Does watching “Office Space” make you uncomfortable because it hits a little too close to home? Is your boss insanely OCD? Too touchy-feely? Possibly retarded? New York Magazine and WSN are here to validate your pain.
Send your most horrorific/hilarious/painfully embarrassing/totally surreal story about your most awful boss to arts@nyunews.com and you and a plus one could win two free tickets to “Not Your Office Holiday Party” with soundtrack provided by We Are Scientists and laughs by the Upright Citizens Brigade. All submissions should be in by Friday, Nov. 30 at 5:00.
Sorry kids, 21+ w/vaild ID only.
What: An office Holiday party you won’t feel bad about the next day
When: December 18th, 2007, doors open at 8:00pm
Who: The Upright Citizens Brigade and We Are Scientists
Where: Canal Room, 285 West Broadway at Canal Street
How much: FREE!!! Just e-mail your worst office-related stores to arts@nyunews.com. To buy your own tix for $25, check out www.nymag.com/nyxny.
Bring a new or gently used coat with you to donate to the 19th annual New York Cares Coat Drive.
See www.nycares.org for more info.
This event is in collaboration with Diesel, POM Tea, and Verizon.
Seriously. I think Fenbert is doing great things in the secular/pagan sphere, not too mention she pumps out a well written column despite the fact that it is occasionally assailed by sarcastic morons.
Frankly though I stopped paying attention to the nay-sayers after my head almost imploded when I read various bearded feminists lambasting Quateman for calling whores…well whores, in her column about a whorehouse. Some of the stuff these comment-trolls manage to write is like a verbal lobotomy-abortion of my brain stem. I’m tempted to suggest that they’re better than that, but I kind’ve doubt it.
Here’s what I like most about Fenbert’s column: the fact that it lures NYC’s pagans out of their candlelit enclaves and into the light of the internet, producing such gems as “T’Chris” and “silvrwlf”. Not only is the wolf silver, it is SO SILVER it has no use for the vowels normally used by christian fundamentalist conformists or numb hetero-normative zombies who tranquilize themselves with regular doses of football, coors-light and the blood of Iraqi children. (Kidding, you guys actually left constructive, well-written comments. I wasn’t sure the response board was capable to actually handling those).
Seriously though, I do think its cool that we get to hear a very different (independent) brand of religiosity. My only question is, where do I sign up? I’ve pretty much filled out all the paper work. My new, pagan name will be Llowoloth the Fatigued, and my main god will actually be Black God, who in addition to having sex with Sarah Silverman can also dunk in your intolerant christian FACE. He also has a way bigger penis than your god. Eat it, Dionysus, you fat half-goat bastard.
Two white men were recently arrested in the beating of a black man on Staten Island.
Perhaps the only thing remarkable about this incident was Al Sharpton’s revelation:
We cannot live in a city, state or nation where people cannot safely be in the streets or anywhere else because of the color of their skin.
Which, of course, is precisely why I generally stay away from east Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Some media outlets entertained the story not, as Mr. Sharpton might have us believe, because it is indicative of a problematic trend, but simply because it’s the opposite of the trend..
Hastily jumping to convict the defendants guilty of a hate crime, as Gothamist’s headline did, doesn’t help things much.
Never mind that the hate crime charges were subsequently dropped.
Gothamist’s follow-up post on the beating included no reference to their erroneous hed, but did pause a moment to make us remember that whites beat up blacks — it happened just last year!
That there is no mention of black-on-white crime for comparison is no surprise; lest they feel Sharpton’s wrath, defendants’ race is rarely reported. Except, as we’re seeing, to prove that 2007 New York is really 1828 Savannah.
The School of Social Work cashed a $50 million check from the Silvers (of Building fame). Which, I don’t know, seems like a nice gesture.
Not to Jessica, though, who posted this comment:
and yet our tuition will most likely still go up next year. can’t we get a $50 million grant that helps students directly and doesn’t just go towards some abstract idea. i’d rather have tuition costs lowered than have a nice new building for the school of social work which only has a tiny amount of students compared to the university as a whole. gotta love those silvers, though.
This shows a misunderstanding of donations, which aren’t as open-ended as they can seem. The Silvers have the right to earmark their extraordinarily generous gift to put it toward very specific ends. Yalinchak bought, fraudulently, a lecture hall. Bobst, a library. Kimmel, a center. You get the idea.
When someone gives NYU money, our school will certainly let the donors control the funds. If the Silvers threw that much cash at the university and rolled the dice as to what would be bought with it, how likely would the family be to give in the future? Especially if they didn’t much like their mystery gift.
The Silvers were more than justified in contributing to a noble cause, in lieu of blindly subsidizing snot-nosed students of Jessica’s breed with an overwhelming entitlement problem.
Call me when Jessica does anything worth $50 million. Hell, half that.
