Things were looking up for former Wharton student and recent Columbia temp employee Chris Clemente in September 2005. For one, Clemente, 37, had just been released from prison after serving 15 years for heroin and weapons possession. But even better than his freedom–he allegedly discovered a new and promising illegal scheme! A friend tipped Clemente off to an MTA machine that was malfunctioning and giving out free fares, authorities said. Over the course of the next three years, Clemente and two others, Cary Grant (that’s his real name) and Lisa Foster Jordan, allegedly stole more than $800,000 worth of MTA money from this Penn Station machine.
In a New York Postarticle, an MTA spokesperson explains how this mechnaical error probably happened:
The odds of [the suspects] stumbling on this were astronomical,” MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin said. The scenario “would only happen if you used an active debit card but had insufficient money in your account and it was from a smaller, nonlocal bank.
In other words, if you were broke and had an account at a nontraditional bank, you too could have taken advantage of the MTA.
What could have possibly brought these three down? According to this Post article, it was a “routine agency audit.” Yeah, I guess an audit conducted every three years is kind of routine.
Here at Ivygate we like to put a critical eye on things. You readers are smart; if all you wanted was feel-good propaganda you wouldn’t bother visiting us – you’d turn to one of China’s state-controlled newspapers or your alma mater’s alumni magazine. Sometimes, however, we come across men and women like Joey Cheek and Alicia Sacramone, individuals who are so un-Vayneresque that we temporarily lose our capacity for snark and vitriol.
The same holds true when we discover intelligent and inventive bands like Miss Vintage. Fronted by lead singer and guitarist Jason Min, Penn ‘05, Harvard GSE ‘07, the band’s sound falls under the genre of art rock, a term that allmusic defines as having “experimental or avant-garde influences” and being “intrinsically album-based, taking advantage of the format’s capacity for longer, more complex compositions and extended instrumental explorations.” (If all this music jargon is addling your brain, just think Explosions in the Sky with vocals or Coldplay without as many pop-y hooks).
Since forming in Philadelphia in 2006, Miss Vintage has played at over 150 rock venues and college campuses, mostly on the East Coast, and has released one album entitled Runways. The band’s second LP, Our Lives Are Not Through Just Yet, will not be released until later this month, but we were able to finagle two of its tracks for your enjoyment: “Trains,” and “The Last Time We Cried”.
In this installment of “Your Olympic Hero,” Ivygate introduces Susan Francia, who is the second attractive female Olympian to have a post devoted to her this evening. While I don’t have any Youtube videos of Susan drop-kicking fans, I do have a charming interview with the Penn alum.
Name: Susan Francia
Ivy Affiliation: Penn ‘04
Major: Criminology
Sport: Women’s Rowing (Women’s 8+)
1. Are you going to win?
We’re going to try our best!
2. Is this your first Olympics?
Yes, it’s my first Olympics.
3. What’s on your ipod when you’re erging?
Lil Wayne, Jay Z, and German techno.
4. Was Penn your first choice?
Good one! Yes, coming from a suburb of Philly, Penn was an institution that I prayed that I would get into. It’s an awesome school and I’m glad I went there.
5. Which is the least athletic Ivy and why?
Rhode Island School of Design, enough said.
6. For the rest of your life, you have to give up either rowing or missionary position sex. What’s your choice?
You mean coitus?
Sorry, but all of the best questions are after the jump.
Never have I ever played a lame-ass drinking game with cups of water and had my college tell me that it was totes against the rules. But that’s because I don’t go to Dartmouth. A recent Time magazine article entitled “The War Against Beer Pong,” describes the demise of Wii’s upcoming Beer Pong game, part of their new line of “Frat Party Games” (what’s next–Superman That Ho?). Apparently, haters took issue with the word “beer,” and now the game is set to be released as Pong Toss, with party cups full of water instead of brewskis.
As ridiculous as this sounds, the banning of beer pong is not so far removed from our own ivy-covered buildings. The article cites Yale and the University of Pennsylvania as schools that now ban drinking games because, evidently, your R.A. will magically know when you and your roommate watch Ocean’s Eleven and do a shot of Stoli every time Brad Pitt’s character eats or drinks something.
