Summertime at Camp Bobo

The View from the Tower: The origin of Ivies

If you're reading this-or anything, for that matter, but given the audience I can safely confine the conversation to this-then you are most certainly living in a hole in the ground. It's Ivies. There is no reading during Ivies.

The View from the Tower: Much too old to be bad at this

The other night at dinner I found myself sitting down to eat without a fork. Or cereal. The first is noteworthy because I had prepared a salad; the second because the only utensil I had grabbed from the abundant silverware holders of our very own Thorne dining hall was a cereal spoon. In fact, the latter is doubly noteworthy because you can't accidentally acquire a cereal spoon in Thorne

The View from the Tower

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

September 10, 2004

As any scholar knows, the word "September" comes from the Latin word meaning "the death of summer and all things fun," a word that I need not mention since it is such common knowledge that it would be crass to even speak it.

In any event, September is the month when well rested, tan, trim, and sober students return to their place of higher learning for nine months that will ultimately leave them with none of the aforementioned attributes.

Over the next nine months the weight lost in brain cells is more than gained in the gut; eyes droop and hair stands on end; slightly-less-than-white skin returns to the familiar Maine skin tone reminiscent of skim milk. Gone are the seemingly endless days, hot nights, beaches, roller coasters, those really big lolly-pops that swirl with all the colors of the rainbow.

Every morning for the past week I've woken to sharp pains in my belly?the tell-tale signs that my GI system is having trouble abandoning the summer regimen of brats, beer, and baseball for the school-year staples of bag lunches, rushed dinners, and homework. Pepto doesn't work and no one at Dudley will give me any more pain medications?at least, not after "the incident"?so I guess that like everyone else I had better accept our fate: another school year has begun.

As the Byrds so aptly picked up from their no-doubt thorough study of the Bible, "To everything there is a season." Mid-coast Maine is no exception, and despite the bubble-nature of our Bowdoin abode, it is safe to say that the campus has undergone quite a number of changes over the summer.

Since I was "lucky" enough to spend my summer within the bubble, I thought I should give those of you who had an out-of-bubble experience a quick tour of recent changes undergone in those bygone months of blissful repast . . .

The statue of Joshua Chamberlain was adjusted after numerous complaints from town elders that Chamberlain had to look directly at the sun for "what seemed like hours, until he saw spots that didn't go away, except on quiet nights or when he drank lemonade." For the record, J.C. no longer looks directly into the sun, much to the elders' approval. The school refused to acknowledge claims of Chamberlain being incontinent. The town elders have returned to their residences.

Forty Harpswell Street enjoyed a proper burial?that is to say, as proper as anything else that ever happened at 40. The services were brief, and I was rather disappointed with the lack of refreshments offered at the impromptu reception. For those of you who haven't heard, 40 will not be "going on" tonight.

Coles Tower was upgraded from a "possible threat" to "a certain deathtrap" on the White House website's list of possible terrorist targets in southern Maine. As a result, the national terror alert status along College Street has been raised with respect to the remainder of the Union on the Bush terror rainbow, from fuchsia to periwinkle-rose.

The College invested thousands of dollars, hundreds of man hours, two lobster crates and a goat into changing the background color and type font of the Bowdoin webpage: www.thesamewebpageasbeforebutwithnewcolors.edu.

Howell house burned to the ground.

Three construction workers working on the chapel towers were let go by their employer after playing a game of "Jenga" which has set back the renovation completion date to 2089.

In order to cut expenses, dining services ordered that the number of forks in the dining halls be reduced by half, hoping that college students ?always nervous about social graces?would be unable to eat without the aid of a fork. Forks, for those of you who don't know, are what you eat soup with.

Res Life finally came to an agreement with the Bowdoin Outing Club, purchasing twenty old tents from the BOC for a yet-to-be-disclaimed new housing option for sophomores next spring. In an unrelated incident, res life staffers were seen slashing a clearing in the Bowdoin Pines. In an equally unrelated incident, a short time after the unrelated incident just mentioned, but not so short a time so as to think the events were related, all of the Res Life staff left Bowdoin and went to Harvard, whereupon they began sucking at life. The school has refused to acknowledge claims that the former Res Lifers have been incontinent since leaving Bobo.

Finally, our very own Barry Mills underwent a number of changes this summer while being a contestant on the to-be aired second season of the hit TV show "The Swan." I don't want to give anything away, but if you see him around and think he looks the same, realize you can only see a small fraction of his body.

Comments are permanently closed.