Saturday, October 03, 2009
We've said goodbye to Blogger. The new blog site is here: http://www.georgetownheckler.com/blog
The official blog of The Georgetown Heckler. A culmination of culture, politics, self-aggrandizing verbal masturbation, and art.
We've said goodbye to Blogger. The new blog site is here: http://www.georgetownheckler.com/blog
Posted by The Georgetown Heckler at 5:22 AM 0 comments
It's up. Along with the new site. Drop us a line if you have any trouble with this site. Hopefully we've made the correct blood sacrifices and such to the correct WordPress gods.
Posted by The Georgetown Heckler at 5:15 AM 0 comments
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this weird felt propaganda wall. Sorry, I just came from Russian Foreign Policy. Anyway, the first Heckler issue of the year is going to be up early next week. And we will have a redesigned, hopefully more functional website. I apologize that it will go up right away without interruption, and we will not have to take our site down for four months like The Hoya.
Posted by JKS at 12:57 PM 0 comments
Things have been going strong for The Hoya the past couple weeks in the racism department. But in its soul, something has died. Todd Olson doesn't get it! The Hoya is a RAUNCHY, IN-YOUR-FACE, UN-PC comedy gift to the world. And if you won't let them make fun of black people, THEY'RE JUST GONNA HAVE TO TAKE THEIR JOKES TO ANOTHER HISTORICALLY DISADVANTAGED GROUP. It's called attitude, and The Hoya has it in spades, unless by spades you mean black staff members.
This week: the disabled! The Ed Board writes a bland editorial in favor of that wheelchair guy suing Mr. Smith's for allowing him to be a fire hazard and then not. "Big deal." OH YEAH? Well, you just have to look a little harder, my friend! The title of this story? "Standing With Taylor: Solidarity Counts." Get it? They can't stand with the guy in the wheelchair because, by definition, he cannot stand. SATIRE.
Uggggggggh. Seriously, they had to have realized what they did, right? That has to the most inane title for the piece they could come up with. Nobody writes a headline that poorly unless they're trying to make a joke. Uggggggggh.
While we're at it, does anyone know this kid? I will withhold vitriol because I've really maybe only said a word to him once or twice, but everyone I know who knows him thinks he's, well, whatever polite word for douche bag exists that I can insert here. And, "I thought he was supposed to graduate last year, isn't he like 25 by now?" Small sample size, so who knows, he may not be a d-word, whatever. Anyway, the interesting thing is, if you go to his website, it's pretty much a chronicle of what happens when you're a rich, well-connected disabled kid.
"LEMON!!!!!"
(See what I did there? I could write for The Hoya!)
Before you leave the site, make sure to donate to his trust fund. Don't look at me like that! It's a special needs trust fund. Special needs people need more than one trust fund. That's why they call it special needs.
Thankfully, we've learned from this Hoya article that this guy "has not ruled out pursuing a monetary settlement." God speed!
And remember, if there's anything you learn from this courageous individual, it's that the Hamptons are a very dangerous place. You could jump into a sandbar and come up suing a landbar.
EDIT 9/20: Reader Will Sommer notes that since publishing this article on Friday, The Hoya has changed the title of the article on their site to "Solidarity Counts," though Will notes "the URL is still standing with Taylor."
EDIT 9/22: And now they have moved the article to a new URL. It's true, anonymous commenter, the printed version of the article was entitled "Standing Behind Taylor." But that's still pointing out he can't stand, no?
Posted by JKS at 2:54 AM 1 comments
As always, if the administrator responds, we will post it.
