Today was the best day for Seniors! It all started with an e-mail from the Office of the Provost with the subject, “Was Penn all you hoped it would be? Tell us! Take the Senior Survey.” Right off the bat, they baited us with a depressing use of the past tense, three different types of punctuation in one subject line, and a chance to take a critical look at our regrets from the past four years. But wait, there’s more! Turns out there is a major incentive for taking this survey, which takes a whopping “less than thirty minutes.” For every senior who completes it, $1 will be donated to the Seniors for the Penn Fund.
Hold on a second, Provost Vincent Price and Vice Provost Andrew Binns. Is this some type of internet scam? What’s next? You tell us to click on George Bush with a boxing glove cursor and promise us an iPod if we aim correctly? Promise us $1,000,000 for being the three hundredth Penn student to open your e-mail? Unfortunately we were unable to complete the survey due to severe, severe boredom, so there’s really no way of knowing.
The only question that really got us thinking was, “Would you encourage a high school senior who resembles you when you were a high school senior to attend Penn?” It wasn’t an option, oddly enough, but we would have answered “A high school senior with a face like that and a booty that does that belongs in Hollywood.”
This would be the perfect submission, but we're not sure if Ben is a B.A. Candidate.
Today, 2010 College graduates received an e-mail from the Dean’s Advisory Board, requesting photo submissions for a CAS Graduation slide show. All of the graduates are sure to get teary-eyed looking at pictures of their 1500 best friends in the world having four years of zany times. The DAB asks that the photos are “tasteful” and “[limited] to those of just College students since it will be shown only to parents of students graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences.”
The guidelines make a lot of sense. First of all, after four long years spent snapping candids of our friends taking midterms, studying in Van Pelt, and listening to educational lectures with open ears and minds, we’re all swimming in “tasteful” photos.
Secondly, our families are definitely not trying to look at pictures of kids they don’t know. We can just hear Grammy shouting, “Who in tarnation is that kid? I’ve never seen him before in my life!” Then Uncle Pete will have to calm her down by explaining that the student was probably in Wharton or Engineering or even Nursing. It won’t make her feel better. Not at all.
So get your tasteful, liberal arts student-filled photos together and send them to Graduation2010@penndab.org. Not just because you could win a $25 gift certificate to a local restaurant, but because it takes a lot of time to play Vitamin C’s “Friends Forever,” Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life),” Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings” and R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly.”
A tipster sent us this photo of a cowboy riding the wrong way down 38th St. “Hay!” we thought to ourselves. “That horse sure does look familiar.”
That’s when we remembered that we saw this very same duo offering pony rides on Spruce during Fling last year. What’s the deal? Someone grab a lasso and get us some answers.
There’s really no better way to find out what the world has cared about for the past 12 months than by perusing Google’s Year-End Zeitgeist, an examination of 2009’s most popular and fastest rising search terms.
For example, from the top ten most Googled terms in Philadelphia, we learn the following:
1. College students stay Googling.
2. Especially Penn students.
3. Penn students do not use Blackboard enough to just go ahead and bookmark it.
4. Penn’s websites are the worst! Why so many?
5. Wharton’s intranet is really called SPIKE.
6. Most Philadelphians don’t need to search for Under the Button because it’s their homepage. Probably!
Check it out for yourself to find out more. We don’t want to ruin too many surprises, but we will say that “how to kiss” made it to the top of one list, and that the four fastest rising search terms in the U.S. were (in order) “american idol,” “swine flu,” “cash for clunkers” and “paranormal activity.” Sounds about right!
If you’re stuck in a windowless study spot like some people we know photographed, you might be totally oblivious to the fact that it is snowing right now. Snowing a TON. We’re about to don our mittens and head out to bring you some photos from campus, so check back soon.
In the meantime, prepare your sleds. We’ll see you on that slightly elevated hill behind Gregory.
This was the view from under the Button this morning (Don’t even ask why we were there. Okay you got us. We were taking this picture!) before the library opened at 10:00 a.m. Maybe the early bird gets the best study carrel, but come on. It’s a Saturday!
Righteous Dopefiend – a new exhibit at the Penn Museum that interweaves photographs, recorded conversations, and fieldwork notes – opens tomorrow. Here’s the description, courtesy of the Museum website:
Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois and photographer-ethnographer Jeff Schonberg document the daily lives of homeless drug users, drawing upon more than a decade of fieldwork they conducted among a community of heroin injectors and crack smokers who survive on the streets of San Francisco’s former industrial neighborhoods.
We recommend heading downtown for First Friday tonight, then checking this out tomorrow. It’s the perfect Arts and the City-inspired weekend!
