Prangstgrüp, active throughout the early and mid-Nads, was the arbitrarily Teutonic prank-committing team out of Columbia University. The members of Prangstgrup have all graduated, and their membership is spread far and very wide. Fortunately, their youthful goings-on have been preserved for posterity both by YouTube and by eponymous stickers that are all over campus, still. Prangstgrüp pranks, for the most part, were confined to a formula: locate where Columbia students acted the most self-serious; recognize that taking college so seriously is inherently comical; and suggest as much, most frequently through the joy of music. READ MORE

It is amusing that Columbia's undergraduate English class schedule included a course called "The Book Review," which taught students... how to review books. Also amusing is that it is now canceled, according to the Observer, due to the death of much of the nation's book reviewing pages. Thing is, Columbia has this all backwards. Now is exactly when students should be taught how to perform criticism! What better time than the Internet age to teach people the Big Three Do-Not-Dos of critique? (I'd tell you what they are, but then you will never buy my book, "The Big Three and the Twelve Lesser Do-Not-Dos of Critique," which I am going to self-publish sometime in 2012, if I do not starve to death first.) Anyway, this book-reviewing class, if properly taught, would actually give great benefit, because it would prevent the young people from making the same mistakes over and over again, because with each generation (and by "generation," I mean each crop of kids every two years that starts blogs and has no idea that anyone has ever blogged before) comes the same common mistakes. ("The Four Classic Mistakes of the New Blogger" is my chapter four, so, you know, see you in 2012 with that.) Why is Columbia tying its educational program to the death of print? Fortunately, Columbia has the future financial health of its students in mind, as, according to its roster, it still offers classes named "Comparative Modern Texts: Competing Isms' Modernism and the Avant-Garde" and "Caribbean Disaporic Literature," though apparently at least one of those course titles is incorrectly punctuated and the other includes an obvious misspelling.