Josetta:
Let's skip with the pleasantries. A year ago, when the nation was gathering together to celebrate Patriot Day, I sent you a letter about blue cups, blah blah blah. Things didn't go well last year for the Georgetown University Soft Drink Society (GUSDS). Once again we were turned down for SAC funding, and when you didn't return my letters about the blue cups, the board began to see me as a weak leader, and a rebel group led by Paul tried to wrest control, in violation of the GUSDS Constitution, the accepted stance of the National Collegiate Soft Drinkers Association, and the good will of soft-drink lovers across the nation's capital. I was able to keep my position, expel Paul, and force the other insurgents to drive up to his house in Connecticut and hang a white sheet stained with grape juice in the big oak tree in front of his family's porch.
I am stronger than ever before.
Obviously, you felt some degree of fear in responding to me last year, but please remember that, despite my power as president, I am just a student like anyone else. I noticed that the blue cups quietly returned, and in turn, you have been allowed to keep your job as Beverage Director up to this point.
However, we again have a problem. Every time this year I eat lunch in the "Down Under" section of Leo's (more commonly known among students as "Leo's Australia") at your restaurant called The Diner, which is to say every day I eat lunch, I have yet to see the blue cups. This is an abomination.
And at this point, I'm about ready to call it racism. Just kidding. You assumed I was a black person because I always eat in The Diner when in fact I just like eating unhealthy food and want to be near it at all times. Shame on you. Stop reading The Hoya.
Just bring back the blue cups, no questions asked, and my group will forget the whole thing happened. I assume you like your position as Food and Beverage Manager and would like to continue to manage providing food and beverages to your children. We hope for the same.
Yours again,
Jack Stuef
President
Georgetown University Soft Drink Society
Posted by JKS at 10:06 PM 0 comments
I have counted on a few things being constant during my stint at Georgetown: John Thomson III is the basketball coach, chicken fingers are served at Leo's on Thursday, and The Hoya is protested for doing and publishing things a lot of students find racist. Now, I haven't always been able to keep my life stabilized on the assumption that I will see chicken fingers on Thursday, but the other two seem pretty solid. So this blog will be on watch all year following The Hoya as it attempts to restrain itself from inevitably publishing the issue that will spur this year's anti-Hoya-racism protests to break out. Thankfully the Media Board suspended The Hoya's bid for independence this year, because the Media Board has proven to nurture the kind of journalism from The Hoya the past couple years that results in really nice, full anti-racism protests.
So far, after the first day of classes, The Hoya has officially not been protested yet. Tuesday's issue, the first of the year, is very careful not to make jokes about "good old vanilla-chocolate swirl interracial fucking." In fact, they were so careful not to make Jessie Sapp seem light-skinned, they darkened a picture so much that he and much of his surroundings are nearly impossible to make out.A good start, but how long can the passive-aggressive protest-avoidance be sustained?
Posted by JKS at 1:27 AM 0 comments
It feels dusty around here. Not because we haven't posted anything in awhile. It's Blogger. It just feels so... 2004? Is that even a year? I am not sure that is even a year that exists it was so long ago. We should probably be beaming HD-tweets into your Heckler-branded content reception devices, not hanging around here. I mean, once in awhile, every four months or so, The Hoya will try to launch itself into the blogosphere, and you just feel uncool typing out thousands of words about college homepage websites. Does the blogosphere even exist anymore? Spell check is telling me that is not a word. I can't be sure.
This blog will be attempted again, though. I can't promise much, but it will be attempted.
There is also a goal to put an issue out towards the end of the month. You can read that too.
Also, I was heartened to see the lower section of Gaston Hall filled up today for a lecture fund event with comedy writer David Javerbaum. Granted, the event was not called "A Noted Comedy Writer Discusses His Craft." It was called "Behind the Scenes of 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.'" And it was freshmen's first opportunity to see a non-NSO speaker in Gaston. But perhaps it is a sign that somewhere on campus, in some dark crevice of social anxiety and Easy Mac, there exists students who have some vague ambition to try their hand, or maybe even hands, at humor writing.
