There is light at the end of Hanover's winter tunnel. Finals are almost upon us, which means Dartmouth's Winter term is nearly finished. But until we all transport our binge drinking to warmer climes for a week or so, we must first ace those tests and meticulously write one to three 12-page masterpieces. In other words, we will be wasting time on First Floor Berry for the next week until the last possible evening, when we will retire to a drug-induced stupor in the 1902 room and try to salvage our academic lives.
Which means that for the next week, Dartmouth students will be exhausting the procrastination possibilities of Blitzmail and Facebook, and turning to more ludicrous outlets for their caffeine-soaked minds. Remember BoredatBaker.com? The anonymous chatroom became a morass of Big Green gossip and obscenity at this time last year. (The site has since devolved into BoredatDartmouth.net and basically fallen off the collective campus radar. A post from yesterday: "This site blows; everyone who visits this site is a fcuking [sic] loser including myself.")
Enter JuicyCampus.com. The next-generation Bored at Baker, Juicy Campus improves the gossip feeding frenzy in essentially one important way: Discussion is broken down into individual threads, so there's no time wasted in trying to decipher which posts reply to which in the general milieu of brain-dead commentary.
The site has taken off at other Ivies, but Dartmouth has yet to catch the Juicy bug (Princeton's most viewed post boasts 6059 hits, whereas Dartmouth's weighs in at 1536).
"Considering we're at Princeton I would think we should all be beyond this Juicy Campus [expletive]," ranted one Princeton student on the site. "I thought this website was created for the big tens and even lower caliber universities."
Nope, dear Anonymous Princeton Snob of the Day, even Ivy Leaguers enjoy a good gossip swap, probably even more than those students at such "lower caliber" universities. This is proven by the highly intellectual discourse on display at Dartmouth's Juicy Campus board. The most popular threads include "Who is the hottest asian girl on campus?" and the most replied-to: "Shaven" -- you do the leg work.
Though the so-far meager postings are mostly downright boring, there are a few insightful highlights. In response to a thread on Alpha Delta, one student wrote: "Odds are, on any given night, you will see a hot chich [sic] who wont have sex with you, but instead gets her kicks from standing around and looking bored."
Hopefully, said Saint Boredom will also be too cool for JuicyCampus.com. If I know Dartmouth, though, she's already logging on at now.
In one commendable moment of cleverness, a student responded to a thread entitiled "biggest assholes on campus" by posting a giant wikipedia entry that was nearly impossible to scroll all the way through.
And then there are the really important rumors that absolutely deserve to be cleared up, such as one post about a student who is supposedly the only player on the football team who showers in his bathing suit. "Is there any truth to this?" asks the anonymous user.
No, there probably isn't. But yes, I'd rather read this than write the 17 pages I've got due on Tuesday.
