It’s hard to believe but it’s finally here: the final issue of the Martini for the year. And I think it fitting that, for a publication full of random crap, I list for you here the top 20 random, yet highly useful, observations that I have made here in my first year at HWS (and if you’re a bit slow and haven’t caught on to these yet, take them into consideration for next year):

1. Lock your computer, or your friends will set porn as the background.

2. Telling security that the 45 mph wind blew your parking ticket away won’t work, but bringing in a can of tomatoes will get it waived.

3. Don’t sit on the Blackwell statue. People pee on it.

4. Most of what we learned at Orientation was utter crap

5. Regardless of time, season or Febreeze, Durfee smells like ass.

6. Registration day is more stressful than finals.

7. The only people in the library on a Friday night are the obscenely overworked and the creepers watching porn in the computer labs.

8. You can get up to 9 parking tickets and still not get towed

9. Hobart is strawberry shortcake; William Smith is cheesecake

10. Drunk bus does not enjoy being called drunk bus.

11. B&G won’t come kill that wasp in your room.

12. Sundae Sunday is the only reason anyone goes to Saga on Sunday nights

13. The Starbucks in South does not actually serve Starbucks drinks.

14. College students still play with chalk and slip ‘n slide

15. Wal-Mart isn’t so shitty when it’s your only option for buying underwear at 9 PM when you realize your laundry is all dirty.

16. There are silent fire alarms in dorms, and a hair straightener can set them off.

17. Despite the fact that no one carries money to Saga, people will continue to table there and beg for spare change.

18. This so-called “green” campus will charge 5 cents per page printed or copied in the library, yet set out hundreds of copies of The Herald each week, which will never be read, and only used for cheapass gift wrap once in awhile.

19. There is no easy way to filter out emails from CSO, so your inbox will perpetually be full of useless messages.

20. It’s not about time management. It’s all about the fine art of BS.

In class today my Political Science professor told an interesting story. He did his undergrad degree at UC Chapel Hill, and, like many students, toured the campus first. During the tour, the guide (as all college tour guides do) listed some impressive statistics including this gem: the average starting salary for graduates from the geography department was $1,000,000. Sound extraordinary? Of course it is! But get this: only later did my professor learn that most of the members of the men’s basketball team majored in geography. Soon after their graduations many were recruited by NBA teams with great payrolls. Sure, they were geography majors, but did that really have to do with their starting salary? Of course not.

Now, it’s not only UC Chapel Hill that comes out with these sorts of statistics. Every university compiles and publishes data about the percentages of your tuition money’s use, the professor’s salaries, graduate’s incomes, employment level, grad school choices, and etc. Most institutions wouldn’t be caught dead actually falsifying this information, but the way that these numbers are presented can be incredibly misleading. For example, when you read about your college’s 97.3% post-grad employment rate, that includes the architecture major serving $8.00 breakfasts at Denny’s on Sunday morning as well as the chemistry major stocking shelves at Sam’s Club. Working? Certainly. Gainfully employed in a field that utilizes their expensive, hard-earned degree? Not hardly. Am I the only one who thinks this isn’t fair? I sure hope not… Sadly enough, it doesn’t end with college. It continues to *dum dum dum dummmmmm* Graduate School.

I’ve wanted to be a lawyer ever since I started watching the West Wing my freshman year of High School. For those of you who don’t know, it’s an award-winning television series documenting the jobs and personal lives of the president’s staff (named after the location of their offices) complete with stirring music, political intrigue, a healthy dose of liberal idealism, and enough irrelevant side-plots to keep plebs interested. Basically, it’s a political scientist’s wet dream. I was hooked. I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to have one of those jobs, wear pencil skirts, and finally put all the obnoxious Republican boys who told me I couldn’t do ____ because I was a girl in their place! Ok, sorry, back to reality. While not legally required, a law degree is basically a prerequisite for any one of those fancy jobs. So to law school I’d have to go, right?

Not so fast, Emma dear. The other day I was forwarded an email from the New York Times about law school. It was anything but encouraging. The gist of the lengthy piece was that students who go to law school end up broke with degrees that are basically useless unless they were among the top 5 students in their graduating class. Even then times are tough. Not a problem for me, right? I mean, I’m smart –I went to college at 16! I got this! Not so, I realized. As I kept reading, I saw that I am just like the poor graduates profiled by the reporter –young, bright, motivated, confident, and anal-retentive about commas. Visions of a life as an underpaid receptionist with a baby on the way and debt collectors pounding on my chipped front-door suddenly flooded my brain. Well why why why are people still going to law school? They can’t all think they’ll make it (or have I completely underestimated the level of narcissism in my generation?)

