Welcome back to the latest installment in the Freshman Guide To NSO 2010. In this episode, we’ll teach you how to buy books, ideally without shelling out for a brand-new one you’ll open once before finals.
Before we navigate the sea of texts, we’d like to issue one word of caution: DON’T BUY YOUR BOOKS YET! Don’t buy them until you’re certain you want to be in the class. It’s okay, no one else has bought them either. And you’re not going to do the first reading. It’s Rosh Hashanah!
The hands-down easiest way to find what you need is to just use Book.ly, which compares all your options for you across several different websites. They even have a custom version for Penn students! But if you want discounts, pros and cons, and other tips, click after the jump.
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In case you were getting sick of him spitting fire spoken-word style (jk, that’s not possible), the Excelano alum/Superman has released the rap single “Don’t Let Me Go.” Produced by fellow Quaker RJ Ferguson (who also does stuff with Hoodie Allen), it just showed up on Hype Machine. So “heart” it, then download for free right here!
Don’t Let Me Go Feat. AmJay
With the toil of fall semester looming on the horizon, it always helps to see some totally boss Penn alums have their backbreaking labor blossom into succulent fruit. For one (professor Marjorie Margolies), this meant seeing her son married off to Chelsea Clinton. For another (hedge fund guru Bryce Markus), it meant buying Lloyd Blankfein’s house. For yet one more (‘04 comedian Whitney Cummings), it meant doing a routine on Comedy Central about getting spanked. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel!
Learn this, downtrodden student masses: work hard for womens rights, run for congress, be a pioneer for adoption, and maybe your son will marry someone famous, thus making you famous by proxy. Alternately, try having the connections and Penn smarts necessary to earn enough money to buy your former bosses house. If that doesn’t do it for you, poke enough fun at celebrities in public to get some bigwig at a cable channel to give you your own show. Once you’re recognized for doing something noteworthy, you’ll look back on all the sleepless nights of paper writing to say “By God, it was worth it.”
Everybody freak out! (It’s okay, we already know you are!) Last night, Penn ‘09 grad Abdi Farah won Bravo’s Work of Art. The show had many excited Penn devotees, though as one former UTB editor noted, “the shocking oversight is that he wasn’t on cultural elite ‘08!”
Did you know Abdi while he was at Penn? Let us know.
As dedicated readers will know, we here at UTB take extreme delight in covering the opening of new food trucks in the Penn hood. Today, we present you with news of the newly opened La Vie Natural Juice and Smoothie.
La Vie set up shop on the southwest corner of 38th and Spruce (right next to Carribean food truck Gigi’s) two weeks ago, after doing a test run on 10th and University in Center City. The truck is run by Fednel St. Fort, a Philadelphian who grew up in Haiti. As the name would indicate, La Vie will serve up smoothies and natural juices: mangoes, carrots, bananas and the like.
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Woohoo! Reports have surfaced that the Sansom Street spot formerly occupied by Bubble House will be taken over by Baby Blues, a BBQ restaurant. The menu (from a California branch) looks excellent. The restaurant hopes to open by the end of the year (ha, yeah right).
UTB investigation/salivation forthcoming.
We hooked ya up in June with a Hoodie Allen track
And for the end of summer he’s coming right back
With a chill new song you can jam to on the go
Or by yourself in your room with the AC on low
Another download brought to you by UTB
Just right-click, “save link as” and it’s all free
“Words of Wisdom” should put Hoodie on the map
Bet y’all hataz didn’t think that a blog could rap!
Words Of Wisdom
On the off chance you’re interested in status, prestige, or yellow highlight on a blue font, you can now search through the New York Times wedding announcements at WeddingCredential. Penn has our own category right on the homepage, along with our Ivy Plus (ew) friends.
The most fun comes in searching for terms like “Goldman Sachs” or “on the board” to hone in on your homewrecking targets. In case you don’t want to wait around for the divorce, you can also search for the terms “brother” or “sister” and gold-dig your way to glory.
Believe it or not, NSO is fast approaching, which means…we need to get our shit together.
Can you string together a coherent sentence and search things on Google or perhaps make nice things in Photoshop or edit a video clip? If so, maybe you can join our gang!
We’ve got a steady team of veteran bloggers, but we’re always looking for brazen new team members to join our ranks. Though it’s a fun gig, be prepared to make a steady commitment! Tell us what you can do for us at contact@underthebutton.com.
