Headached and frostbitten, Harvard students are still trying to figure out what went wrong. Another year of heightened party restrictions and generally pitiful party behavior in Cambridge proves once again that even though Harvard outscored Yale in The Game, Yale still scores more in general. Harvard kids managed to screw up their own pep rally by getting too rambunctious during a Girl Talk concert. To boot, Crimeds botched the 40-year-old Crimson-YDN pigskin challenge by failing to show up to the game. They even refused to open the doors of 14 Plympton St to let the Elis in for a drink.

The Crimson Crazies can blame the Boston Police Department for cutting this year's tailgate short, but the Girl Talk incident is unforgivably the fault of the fun-starved students who organized it. (Really, putting Greg Gillis on a flimsy stage with a PA system is like putting a hungry tiger in a preschool playground.) Meanwhile, the hope that ever-tightening restrictions in Boston and Cambridge might pull the focus back to the football also turns out to be a bit bogus. From the looks of it, there are just as many police officers on the field as gridiron giants. For all the buzz and hullaballoo, this year's 125th anniversary of The Game succeeds, yet again, in stirring more nostalgia than cocktails.

Check out some pictures from the festivities along with B-list celebrity gossip after the jump.

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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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Last week, my co-editor Robyn waxed on about the awesomeness of Alexander Dominitz's "95 Theses," a parody (and a marked improvement on) Jay-Z's "99 Problems". This week I bring you Max Lanman's "Brangelina", a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the rising popularity of celebrity adoptions.

According to the Yale Daily News, Lanman - who is a junior at Yale - read an story entitled "Brangelina" in People, and it "amused Lanman so much that he was compelled to write a song, and after that, direct a music video." The music video has catchy backing beats, high production values, and features copious amounts of semi-disturbing pelvic thrusts.

Is "Brangelina" better than "95 Theses"? Yalies, readers: weigh in!

• Columbia: "'Rooster’s breakfast' is Slovenian slang for 'early morning sex.'"
• Columbia: Madonna Constantine demonstrates inability to cut losses.
• Harvard: Oh Harvard kids, so goddamn worldly.
• Yale: Would you believe these kids and their hats?
• Princeton: Construction workers go overboard trying to take Princeton's gobs of money.
• Dartmouth: "An officer assigned to detail a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority event at Everything But Anchovies arrested an underage male who brought liquor in a cup to the event." Gin and anchovies -- busted.
• Penn: Hillary Clinton owes everyone money.

Aliza Shvarts, she of the miscarriage art that caused such a stir at Yale a few months back, has been hiding out since April, even declining to come to graduation. But for everyone who hoped that her fifteen minutes were up, bad news.

Shvarts is back on the art scene, and not at any old two-bit gallery. No, she will present a piece at London's Tate Modern this weekend. Considering that the Tate is also home to skull-encrusting, shark-pickling Damien Hirst's cow and calf carcasses, it sounds like a great match!

Shvarts was invited by Seth Kim-Cohen, a Yale art history professor and curator of the event. The Tate is calling it "an unmissable opportunity to examine the relationship between culture and technology with a range of leading thinkers and practitioners," but a spokesperson was quick to emphasize that Shvarts' piece is "not going to be in the Tate gallery. Nothing is on display." (Translation: "No abortion art, please. We're British.") Read the rest of this entry »

We saw this YDN headine:

For Senior, Abortion a Medium for Art, Political Discourse

And thought the headline editor made a humorously inappropriate mistake. But then we read this:

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

So- wait a- holy shi-

The display of Schvarts' project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts' self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.

Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.

I think I saw this, once. In a horrible, horrible nightmare.

If L'Affaire Papaya is any indicator, Shvarts should think about getting a security detail for her dorm. Drudge Report linked to the article, and you know what they say: First Drudge, then the blogosphere, then psychotic right-wing militiamen with websites hosted on Angelfire. Due to sudden influx of Drudge-related traffic, YDN's website is periodically going down. So, until YDN stabilizes, we're running the full article and a li'l more commentary after the jump. Oh, and in case you're wondering:

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, as well as the number of times she inseminated herself.

Well, at least she has a sense of modesty.

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The weirdest thing about the most high-profile plagiarism scandal of the year is that copycat White House staffer Timothy Goeglein chose the Dartmouth Review to knock off. Dartmouth? sniffed incredulous student writers at the holy elitist trinity of HYP. If the White House is stealing from Dartmouth, surely somebody more important is stealing from us!

And since everyone knows the only American institution more revered than the White House is the New York Times, a tipster has connected the dots between NYT and the Yale Daily News. Specifically, NYT's article on "drunkorexia" (helpfully placed in the Fashion & Style section, lest we believe this is actually a disease or serious addictive problem) and a recent YDN article on sexually transmitted diseases. Besides the fact that long nights of drunk puking often lead to STDs, our tipster points us to the "lede/nutgraf similarities."

Now, we can never truly know who copied what, for what reasons, and how many chakras it will take to exorcise the plagiaristic demons. But you can judge the YDN-NYT "similarities" for yourelf after the jump.
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A brief discontinuity in the IvyGate continuum: Around 2PM yesterday our post on papayagina abortion went dead, following Yale Daily News' removal of an online article about a pro-choice event where, among other things, students simulated abortions on papayas. YDN's explanation:

Out of concern for Rasha Khoury, whose quoted comments were being dangerously misinterpreted throughout the blogosphere, we removed the story yesterday afternoon from YaleDailyNews.com

Leave it to pro-lifers to get all dangerous with misinterpretation. (Does Francisco Nava have a blog?) Of course, YDN's removal of the story is slightly futile, since copies of the original are already circulating right-wing blogs. We also have a feeling the Eric Rudolphs of the world aren't the type to check facts. Khoury (Med '08) writes in today's YDN that the papayabortions were "to practice and demystify, not trivialize, the procedure."

Oddly, the trivializing forces of L'Affair Papaya are mostly on the other side. Dawn Eden, author of Thrill of the Chaste, hosted a contest to rewrite Yale's anthem "for all those liberal arts students ... about to learn how to suction a live baby out of the womb," a clear homage to conservative Clinton Taylor's "Taliban Boolah Boolah" fight song.

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Remember when the Daily Princetonian ruined kittens for an entire generation of Ivy Leaguers? Yale Daily News (and the people they write about) just did that for papayas:

Students who walked into WLH 119 on Tuesday night were greeted with models of the female pelvis complete with fallopian tubes, cervixes, vaginas - and papayas on which to perform mock abortions.

Adds unexpected context for this headline, though.

UPDATE: This post links to a Daily News article that has since been removed. Read here to find out why.

Today's Yale Daily News opinion page puts a post-Halloween doodle on wash, rinse, and repeat. Please compare today's Entryway K by Sara Freiberg:

...with last year's November 1st Artist's Alley by David Muenzer:

Interestingly, Muenzer is still on staff and shares white space with Freiberg, which makes us think the YDN opinion staff should form a circle around them and start chanting Fight! Fight! Fight! to settle issues of intellectual ownership. Of course, the concept is simple enough that each doodler could have come up with it independently, much like the time I thought I invented using DP as a pun (say what you will about YDN, at least its acronym isn't also a feat of slutty acrobatics).