It all comes back to statistics. The same sorts of statistics that the UC Chapel Hill tour guide quoted. The same statistics that are in your shiny expensive-cardstock admission pamphlet. Basically, schools look nice until you dig deeper.

Colleges, law schools, medical schools, and all other forms of higher education fudge and misreport numbers for the simple reason that it’s in their best interests. Since they all do it, if one school was to take the moral high ground they would stick out in the opposite way. Suddenly they would lose donors, ranking numbers, and high-caliber students. Trickery works out well for them, but very VERY poorly for us. We students deserve to have all the information before we (and our parents) put out. If schools aren’t going to provide the info for us, then we need to do some digging. Don’t take numbers at face value, because as wonderful as whatever school seems, bottom line, they are a business and we are the investors.

6:58. I sit slouched over my desk, my laptop screen glimmering demonically in the pre-sunrise gloom, my eyes reduced to tiny slits from its neon glare. Around me, the building holds its breath, half its residents slumbering peacefully while the other half keep anxious vigil at their own computers.

6:59. My heart rate starts to increase. Impulsively I stand up and do a few jumping jacks, running in place to get the blood flowing. After only a few seconds though I am back in my chair, poised and ready for action. Waiting, heart thumping, for a sign…

7:00. A jolt of adrenaline shoots through my body as I rush to project all my energy into my index finger: Click. You could hear a pin drop in the stillness. Hunched like vultures eyeing their kill, we wait, pupils dilated and hands clammy.

Your login has expired. Please try again.

Pandemonium. There is a hell, and I am in it. Screams of fury fill the air. Doors rattle in the whirlwind that is thirty barely-awake sophomores, whirling down the hall and crying their despair to the world. Bodies collide in the halls with such energy that sparks emit. The flames are roaring; I see computers flying past my window, hurled from the third floor with such force that they shatter into infinitesimal pieces upon striking the frozen ground. Through the smoke, I squint at my screen and try again. Click. Pause.

Your login has expired. Please try again.

Expired? How can it have expired—I haven’t even been awake twenty minutes, let alone logged in! The desperation is growing. One girl fall to her knees, frantically pulling at her hair, while her roommate stands by with a face akin to Picasso’s famous Scream. Glass shatters from the pitch of the yelling while the inferno continues to rage, our fervor un-dampened even by the sprinklers now showering the halls. Bodies fall like birds as desperate students follow their computers to an icy demise, preferring death to taking Intermediate Russian as a pre-med major. The bottom is dropping out of the world; this, surely, must be the apocalypse.

With my last bit of strength I try once more; summoning all my willpower. Click. Pause. This time feels different. I start to tremble. The wait is interminable, and I can feel my strength leaving me. At last, the screen refreshes, and through sweat and tear-blurred eyes, I can read the words and see the four blue circles:

We’re sorry, the following classes are no longer available.

Mind numb, I let my body take over, my fingers making choices my brain cannot control. Poetry of Cavemen. Discoveries in Electophysiology. Biology of the Blue-Tailed Rat Monkey. And of course, Intermediate Russian.

Thank you! Your registration is complete.

Numbly, I stare at my screen for a moment, contemplating the next five months of my future. And then, slowly, I walk towards the window.

“I hear they have a lot of nice soups in North Korea, and casseroles. Because it’s so damn cold.”

“They have male joints and female joints, and you just stick them together”

“World cultures! I have so little of it I can’t even speak of it!”

“So if you’d like to come up to my office later to fondle my rainstick, that’d be okay.”

Listen up for any thought-provoking or simply amusing quotes by your professors, and email them to us at martini@hws.edu. Please keep quotes anonymous to protect the not-so-innocent

Article By: T.W. Sag

Who has to know? Well, all things considering – including the fact that this is a campus-wide publication – probably the entire Colleges community. Know what, exactly?

The Hobart College football and lacrosse programs have been put on three years probation by the NCAA for “major violations” involving ineligible players, benefits that weren‘t permissible, and a lack of control on the part of the institution. The lacrosse
program is also banned from post-season play for the 2011 season. So, even if they were somehow able to make it there, they wouldn‘t be allowed to actually go.

