Digg's 100 Weirdest Stories of 2008

Celebrate the holidays with bemusement at what your fellow humans are capable of, by way of Asylum's 100 most bizarre Dugg stories of the year.

Selections range from the adorable "Dogs Risk Life to Save Kittens from Fire" (#73), to the absurd "Woman in Cow Suit Arrested for Creating Chaos" (#97), to the dubiously informative "Redheads Have More Sex than Blondes or Brunettes" (#16).

The list also includes such charming tales as "Man Sues Doctor for Stapling Butt Shut" (#84) and "Guy Had Sex with 1,000 Cars" (#91), as well as a disproportionate number of castration-anxiety-fueling foibles.

My favorite: the indecently hilarious "Chocolate Factory Refuses Bathroom Access to 5-Year-Old with Diarrhea" (#3). What are yours? Discuss.

Asylum: The 100 Weirdest News Stories We Dugg in 2008

[From Dana Pellegrino '12]

Unigo.com: The Tell-All Guide to Colleges

Jordan Goldman '04, the co-editor of "The Students' Guide to Colleges" (which he started as a Wes freshman), has hit it big with Unigo.com, a free, student-generated guide to North American colleges for prospective students which is starting to give the likes of Princeton Review and U.S. News a run for their money.

He and his apparently very profitable start-up site are featured in this weekend's NY Times Magazine, the College Issue:

Broke young college graduates with ideas for awesome new Web sites are about as thick on the ground as pigeons in New York City, but Jordan Goldman has a talent for getting noticed. Born and raised in Staten Island, he graduated from Wesleyan in 2004, spent two post-grad years in England and, upon his return to his native city, lived in 16 different sublets in the next two years. His own parents referred to him as the Wandering Jew. “I was ordering Chinese lunch specials and dividing them into three,” he remembered recently, “and that was my food for days. My mom thought I was nuts. She kept saying, ‘Get a job,’ and I’d say, ‘No, Ma, I have this idea.’ ”

...“For so long, the colleges have been able to have this stranglehold on the P.R. image of their school,” Goldman said recently in his office, decorated boy-workaholic-style with nothing but an open box of Frosted Flakes and a toy robotic dinosaur. “It’s just harder to look at them as the main source of information. If you’re a college student, you are as much of an expert on being a student at that college as anyone.”

Check out the site, it just might be a game-changer in the college process industry.

NY Times: The Tell-All Campus Tour

Obama won Wisconsin

Nevertheless, I think this is awesome:

Mr. Obama’s finance director, Julianna Smoot, who has helped him raise more than $150 million so far, does not even have her own office. A Ping-Pong table is the gathering spot for Friday lunches for her team.

The setting, which has the feel of an Internet start-up, is emblematic of how Mr. Obama, of Illinois, has been able to raise so much money. On Wednesday, the Obama campaign will report to the Federal Election Commission that it collected $36 million in January — $4 million more than campaign officials had previously estimated — an unprecedented feat for a single month in American politics that was powered overwhelmingly by small online donations. That dwarfed the $13.5 million in January that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is expected to report Wednesday and the $12 million Senator John McCain’s campaign said he brought in for the month.

Ahhh, the power of the internets.
-Link (nytimes)

Wesleyan email to yahoo.com delayed

Email sent from any wesleyan address to yahoo.com addresses may be significantly delayed or automatically flagged as spam. The wesleyan.edu domain has been greylisted due to a series of mass student mailings that were marked spam by wesleyan students who get their mail forwarded to yahoo.

If you're sending an important email to someone who uses yahoo, for now you should send it from somewhere besides wesleyan webmail.


I will refrain from making any snide comments about this situation, even though it would extremely easy. Thanks for the info, faithful sys-admin, and good luck convincing staff not to send unsolicited mail!

Wesleying and WesFiles not playing nice

I have noticed that whenever I refresh Wesleying in Safari, a dialog box unfurls asking me to log in to WesFiles. This has happened on at least two computers. I can't figure out what is causing it, because there's nothing on the page that references WesFiles, but I'm wondering...

Is this happening to anyone else?

EDIT: Found the problem. Fixed the problem.

Fare thee well, wesleying.net!

We've neglected to renew our ownership of the domain name wesleying.net, so it will no longer work. Make sure you change your bookmarks to wesleying.blogspot.com to keep things running smoothly.