We may have lost some other fourth-place contest, but we win where it really counts according to this Complex.com countdown. Smoke’s had a very respectable showing in the Top 50 College Bars in America at number four.
The site justifies the ranking with the “Dog Day” afternoon special ($1 hot dogs and $2 draughts), but um, hello? No mention of Kweder?
K4TPF? Yup, Tuesday night Smoke’s fave Ken Kweder is in a video asking you to donate to the Penn Fund. It’s from May, and Kweder asks you to “donate before you leave campus” but still, ahh – this is cute!
In a recent post on the Wall Street Journal’s “Hire Education” blog, Penn’s very own Aliza Hoffman muses on heartstrings and handshakes as she navigates the senior year job search.
While she makes a solid argument for seeking out self-discover before submitting your application to every OCR resume drop-box out there, we have to wonder why she considers working for a reputable organization (“whatever company is trendy at the time via LinkedIn”) and inner happiness to be mutually exclusive.
But whatever your take on I-banking, Teach for America or the Fortune 500, we can all agree on and enjoy her reference to Smoke’s making it into the WSJ:
While sharing a pitcher of cheap beer at Smoke’s, Penn’s go-to watering hole for thirsty seniors, I was approached by a friend of a friend who had just accepted her Teach for America assignment. Teetering in her four-inch stilettos, she joyfully squealed, “I’m going to be a school teacher in Las Vegas! It’s like I’m the star of my very own Van Halen video!”
At least some of us know where our hearts are—for better or for worse.
Being a second semester senior is a confusing time. We want to kick back and enjoy our last semester at Penn, but there’s still all this stuff looming above our heads. Stuff like classes, extracurriculars, our inevitable entry into the real world. And to top it off, it doesn’t help that Penn makes it sound like everyone else has it together besides us.
But despite how stress-inducing Penn can be, for one month over the course of your four year stay it likes to say, “Hey. Take a load off. Get drunk.” That month is almost here. Feb Club officially kicks off next Monday at Smokes. (A full calendar of events can be found here). And as per an extensive email from Senior Class prez Arthur Gardner Smith, there’s a bit of preparation needed if you want to participate. Read the deets after the jump.
Don’t you sometimes wish you could find a life-size poster of Kirk Cameron, smack in the middle of your weekly issue of Street? Perhaps your quest for the perfect butterfly clip to pin back those nasty flyaway hairs, has left you feeling frustrated and alone. Or maybe you just want to learn how to make edible jewelry to wear to your BFFAEAE’s totally bomb pool party. Well this week, Street can show you how because it’s the Joke Issue, where prepubescent dreams come true!
This week, All That’s Ashley is here to answer your most embarrassing questions with some heartfelt advice. We have a rockin’ movie review of everyone’s faves, MK & A; a complex quiz to assess what kind of lip moisturizer best fits your quirky personalities and we test to see if you really have what it takes to be a Mambo #5 Girl.
But the Joke Issue wouldn’t be complete without Cultural Elite: the dreaded (for some) yet instantly satisfying (for all) Street-selected list of cool (or sometimes, totally uncool) seniors that you should want to know (of).
So, like, OK. As you’re about to embark on your last day of classes remember to pick up a copy of Tiger Street (or download the PDF) and let your teeny bopper adventures begin! And because we’re really good at studying for finals, this week’s writers’ meeting will be tequila-filled at Smoke’s. Check inside the issue to see if you’ve been crushed!
Tipster Emily Kaplan sent in this photo of some kids playing leap frog outside of Smoke’s. Sure beats beer pong!
Amy Gutmann conferred seniors’ Penn diplomas yesterday morning, but Smoke’s patrons had the chance to earn an even more exclusive diploma at the 40th Street institution. Check out one of the certificates below, which the owner was handing out last night (this one belongs to a UTB housemate):
When we heard about the senior class board’s “Last Chance to Cuddle” party, we were all, “psssh, as if I’m going to send Brett Perlmutter a list of my crushes.” Based on past class board debacles involving user submissions, we guessed that the information would not exactly be secure. But then everybody started talking about the stupid cuddle party, and we were like, “fine, fine, we’ll check it out.” We visited the page, realized that if you start typing in your e-mail address and get a prompt to complete it that might mean that someone has already entered your name, and immediately became transfixed by the tantalizing possibility that someone might have a crush on us! So we opened up the excel spread sheet where we keep records of all our crushes, calculated the top ten using a complicated formula that incorporates height, future earning potential and number of Facebook friends, and submitted the top ten. Now we’re just crossing our fingers for a match. To all the dummies that submitted Gmail addresses rather than webmail addresses: we find your inability to follow directions endearing, see you at the concurrent “Last Chance to be Rejected” party at Ben & Jerry’s Friday night?
