Tired Old Star Taking A Schvitz

Let me tell ya, sonny, they don’t make stars like CW Leonis anymore. You think the sun is a big deal? The sun is nothing! This guy is twice the size-with a radius 250 times bigger! So in his twilight years, 500 light years from Earth, it’s only right that he gets to enjoy one of life’s true pleasures: a “steam bath.” I heard from Herschel.

“The scientists working on Herschel propose that a previously unsuspected chemical process is at work, one in which ultraviolet light from nearby bright, hot stars is breaking up the carbon monoxide and releasing its oxygen atoms to join up with hydrogen and form water molecules. In an aged star like CW Leonis, which is also throwing off a large envelope of gas and dust, such a chemical process ought normally to be blocked — the UV light should be prevented from getting through to the carbon monoxide to work on it. But Herschel and other telescopes have shown the stellar wind billowing away from CW Leonis to be extremely clumpy, allowing the UV light to penetrate deep in towards the star and trigger the production of water.”

“This is really exciting,” said Dr. Leen Decin, who’s been studying the telescope images at Belgium’s Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. “Since it is the first time that we have seen a lot of carbon and water molecules co-existing close to a very luminous, but dying, star.”

Yesterday was moving day in Boston, and the city’s many college students were forced to confront the pest that is eating America: bedbugs. The New York Times shows that while some of our young scholars are blase about the bloodsuckers, there are signs that others, at least, have their priorities straight.

Officials for the Inspectional Services Department spent much of the day canvassing neighborhoods and slapping bright orange stickers on items left on sidewalks. “Caution this may contain bedbugs,” the stickers warn, “do not remove!” An image of a bedbug appears on the sticker to drive the point home.

The warning was not always heeded in one neighborhood teeming with students and recent graduates on tight budgets, hard at work claiming discarded furniture from the sidewalks.

Clay Adaurczyk, 23, let his roommate claim an end table, a chord organ and a bong, but he said he drew the line at a used pillow.

Johns Hopkins announced a study this morning that found that “minority pedestrians are far more likely than white pedestrians to be struck by motor vehicles” and “uninsured minority pedestrians hit by cars are at a significantly higher risk of death than their insured white counterparts, even if the injuries sustained are similar.” Oh yes: “uninsured patients had a 77 percent greater risk of death” than the insured. Here’s one nice way of putting something complicated: “Previous studies have shown that insurance status and race may increase mortality risk because of treatment delay or differences in services provided.” Jaywalking! A one-way ticket to death in racist America! No but, best of all, now we’re going to see a spike in “minority” ER visits, since it’s the fun new past-time to drive Muslims off the road in your Chevrolet Blazers.

Oh cool. Now we’re supposed to “shore up” and guarantee Afghanistan’s bank too? I mean, haven’t we done enough, what with helping Iceland and Latvia and Greece and-oh, wait, what’s that you say?

Much like our planet, this story is BREAKING: “An oil rig has exploded 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana, with 12 people overboard and one missing, the Coast Guard said Thursday morning. Rescue attempts are underway for at least 12 people, Coast Guard spokesman John Edwards told CNN. 13 people were on board the rig total, Edwards said, noting 12 have been accounted for, but one person was missing.”

Here’s Arizona governor Jan Brewer giving her opening statement in a televised debate last night. Have you cringed yet today? Because you’re gonna. It hurts. Brewer was reportedly so upset by her performance that she spent an hour after the debate personally racially profiling people and immediately deporting them just to blow off steam.

Jesus Lord, iTunes 10 is ugly. It’s so ugly! From the dock logo to the buttons to the icons to the spacing to even little tiny things, like the shade of the grey background and the shade of the fonts and the recasting of the volume bar-everything about it seems hideous, clunky, metallic; it feels impossible to get one’s little trackpad to navigate these blocky boxy things. Is there not a senior gay in Apple product design to throw up his hands and send a design like this back to the youngsters? I know there’s decided gay presence in the retail store design, which explains why their stores are largely so successful in terms of siting and presentation and flow and drama. But this-this is garbage!

This makes me SICK TO MY STOMACH.

On Oct. 12 Electronic Arts, one of the world’s biggest game publishers, is set to release a first-person combat title called Medal of Honor. Developed with advice from elite American special forces, the new game is set during Operation Anaconda, part of the Western war in Afghanistan that followed the Sept. 11 attacks.

So far, so conventional. But in Medal of Honor’s online multiplayer mode, in which teams of players battle over the Internet, one side in each match will be the Americans and the other side will play the role of Taliban fighters.

New York Times videogame critic Seth Schiesel predictably tries to explain why this is not a big deal, using the kind of mealy-mouthed and obfuscatory words we’d expect from a paper whose agenda is dictated each morning by the imams in Iran, but I think we can all agree that this is WRONG ON EVERY LEVEL. When the Taliban attacked the World Trade Center on that dark day they committed the greatest atrocity against humanity ever perpetrated. The fact that less than 10 years later these purveyors of video garbage think it’s acceptable for gamers to portray them-even in multiplayer mode-is a deliberate punch in the gut to every loyal American who knows that the events of September 11 are a gaping wound which will never ever heal, and never should. We need to remain eternally vigilant. (I, in fact, think we should shoot down every airplane that flies over Manhattan, just in case, but I’m aware that this viewpoint is slightly out of the mainstream and I don’t want my agenda to distract from the outrage that we should all be manipulated into here.)