Come visit our table at SAC Fair on Sunday from 12-4 PM (or, if you want, for just a minute or two during that time span) to sign up for our online paper thing and the various advertisers to whom we will sell your e-mail address. We'll be in Red Square with the other misshapen, pale, non-university-funded student groups. Who knows, maybe we'll even pass out free GUGS burgers we've taken from the GUGS grills across from us!
Posted by JKS at 12:43 AM 0 comments

Remember when we strained to bring you a blog last summer and then in the two semesters after that? That was fun. But it's not happening this summer, we're pretty sure.
Not that we really blogged about anything last summer. It was mostly just Jack Stuef writing boring updates of his writing fellowship and copy-and-pasting rejected Onion headlines. If you want to read more about his boring life and the occasional rejected Onion headline he deems fit for the world, follow him on Twitter. In an incredible accomplishment not befitting a scarcely published, constantly on the brink of death, narrowly focused college humor magazine, another of us, just-graduated Heckler editor Jon Rapoport, got this summer's writing fellow job at The Onion. He's probably not going to be writing a diary of his magic Onion journey on here, but we just wanted to brag. Seriously, there are much more established, better run, and university-supported humor mags out there. We should not be the one producing the best writers.
Our DeGioia Twitter account from our last issue continued on for less than a month, got some nice press, and then was shut down after the school complained to Twitter. Sorry.
If you want, you can take a look through our archives. A lot of the links don't work anymore, so we have obviously won our wars with The Hoya and stupid-college-homepage things! We haven't heard back with the ever-Googling-on-the-job Heather A. Maginnis, but we have taken over her immaculate Google results. Blue cups finally returned to Leo's. And John Q Pierce remains at large, though we've won his Google results as well. There you go, closure.
In closing, the federal government apparently considers both the Heckler and The Hoya (I KNOW!) real campus newspapers.
Now go buy our sandwich. And e-mail us if you have any desire to write for us next year. We're having a lot of turnover of writers, and well, hopefully, with your help, this thing won't die out before it sees the new decade.
Posted by The Georgetown Heckler at 7:11 AM 2 comments
We're going to do a THIRD issue this year! Look for it early next week this Thursdayish DEFINITELY WEDNESDAY 5/6 AT THE LASTEST right here on the Internet.
Also, if anyone has any disgusting remarks about children to share, put them in the comments. I actually don't have enough time on my hands to come up with these, so I need your help to reach the necessary college humor magazine disgusting-remarks-about-children quota for this month. Thanks.
UPDATE: It's up.
Posted by JKS at 1:20 PM 2 comments
SPEAKER: PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
OBAMA: Thank you so much. Please, everybody be seated.
Well, to President DeGioia, thank you so much for the gracious introduction, and thanks for bringing your family, including J.T. Appreciate you.
(LAUGHTER AT OBAMA PRETENDING TO APPRECIATE DEGIOIA)
The -- we're going to invite him over to hang out with the girls.
(LAUGHTER)
He's a pretty good-looking young man.


To Georgetown University students, it is great to see you.
(LONG, RAPTUROUS, BOASTFUL APPLAUSE)
Posted by JKS at 7:35 PM 1 comments
People searching for that term on Google has led to an explosion of visits to this blog, via this post.
Look kids, the Heckler is here to help. Just give me your information, I'll go over to the admissions office to argue your case, and they will be sure to not let you in.
Now scram. You'll love it at Tufts.
Also, can the person who googled "provost georgetown beanie baby" shoot me an e-mail? I really, really want one of those.
Posted by JKS at 6:16 PM 0 comments
I generally dislike MyAccess (can't they at least put up the old-style Schedule of Classes if they're going to put up the old-style Course Catalog?), but it can see what your schedule will look like up to THE END OF TIME:
In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos,
while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb.
The third big war will begin when you decide to take ARTP-080, Public Speaking.
Posted by JKS at 3:28 AM 0 comments
NOTE: There is no humor in the following rant. Move along.
