Headlines on Wikipedia, Peeps, and Looking Good

• Students complain that their college won't let them use Wikipedia as a source. Are you kidding me? Middlebury College won't let students cite random information they've found on the Internet that has a decent potential for being wrong and students complain!? Pardon? Will they start complaining that the college doesn't let them cheat off their friends next?
• A professor writes a book, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read? A cheaper alternative to the Columbia Core Curriculum.
• Washingtonians aren't just obsessed with politics. They care what they look like too. Go figure. Them and the rest of the country.
  
• I'm not going to lie, a Peeps diorama contest scares me. A lot.
  

Headlines on Equality, Racism, and FroYo

News articles that I found interesting while in class this morning:

• Apparently, there's a new brand of literature--candidate lit.
• Frozen yogurt, "the leg warmer of food trends," gets popular again. (I didn't know it was unpopular. Has the NY Times met any seminary girls lately?)
• Internet addicts (some who use the Internet 4-5 hours a week) treated with therapy and electroshocks and rehab in China. I'm in deep trouble if this comes to America.
• NYU Republicans try to pull off an event they're going to get a lot of flak for. Does the safety school downtown know any Columbia history?
• Wimbledon just catches up with the times and starts to believe in equal pay.
  

On Tears

Times I've cried in the past year-and-a-half:

• A particularly brutal fight with my parents in which they essentially took something away from me because they thought it was just more important for my sister to have it.
• Maybe when my computer crashed. I know I freaked out and convinced my father to come straight from work to my dorm to fix it, but I'm not sure I actually cried.
  
• A very good friend's engagement.
• Newspaper. Twice. Never while I was editor, both since I entered "retirement." Once because I was having a hard time (still am) finding my place there and once last night after my successor told me in no uncertain terms that he doesn't need my advice/feedback about the job I held for a year and the section I built because he knows everything I could tell him. I did a good job training my staff, but not that good.
  

I'm not a crier. It really takes a lot of emotional excess to make me cry. So the fact that I've cried twice in the past three weeks really worries me. Not really sure what I'm supposed to do with that...

Happy Blog-a-Birthday to Me

Two years old and never been kissed by...

How to Know You're Addicted to Blogging

I'm not really as bad as all that, but I found the comic here and thought it was pretty funny.

Cheaters Never Prosper, but They Might Get Into Law School

A little over two years ago, I was outraged when a friend took the LSAT and reported cheating by a yeshiva guy. Yesterday, I took the LSAT and can't report much better.

A cluster of yeshiva guys (I don't know which yeshiva) were sitting right by me. The one next to me spent the entire time before the test convincing his friend that he needed to cheat off of him because he just couldn't finish in time and it was his only chance for a 165. I exchanged incredulous glances with the girl sitting behind me.

Then, right before we started, the proctors caught a guy (in a yarmulka) who was posing as someone else to take the test for him. They caught him and he left and the proctors promised they would write the guy up and that he'd never be able to take the LSAT ever again. To which the cheater sitting next to me says, "What a chillul Hashem." Right before he spends the entire test cheating.

I almost didn't post this because, after all, isn't it a chillul Hashem for me to publicize these indiscretions. And I was shaken up by the fact that a guy who was so clearly a yeshiva guy would so blatantly cheat. And maybe I should have turned him in (though the proctor did see him cheating and warned him, but then she let him go). I'd like to think that most Jews don't cheat, wouldn't think of cheating. That most frum Jews do better than that. That this guy won't get into law school anyhow.

And on good days, I believe all those things (well, I don't know about cheater boy getting into law school...). I believe that this was an anomaly, that while it is easy for people to see one rotten apple and assume they're all rotten, they're wrong. That indicating this anomaly--that it is not what frum Jews actually believe--is right and important, too.

I just hope I'm not the one being naive.

Dear Teach for America, Stop Stalking Me

I'm being stalked. Not by a cute guy, or even by a not-so-cute guy. I am being stalked by Teach for America. The e-mails asking for a meeting were flattering at first, then got annoying, but the letter slipped under my door--now that was just creepy.