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Starting around 9 p.m., the corner of 40th and Walnut started to flood with West Philly teenagers. Hundreds of them. McDonalds, Fresh Grocer, and Greek Lady closed their doors to business while the police barricaded Walnut between 39th and 40th, and 40th between Walnut and Market. Tipsters reported seeing nightstick-wielding police officers attempting to herd the mob away from campus, as well as helicopters circling the area at around 10:30. By 11:00, the mob had dispersed and the line outside of Smokes (protected by a security guard) was back to its usual Saturday bustle. According to the DP, the Philadelphia Police Department has reported an assault against an officer.
In this installment of our visual Penn survival guide, a collaboration between UTB and David Comberg’s Information Design class (FNAR 337), we prep you for the upcoming weekend with a handy guide for steering clear of your Pennemies. Click on the thumbnail to see the full image, and View previous images here.
“How To Avoid The Penn Crowd,” by Maria Lobikin.
This will be the graduation of this generation of this decade.
Just because you have to graduate (sad) and leave all your friends (really sad) as you burst out of the Penn bubble into a world without jobs (wow, this is even sadder than we thought) doesn’t mean that Graduation itself can’t be fun! Right? The DAB is trying to make you feel just a little bit better – cheering you all up as Feb Club comes to an end, perhaps? – by making a photo slide show to show to parents at the College graduation. They want you to remember that the photos will be seen by mom and dad, so keep it clothed and kosher. If psuedo-celebrity in May isn’t motivation enough, think of this: “At the end of each month, we will have a random drawing from submitted photos for gift cards from local restaurants/bars like Smoke’s, Pod, Distrito and Mad4Mex.”
To be a part of this last-ever Class of ‘09 facebook album, email your pics to graduation@penndab.org
Greetings from Van Pelt, where we have hunkered down to wait out this dark rainy abyss of a Thursday. The only thing keeping us going is the new issue of Street, which conveniently has Smoke’s right on the cover. Let’s take a peek inside, shall we?
The centerfold, if you will, is the aforementioned valentine to Smoke[y Joe]’s, which is a much better Pennstitution than the econ screem or whatever, if you ask us. Next up, the Highbrow section brings us a dispatch from Penn’s Brown-town, also known as the South Asian community. Consider your cross-cultural analysis requirement fulfilled! Over in the film section, we learn that, in addition to Beyonce, Michael Gold also has a special place in his heart for Newsies. And Lowbrow caps off the issue with a delightful recounting of Amelia Bedelia-Cohen’s adventures at Penn. Hooray! And don’t forget about our writers’ meeting tonight, for magaziners and bloggers alike–6:30 at 4015 Walnut.
A tipster tells us that Alicia Sacramone, Olympic gymnast and fellow Ivy Leaguer (she goes to Brown), made a cameo at Smoke’s on Wednesday night. Um, whoa! She totally won us over this summer, and not just because she’s pretty and Ivy League, but also because she seems tough, like that rebel gymnast in Stick It. And we happen to know that she was in town for a gymnastics event at the Wachovia Center yesterday, so she must have decided to squeeze in some Sink or Swim while she was in Philly. Smoke’s is pretty strict with I.D.’s, but we guess exceptions can be made for Olympians who don’t turn 21 until December. (No such luck for fellow Olympians Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson, born in 1989 and 1992 respectively. And don’t even get us started on the Chinese women’s team–would they even be able to get into a PG-13 movie?) Anybody have any pictures with Alicia? E-mail us!
For those of you who don’t spend 100% of your internet time on facebook and reading celebrity gossip, political and shopping blogs like me (and I’m kickass), I would like to inform you that the recent Ivy-Graduates-in-San-Fransisco-Constituency, also known as “Team Google” have created a new feature to prevent you from writing drunk emails.
Mail Goggles, as they are called, note a frequency in typos and interrupt your rant to an ex with math equations. If you are competent enough to solve said problems, you may continue your well-wishing of the syph and herpes.
Now, this idea could work if your emails looks like this: djklfasdlkfjaklghah. While this may be beneficial to some, I have to ask: how many of you actually drunk email?
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