Chapel Hill played host to journalists from two of America’s most well-known news sources this week. Ira Glass of NPR’s This American Life and Alex Williams of The New York Times both paid visits to campus, evidently with the shared goal of poking fun at the trials and tribulations of life as a UNC student.

Ira Glass, a self-proclaimed fan of the DTH’s kvetching board, reiterated how pathetic it is that someone at our school had never heard of Star Wars, calling this lack of pop-culture exposure “beyond homeschooling.” He hit on another sore spot, eliciting an awkward silence when he unintentionally pointed out that our basketball team may or may not currently rank in the top 50.

"Wesa got a grand army. That's why you no liking us meesa thinks."

The New York Times, meanwhile, succeeded in creating an exaggerated portrait of Chapel Hill students, in which all girls are hopelessly devoid of self-respect and all boys are Chauvinistic pigs. Alex Williams, who splits his time between reporting for the Arts Section and the Stating the Obvious Section of the Times, discussed the “new math on campus,” i.e., the 60-40 female-male ratio that is about to rear its ugly head for Valentine’s Day.

Williams took a leaf out of Tucker Max’s book, venturing out to several Franklin Street bars to “do research.” Given their questionable sobriety, most of the interviewees were surprisingly well-spoken. However, Williams did manage to tease out a few gems and then insert them into his article with little to no context. Our favorite take on relationships at UNC came from junior Emily Kennard, who was robbed (or should we say “cheated”?) of her dignity by Mr. Williams’ sneaky reporting.  Clearly, this is an accurate representation of all Chapel Hill girls’ sense of self-worth. Thanks for that, New York Times.

Matthew Garofalo gave an equally flattering impression of boys in Chapel Hill, saying, “You don’t have to work that hard…You meet a girl at a late-night restaurant, she’s texting you the next day.” We weren’t aware that Time-Out and B-Skis were hot spots for picking up the ladies.  Thanks for the tip, Matthew.

Is it really that easy, Mr. Garofalo? Insert cat-related sexual innuendo here.

The Times article was accompanied by an eight-picture multimedia section, which was really disconcerting to flick through due to the absence of Facebook tags. The slide show also revealed that Deep End and P.T.’s have apparently invested thousands of dollars to improve their lighting since we were there last weekend.

The glorified Facebook album, sorry, “multimedia show” depicted two sophomores fratting chatting it up at Bob’s. We’re sure they were reminiscing about their respective gap years, which are usually to blame for the abundance of 21-year-old sophomores at Bob’s.

Finally, the article ensured that every female reader is super excited and optimistic about Valentine’s Day, pointing out that “Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.” Alex Williams, don’t pretend you won’t be spending the evening of February 14^th with some Pokey Sticks and the ER box set DVD. Also, way to rip off Professor Byrns’ “Economics of Love” Valentine’s Day lecture.

That’s it for today, kids. Lookout for our Student Body President endorsement tomorrow, which will evaluate the candidates on only the most relevant and serious of criteria for carrying out the duties of the office. Oh wait, three more things:

1) A lovely kvetcher once asked “Who do I have to blow to get into the kvetching board?” Well here’s your happy ending, sort of. The DTHole is starting an overflow kvetching board, which we will publish about once a week. So, if your kvetches just weren’t kosher for the DTH, send them our way: dailytarhole@gmail.com.

2) Props to Liz Deane and Justin Tyler for getting creative with their campaign for Senior Class Officers. Their parody of Juvenile’s “Back That Ass Up” music video turned us into absolute ROFLcopters, and actually made us want to vote for them. It’s almost as good as the Throwback Rap playlist on fratmusic.com.

3) Finally, we just had to call this person out on the most ridiculous license plate we’ve ever seen. Don’t get us wrong, we aren’t jealous Clef Haters, but this is just heinous. Actually, maybe we are jealous of whoever has such a dedicated stage mother. (In case you can’t tell, it’s a grey Porsche Boxster with a “Carolina Mom” decal and the words CLEF MOM emblazoned across the license plate.)

P.S.  Apparently Gawker is on the same page we’re on: http://gawker.com/5466193/the-dance+card-problem-college-girls-outnumber-college-guys-misandrist-chaos-ensues?skyline=true&s=i. And as for Alex Williams, at least he has the good sense to call these girls “sorority women” while he unabashedly paints them as bimbos.

P.P.S.  In reference to yesterday’s post, those are the actual celebrity matches we got from FaceDouble.com.  They wouldn’t be funny if we had picked them ourselves.  Joe Levin Geller?  You can’t make that shit up.

This year’s batch of Student Body President candidates is taking a conscious step toward combating stereotypes. Despite the commonly held conception that it takes an exceptionally unrealistic, narcissistic and delusions of grandeur-plagued person to pursue this office, none of the candidates have succumbed to the recent Facebook doppelgänger trend.