I think that Teach for America is a really great program, and once when I didn't have an internship, I even considered it for about five seconds. But I would be an awful teacher because I do not like stupid people. So, Teach for America, you don't want me. I know you don't. And I don't want your e-mails. Really.

Obama for President?

So, Barack Obama has officially announced his bid for the presidency. No endorsements here, but, if elected, Obama will be the first Columbia College graduate to ever be elected to that post. And that's pretty cool in my book.

Save the Whales? Save the Newspapers!

"The world's oldest paper still in circulation has dropped its paper edition and now exists only in cyberspace."

Most depressing piece of news ever. Well, fine, maybe not ever. But in case you couldn't tell, I happen to like newspapers. A lot. And while I do read a lot of my news online, I like the paper thing. I like when my fingers get smudged with newsprint. I like turning the pages. I like catching when good newspapers make mistakes and jump to the wrong page. I like the finality of the print edition. I like the rush before deadline and the tangible thing you've put out when you're done.

And it's sad to me that there's all this talk of newspapers dying--not so much because I'll be out of a job (I mean, that's why I'm taking the LSAT, right?) as because I believe in newspapers.

So, get out there and save the newspapers! Just don't ask me how.

Things I Should Probably Be Worrying About

Right, so I've been stressed out about the LSATs and my mind is going in circles stressing about everything, but I've been neglecting some things I should probably be worrying about:

• My lamp is melting. Like the colored plastic shades are actually melting and there are holes in them. But I use it anyway.
  

• I just took out about half the books in the Journalism Library (which isn't a really big feat--it's a pretty small library) for a paper I'm writing. But now I hafta read them all instead of using them, piled up next to my desk, as a nice little table for my tissue box.

• I do laundry on the "One More Day and I'm Naked" schedule ... and let's just say I'm close.

• I need an apartment for the summer or I will be commuting to my fabulous internship from a cardboard box on the sidewalk.

• I have to do a class presentation on a book I have not read. And masterful as I am at B.S., I very much doubt my ability to present a book that I don't know anything about.

• I haven't decided if it bothers me that my current publishing internship makes me into the bad guy (gal?) who rejects all the manuscripts of bright-eyed authors.

• I dusted instead of studying last night. That's right, dusted. Procrastinating is one thing, but that is downright disturbing.
  

Why You Should Not Register Early for the LSAT

"Oh, sweetheart, you don't need law school. Law school is for people who are boring and ugly and serious. And you, button, are none of those things."

I registered for the LSAT in September. I have since decided that I don't want to be lawyer as of now. Maybe I will one day. Maybe I won't. All I know is that right now I want to be a copy editor. That it's what I love and what I'm good at it and that I do not have an interest in being a lawyer. But I registered for the LSAT in September. Before I knew all that.

And you can only get a nominal part of the price back if you cancel the test. So, I decided I should take them. The score lasts for five years and if in the next five years I decide that I really don't like commas or something, then I'll be able to apply to law school. And by five years from now I expect to have it all figured out.

So, I'm taking the LSAT. On Monday.

Except it's really hard to be motivated to study for a test for admission to a school you don't want to go to. But tests--especially standardized tests--stress me out. And I don't like doing poorly. Ever. Even if it doesn't matter. And let's say, unlikely as it seems, I fall out of love with working from 4 to midnight fixing other people's mistakes and I decide that I want to go to law school, and then I need a good LSAT score.

Just wish me luck.

Correction, Correction, Read All About It

In doing research for a paper I'm writing (on newspapers, what else?), I found this book and sorta fell in love with it--Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at the New York Times: A Collection of the Newspaper's Most Interesting, Embarrassing and Off-Beat Corrections. Maybe I'm so enamored because I used to be in charge of corrections at my school newspaper. Or maybe because last week, they (under someone else's reign) ran the dummy text in the corrections box instead of the actual correction. The dummy text is an actual correction. From four years ago. Oops.

My favorite one from my perusal of the book--from March 11, 1975:

"In yesterday's issue, The New York Times did not report on riots in Milan and the subsequent murder of the lay religious reformer Erlembald. These events took place in 1075, the year given in the dateline under the nameplate on Page 1. The Times regrets both incidents."