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James Yu | September 29, 2008 at 1:35 am
The day after I wrote about Keggy's kegnapping, Deadspin reported that Keggy had been found, albeit "suffering one torn off eye and a badly damaged nose." Since I was in a rush, and because blogs are particularly renowned for their reliability, I took Deadspin's word for it and emailed Jacko Editor-in-Chief Dylan Kane that I had heard of Keggy's glorious recovery, and that I wanted to hear about all of the juicy details relating to the incident.
He replied:
Um, definitely not! Who told you that? No, Keggy is still missing. I might as well give you the rundown, I never did over the phone:
We last saw him safely sometime over the summer. July, maybe? Definitely late June he was here.
He must have been missing by the end of August, because the room he was in got reassigned from patriotic, American, apple-pie, penis-joke-based publications (like us) to the international students' orientation crew (not so much) at that time, and the people who did said reassigning say he wasn't in there at the time they took it over, which was more or less the end of August.
He was locked to the table with a bike lock, which we found there, undamaged, without Keggy. So either someone knew the combination, or we were lazy and left it, like, one digit off from the combination. We really don't know.
The mechanics of wearing a giant plastic cylinder are complicated. We use a modified frame pack inside, with some pieces of wood to support the top of the keg. It's incredibly uncomfortable, but it beats the alternative, which is having no support and resting the keg's entire weight on your upper shoulders and top of your receding hairline. It also comes with a costume: green tights, green t-shirt, white shorts, orange high-tops. So whoever took him took ONLY the shell. They can't possibly wear the costume or look much like Keggy, because they left all that stuff behind.
So Keggy is, in fact, still M.I.A. After hearing that I re-read Deadspin's post on Keggy and realized that the blog had mistaken Keggy's current kegnapping with the Sigma Nu kegnapping incident in 2003. Since Jacko's site only mentions the first incident (without a date) it's easy to see how such a misunderstanding could arise.
Read the rest of Kane's email after the jump.
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Read more: Dartmouth, deadspin, jack-o-lantern, keggy the keg
Can three men really put the economy back together? Of course not. But to a large degree, it's Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Timothy Geithner who are engineering our response to the Market Meltdown™.
But what do we know about these men? Can we find out anything about them from the various newspaper profiles they've appeared in this week?
Um, yeah. We can find out a lot about them. But I'm only going to note their college affiliations: Paulson is Dartmouth 68' and Harvard business '70. Bernanke is Harvard '75 and MIT '79 (econ PhD). Geithner is Dartmouth '83.
I know what you're thinking: "But Harvard's only a lesser Ivy." Not to worry; McCain is pitching in.
In case you haven't been reading the newspaper or watching television, the startled-looking bald man in the above picture is Paulson.
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Read more: Dartmouth, Harvard, i-banking, Market Meltdown, newspaper profiles, Paulson
A tipster directs us to this particularly charming yarn in the current Freshman Issue of the Dartmouth Review, in which pseudonymous writer Preston Q. R. Primrose regales us with his Penthouse Forum-esque quest for the "Real Dartmouth Seven." He of course means sex: "a licentious visit to the seven sororities" all in one night. Allow us to recap.
Much like Odysseus, "Preston" and his "bros" kick off the evening by pregaming in the basement. Luckily, within an hour and a half a KDE senior booty-calls our young hero. By his own timeline, eight minutes after getting said text he has scored "one down, six to go." This is a red flag that maybe we have an attempt at satire on our hands, kids, because... eight minutes (remember! that includes travel time and foreplay)? Is that really the example we want to set for the freshmen?
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Read more: Dartmouth, dartmouth review, Sex, sororities
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James Yu | September 24, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Keggy the Keg, quite possibly the coolest mascot in the history of the universe, has been kegnapped. According to a campus-wide missive sent by The Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern - the comedy magazine that spawned the beloved anthropomorphic beer keg and was responsible for creative stunts like "Drinking Time" and, most recently, the "D.Y.E." - staff members returned to campus during pre-orientation only to find that Keggy had been "forcibly abducted" from his home in room 205 of Robinson Hall.
For the uninitiated, Keggy the Keg is the unofficial mascot of Dartmouth, which is offically mascot-less. He rose to prominence in 2003, during the Student Assembly's mascot search project, which was aborted after a poll showed that most students disliked the idea (who wouldn't) of having a moose parading about during athletic events.
Who could possibly commit such an heinous crime? When I first heard about this I immediately thought of the College's administrators. After all, at times they've been known for denying Keggy entry into sporting events, and since they run Dartmouth they could easily have abducted him when everyone was off-campus for the summer. But this question-and-answer on Dartmouth's website seems to suggest a kind of resigned acceptance of Keggy, and plus his theft has been reported to both Dartmouth Safety & Security and the Hanover Police.
If anyone has any information about Keggy's kegnapping, please - for the love a freeflowing tap and the safety of all those who reside in the backwoods of New Hampshire - notify Jack-O-Staff or the toughs at H-Po. Not only will you get the satisfaction of knowing that order has been restored in the quiet town of Hanover, but you'll also get a boatload of free Keggy loot to boot.
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Read more: Dartmouth, jack-o-lantern, keggy the keg
So maybe you didn't get into the Ivy of your choice. Maybe you're gorging yourself on extracurriculars at Cornell to make that Harvard transfer app shine a little brighter. Or maybe you're a Barnard girl covertly sitting in on CC Lit Hum lectures in a Columbia sweatshirt. Of course, bemoaning your enrollment status at one of the best colleges in the country isn't usually the purpose of a student organization. At least, it wasn't until DYE came along.