To overly eager incoming freshmen: hi! We won’t be accepting applications for semester-long positions from ‘14ers just yet, but hold tight! We’ll be holding info sessions shortly after NSO for us, and our parent publication, 34th Street. If you have ideas in the meantime, however (perhaps you’d like to chronicle your first trip to a frat party?), feel free to drop us a line.
Update: For some clarification…on the writing end, we are currently looking for staff reporters. So, if you want, pitch us a beat you’d like to cover or a column you’d like to write. If you take good pictures or make videos, tell us about that too.
Beer bear?
This Saturday you can drink beer and watch a bunch of animals doing cute things at the same time! Okay, yes, this is what we do most nights, but this time we’re not talking about watching sleepy kittens on YouTube. It’s the Philadelphia Zoo Summer Ale Festival!
The event is going to have beer from nineteen different breweries, plus a bunch of local food and a chance to kick back and hang out with the animals. You can also learn lots of eco-friendly tips and tricks as well as support the zoo’s Creatures of Habit initiative, so we’re sure the animals will be extra cute to say thank you. Did we mention the lifesize LEGO animals??? Buy your tickets here!
But don’t worry, she will be back! Career Services guru/Queen of Your Inbox Claire Klieger mentioned in an email today that she will be going to Zimbabwe! What do you think she is doing there?!?!
Fortunately, friend to UTB Helen Cheung (and Kelly Cleary) will be holding down the fort.
Bon Voyage!
Strangefruit indeed (this isn't her, by the way)
Jeez, Penn is having a pretty serious TV moment. With all of these youngin’-oriented MTV appearances now firmly under the collective belt of our student body, it’s high time the more established set had their moment in the sun, don’t you think? Class of (anytime in the ’90s) alums, have we got the spokesperson for you!
Enter Kristin Haskins Simms. A woman of many roles (and a graduate of my high school – represent!), Haskins Simms has made the transition from English/French major to finance industry underling to widely traveled fashion designer. Frankly, she seems like the type of well-rounded, diversely occupied graduate that would appear in a brochure meant to lure in prospective students, so good for her.
It’ll be interesting to see if her professional past influences her designs. After leafing through her website, it looks like she might not have enjoyed her cubicle years all that much – her line, Strangefruit, looks a little bit like what a hardened dominatrix army veteran would wear to the office job she resented (we mean that in a good way). Check out some interview pieces here and watch the premiere at 9 PM on July 29th on…Lifetime.
Jason Mattera dressed in scarlet. Irony?
Uber-Conservative author and blogger Jason Mattera recently posted an article about stupid Americans and their stupid college classes. Penn must be doing something right because we got a whole paragraph to ourselves! Apparently teaching a class called “Adultery Novel” and analyzing Marx is a big no-no. Also, according to another website, we suck because we are “bizarrely” politically correct. Sorry we take elections and politics seriously, guys. We’ll try to lose interest immediately.
A lot of you kids are young, so maybe you don’t remember Ibrahim Jaaber, but he went to Penn and he played basketball and he was really, really good. As good as we are at dating. He won Ivy League Player of the Year in 2007 and went on to play ball in Europe. Now he’s on the Lakers summer league team and has a good shot of suiting up in gold and purple come fall.
Yeah, we know, the Lakers! Exciting, right? They won the NBA Finals the last two years, but could end up losing some of their point guards this off season. Jordan “My Ears Are Enormous” Farmar and Derek “I Will Teach You Life Lessons” Fisher could be leaving for the Nets and Heat respectively, opening up an Ibrahim Jaaber sized hole in the team. (We like to imagine an actual hole in the shape of his body in a wall somewhere in the Lakers practice facility that he can jump through on the first day of practice.)
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Excessively douchey images from Gawker
Gawker just totally called out a Penn alum for being, well, a giant dick. Basically, he tried to scam some 19-year-old models, they figured it out, used the reply-all function for good and not evil, and he flipped his shit.
You can decide for yourself which of these are natural versus Wharton-nurtured about his douchiness:
- Um, the whole extortion thing
- Excessive use of capital letters in subject line
- Obnoxiously listing all of his accomplishments, making sure they are seen as better than anything anyone else could do
- Assuming a mastery of the legal system, power over the forces of logic, and psychic skills to predict, without any doubt, a court victory
- Name-dropping Domino’s Pizza
So there you have it: John Fitzgerald Page, today’s worst person… in the woooorld!
