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 14th 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. Look out 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.