Meet DYE, the Dartmouth Yale Enthusiasts, who, according to a recent email they sent to fellow Dartmouth students, "is a group of aspiring Yale undergraduates, providing support to one another during our (hopefully brief) intermediary period here at Dartmouth. We provide transfer application support, interview preparation, and standardized test reviews. Additionally, we have social events that make the experience at what is not Yale a little bit more like if it were Yale."
More about DYE, after the jump:
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Read more: Dartmouth, Prank, Yale
In a move perfectly designed to conjure "Animal House" jokes, James E. Wright, President of Dartmouth College, signed the Amethyst Initiative. This petition, introduced this summer by John McCardell, President Emeritus of Middlebury College, is designed to "reopen public debate over the drinking age." So far 129 college and university presidents have added their John Hancocks to this measure to curb binge drinking by maybe getting kids to start drinking earlier.
Though Dartmouth is the only Ivy on a list of signatories that includes schools as disparate as Hampshire College, Duke University and SUNY Purchase, UPenn President Amy Gutmann agrees the drinking age should be lowered to 18. Why didn't she sign the petition? The Daily Pennsylvanian will answer that:
Gutmann did not sign the initiative because she has not seen conclusive evidence confirming its claim that the higher drinking age causes increased levels of binge drinking
So why is Gutmann in favor of lowering the drinking age, if not to stop young people from drinking? Well, Gutmann--by way of the Daily Pennsylvanian--believes in a little thing called freedom.
It is "unrealistic" to expect people who can vote and serve in the military "not to be able to take a drink," says Penn President Amy Gutmann
After the jump, Cornell President David Skorton refuses to sign for no articulated reason.
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Read more: Amethyst Initiative, Cornell, Dartmouth, Drinking, Gutmann, Skorton
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James Yu | August 15, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Everyone is getting into the college rankings game these days, and everyone - it seems - has the same goal in mind: to dethrone the juggernaut that is the U.S. News & World Report. But while students and alums of certain liberal arts colleges and lesser-known universities are probably reveling in Forbes.com's inaugural rankings, the newest kid on the block is unlikely to find much support among the non-Princeton Ivy set this year.
Of the 569 schools included in the rankings, here's how the Ivies stacked up:
1. Princeton
3. Harvard
9. Yale
10. Columbia
27. Brown
61. Penn
121: Cornell
127: Dartmouth
Brown at 27 already seems like a stretch, but Penn at 61, Cornell at 121, and Dartmouth at 127? How vulgar, indecent, cruel! Some quotes and commentary after the jump.
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Read more: Dartmouth, forbes, Ivy League, Princeton, rankings, the dartmouth
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James Yu | August 15, 2008 at 12:53 am
Outsourcing is here, it's growing, and it kind of sucks. First it was limited to low level work: call centers and their ilk; things American college grads weren't competing for. But now, more and more, outsourcing is rapidly encroaching on jobs that have historically gone to Ivy League students: analyst positions at New York investment banks.
According to a recently published article in the Times, Wall Street's woes have fueled a bona fide bonanza of work in cheaper locales like India and Eastern Europe, where the research tasks that were once handed to newly-minted college grads and M.B.A.'s for salaries in excess of six-figures can be had for a fraction of the cost.
At India-based Copal Partners, which "churns out equity, fixed income and trading research for big name analysts and banks... business is up about 40 percent this year alone." Similar upturns in work have been seen by other third-party firms as well.
It doesn't seem like outsourcing will stop just there:
After research, the next wave may include more sophisticated jobs like the creation of derivative products, quantitative trading models and even sales jobs from the trading floors... In the future, executives in India like to joke, the only function for highly paid bankers in New York or London will be to greet clients and shake hands when the deals close.
More sobering quotes for all you finance types after the jump.
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Read more: Dartmouth, i-banking, india, new york times, wall street

Have you ever been reading a story about Obama in Time or Newsweek and thought, "Ok, this story is good but it would be better if it were much shorter and written from a fratty perspective?" If you have then you should definitely check out Brobama.org, a website put together by bros Lee Cooper and Scott Henning, both Dartmouth '09. These bros (who are, in fact, brothers in the Alpha Delta fraternity of "Animal House" fame) were interning in DC this summer and decided there was a need for a site to "translate campaign coverage and political news for people our age who might not otherwise be interested."
The site breaks a news story down into three elements: "News," "Context," and "What This Means for the Common Bro." For instance:
News: McCain's age more of an issue than Obama's race.
Context: 23% of Americans think McCain's age would make him less effective as a president
What This Means for the Common Bro: Can a dude still be your bro if he's old enough to be your granddad? The significance of age is debatable, but Obama's choice of V.P. will be more important now.
Presenting Obama as the bro's choice for president is arguably something Obama's campaign could stand to do a better job of. In that sense, Cooper and Henning's site helps reinvent Obama as a regular guy. And who better to do this than two media-savvy Ivy Leaguers?
Meet them in this interview conducted by Robyn Schneider:
1. Dudes, how'd you come up with the idea for the site?
Young voters and campaign organizers have already made their marks on this election cycle. But there's still a perception that young voters rally around candidates, particularly Obama, without any real appreciation of their policies and goals. We decided to take it upon ourselves to create a space where the newest generation of voters could be exposed to campaign issues that affect them. We've found a lot of voters our age who don't find popular political media as accessible and appealing to them as it should be. There's a startling lack of apbropriate brocabulary in the mainstream media today.
Interview continues after the jump.
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Read more: alpha delta, brobama, common bro, Dartmouth, obama