Can you say “oopsie?” To get the full scope of this issue, let‘s backtrack about fourteen years. From 1994-95 to the fall of 2008, Hobart College allowed its freshman lacrosse students to participate without having an eligibility certification through the NCAA. So, for fourteen years, there were a lot of studentathletes playing that weren‘t actually eligible to do so. To add insult to injury, during that same time frame, the Colleges didn‘t track how well those same athletes were meeting their degree requirements, because, well, everybody knows that in the grand scheme of things you go to college to get an education. A lacrosse player comes here to get a higher education degree, and plays their chosen sport as well. Much like I‘m here to get my degree and write for the martini, too.

So, at this point, it‘s not looking too good for Hobart in the eyes of the NCAA. And it gets a bit worse. The 2005-06 season saw a student-athlete participate though he failed to meet certain progress requirements set forth by the NCAA. Couple that with failing to produce squad lists and now you get something that can – and was –construed as lack of institutional control.

Now, while that investigation was happening, there was another running for football. I understand that there are certain alums who want certain people at the Colleges, and sometimes those certain students play a certain sport. Unfortunately, it‘s more or less against the rules for an alum to basically offer to pay for you to go to college at his alma mater have you play football there. It‘s a nice gesture, especially because the cost of our lovely institution is so high, but during the 2006 and 2007 years found this, and the students who participated in the sport as a result of this, to be a violation of NCAA rules.

How exactly did this get out? Everyone knows about the Colleges sterling retention rate, or lack thereof. When the student who hadn‘t actually been eligible transferred, his new institution looked to Hobart to provide evidence he had been cleared through the NCAA. There kind of wasn‘t, which prompted looking into the program as a whole, and the next thing you know, there‘s one big moment of confusion regarding the lacrosse team, eligibility, and tracking the progress of its participants on their way to their degrees. There was a bit of the blame game going on as to who was actually responsible for this whole shebang, and while it‘s great that Hobart requirements are higher than the NCAA ones, somehow someone slipped through the crack and failed on both accounts.

Ultimately, whether or not the finger-pointing actually works out in the end, there is the issue that the Colleges as a whole didn‘t keep a bit of a closer eye on this thing. That‘s where the lack of institutional control comes in. Because those toward the bottom of the ladder didn‘t do the job they were supposed to, now means the topplayers kind of look like idiots. And by idiots I mean that they should have at least kept an eye to make sure everything was going according to regulation.

Again, we can play the blame game throughout the athletics department, but really, the damage is done. The damage report? There‘s everything from public reprimand and censure to directors of admissions, athletics, compliance and financial aid, the vice president for institutional advancement, and the men‘s lacrosse coach having to attend the NCAA Rules and Regulations Seminar to wiping all the wins off the books for the 2005-06 season, including post-season competition. Student-athlete records have been vacated, and the coach‘s record has been changed to reflect this decision as well. Also, should our Division I Men‘s Lacrosse team make it to post-season play they can‘t participate.

The monetary fine for all of this? $70,000 for the fourteen-year eligibility infraction. That, my friends, is the equivalent of a four-year Faculty Scholarship. Somewhere, someone just lost their opportunity to come to this campus for the original purpose of gaining a higher education from a very credited institution.

Doesn‘t seem quite fair, does it? I‘m not sure where the money to cover this fine is going to come from, and, while it might behoove me to know how it‘s going to be funded, I‘m much more interested in putting a chunk of change like that toward the design and production of the new performing arts center that, as a liberal arts institution, we seem to lack. I like sports just as much as the next person, but we get degrees in something other than soccer, lacrosse, or football. We get degrees in chemistry, English, philosophy, and psychology. We apply for grants and scholarships, not get called up to national teams or professional clubs.

Isn‘t it time we start remembering that happy little fact? Think about it. Fourteen years worth of fines might just have turned away the next Nobel Prize winner, or the next best-selling author.

Sources: http://rochester.ynn.com/content/529223/hobart-penalizedfor-ncaa-violations/http://www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/conect/47262e00455277ea9c22be
c8c7999200/20110106+Hobart+D1+Pub+Report.pdfMOD=AJPERES&CACH
EID=47262e00455277ea9c22bec8c7999200

Description: Shake everything with icicles and strain with your Nalgene bottle into plastic Halloween cups.

Effects: I‘m suffering, your suffering, I woke up late, they woke up late, someone pushed me into a snow bank, I fell down a road, married a red head, watched said red head take a nap with someone else, and now you can sit down, stand up, dance, take a shower and drink this bastard.