This blog's annoying need (on my part, and probably yours) to call The Hoya on their endless bullshit and lapse of duty as our "newspaper of record" can perhaps finally come to an end. They fucked up big time.
On Wednesday I first tried to write this post, but it's really hard for us to respond to The Hoya's April Fools' issue. First, one of our writers was asked to write most of the thing for them in 2006, and The Hoya couldn't manage to find a place between making in-jokes about themselves on their masthead to at all acknowledge him. Second, their crude "jokes" have been hypocritically allowed to be printed once a year despite us being denied the permission to become an official student organization in part because we wouldn't be allowed to write any strong satire. Third, the issue is a clear embarrassment to The Hoya and is demeaning to Georgetown and the art of humor in general.
This issue has for years been a reflection of The Hoya's bizarre but previously concealed views about what they have covered for the past year and their contempt for certain groups and people on campus, but somehow the issue has always come and passed without widespread outrage (especially easy last year, as they released the issue weeks late when people were starting to study for finals).
The Hoya generally defends the April Fools' issue, as many have this year, as a "joke" that everyone should "chill out" about. Satire, however, is more than just a joke. Whether The Hoya realizes it or not, it has a point, and if you're going to write it, you have to be ready to defend that point, because it's yours. I think they put together what they thought were jokes without realizing, in these articles, the latent racist and insensitive assumptions and ideas that made them funny to them.
We shouldn't be surprised that these notions exist in the writers of The Hoya. I've seen it a lot in certain members of the Long Island-New Jersey triangle, the great mass of the student body that to a high degree defines what Georgetown is at the present. I would hazard a guess that some of it comes from of their parents and a lot of it from a general isolation from people who are different from them. This is not to say that all students from that area are like this, or that all students with such racial notions are from that area, but I think that these notions are out there in the student culture, and that culture is largely defined by them.
It doesn't surprise me at all that The Hoya wrote these articles because we've received so many submissions to the Heckler that I've found to be not only unfunny, but also racist. One particularly baffling article that we like to pass around amongst ourselves was about Tiger Woods being arrested for rape. The reason he won so many trophies, the article alleged, was not golf skills, but raping people. On at least two occasions, I've had to rewrite an article I thought had a good premise but seemed racist or homophobic in how it was carried out.
Another striking thing about this April Fools' issue, one that relates to charges of racism, is The Hoya's obsession with vigilante justice. It's something I've also noticed in the culture here. I don't know if it's fueled by superhero movies, Catholic ideas about justice and punishment for straying from a code of acceptable practices, or a suburban fear of outsiders and the need to purge them. But it is a rampant belief, displayed in the comments here and here and elsewhere over my three years on campus.
And in this same vein, it has surfaced that some in GUSA are trying to find a way to get The Hoya punished for what they did.
As much as I detest what The Hoya did, that may be even more distressing than latent racism bursting onto its pages. The Hoya's freedom of speech may have been used hatefully, but we cannot let our selves or the powers that be get in the habit of punishing people for this type or any type of speech, save the extreme cases of slander and libel.
And hopefully, journalists will learn to stay out of humor. It's a bad idea.
NOTE: We're lazy, but we are planning a new issue of the Heckler in the next few weeks. One that, as always, we can stand by, and one that hopefully has real jokes.
Posted by JKS at 6:51 PM 4 comments
So this happened. It was remarkably close given the traditional model of GUSA elections: The Hoya endorses a ticket, and students who vote, i.e. freshmen, sign off on The Hoya's choice. The last time The Hoya's endorsed ticket did not gone on to win the election was back in Bush's first term of office. And that only happened because the ticket that narrowly won had fines (something they had back then?) that exceeded the $75 limit on campaign spending and had the balls to put flyers refuting the Hoya endorsement inside of each copy of The Hoya, but their disqualification was overturned months after the election. Current seniors have never seen an election in which the Hoya-endorsed ticket did not win, and neither did the class graduating before them.