I mean, I get it, drinking games are a way for people to get drunk, but if they really want to wake up the next morning with a pounding headache, won’t students just…get drunk anyway?
Welcome to judgment day, Ivy Leaguers, where we find out whether the grassy quadrangles encased by your school’s iron gates are a heaven or a hell. So gather round, because I’ve got the results hot off the press fromThe Princeton Review’s The Best 368 Colleges 2009. Gems from this Compendium of All Things Safety School after the jump.
If you torture a dog with random electric shocks, will the dog become sad?
Such was the question millions of Americans were once frantically asking, until Penn professor and psychologist Martin Seligman decided to find out once and for all. (The answer: Yes.) However, Seligman’s results, after they were first published 40 years ago, had a perhaps unintended effect. As it happened some time later, CIA torture aficionados became very interested in Seligman’s work and wanted to examine the implications of this revelation for human torture. Seligman’s dog studies, it turns out, were instrumental in developing techniques used at Guantanamo Bay. So say the muckraking journalists, at least. The Daily Pennsylvanian reports:
[Writer Jane} Mayer's book [The Dark Side] alleges that Seligman’s research heavily influenced the psychologists that developped [sic] CIA interrogation techniques at the Guantanamo Bay military prison. But in a pre-publication review of the book’s content, Harper’s Magazine writer Scott Horton writes that Seligman “assisted” in the development of their interrogation techniques. This statement has since circulated on several psychology-related blogs and is a claim that Seligman unequivocally denies.
Bloomberg News columnist Amity Shlaes has a monster scoop this morning: Ivy League networking is dead.
A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Shlaes points out, recently tried to quantify the strength of what the authors call the “connection premium” of attending an elite college or business school. Focusing on Wall Street analysts, the economists looked at whether the financial advice they gave was better when they had the same alma mater as a senior officer at the company they were recommending. It was, obviously — by 8.16 percent.
This all changed, apparently, with a 2000 Securities and Exchange Commision rule called “Fair Disclosure” that prohibited, it seems, chatting over drinks at the Harvard Club. After that, the “connection premium” disappeared. Fair, indeed, I guess.
No one will suffer more from the new rule than Harvard kids, who once made up 19 percent of all networking, according to the killjoys.
For a few weeks in May, my friend Greg worked as a “scavenger” at Yale, going through all the crap people leave behind in their rooms after finals and (mostly) trashing it. He was paid pretty well, and got to keep anything he found. His final haul, I believe, was a few bags of chips, a blue bicycle and a ratty Dr. Pepper t-shirt he is way too proud of.
According to police, a West Philadelphia apartment vacated by seven Penn students last month was, upon later inspection, found to contain a human skull.
Princeton: “Even at Princeton University there are slackers, and Gary Klondike is one of the best.” Watch The Take Home Final.
Penn: One tipster requests that that we print an addition to an earlier post on Ivy League cocktails to include the Pennsylvanian: apple brandy, Madeira, egg white, and lemon.
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Read more: budget crisis, chris clemente, mta, Penn, stealing, Wharton
Here at Ivygate we like to put a critical eye on things. You readers are smart; if all you wanted was feel-good propaganda you wouldn’t bother visiting us – you’d turn to one of China’s state-controlled newspapers or your alma mater’s alumni magazine. Sometimes, however, we come across men and women like Joey Cheek and Alicia Sacramone, individuals who are so un-Vayneresque that we temporarily lose our capacity for snark and vitriol.
Such was the question millions of Americans were once frantically asking, until Penn professor and psychologist Martin Seligman decided to find out once and for all. (The answer: Yes.) However, Seligman’s results, after they were first published 40 years ago, had a perhaps unintended effect. As it happened some time later, CIA torture aficionados became very interested in Seligman’s work and wanted to examine the implications of this revelation for human torture. Seligman’s dog studies, it turns out, were instrumental in developing techniques used at Guantanamo Bay. So say the muckraking 
Bloomberg News columnist Amity Shlaes has a monster 
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