What would you do if one day you were walking along Harvard Yard and suddenly came upon THE MEMBER'S MANUAL OF THE OWL CLUB FOR MEN??!! (For those of you who don't know, the Owl Club is one of eight final clubs at Harvard, boasting exclusive all-male membership, vast alumni connections, and a constant bevy of barely-dressed freshman waiting outside its doors on Saturday night.)

Well, if you were Garrett Dash Nelson, Harvard '09, you'd publish this gem on your blog "Legion," a blog fully equipped with snarky commentary and refreshingly witty insight about everything from politics to Harvard life. Like so:

The opening page to the manual is an appropriately button-up affair, but perhaps a bit too austere. For example, this owl is hocking potato chips and having a fucking awesome time doing it. This owl is peacing out with Abe Lincoln (!) and is also “wise to the monumental mischief of the Terror Twins.” By contrast, the Owl Club’s owl appears to have been “backed up” back up there for well over a century, standing on its anthropomorphic legs and stuffing its wings up its butt. And thus we have stumbled on our first ethnographic discovery: Owl men never poop.

Nelson and his fellow bloggers Jon-Mark Overvold and Maryellen McGowan take the most amusing selections from the Manual and proceed to tear it apart, all in good humor. In response to one rule listed in the Manual, "Alcohol and tobacco are the only drugs allowed on the premises. If any other drug is brought onto the premises, all members involved will be expelled and their names purged from the records," Legion writes:

That’s right PURGED FROM THE RECORDS. And what’s worse is, if you then break the mirror you were snorting coke off of before you were PURGED FROM THE RECORDS your collars (all of them) will refuse to pop for a period of seven years. Shackled to permanently flaccid neck accoutrements, exiled members then have little chance of spawning.

Highlights from the Manual analyzed and dissected by Nelson, Overvold, and McGowan along with comments about the article given exclusively to Ivygate by Nelson himself, after the Juuuump! Read the rest of this entry »