We may all think the Hoya Ed Board made a strange decision this year on their endorsement, but we have to remember it's our duty to vote how they say to vote, no matter how bad a choice it may seem. So Georgetown, enjoy your new GUSA executives:
You deserve them.
Posted by JKS at 10:52 PM 0 comments
http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2009/02/27/one-of-these-things-is-exactly-like-the-other-hoya-misprint-in-friday-edition
And thus our beloved Ed Board continues its silence on the biggest news of the year.
I understand, though. We printed our print issue with Silver Communications last year, and our shipment somehow ended up at somebody's house on 36th St. Luckily somebody at the house knew what the Heckler was and correctly guessed that 2,000 issues of the Heckler were not meant only for him.
Posted by JKS at 7:51 PM 0 comments
Well, it looks as if what it looked like was going to happen with the GUSA election happened. The disqualified tickets are back on the ballot. And boy, they sure have the momentum going for them! Who can name another ticket in the race now? It's all Lamb-Breen and Dagher-Ibrahim, Dagher-Ibrahim and Lamb-Breen. There's no oxygen left in this race for the tickets who weren't disqualified.
One of these two tickets would certainly win, but Nick "19 Years In The Making" Troiano's hilarious decision to re-instate instant-runoff voting was enacted for next year's election. Now that we have a regular ol' plurality election here for this year (or is this one a Cajun-style runoff? who knows), their high profile won't matter as much, but I think all the attention will still probably bring one of them the victory. That is, if the Hoya Ed Board doesn't strike again with its annual pick, although I have a hard time seeing how anyone but the Ed Board would like their pick this year.
I think the key to this race, though, will be who gets disqualified next. Will it be Lamb-Breen? I think so. They seem like the favorites, and they know that the attention of another disqualification, this time without some of it being diverted to a second ticket, would probably seal a win for them. I'm guessing the weaker Dagher-Ibrahim will hang back and hope that Lamb-Breen's second disqualification won't be overturned, because even a second disqualification for Dagher-Ibrahim may not be enough to raise their name ID to winning level. But who knows? It's anyone's race. After seeing these two tickets get all the attention, tickets who were too shy to get disqualified last time might do it this time. Maybe every ticket but Dagher-Ibrahim will get themselves disqualified. Who knows?
However it plays out, the important thing to remember that it is your duty as a student to vote in this election, which is more important than national elections, because it takes all of us working together to keep this charade going. Do it for the douchebags who want to be Bill Clinton.
On a side note, has anyone been following the Hoya's coverage of this? They've had all the developments from the past week slopped together in one article that is getting extremely long and incoherent. It's great. And check out the comments, which now stand at over 50. One guy alleges that friend of the Heckler Will Dreher is a member the leader of a secret society called the Wolf's Head Union, which the poster says is in an eternal struggle with the (Second? Sixth? Sexless?) Stewards and of which I've never heard. Can that crazy guy comment here on what this wolf taxidermists' guild is? Are they these guys who capture wolves and make them sit on boxes of motor oil? Because wolves hate that.
Just look at that wolf howl. Wolves fucking hate fossil fuels. Or maybe the other Stewards finally just gave in and rename themselves. Who knows? Who cares? Well, yeah, obviously me.
Finally, can we please tack a superfluous keg ban referendum onto this ballot? That was so much fun.
Posted by JKS at 2:46 AM 0 comments
Play this as you read this post. I MEAN IT.
Wow, how long has it been since we had election disqualifications? Twistah? That was like three years ago! Anyway, the happy news came late Monday night that two tickets were disqualified for illegal flyering! Yay! Usually we have to wait until after the election for issues to flare up that question the legitimacy of the election, but here we are, on election eve, getting to open our presents early. Does this mean we get to have additional problems with the election after students vote today too? A boy can only hope!
Really, though, I have to thank the Election Commission. I wasn't sure it was worth it for me to take Lamb and Dagher posters and stealthily put them up in Darnall, ICC, Village B, and Leo's in the dark of night, but the Election Commission showed us that dreams do come true, and now I have blog material.
