In light of a slow news week and in the spirit of education, I find it fitting to diverge from the realm of current events in order to present a history lesson—Gossip Bro style. What’s that? You wanted to read about some sort of “important” sporting event that happened on Saturday? What can I say about Alabama? We lost, according to some, but according to those of us who don’t come from a backwater public university whose endowment is less than that of my high school and whose most famous attendee dropped out to write some book about how to kill mockingbirds or something, Duke still came out on top.
But I digress—on with the lesson!
In this economy, Duke students have had to do some reprioritizing of their life goals. What if we don’t get that job at Goldman Sachs? What if we have to settle for an associate program at J.P. Morgan? What if we have to wait until we’re 30 to make over $200K? With so much uncertainty, there has been a paradigm shift in student aspiration: Why focus on the future when we can Frat out with our Frat out right here on campus? This desire to be more “Frat” is a well-established sociological trend—even linguists and lexicographers place the adoption of “Frat” as an adjective ca. 2009, according to the fact that Gossip Bro considers himself both.
But what is Frat? As with many such questions, the answer lies in history. If we are to ever successfully up our fratgame, we must examine the great, albeit unsung men and women of the past who truly knew what it meant to be Frat. This week’s Frattiest Historical Figure That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of:
Tycho Brahe: Astronomer.
Tycho Brahe was born in 1546 to a Danish nobleman. Armed with nothing but his badass name and an obscene fortune, he was stolen by his uncle at the age of two and forced to become a scholar in pursuit of a civil service career. When his uncle died, his real father pressured him to become a lawyer. Frustrated with the Man always telling him what to do (and true to form for a fratstar), he gave his father and his dead uncle’s memory the proverbial finger and decided to become one of the most important and recalcitrant astronomers of all time.
Sometimes called “Psycho Brohe” by his frat brothers, Tycho got into his first true frat war at the age of 20. At a professor’s house, a fellow nobleman disagreed with Tycho on a fine, and probably irrelevant, point of science. Unable to let it go, Tycho challenged him to a duel (yeah, the sword kind). By conventional accounts, Tycho lost the duel when he had the better part of his nose sliced off of his face; however, he simultaneously performed alchemical metallurgy and self-taught rhinoplasty when he replaced his own nose with one made of silver and gold, so who was the real winner?
Tycho became so skilled at astronomical observations (without a telescope, mind you) that the king of Denmark gave him autonomous rule of his own island on which to conduct his research. Always snapping necks and cashing checks, Tycho spent lavishly on himself and mistreated the citizens of his island, throwing any dissidents into the dungeon beneath his gigantic, part fortress, part laboratory, part frathouse called Uraniborg.
To add to Tycho’s fratgame, he kept a pet elk and had a midget friend named Jepp. Arguably more frat than even Tycho himself, the pet elk met his end when he got drunk at a party in Tycho’s castle and fell down a flight of stairs. Jepp the midget was a psychic whom Tycho kept underneath the table during dinner and brought out for entertainment between courses.
The obvious question: How could Tycho Brahe possibly get frattier? How about this: He fathered eight children with a woman he never married, witnessed one of the first supernovae ever documented by humans and was probably murdered by Johannes Kepler out of jealousy (although some sources purport that it was one of Kepler’s pledge tasks).
So what’s the point? Is it that you have to own your own island, a drunken pet elk and a psychic midget in order to become “Frat”? No. The point is that no matter how hard you think you rage at Tailgate (even if it is a huge game like Alabama or the University of Bojangles or whoever we played this weekend), there will always be someone who has been around the block a few more times than you. If we want to have idols to whose greatness we can aspire, we must remember the great historical fratstars who made it all possible.
Classic Gossip Bro.
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