As is painfully obvious by now, Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, is dead. This year has also seen the sad deaths of Coretta Scott King and Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett, as well as the fortunate and long-awaited deaths of dictator Slobodan Milosevic and that bastard Kirby Puckett. Some of these deaths were more predictable than others. (For example, compare Irwin's job title or Puckett's loathsome obesity to Slobodan's graceful aging.) It in this spirit that I present to you some predictions for the deaths of some of Dartmouth's campus celebrities this fall:
Death One. Our status as a Top 20 School in the Princeton Review.
We've been sliding for a few years now. The straw that will break the camel's back is the completion of the new dorms on Tuck Mall. The first thing I heard when I walked into Fahey Hall was the sharp b*tchslap of the College Endowment's hand across the East Wheelock Cluster's face. What was once the College's premier residential location, complete with big rooms, modern amenities and worth every ounce of the extra effort of applying, has become second-rate. Now the only face that the Admissions Office likes to show the outside world has four fingers and a '68 class ring marked in red across its pale-because-it-has-never-seen-the-sun face. Who's the smart one now? Just kidding. Please stay. Here, take this new math building.
Death Two. The new meal plan with Topside restrictions.
Young '10s, you don't know this, but there was a time when you could spend an entire term's worth of DBA on chips, salsa, energy drinks and Febreeze. (Lighters, condoms, and Vibe Magazine have been DASH for as long as I've been around.) But now there's a $200 limit to your Topside expenditures. The idea is that the extra leeway you've been given with your meal plan's rollover feature will be made up for by your forgetting to spend all of your Topside allocation, the remainder of which DDS gets to keep and use to improve the product selection at the convenience store it wishes you wouldn't use. So hopefully that stops.
Death Three. Hope for the football team.
Just kidding! We have a brand new playing surface. This will definitely turn things around. 8-0 from here on out. Collegestradamus has spoken.
Death Four. Unreasonable keg policies that result in thousands of cans being thrown away needlessly by Greek houses every week.
Another joke; the Greek community is too apathetic and the environmentally aware community is too pleased with itself to give up such a good talking point to hold against the Man. Double joke, all it's going to take to change the keg policy is just one more biting piece from The Dartmouth Review.
Death Five. Sophomore summer.
The truth is that the '08s dropped the ball. Most of us had a great time but that wasn't enough. We were faced with the death of Tubestock and what did we do about it? Fieldstock. We had Fieldstock. With carts. And the carts had rules. At first I thought it was a funny joke. Then it became a mind-numbing reality. Maybe we unwittingly started the New Tubestock. Maybe one of those innovative weekends we strained to produce this summer will be passed down and grow and be repeated for years to come. Or maybe we actually had Tubestock somewhere top secret and the administration never found out. Regardless of what has happened, the burden is now on all '08s and '07s to continue to talk up the X and on the '09s to figure out a way to furtively increase the risk of accidental death for next year.