The Wikipedia entries about every school from University of Illinois, Urbana to Harvard Law are being improved and the scanner developed by Virgil Griffith, a grad student at the California Institute of Technology, knows who’s doing the updating.
The changes range from the blatantly self-serving to the highly amusing:
As today’s WSN story revealed, Dr. Ron Paul is an internet sensation.
A tiny bit of coverage, having nothing to do with NYU, was feasted upon by his trademark internet trolls. The 344-word article drew 25 website comments in 18 hours despite being all but buried. Obama spoke in Washington Square Park and got just 10 — oh, and perhaps you noticed his huge picture on the front page of our Sept. 28 issue.
Paul’s supporters call themselves Republicans, Democrats, even “Paulists.” Whatever they call themselves, I’d add “a little nutty” to that list.
As a libertarian myself, I can’t help but sit back and chuckle while strange folks descend on the WSN website to label a harmless news story a “hit piece” and speculate with comical paranoia about the writer’s ties to the “controlling mainstream media.”
I’m too young to remember the last time people spoke of a presidential candidate like one would speak of the second coming of a prophet. Then again, this is really only the second election in which the internet will play a decisive role.
The internet’s great for donations and all, but the anonymity is too much for some to handle. The folks at Collegehumor know this. I wonder if Paul’s cause would be furthered best if some of the crazies just hushed up. If anyone were to convince me that the Federal Reserve should be abolished, it won’t likely be Weird Armchair Bob.
What’s certain is that if Dr. Paul turns out to be a crook, there’ll be hundreds of heartaches clogging the intertubes.
On behalf of the opinion section, including co-editor Aaron Greenblatt and deputy Eric Bruenner, I would like to acknowledge that the Arts blog is schooling us.
It’s not easy contriving an opinion for all of this stuff, so sometimes you just have to know when to throw in the proverbial towel.
We will be back in August, more opinionated than ever before, I’m sure.
Incidentally, if you’re interested in becoming a contributor or perhaps a weekly (or bi-weekly) columnist, shoot us an e-mail at opinion@nyunews.com with a brief writing sample. Please be an undergrad, and not a hack.
Best wishes for the summer,
Anthony Marek
Anytime a jarring event like this unfolds in any corner of the world, the word “backlash” creeps out of the woodwork to distort things. It’s a horribly distracting work of fiction; the Council on American-Islamic Relations exploit it expertly.
A Reuters story interviewed the Chinese owner of a grocery store near the Blackburg campus — not surprisingly, the words read like those of someone who suffers from PTSD:
“Everyone has always been open and supportive,” said Xiaojin Moore, co-owner of the Oasis World Market grocery store a mile (1.6 km) from campus.
Moore, a native of China, hoped her three small children would not be targeted because of their Asian appearance.
“We just want to be left alone to figure things out, until things calm down,” Moore said.
Left alone? What horse shit. Nothing happened to you. Notice that the headline of the story cries “Asians Fear Backlash after Virginia Tech Shooting” — only to quote a bunch of people who aren’t worried about a “backlash.”
It gets better. There’s the UC-Riverside professor who dances around plainly trumpeting the fact that, as a Korean-American, he’s a victim, too:
I’m sure that, in the weeks ahead, many Korean Americans will feel somehow responsible for this one Korean American student’s action, even though it appears that this was the action of one apparently disturbed young man. This could have been done by anybody who suffers from severe depression or a mental disorder and is not properly treated. And yet, I too somehow feel responsible. Why? As someone of Korean ancestry, I feel a cultural connection and almost a moral responsibility for his actions. Many in the Korean community are already mourning the very idea that a Korean is responsible for these senseless deaths.
As we approach the 15th anniversary of the civil unrest in Los Angeles, the Korean American community here still vividly remembers how the mainstream media portrayed Korean immigrant merchants as gun-toting vigilantes, defending their stores as Los Angeles burned in 1992 — and we are still trying to overcome that stereotype. There are more than 500,000 Koreans in Los Angeles, the largest enclave outside of Asia, and this is the image many Americans have of them.
The Asian American community has long complained about the absence of Asian American faces in popular media. Even the initial media report of the shooter as Chinese reminds me of how Asian Americans all “look alike” to those outside the community.
Sure, a few professors and kids died, but what about the people who are labeled Chinese when they’re Korean or Thai? What about the tribulations of the poor shooter, who will never get to rest in peace among the headlines that call him not just a cowardly killer, but a South Korean cowardly killer?
The author, Edward Taehan Chang, was able to go a whole two paragraphs before ejaculating his nonsensical concern for this ethnicity. Skim the column for any traces of empathy for the real victims — you’ll find not one.
And that’s the real problem.
Yesterday’s shooting at Virginia Tech must have really put things in perspective. No matter how much of a bad day you thought you were having, you certainly felt like a world-class jerk after reading the news.
I wasn’t really old enough to analyze the Columbine massacre when it went down a day before my birthday in 1999 — I was an adolescent probably too preoccupied with the loot I’d rack up the following day.