I am sure the Hoya Ed Board will back up this decision. "On the national political scene, putting campaign posters in places where they aren't allowed does not disqualify a candidate; in student goverment, however, we believe such rules are necessary so that nobody sees a campaign sign within 500 feet of a tray of chicken fingers because, as science tells us, those people will invariably vote for the names on that sign. The smell of chicken fingers is just to strong for us to perform our democratic duty."
Unfortunately, the Hoya website seems to have exploded in the wake of this GUSA news:
So I will have to wait until they can compose themselves.
EDIT: Well, the site is back up, but there's nothing from the Ed Board. I guess they're pretty backed up over there, because the two editorials this week are about stuff that was news a couple weeks ago. AND SO WE WAIT.
Posted by JKS at 4:24 AM 0 comments
Hey, look at that. It's a new issue of the Heckler. I'm not sure how it got here, but be nice to it. It tried.
Posted by The Georgetown Heckler at 1:46 AM 0 comments
Last year's Hoya Ed Board struck the correct note in their GUSA endorsement:
GUSA is a joke. A tragically, hilariously, hyperbolically, theatrically side-splitting joke. A joke whose punch line we will never fully understand.
About a year ago, the editorial board of The Hoya (then differently composed) offered an answer of its own — not much.
They also aim to enliven extracurricular life on campus by asking the GUSA Senate to devote half of the $60,000 GUSA budget to a “Georgetown Fund,” which would enable student groups to host events that SAC couldn’t or wouldn’t fund.
Both men know student government well. Angert has served in the GUSA Senate and as secretary of student life in the GUSA Executive Cabinet ... Kluger has served in the Executive Cabinet as director of advertising, and has helped to organize successful events like “May the Best Man Win” (a panel discussion and subsequent presidential debate watch) and an Energia lecture.
Angert and Kluger’s experience in student government will prove valuable if they are elected. On the national political scene, outsiders are often welcome; in student government, however, we believe that experienced leaders with the skills necessary to meet achievable goals are ideal.
They are ready to lead, and we endorse their candidacy.
darktrinity1911 (1 day ago)
This video sucks. Poor audio quality, poor candidates dancing like douches.
calenandjason (1 day ago)
haha you're right darktrinity we will do a much better job representing the student body than we could ever do dancing
Posted by JKS at 1:53 AM 3 comments
This admittedly ridiculously long rant I wrote last week upset some people in the comments and our inbox, but I thought I had heard the last of these failure-bound college-homepage-peddlers until this evening, when I returned from class to find this banner hanging between the first- and second-floor windows of my apartment:
Hey look, it's somehow yet another stupid college homepage thing, this time set up by Campus Corner Connection, Inc., whose website, at first glance, adorably manages to look like one of those search-engine infested abandoned URL-address placeholders. "For the People, By the People..."
Wait, what does that ellipsis mean? Oh right, the mysterious terror of their unauthorized banners appearing on the outer walls of your apartment. By the people.
I have to say though, this doomed college homepage thing looks a little better than the others. Look, pretty animated GIFs! Links to your two favorite newspapers, The Hoya and The Georgetown Independent! A forum where you can chat with the people who run Hoya Connection and their various aliases! Promotional pens, calendars, magnets and t-shirts with images that also appear to be from a URL placeholder site and which may or may not be free!
Now, I am flattered that this Brand Ambassador or "marketing intern" must have decided that the attention I've given to these stupid things were worth bothering me by putting up a banner on my and my roommates' apartment without our permission, but this marketing stunt made me angry.
Next time, please make your marketing even more extreme by doing the ultimate desecration-to-a-Village-A-apartment stunt, throwing a brick through our window. At least then I'd achieve my dream of being in a Public Safety Alert.
Posted by JKS at 9:04 PM 2 comments