By: The Drinkmaster

Article by: Khalym Burke-Thomas

Every once in a while you come across an artist or a band and wonder where they‘ve been all your life. An artist who encompasses all it is you look for in music while, at the same time, presents that music in a wholly new and refreshing light.

Such is the case with Dane electropop artist Oh Land.

Born to an opera singer and theater pianist, Oh Land (née Nanna Øland Fabricius), seemed early on destined to be an artist. Indeed, she was once a dancer at the Danish Royal Ballet Academy. Until she suffered an injury, that is. An injury that put her dancing career to a halt. But, of course, some things happen for a reason. Without that faithful injury Oh Land would have never turned to music. And that would have been the real shame.

Oh Land‘s debut album Fauna was released back in 2008, but like all music that truly resonates, it sounds just as good now as I imagine it did back then. This timeless quality to Oh Land‘s music is especially relevant since Oh Land has said of her music that her “goal is to sound like I’m from 2050, but still feel really classic, like the music is an old friend.” And on Fauna she certainly accomplishes this; no matter how outlandish the music gets, there always seems to be a classical and familiar underpinning to it.

The album‘s opener “Numb” is a track that can best be described as music box meets dance floor. It shouldn‘t take long before comparisons are drawn to artists like CocoRosie and Björk (whom she cites as an early influence), whose music also exhibits a kind of whimsical club element. Oh Land‘s voice here and throughout is supple: a soft coo at times and a bluesy belt at others.

“Still Here,” presents a running theme of Fauna’s: the voice is an instrument. Perhaps the most important instrument there is. Guttural huffs and throat clearings are layered over kickdrum beats and popping-bubble sounds and lush vocal interplay.

The power of the voice becomes even more evident on “Frostbite,” a haunting pianodriven ballad between Oh Land and… herself. Through vocoder Oh Land‘s voice becomes a tenor that eerily resembles that of Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons fame.

“Heavy Eyes” is an R&B smorgasbord of jingles and rapidfire percussion whose composition, at its core, could fit on any Destiny Child‘s album, especially during the chorus.  Halfway through the album, “Koo Koo,” the album‘s shortest track (clocking in at a little under two minutes) serves as somewhat of an interlude. Despite is brevity, the track proves to be one of the album‘s strongest and in its simplicity reveals the poetic nature that permeates Oh Land‘s lyrics:

[…]

He cleans up the forest-floor
He practices some steps he’d never seen before
So unaware that she’s a swing door
Left in fainted feelings on the empty stage once more

[…]

It’s a dusky dawn day
And if you carefully listen
You would hear him say:

Koo koo
Koo koo

There is little to critique on Fauna. Oh Land has said herself that the album was recorded in her bedroom and never was supposed to see the light of day. Without any commercial aims the album is as honest as can be. But that isn‘t to say that the album is without is its faults. After awhile the listener becomes aware of Oh Land‘s tendencies, which is fine; all artists have them. Still, some variation in the production wouldn‘t have hurt.

Luckily, Oh Land‘s most recent (eponymously titled) EP, which was released last year, meets these needs and then some, so there‘s no doubt in my mind about Oh Land‘s room for growth as an artist

Aries: Course we’re not trying to tell you anything but really…we are.

Aquarius: You’re worse at interpreting the signs than martini mystic, and she makes this shit up all the time.

Leo: If nothing makes sense and it’s making you feel fucked up, try turning the instructions the right way up.

Taurus: Got an axe to grind? Go join a Capital One commercial.

Virgo: Pizza was not made to go through your nose in any capacity.

Cancer: If you need batteries for any recreational activities this weekend, martini mystic will be glad to get plugged in.

Sagittarius: The universe hates you. Get used to it and invest in a helmet.

Pisces: Your mind might be on your money, but your hand is definitely somewhere else. Might wanna check that.

Gemini: You’re having a quiet day, and it might have something to do with the new tongue piercing you got when you were a little “freer” on Saturday night. Good luck tellin’ the parents about that one.

Libra: Someone’s really impressed with you – though it might because you’re wearing those pants. Or rather lack thereof.

Scorpio: You were a squid in another life. Just thought you should know.

Capricorn: Today is not your best day. Running around in the snow in your underwear singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” might have something to do with that.

The martini finally has a full-featured website. Feel free to browse our news postings, paper-copy PDFs, and rate/comment on our stories. Check back often for all the most recent updates!