartmouth: Doesn’t even try to count all their alumni participating in congressional races.
• Harvard: Massachusetts Governor wins re-election, receiving large numbers of votes from Cambridge and Boston.
• Princeton: Don’t tell Serena, from GG, that professors are off limits, chiefly because her dreamy love-interest went to Princeton.

Remember television? At least, remember the television that wouldn’t cater to the brain-dead, the attention-deficit, the emotionally-challenged, and the desensitized? Ever since Gossip Girl hit the Ivy college wall, it has spiraled into oblivion (kind of like Saved by the Bell: The College Years). ABC Family (and all of its naive college depictions) has always been a moralistic, cringeworthy disgrace. Exhausted, reality television and even internet porn (maybe) have recently sought to scoop the cream from the crop, looking for the next big star (clothed or otherwise) with some Ivy history to spice things up.

What does a Harvard alumni really look like? At your best, Matt Damon, David Foster Wallace – hell, even Mark Zuckerberg…if they had stayed. At your worst, this (he could’ve made it, folks). Sorry, let’s revise this question: what does a Harvard alumni really sound like? The yawning, oleaginous mouth of a sesquipedalian aristocrat? Close enough. Minus the “sesquipedalia.”

The Harvard Crimson recently interviewed the 2010 graduating class and alumni from 1960 forward to make some repetitive claims about the inherent school-wide disappointments of fifty years of America’s finest men (and now women). What’s changed? Apart from women, African-American people – check. Congratulations!

What hasn’t: watch it for yourself -

Props to the pink booty shorts. You’re making strides, Crimson.

Some people just never learn about self-worth…especially clueless Penn alum like one Jordan Zucker. Despite four years of top-notch Philadelphian fraternal passion, Ms. Zucker has resorted to joining other P-college attendees, digging up her meals out of the fleshy, sour trash can of reality television by auditioning for Oprah Winfrey’s Search For the Next TV Star competition. Ms. Zucker aims her bottomless bimbo glasses of wine at the Oprah throne, and at best, splashes just a drop of incompetency on her royal toes. Her brilliant idea? A female-oriented sports-themed fantasy-football cooking Dr. Seussian nightmare. Rhymes aside (and multiple empty wine glasses, faux Bohemianism with a trophy guitar,cheesy beach backgrounds, etc.), her belief in her “experience” in television – which boils down to a guest screenshot on Scrubs and some DVRed Food Network special – leaves me wondering what concoctions of self-humiliation and self-illusion are brewed on Penn campus. Oh wait, I already know.

That’s right. Sorry to all those of you who wanted to see the First Lady, or just find out what a patterned cardigan and chunky belt combo looked like in real life.

It’s a Yalien invasion!

The Observer ran a story yesterday that about “Yaliens,” Yale grads who get into their little space pods and fly over to New York City, where they find refuge from that other “city” they were stuck in for four years.

Then they create a Yalien colony among themselves, like a transplanted Yale campus—as Slate editor and Yale alum Jacob Weisberg said, “I mean, Williamsburg is sort of the Yale campus without the classes, right?”—in which, so it seems, they replay their Yale experience without the classes, right? As his former classmate, journalist Richard Bradley explained:

“New York is Yale’s backyard…It’s something you take for granted—you’re fish, so you swim in the ocean.”

Aliens, fish, whatever Yale alumni are, they come off (in this article) pretty much the way this blog does. (Whether that’s good or bad, it might depend on the day!) They are unfailingly elitist and remain enclosed in their own private universe. As the Observer article reports, “Yaliens keep to themselves when possible” because, a source explained:

“There aren’t as many people here who are smart and interesting…There are a ton who look like they would be, but they’re not.”

But when they do communicate with outsiders—perhaps while taking the bulldog out for a walk—they have a particular charm that seems to be a blend of smarts, ironic humor, and a genuine love of the mothership. They can’t thrive for too long without it!

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