Over the past week, thousands of teenagers and young adults all over Facebook have changed their profile pictures to photos of celebrities who are inevitably far better looking than they are. Tragically, the chosen celebrity often bears no resemblance to the awkward college student.

At the moment, all six SBP candidates have official campaign photos as their Facebook defaults. Many of these photos feature slogans, color alterations and considerable Photoshopping.

Undoctored and unflattering photos of the candidates can be found on the Daily Tar Heel website.

“I mean, it just doesn’t do anything for someone’s image to point out how much hotter, say, Jake Gyllenhaal is,” said one campaign manager who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We’re all about highlighting the positives and sweeping the negatives under the rug.”

Daily Tar Hole investigative reporters took the liberty of Facebook stalking the candidates to see what kinds of photos were featured on their profiles. We submitted several of these travel snapshots, contrived campaign photos and cRaAAZay pArTay piXxXxxxx to FaceDouble.com, a website designed to help desperate nineteen-year-old girls find prettier versions of themselves.  Here’s what we got:

Joe Levin-Manning had the funniest result, hands down. According to the magical doppelgänger generator, he is a dead-ringer for none other than Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Cruel Intentions fame.

Greg Strompolos bears an uncanny resemblance to one of our heroes, comedian Sarah Silverman. Too bad his witticisms at the forums aren’t quite up to her level yet. Actually, it’s probably a good thing that they aren’t because we were already peeing our pants listening to Nash Keune talk about invading Iran with narwhals.

When we fed it Shruti Shah’s picture, the face recognition software came up with some random hair gel victim who was a child actor in Road to Perdition. Maybe he has both Indian and Jewish heritage too? Or maybe we accidentally uploaded Greg Strompolos’ picture.

Given the small African child Hogan Medlin was clutching in his old default, we expected to get either Brangelina or Madonna. But his doppelgänger (other than Roy Williams, as his “Photo Gallery” would suggest) is the fabulous Miss Britney Spears!  (Disclaimer: that caption came with the picture.  Since when is Britney Spears an author? For that matter, since when is she literate?)

FaceDouble.com thinks Monique Hardin could pass for John Krasinksi. We think Jim would approve of Office (ha, ha) hours in the Pit, too.

Though we were hoping for Tilda Swinton à la The Chronicles of Narnia, Nash Keune’s face proved to be quite the doozie for FaceDouble.com. There were no matches! This only seemed appropriate for this year’s most “atypical” candidate. (You have mastered the art of understatement, haven’t you, Daily Tar Heel? Or maybe you’re immune to satire?)

By some lucky accident, however, Nash’s Facebook picture reminded us of another celebrity, er, politician. It took us a while to put our finger on it, since the resemblance was really subtle, but we finally realized that his picture looked a lot like those posters Barack Obama had two years ago. What a coinkydink!

And last, but not least, don’t think we’ve forgotten about you, DTH staff! In our Facebook stalking of past and present SBP candidates, we came across evidence that two high-level editors had broken their own rules of not fraternizing (i.e., appearing in Facebook pictures) with candidates. Below is a picture of Editor-in-chief Andrew Dunn, Managing Editor for Online Sara Gregory and 2009 SBP candidate Ron “Take Down the Terminator” Bilbao. If this isn’t fraternizing, then we don’t know what is. According to an email sent to DTH staffers, any reporter caught committing such an egregious transgression would be off the paper!!!

In case you didn't know, they are dating. (see 4/3/2009 entry)

Since the President and Vice President are clearly unfit to lead, what is the DTH’s equivalent to Speaker of the House? Would FaceDouble.com come up with Nancy Pelosi if we put in University Desk Co-Editor Kevin Kiley’s photo?

Until next time, keep it real, DTHolers. Friend us on Facebook (our doppelgänger is a striped possum). And, if you’re interested in narwhals or enjoy Noam Chomsky, check out Nash Keune’s 680-page platform.

P.S. And now we’re going to play…find that kindergarten error in the DTH. At some point over the last five days or so, the copy editors at the Daily Tar Heel demonstrated that they don’t know the difference between “effect” and “affect.” First person to spot it and email us wins a prize!

So many GRACIAS-es, Davis, for closing at midnight instead of 2 a.m. during exams because it is a “Friday.” We were unaware that the rules of the “weekend” still applied, since many of us have 8 a.m. exams in approximately 6 wretched hours. UL tourism did increase exponentially as numerous students cracked out on caffeine, Adderall and both wandered desperately in search of any spare cubby or table until leaving in defeated dazes.

And don’t you even start, Student Stores. Forcing us to buy Scantrons and blue books at you is a cruel, cruel way to add insult to injury. About as torturous as actually wanting to be in Davis after midnight…

(Yeah, we know it’s not the end of the world…that would be this link, which just never gets old.)