And do you want to know the worst part? I called the national videogame chain GameStop to see if they planned to carry this filth, AND THEY DO. AT THEIR 270 GREENWICH STREET LOCATION. Non-New Yorkers might be unfamiliar with the neighborhoods of the city, but 270 Greenwich is FEET AWAY FROM GROUND ZERO. I mean, thousands of feet, but it’s practically right there. It is like GameStop is digging up the corpses from that pit of horror and sticking a controller in their hands and making them play a videogame IN THE ROLE OF THEIR TALIBAN KILLERS.

Now, look, I understand we have a First Amendment in this country. I’m not saying GameStop shouldn’t be able to sell their MULTIPLAYER JIHAD KILLER MUSLIM GAME blocks away from the most awful attack in the world’s history, I’m saying that just because you HAVE a First Amendment right doesn’t mean you should be able to EXERCISE it. Or even have it, really. If GameStop wants to be sensitive to the victims of Ground Zero, and their families, and New York, and Jesus and Pat Tillman and every good-hearted white-faced person in America, they will do the right thing move this game to where it belongs: their outlet in Times Square. I’m not going to stand for this. Who’s with me?

We actually didn’t cover this story earlier, because it was the feel-bad feel-good story of the year, and it was too much for my delicate sensibilities-oh wait, we did!-but now here we are. Good news! A blind dog and his seeing eye dog best friend have found a new home to take them in! (The bad news still is: they were up for adoption because their owner has cancer and is moving and giving up her dogs to be near family.)

by Katjusa Cisar

The marketing team that dreamed up Drake University’s latest campaign, “The D+ Advantage,” got so carried away by an apparent allusion to positively charged molecules that it thought it could either ignore or, alternately, capitalize on one obvious fact: the logo is the grade for pathetically under-average schoolwork, a D-plus.

Or, as Drake envisions it, “your Potential + our Opportunities.”

It’s a chemistry equation, see… except with people and a horribly misguided institution of higher learning. (Never mind that a positively charged ion attracts negativity-but hey, I barely passed Rocks For Jocks in college, so I’ll leave the scientific interpretation to others.)

Let Drake, who graduated such stuff as esteemed poet Mark Doty and gay journalist Rex Wockner and that creepy guy from Lost, break it down for us: “When we talk about D+, that’s what we mean. Every moment at Drake is one that has the power to educate, to transform, to open minds and to unleash potential-to introduce who you are, to who you hope to become.”

George Carpenter, founder of Drake University, laid out this idea during a commencement speech in 1884, when he declared:

Institutions of learning must come under this rule: By their fruits ye shall know them. A practical education is that which gives the mind the most power and adaptability. The credentials that your young and hopeful alma mater will soon confer upon each of you can only give you an introduction to the world of letters and of actual life. They can serve you no further. In whatever of the varied vocations of life you may engage, as well as in general society, you must work out your own destiny.

Poetic, no? But a real bummer to try to brand. In this age, we need a quick visual, one that really encapsulates a core idea in the 1.9 seconds a potential student takes before clicking on to another page in the fruitless quest to find information of value on a university website (the webcomic xkcd did a neat Venn diagram on this phenomenon).

To be completely inclusive by Wikipedia’s standards, “D+” doesn’t just have an entry as a terrible grade. It’s also listed as an indie rock band from Anacortes, WA, with “droll vocals and witty wordplay, and a minimalist, charmingly ramshackle sound.” Pitchfork last reviewed the band in 2003 with a 4.8 rating.

That’s the company you’re keeping, Drake marketers. Except, unlike D+ the band and D+ the grade, you’re not even passing. Maybe try for a “charmingly ramshackle sound” next time, eh?

In an internal email sent to faculty and staff on Tuesday morning (and published here by a renegade recipient), Drake University defended the The Drake Advantage campaign as “intentionally edgy.” In a confusing leap of logic, it praised the logo as a standalone eye-catcher but then backpedals and says “The D+ was not designed to stand alone or represent a grade. it was designed to be paired with prose.”

The “D+” graphic scored well in a survey of 921 high school students, according to the authors, Tom Delahunt, vice president of Admission and Financial Aid, and Debra Lukehart, executive director of Marketing and Communications.

Taking a strangely condescending tone, the letter goes on to explain, “Our experience in the survey and in the field suggests that the kind of students whom we want to attract to Drake easily understand and appreciate the irony of the D+, and that it is having the intended effect of encouraging students to find out more about what makes Drake so special.”

Hear that? If you don’t easily appreciate the irony, Drake doesn’t even want you, you dense plebe!

Katjusa Cisar is a freelance writer living in Atlanta.