Last Thursday, the Yale Daily News rained insulting (and aged) statistics onto the campus's crowd of Obama supporters. The title of YDN staffer Divya Subrahmanyam's article alone could reap the scorn of anyone who's ever worked on a campaign:  "Double take: Months of canvassing, 430 votes to show for it?" The article goes on to calculate the underwhelming performance of Yale for Obama workers according to a 2002 formula by Yale political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber.

Yale's Obama faction was not pleased. The flurry of disgruntled comments on the article can pretty much be summed up with phrases like "I'm overwhelmingly disappointed by Divya's article," "And your point is????," or "What a terrible, thoughtless, and irrelevant article." Others point out the YDN's hypocrisy in undermining the efforts of some when the paper celebrated the work of canvassers in Virginia the day before. But Nathan Tek '09 has a point:

just because it makes you feel bad doesn't mean the research is bad or that the article is incorrect. grow up, Dems.

None of which stopped Yale for Change, which sent out a passive-aggressive group email including the word "appalled," accusing YDN of destroying democracy and freedom as we know it, and demanding an apology:

The paper never covered our efforts on election day, only here, an article that demeans our work. It says nothing of the overall ground operation of the campaign. It denigrates civic engagement.  It ran a news analysis piece without running the news.  There are any number of problems that I have with the story, and I imagine the same is true for most of you.  ...  We asked [YDN editor] Tom [Kaplan] to issue an apology, but he refused.

So goes this now classic yet always tired battle pitting poor reporting by Ivy dailies against the soft-shelled emotions of students. Check out Yale for Change's email and some good ol' fashioned fact-checking after the jump.

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Dunster House was the drunkest house at Harvard this weekend, where Halloween went terribly awry for one delightfully impaired student who shall be known only by the first initial of his last name: U. In the wee hours of morning on November 1, an email shot through cyberspace:

From: [redacted]@harvard.edu
Date: Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 4:18 AM
Subject: Mr. U.'s exciting Halloween in Dunster
To: [redacted]@harvard.edu

Dear Mr. U.:

I hope your Halloween 2008 was eventful, since you probably don't remember much of it. A few events in my room during this night is quite regrettable. Since you were blacked out, I think a summary is in order. Best of all, there are two exciting parts to your adventure in my room :

Part I.
1. You puked everywhere outside the hallway, making it almost too nauseous to even enter my own room
2. You puked onto the futon
3. You puked all over my hallway right outside my bedroom
4. You puked in my bedroom onto my computer chair, where I found you with your pants to your ankles in your underwear sitting on top of your puke
5. You puked all over a bunch of my sweaters and jackets

Part II. [I leave my room, leaving you asleep with the trash can next to you and return in 2 hours to find that:]
1. You puked all over the table I had put across my bedroom door to make sure you don't make your way there again
2. You puked all over the floor of my hallway
3. You took multiple shits in the hallway in front of my bedroom door, then proceeded to step in the shit and smear it all over my bathroom floor.
4. You smeared shit onto my sink, but I wiped this off out of necessity.

I found you sitting on top of the toilet, with your jeans at your ankles. Hey, at least you made it to the toilet?

The embattled puked-upon emailer (henceforth Mr. PU) delivers the "good news" after the jump. Also: Photographic evidence from the scene of the stench (SFW, but NSF-lunch-break)

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And by "chastity oath," we mean "becoming a co-defendant in his Title IX lawsuit against Columbia's Women Studies department and never get invited to another pillow fight at Barnard. Ever." Caught circulating CU's "Noble Freedom Warrior" Libertarian email list:

From: Roy Den Hollander

Date: Oct 24, 2008 11:58 AM

Subject: [CCL] Columbia Lawsuit

To: [redacted]@columbia.edu

Dear Libertarians,

I'm a graduate of the Columbia Business School and a lawyer who is currently suing Columbia University because its Women's Studies program discriminates against male students and male alumni and violates the First Amendment establishment clause concerning religion.

The case is a class action lawsuit, and I am currently looking for Columbia students or organizations to join as plaintiffs. All expenses are being picked up by the MR Legal Fund.

I can be contacted at [redacted]@yahoo.com or (917) [redacted].

Thanks

Roy

Over on the Philolexian Society's list, they're replying to Roy with chicks-with-dicks porn. But to discuss the impressive girth of Philo's collective silicone phallus is to beg the question: MR (that's misogynspeak for "Men's Rights") Legal Fund exists? And... has money?

The scene: A play at Princeton's Berlind Theater needs a line-prompter. A group email seeks volunteers. To minimize needless responses, the vounteer is to "reply all" so everyone knows the position has been filled. Freshman KaYee Ivy Lau responds,

I can do it if you still need someone :)

Enter, stage two-left-feet: Roby Sobieski, sophomore thespian and little brother of actress Leelee Sobieski. Noticing Ms. Lau's foreign-sounding name, Roby pens a patronizing response that quotes English dictionaries at length and points her to a career in telemarketing. He sends it to the entire list. An excerpt:

Dear Ka Yee Ivy Lau,

...As the Oxford English dictionary defines it, a prompter is: "A person in a theatre placed in a position next to the stage but out of sight of the audience, in order to be able to prompt the actors."

Search for further information brought me this as well: "Prompts are mouthed silently or hurled lyrically in a half-voice, audible (hopefully) only on stage."

Now while I'm sure that you would do your best, I have a feeling that someone who presses reply all and notifies his/her actions to an entire email list is not the best choice for the job of being discreet and/or silent in a theatre. Also, now everyone on this list would also be distracted during the production, wondering who the "elusive" Ka Yee Ivy Lay is.

But do not fret my friend, I am sure that somewhere out there, there is a job for you. Perhaps telemarketer?

For the record, Ivy is Princeton '11 and attended one of the best international boarding schools in the world, located in the British Isles. We're guessing she'll do better than "telemarketer."

Now, if the point of the original "reply all" was to minimize email clutter, Roby undid it, and then some. What follows is 50+ emails from the entire Berlind list-which includes not just students but alumni patrons, staff, and faculty-tearing the little Sobieski several new ones and assuring Ivy that she would, in fact, be a very good prompter. Then, the backlash: Stop spamming! Backlash to the backlash: Spamming is fun! Also, Roby's sister has nice tits!

Roby's final missive: A single hyperlink, to a clip of his sister discussing his sex appeal on national television. Lest there be any confusion: Roby Sobieski is not just any rude brat. He is a highly entitled, younger-sibling-of-someone-famous rude brat.

Complete story arc after the jump.

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The "reply all" contagion that has long plagued the lovesick and food-poisoned students at Princeton spreads now to Dartmouth, where midterms come with a lesson on the danger of online rants:

Subject: Kiss my Fanny
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:28:14 -0400 (EDT)
From: [redacted] @Dartmouth.EDU
To: "ENGL.041.01-FA07"

WHAT the HELL were we supposed to get out of Fanny Fern??? Just the sentamentalist ideology?  She's really like the weakest link out of the bunch and not just becuase that reading seemed out of place but also because it's one that I know the LEAST about.  God bless him for trying to throw a woman in the mix but curse him for throwing that curve ball. Taking the 19th century woman from the kitchen to the classroom is FUCKING me all up.  So again, WHAT the HELL were we supposed to get out of Fanny Fern???  Thank you for your consideration and goodluck with the studies.

More amazing than the fact that the writer expected peer "consideration" of a triple-question-marked, profanity-laced query is the fact that he apparently forgot that the professor's e-mail address tends to be included in online class lists. Professor Michael Chaney's "reflective" and metaphor-heavy response (Michael Jackon's "We are the World" comes to mind), after the jump.

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