Isn’t it interesting how the media oozes this horrendous biography of the killers when things like this happen? I know more about this 23-year-old South Korean nobody than I know about most of my professors. His roommate describes him as a loner, he lived in the VT dorms, he may have been taking medication for depression, and, something that is getting way too much play, he wrote “violent” plays.
I can’t think of any reason that the media would toss all of this at us, except for some perverted attempt at explaining what he was thinking or dealing with.
Newspapers know their readers demand it, so that’s why they print it — they really don’t have a choice in the matter. But trying to place their readers in the shooter’s shoes is awfully hard to do without giving the appearance of apologizing for him, or worse, blaming the victims — the latter of which John Derbyshire of the National Review has no qualms in doing:
Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn’t anyone rush the guy? It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness’ sake—one of them reportedly a .22.
An Australian newspaper, the Daily Telegraph ponders in print, “This is the face of the girl who may have sparked the worst school shooting in U.S. history.” (Heart-wrenching photo of the deceased girl included.)
Naturally, the shooter himself was the last to assume culpability for his romp of terror: “You caused me do to this,” read his suicide note. He was an English major, by the way.
So he took or Prozac or something like it. So he wrote a violent play. Fascinating stuff.
It doesn’t connect any dots, of course. Dozens of English majors, this will shock you to know, get through each day writing violent books and plays and movies, without going on real life killing sprees. Depression medication has got to work for a plurality of those to whom it is prescribed, otherwise it would have gone the way of Fen-Phen and Vioxx by now.
Conversely, I’m sure a good share of criminals didn’t write blood-soaked one-act plays or suffer from depression (or live in a dormitory at the ripe age of 23).
Bottom line is, I’ve got to think that with every pointless bit of information that is released about this guy, the victims and their families suffer that much more. I much prefer to refer to 32 dead victims, not 33, and it is no accident that the killer’s name has not been used in this post.
He was the lowliest coward there is, and deserves to be forgotten. That’s it.
My sympathies to the victims and anyone touched by yesterday’s tragedy.
Nobody in their right mind would call the author of this diatribe — which pulled no punches in calling the “majority” of NYU students lazy — a decent politician. In her Feb. 12 op/ed, Meredith Dolgin declared triumphantly, “As the CAS student council president, I can justifiably say that the majority of you have done nothing at all.” (To her credit, “do[ing] nothing” refers to school issues, not just plain nothing.)That’s why it came as no surprise to me to see that Dolgin is in all likelihood as corrupt as they come.
Worse, it’s clear that she can’t be the sharpest tool in the shed, either. What politician insults her constituents? What future job seeker goes autocratic a month before graduation?
Hats off to Megan Cruz for recording what is sure to be a damning conversation with Dolgin in early February:
“If I didn’t want you on the council, I wouldn’t have you on the council. I’d get rid of you — easily,” Dolgin said in the tape. “I mean, I keep people when I want to keep people, and I get rid of people when I want to get rid of people.”
Ms. Dolgin appears to be pre-law from her Facebook profile, so here’s hoping she had no plans for constitutional law. No need to read this story twice to infer that she is no fan of democracy.
Or, if I were Kreiter, HP are stealing from me. In any case, I’m a victim of theft. Help.
I’m trying to print some stuff out on my hot HP PSC 2350 (it prints, copies and scans, but for me it’s been just an expensive, great looking printer), and I got this error message that I’ve never seen before, something to the effect of “checking” the tri-color cartridge. I did that.
About 12 times.
Then, after doing some research, I found out that the cartridge is “expired” and can’t be used.
No worries, I’m only printing some boring Microsoft Word documents. Surely you don’t need a color cartridge for that. Surprise! You do.
On Eric Bruenner’s latest column, Bee Fisch commented, “If you are not fired by Saturday, then I will start picketing…”
Well, Bee, it’s time to start picketing.
As opinion editor, I rarely post blog entries to defend my columnists against prickly comments. But I took issue with this one because it makes significant allegations based on an incorrect reading of the column.
There were two types of protesters at the NYU College Republicans’ panel on illegal immigration this past Monday: first, there was the goofball socialist that held up posterboard with colorful accusations “like fascist,” squawked “si se puede,” and boldly turned their backs on Chris Simcox when he spoke.
Then there was the type who only “cheered internally at every ‘fuck you’” and who transcended this whole pedestrian argument by declaring Simcox unfit to contribute to academic discussion. The latter are an elusive breed; thus far I have only identified Mike Devlin and Una Hardester, a self-described “mild-mannered human rights activist,” as members.
I really liked Mike’s column, but maybe I was just relieved that a sympathizer of Enrique Morones was backing up his position in the English language. I exaggerate, but still, the column was good. That didn’t, however, change its status as a more eloquent way of opposing Simcox’s right to speak, and that’s where I take issue.
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