'Light, intermittent rain'

It’s another week down and SIR ELTON BRAND, PRINCE OF TENNIS is still in the same classes he was in a week ago. He had no idea these semesters were so long. Back home, a semester was four days long, with the final on the fifth day. The classes usually started off slow, not picking up until the second day. On the third day they usually started winding down, and the last day of class was usually a fun day with games and food and the standard 15 minutes envying and criticizing imperial, plentiful America, where everyone thinks everyone else doesn’t know how good they have it.

Yes it’s true SIR ELTON is a better person than you because although neither of us take any action to help the less fortunate, SIR ELTON has done his part by writing a column about how they need to be helped, leaving it up to you to actually do it. No, just kidding, SIR ELTON plans to start doing his part to help the less fortunate very soon—by joining a fraternity. You know they do quite a bit of volunteer work, too. You didn’t know that? Well, SIR ELTON’s never seen it either, so he just assumes they’re counting their efforts to keep the manufacturers of cheap beer employed, which SIR ELTON is totally down for.

SIR ELTON had also forgotten the tightly packed attack formation of the freshman class. As they thunder across Towerview on their way to Cameron Crazy 101, SIR ELTON felt like Simba from the Lion King narrowly escaping death by stampede. SIR ELTON has always known that learning a skill and mastering it are two different things, but he had no idea how long it took after a baby’s first steps for it to learn to walk places alone.

On a related note, one high-level Duke administrator, Zack O’Bawls, who is in fact just under Dick Brodhead, has suggested that the real reason freshmen haven’t taken their iPods out of the box is simply because they have yet to figure out how to walk and listen at the same time. Hopefully, by senior year they’ll be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Speaking of chewing stuff, SIR ELTON remembers when he first moved to West Campus and was so excited to hear that he could now eat at the Great Hall. He soon found, however, that the name doesn’t quite tell the whole story. In the interest of truth in advertising, SIR ELTON suggested that the name be expanded to “Great Hall, Crappy Cafeteria,” but for some reason the manager hasn’t tacked the comment card on the board yet. Apparently some girl whining about the lack of low-carb options at the pasta station is more important. Still there’s not that much to complain about since this is the first time in SIR ELTON’s life that starving isn’t the only entree on the menu.

On another note, SIR ELTON heard the hurricane was a big one. Some accounts claim the eye is as big as the state of Florida. Of course those accounts aren’t true, but they’re still accounts and that’s what we’re going with. Now that’s scary if you think about it. SIR ELTON wonders how the University of Miami doesn’t lose all its fans after one of these things. It seems odd to go to a stadium yelling “Go ’Canes!” right after one ripped your house to splinters and killed your grandma. There’s a reason it’s not the University of Orlando “Skin Cancers,” right.

SIR ELTON read in The New York Times that security and peoples of the government are really cracking down on Duke students off campus. He thinks this is a great idea because it’s much better for the school for students to publicly urinate and binge drink underage on school premises. That way any record of it can be easily erased when Duke alumni are running for political positions like President of the U.S., or for the rotary club. Police brutality, on the other hand, is not a good thing because cops are mostly nice people and don’t deserve to be brutalized.