Hearing that DDS was going to cap my Topside spending at $100 crushed me. What will happen to my late-night splurges on Ben and Jerry’s and Goldfish? With a $100 limit, I won’t be able to afford every Pepperidge Farm, Coca Cola and Planter’s product offered to our campus in that nifty, convenient-storesque entity that occupies the top floor of Thayer. I mean, how can they make me choose between low-sodium Cheddar fish and mini-Mint Milanos? I want them both. I want them all!
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In the early 90s, most kids were watching “Clarissa Explains It All” or “Legends of the Hidden Temple.” Nickelodeon was okay, I guess, but for me, Lifetime was where it was at. Ugly teal sweatshirts, the Round Robin and blowup candy bars were the things of my childhood afternoons. Whenever I heard that beep, I thought of the fun I could be having on Supermarket Sweep.
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I remember when $100 was a lot of money. Many years ago, I recall watching a show hosted by that consummate entertainer Bozo the Clown. He selected small children, chosen by a random number draw, who faced the Herculean task of tossing ping pong balls into increasingly distant “Bozo Buckets.” Any child who could sink all six buckets earned a crisp $100 bill. I recall, at the time, pining for that $100 — the countless packs of Fruit Stripe gum I could have purchased! Oh, how devoted I was to those sticks of terrible gum — my happysticks, I could have called them.
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Welcome, to Episode 3 of the Sonic Rage Cage, and as they say, “Third is the one with the hairy chest.” The theme of this week’s Mirror is “Team Topside,” and even though that has no relevance to music, we will stick to the topic of our column. Because it’s easy and involves little thinking, we are going to go through our iTunes libraries on shuffle, and just say a couple words about the song that comes up. Yes, we’re trying to show off how large and diverse our iTunes libraries are. “Real” men have large iTunes libraries … and they have at least one Toni Braxton tune.
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“Guest-Host Relationships” in great literature/bard-songs are go-to topics to bring up for discussion when you’re trying to score points in any Classics or English class here at Dartmouth. Our notion of Guest-Host responsibilities has been informed by the experiences of pairs like Odysseus and King Alcinous, Huck Finn and the Grangerfords, Martha Stewart and Alderson and Sinbad and Phil Hartman. I’ll briefly summarize the typical duties of each role, for you Econ majors out there who aren’t familiar with the term “xenia” and haven’t seen the film “Houseguest.” (Now that’s what I call tragedy — I’m sure it’s at Videostop.)
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I fear for the freshmen, I really do.
I fear that they have accepted this term’s weather as the norm for a Dartmouth Winter.
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I look around and cannot help but notice the marked absence of backpacks being sported by our student population. This observation astounds me. After all, we are on a college campus where students must need to take books, notebooks, pens, papers and other such school supplies to class. All of the above cannot possibly be comfortably carried to and from class on one shoulder. I mean, these items get too heavy for even a two-strapped backpack. Oh my God, can it be that these students have — gasp — chosen to make a fashion statement over actually being comfortable? Oh the blasphemy! These students have made fashion a priority over comfort and, maybe even, over academics. I cannot help but beam with pride at this shift in priorities and at the emergence of the Louis Vuitton messenger bags, brightly-colored totes and Longchamp carryalls. While the disappearance of the backpack has not spread to our male population yet, I anxiously await the day that men boycott backpacks in favor of the man-purse. Until that day, I will have to be content with the progress our female population has made and will have to put my own Hello Kitty backpack into storage because it is obviously not en vogue any longer (I’m not sure it ever really was). Today is a memorable day in that your very own “On the Sidewalk” columnist has taken a lesson from these backpack-less prima donnas strutting their stuff on the pages of the Mirror. Touché, readers, touché.
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