Girl Talk, Sweating Across New England

To help you get pumped for billowing waves of sweaty nostalgia on Saturday night (assuming you're among the half of the student body which should ostensibly have scored a ticket by now), here's how recent Girl Talk shows went down at other schools:

• Brown students were drenched in Greg Gillis' sweat as he swam over the swelling crowd while opening for M.I.A. at Brown's Spring Weekend this year.
• Yale devolved into a writhing mass of disinhibition in response to Gillis' "laptop antics and mind-blowing abs", with double the venue's maximum capacity crammed into the Dining Hall.
• Harvard's Police Department had to cut the outdoor pre-game pep rally show last month short after multiple failed attempts at crowd control, because hundreds of overeager concertgoers were swarming the stage and compromised its structural integrity.

This is more likely how it'll be at the Bacon Field House, from a September show at Bates:

White People Love/Hate the Ivy League

Ok I'm just a sucker for Stuff White People Like, but last week's entry, The Ivy League, is too spot on not to share:

White people have a tortured relationship with the Ivy Leagues, and if you broach the subject in the wrong way you can offend and even anger a white person.

But before getting into the more nuanced aspects of the subject, it’s important to know that all white people believe they have the intelligence and work ethic required to attend an Ivy League school. The only reason they did not actually go to one is that they chose not to participate in the “dog and pony show” required to gain acceptance... This should always be at the back of your mind as you talk to a white person about the Ivy League.

Once you have determined that a white person did not attend an Ivy League School, you should try to give them the opportunity to explain why their school was actually a superior educational experience. Some easy ways to do this are to mention grade inflation, professors who value research over teaching, or high tuition costs. Any one of these will set a white person off on a multi-minute rant.

...White people also like to call their school “The Harvard of the [insert region or conference]”. Do not challenge this, it will ruin their confidence.

Replace "white people" with "elite New England liberal arts school students" and it is just as effective. Sorry if this post offends you, either as a white person or as a Wesleyan student.

Stuff White People Like: The Ivy League

Risk Meets College in Epic Online Battle Game

Like you don't have enough nerdy things to do online - last fall, a group of Yale undergrads created an online game called GoCrossCampus (GXC), a territorial-conquest game along the lines of the board game Risk in which teams consisting of unlimited numbers of players play on behalf of real-world dorms or schools (or any other collective interests) by competing for control over a virtual map of relevant geographic areas.

The company behind GXC, based in New Haven, is slowly growing, and the game has already spread to 24 universities and high schools. Google is even on board, planning to bring the game to its New York office by playing the sales department against the engineering one on a map of its Manhattan campus.

The rules of GXC are relatively simple. Every player is allocated a number of armies each day and must coordinate attacks, troop movements and defensive maneuvers with teammates. Players can move their armies once each day, and the game software calculates the result of clashes with an algorithm that gives a slight edge to defenders.

Some of the most significant moves occur offline, as players gather in the real world to elect commanders, recruit other players and discuss strategy and ways of spying on opponents as they formulate battle plans.

Check out this slideshow for a scintillating account of the recently played Ivy League free-for-all (Northeast conquest map pictured above).

So, who's up for organizing a Wes edition of this, or maybe waging war on some of our sister schools? A Little 3 competition spanning Connecticut and Massachusetts? An inter-dorm brawl over Andrus field? SciLi vs. Olin, for domination of our study habits? Possibilities are endless!

Thanks to Mark E. Miller '79 for sending this over.

Radar Names Cornell Worst Ivy

Worst Ivy League University: Cornell University

Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, Cornell's suicide rate turns out to be no higher than the national average. But over the years, low academic satisfaction, an oppressive Greek system, and a boring host town, have inspired dozens of depressed students to hurl themselves over campus gorges, earning Cornell a reputation as the worst of the Ivies.

Illustrious Alumni: Failed Senate candidate and drunk-driving enthusiast Pete Coors; right-wing performance artist Ann Coulter (right); lecherous lip-flapper Bill Maher.

Notable Course: Post-National Gastroidentities. An excerpt from the class description: "We will attempt to answer the question of how food, cuisine, and gastronomy play an important part both in the strategies to instrument normalcy through the imagination of the modern Nation-State, and the ways in which discourses affirming nation, race, ethnicity, hospitality, the universality of humanity, interact with each other fragmenting the national gastronomic field and undermining the unpolluted self-understanding of the modern Nation-State."

Raw Data: Of all the Ivies, Cornell has the lowest incoming SAT scores, the highest acceptance rate (27 percent), and the lowest academic satisfaction among students, which makes it America's Best Safety School.

School Pride: "I haven't overheard a single intellectual conversation in three years, unless it was between Indian or Asian students," writes an architecture major on Students Review.

Fun Fact: According to a survey on College Prowler, Cornell has the ugliest girls in the Ivy League. In fact, it ranks close to dead last in the country. So when students here get together for a "study session," they actually study.

Tuition: $32,800 plus room and board.

(source: radar magazine)