Because we hope you’re as excited as we are about Spring Weekend, we’ve decided to up the anticipation even more. We’ll be hitting you with a snapshot of the food and drinks we’ll be consuming over the next 12 days.

Because you may know (or you can guess) that the amount of exquisite, delicate, flavorful sustenance about to hit your palate over the next few days can be too much to handle, why not prepare your stomach/body with a shot of nutrients?

To this extent, we suggest some Vitamin Water (like XXX or Power-C) and fruit juices with plenty of antioxidants and vitamins to reload once you finish all your assignments. We’re not sure what any of these words mean but they suggest health and responsibility, things we will soon be sacrificing in favor of free love beer music … well, paid-for fun. You’ll find these beverages in all the auxiliary eateries and neighborhood markets for fairly cheap prices.

And if you really can’t wait for the fun to start, they also make great mixers.

Image via.

When I turned 21, the age when the morally upright Uncle Sam decided I could handle booze, I was abroad in London. It’s a city that proves gloomy enough without an unwelcome birthday. London’s nickname is “the Smoke,” which is appropriate because it’s very gray and because I sometimes found it was hard to breathe there.

It was April 6. As the clock approached midnight, I downed some Stellas at a sparsely populated café. A few of my moneyed friends had left London the day before to go skydiving in Lucerne, Switzerland; I was mostly broke and completely alone.

When I sobered up, I found myself aboard a train to Hollyhead — a seaside town in Wales. From Hollyhead, I bought a roundtrip ferry ride to Dublin. I boarded the vessel and promptly fell asleep in the first available chair, mumbling about a Portrait of Dorian Gray. I awoke with a dry mouth aboard the ferry. I got up and stepped carefully: the floor was littered with bodies; each was asleep or hoping to be. It was around five-thirty in the morning when the sun smudged the sky, polluting the cragged Irish coast with a sour orange.

F. Scott Fitzgerald would introduce himself at parties as “one of the most notorious drinkers of the younger generation.” While I’ve sort of fallen in love with the phrase, I’m not as brilliant a drinker or writer as he was. Anyway, I needed something of an introduction (as I knew no one and had no plan) so I went with a typical Irish greeting: “What’s the craic?” [Read more →]

Now that Halloweekend’s over, and you’ve finally found the remnants of your slutty [insert animal here] costume scattered around campus, it’s time to look to the future: responsible balancing of school work looking for another excuse to drink.

Here are some of the stranger red letter days for breaking out the red cups.

The Big Ones

Hannukah – Why party on just one holy day when you can party for more than a week straight? Here’s to having another miracle: a single handle of vodka that lasts for eight whole nights. Mazel tov! December 20th-28th

Holi – The Queer Alliance can’t hog the rainbow; break out the color in a giant pigment fight to celebrate the beginning of spring. Just don’t dare throw glitter—that shit’s the herpes of craft. March 20 [Read more →]

Despite what Jersey Shore may lead you to believe, recent studies have shown that there is a positive relationship between your intelligence level and your level of drinking.

According to various studies, you are boozing it up because a.) you are an early adopter of this marvelous new thing known as “alcohol,” or b.) you are making up for a childhood spent time mastering the intricacies of D&D, or c.) it’s the only way you can deal with stupid people around you.

Drunk as F[uck], kinda like a FML for drinking. Be regaled with stupid/disgusting/poorly advised stories of people drinking too much. Maybe it’ll make you feel better about your weekends. Or give you an anonymous forum to air your dirty laundry.

There aren’t new posts terribly frequently, so evidently it hasn’t quite taken off yet. Maybe if you like it, you can make it happen.

As it’s beginning to reach mid-October, students–sophomores, especially–are starting to think about where they might find themselves in the world, studying abroad, next year. When trying to decide where to go, there are lots of things to consider: do I want to spend three months in this country? Will I get to travel around? What will I be studying? How will I meet people? Will I speak the language?

These are all important things to consider, but according to The Huffington Post, there may be one more thing to add to your list of considerations: booze. An article in The Huffington Post entitled, “Students Learning Abroad Increase Drinking: Study,” declares, “Students who go abroad while in college are likely to increase or even double their alcohol intake while they’re away, a new study has found.” Maybe not, but isn’t that kind of obvious? In most other countries, drinking under the age of 21 is either totally legal or not a problem. And the survey mirrors that fact saying, “Students who were less than the legal drinking age in the United States increased their drinking while abroad by about 170 percent…The overall increase was about 105 percent.” It makes sense that if the drinking age is legal and you’re studying away from home, you’re probably going to drink more. But worry not, concerned citizens remaining on campus — your peers’ new drinking habits won’t stick with them when they return to their U.S. campus.

So if you’re considering studying abroad in Europe, Australia, or New Zealand, you may want to keep this so called “spring-break drinking culture” in mind.

Photo via The Yale Daily News

According to The Yale Daily News, police officers raided an off campus More-Ezra Stiles “screw” (a Yale version of SPG?) as part of “Operation Nightlife” to “curb violence in the downtown entertainment district.” Apparently, a dozen police officers stormed the club with SWAT gear and assault rifles, ultimately resulting in the Tasering of one student and arrest of 5…and I thought Brown was supposed to be a dangerous place.

So in the problem-free utopia that is New Haven, the question begs to be asked, why is the NHPD spending $15,000 a weekend targeting college kids, especially Yalies?  Has ResCollege competition gotten out of hand? Are the Whiffs at war with the Doox? Is tapping stirring up strife between secret societies?   We Brunonians may never know. But hey, that’s why we didn’t choose Yale.

A video, clearly showing that the popo meant business, after the jump.   [Read more →]

Courtesy of Chattahbox

Don’t get us wrong; we relish saving the environment as much as the next college blog, but ever since Brown discontinued the sale plastic water bottles, other (more trivial) issues have surfaced.

According to the Providence Journal, Brown is the first Ivy League school to purge itself of the environmentally-offensive plastic water bottles. (And that is pretty tremendous. Of course Brown had to be first. That’s who we are.)

“While plastic water bottles are often more practical, Brown has been really good about distributing reusable ones,” freshman David Jacobs commented while sipping from his aluminum canteen.

Based 100% on anecdotal and flimsy evidence, however, some Brown students seem slightly insulted by the dearth of expendable, portable potables.   [Read more →]

Graph made using GSS by Blog staff

Okay, not quite. But someone over at Discover had a bit too much time on their hands. Using apparently existing stats on alcohol consumption and demographics, the blogger produced drinking data on various cross tabs of the population, including religion, gender, and region.

But perhaps the most relevant to Brown students would be the finding that people who drink more scored higher on a vocabulary test.

Obviously that’s not to say that the drinking made these people have better vocabularies. It’s correlative, not causative (or some mumbo jumbo I don’t remember from high school Stats class). But it may make you feel a little less guilty about the Friday night activities you’re about to engage in.

In case you have an entirely different conception of an awesome Friday night, you can create your own cross tabs if you want to check Discover‘s work or if you’re curious about other demographic trends.

Party on, Garth.

Company of fish
No seafood, but hot bodies
Flutter in the breeze

…Be safe children, but don’t forget to submit your fishkus (FishCo themed haikus) to fishco@browndailyherald.com.