cowperthwait | lies, evasion, spin, circumspection and cleverly veiled hype

GQ's recent list of the 25 Douchiest Colleges puts the U of C at 17th, calling it the home of "The Paul Wolfowitz Douche," identified by "Horn-rimmed glasses; pipe; well-thumbed copy of The Antitrust Paradox; precocious ideas of mankind as brutish and disgusting." Surely not great, but at least we aren't "The 'I Went to a School So Exclusive, Only Six People Know About It and Half of Them Are So Smart They're Clinically Insane' Douche" of Deep Springs College (number five), and anyway, GQ acknowledges the entries are "possibly stereotyped." Also, I'll stop calling you Shirley.

The University of Chicago ... just flat out does not belong on this list. The student body is socially inept, sure, but in a kinda charming, pitiful way. One guy I know from U. of C. raises a finger before speaking, starting each sentence with, "Hmm…question…"

• "Stayin’ Alive" (R. Stigwood)
• "Billie Jean" (M. Jackson, Q. Jones)

• "Happy Birthday (To You)" (P.W. Orem, R.R. Foreman) — 2x
• "Layla" (E. Clapton, J. Gordon) — guitar solo

• "45:33" (J. Murphy, a.k.a. LCD Soundsystem)*

• Scheherazade, IV: "Festival At Baghdad. The Sea. The Ship Breaks against a Cliff Surmounted by a Bronze Horseman" (Allegro molto — Vivo — Allegro non troppo maestoso) (N. Rimsky-Korsakov, Op. 35)

• "This Year" (J. Darnielle) — 180x

We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about.

Incest-related invectives are only one class of mother insults, which may impugn a mother's sexual integrity—as in the Italian phrase "If the streets were paved with pricks, your mother would walk on her ass"—or suggest that the speaker is about to rape or violate the listener's mother himself. (For example, the great Turco-Mongolian curse, "I urinate on your father's head and have intercourse with your mother!")

[79-year-old Randall] Wilt, of North Canton, [Ohio,] received his General Educational Development (GED) diploma last month after 10 tries and after about five years of meeting with tutors weekly. This semester, he’ll sit in a college classroom for the first time, with students a quarter of his age.

“What if everyone said we couldn’t go to the moon?” Wilt asked. “Nothing ever happens when you say, ‘I can’t.’ ”

Wilt was born in 1929 and grew up in Garrett County, in the Allegheny Mountains.

It has taken most of his life – but, after 26 years, builder Graham Parker has finally solved the puzzle of the Rubik's Cube.

When he bought the toy in 1983, Yuri Andropov was leader of the Soviet Union, breakfast TV was a novelty and music CDs were in the shops for the first time.

'I cannot tell you what a relief it was to finally solve it,' the 45-year-old from Portchester, Hampshire, said. 'It has driven me mad over the years – it felt like it had taken over my life.'

Roughly 3.5 million volumes will be stored on racks in a climate-controlled underground facility that digs down about 50 feet. The glass dome above it will reach 36 feet high, supported on a curving grid of steel. Ceramic patterns on the glass will block the sun, reducing heat gain.

“At least that’s what the engineers tell me,” Jahn said Friday, when I asked if the dome would turn into a sauna, as the Thompson Center infamously did....

CELEBRATE RADICALISM! CELEBRATE THE EARTH!

You are invited to join ECO (the environmental concerns organization) and others in the closing event of this year's Earth Week, the March of Industrial Progress! We, the participants--hopefully also you--will dress in various and hopefully extravagant ways as industry/capitalism/progress (though theme dress is not necessary--anything at all will do) and parade from the quads to the point, where we will burn the Earth in effigy in protest to the diverse and extensive destructions of capitalism. Afterward, however, we plan to remove our industry costumes and, producing a new, unscorched Earth, reveal ourselves as proponents of any of the various ways forward. Finally, hippies, communists, anarchists, and all others will toast smores (including vegan smores) around the bonfire. Bring yourself, a noisemaker, and a marshmallow skewer.

Friday, April 25th
7:00 PM
The Circle on the Quads