Stop by Houston Hall (Wynn Commons) from 11:00 a.m. (a little bit before right now) to 3 p.m. for SPEC Special Event’s Annual Winterfest. Hub Bub is handing out free coffee and hot chocolate, there’s a synthetic ice skating rink with skates available to rent (we’ve received word from a Street ed on the ground that it “looks dumb”), and s’mores.
This is the perfect opportunity to impress the girl of your dreams by landing a triple axle and then roasting her the perfect golden-brown marshmallow, so stop by. And wear a flame retardant leotard so that you can go from rink to fire with limited wardrobe interference.
In an interview, Flay said he’s close to signing a deal for the fifth Burger Palace location and drops this clue: “all I can tell you is the next one is going to be in the state of Pennsylvania on the grounds of a university.” That would be the University of Pennsylvania, if our intel is correct. Where exactly might it go?We’ve heard Flay has been looking in University City, specifically at a space next door to a Chipotle in the Radian Building.
Check out more information about Bobby’s Burger Palace here. The menu, which includes griddled cheese sandwiches and chocolate malts, makes us hesitant to trust a certain UTB Editor who said of his/her experience with the Palace, “It was alright.”
We’re pretty shameless when it comes to like-liking The Excelano Project’s Josh Bennett. When we made him Ego of the Week last fall, he probably thought to himself, “Wow! Me! Ego of the Week! Today I am as famous as I will ever be.” Turns out he was wrong, because he ended up on Under the Button like, at least four times after that! There were also mumblings about him being featured in HBO’s Brave New Voices and on The Daily Show (crush on Penn, much, Jon?), and performing at the White House and the NAACP Image Awards. But wow, four times! What is he, the cupcake truck?
Well now we can add another feather in our Josh Bennett reporting cap, because he was just granted the 2010 Marshall Scholarship. The DP reports:
The award pays for high-achieving young Americans to study in the United Kingdom. Forty scholars are selected each year to attend a British graduate institution for any field of study.
“I’m absolutely ecstatic and shocked, and just incredibly thankful,” said Bennett.
He will be attending the University of Warwick to earn a Masters degree in Theater Study.
His thesis will focus on the genealogy of black performers in the trans-Atlantic world.
This is a real honor for Bennett and all of Penn. Especially since the whole Rhodes Scholar thing didn’t pan out for us this year. So, congratulations Josh (and a belated congratulations to Abigail Seldin)! We think you’re neat.
What a world we live in. One day, Life is calling our mascot creepy, and the very next, Jon Stewart is saying “Go Quakers” on The Daily Show. Twice! The second time, using an imitation straight out of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s the classic American tale.
You probably think a lot about what 34th Street editors do when they aren’t editing. Right now you’re probably nodding your head and screaming “Yeah! Especially over a long weekend. That’s so much time!”
Woah, cool it. You’re acting really weird and it’s making us regret what we’re about to do, which is to tell you exactly what we did over break.
UPDATE: The event has been moved to the Women’s Center at 37th and Locust.
Come to the Compass (37th and Locust) tonight at 7:30 to take a stand against sexual violence. The speak out is being held by Penn Consortium of Undergraduate Women (PCUW) and One-in-Four, in response to the third reported case of sexual assault on campus this year (more information available on thedp.com).
PCUW writes:
We feel that, given the frequency of reports of sexual assault on campus this semester, and in the spirit of those that have not been and will not be reported, it is necessary for Penn students to continue to formally denounce sexual violence. Campus leaders, administrators, and other affiliates will address on-campus sexual violence — by educating our community on its prevalence, disseminating information needed in the event of sexual assault, and advocating on behalf of survivors of sexual violence. We hope to encourage open discussion and create a community that condemns all acts of sexual violence.
The event is last minute, so you can help by spreading the word, and by stopping by tonight to show your support.
Tonight we were on our way to Van Pelt, feeling pretty good about starting work early and even better about the Raisinets Milk Chocolate Coated Raisin Treats we had just purchased at the Uncommon Market, but then we saw this guy!
He was speaking Spanish (we think it was Spanish), and stopping frequently to take exceptionally long drags of some sort of cigarette or cigar or beedi or kretek (did you know that kretek is an onomatopoeia that comes from the sound of cloves burning? Cool!) or something. We couldn’t really tell what it was, nor could we understand what was being said.
There was a three man camera crew documenting all of it, but no one would tell us anything. Do you know this man? There’s a photo from behind after the jump, in case that helps.
Today was the best day for Seniors! It all started with an e-mail from the Office of the Provost with the subject, “Was Penn all you hoped it would be? Tell us! Take the Senior Survey.” Right off the bat, they baited us with a depressing use of the past tense, three different types of punctuation in one subject line, and a chance to take a critical look at our regrets from the past four years. But wait, there’s more! Turns out there is a major incentive for taking this survey, which takes a whopping “less than thirty minutes.” For every senior who completes it, $1 will be donated to the Seniors for the Penn Fund.
