Dear Rhode Island weather,
please get your shit together.
You’re ruining my ‘do,
and messing with my attitude.
Don’t taunt us with the promise of Spring,
when we really don’t know what tomorrow may bring.
Oh, wait—I know…
Rain, and snow, and terrors untold.
No, I’m not exaggerating.
You truly are exasperating.

So for fuck’s sake,
give us a break.

Image via.

One of the campers pictured here bought those godawful JWW chairs. Tonight, he’ll sit close to the fire. Too close.

Despite the public perception that we’re the happiest students in the nation, Brown students and members of the administration have got a lot of ground to make up in a disturbing number of important areas. Our landscaping, for instance. Our entering/exiting architectural choices. Our “these chairs aren’t functional but who cares because apparently purchasing working things from Ikea would lose us street cred or something” decisions. And the list goes on.

FlogDailyHerald’s mission is to bring to light these failures, these persistent aggravations, in an attempt to spark some intervention on the part of the U and its student body (the authors of BlogDailyHerald and its malnourished sister publication, the Brown Daily Herald, being naturally above reproach). This screenshot of our inbox following the publication of our last Flog shows you just how well the student body has responded to our suggestions. Our writers are invested heavily in the Flogging process, to the extent that we’re in sponsorship talks with Mister Sister.

We realize, though, that the portion of humanity that exists beyond our impossibly virtuous staff is filled with folks eager to have their say. Who are we to deny the voices of our nation community school narrow group of Facebook friends? Witness, now, the birth of a new era of Flogging: the Fireside Flog. We’ll sit down and chat with completely real, not made up at all members of the Brown community, listening to their candid, uncensored view of what’s going wrong around here. Most importantly, we’ll try to show both sides of the issues: some of our Firesides will be with the victims, some with the very perpetrators we dream of [insert frightening gerund here]. Though these are conversations, we still strive to meet the challenge of FDR’s Fireside Chats – because really, what were his warm radio narratives if not extended monologues of “shit’s fucked so here’s unsolicited advice”? That’s nutshell enough for our vision.

Let’s get cracking.

Fireside Flog: “I mean, diagonal crossing is easier.”  [Read more →]

The newly introduced experimental concept of “bowl that holds non-negligible amounts of food/drink”

“Bowls” in the Ratty: We all know them. We all hate them. Until now (now being like a week ago, but I’d say that’s a pretty fair turnaround on getting a post written and published). For the longest time, a FlogDailyHerald piece on the offensively bad design of the Ratty bowls, which were probably the greatest problem confronting Brown and/or humanity in the past 30 or so years, had been gestating, gathering steam, being meticulously edited, scheduled for release at the perfect time, positioned to change our understanding of tableware/life as we know it… vaguely discussed every so often. Well, no need anymore. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Brown UCS, the Ratty now features bowls that hold more than half a ladleful of soup. The significance of this development can’t be put into words, but if we did put it into words, the words would be “life-changing,” “globally important,” and “infinitely better.”

UNFORTUNATELY, there is much work left to be done. For one, the mug size at the very Sharpe Refectory now boasting improved bowls has inexplicably plummeted, and the hot chocolate machine has been spotted failing to produce hot chocolate on multiple occasions. More importantly, the plastic cups remain fun-sized versions of the V-Dub’s big boy cups, because apparently mass-ordering normal cups became too expensive halfway through and we decided to downgrade so we could preserve funds to operate the SciLi during a blizzard do, uh, whatever it is we do with our funds. So, yeah, good work, Ratty-bowl-changers. Now fix our mugs and cups.

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Your boy Jonathan Levine ’00

In what some might describe as an anticlimactic moment, the “advance screening” of Jonathan Levine ’00′s upcoming film Warm Bodies turned out to be neither advanced nor screened, as a projector malfunction derailed the popular event. Levine’s film had students lining up by the dozen for the few remaining seats well before the 7 p.m. scheduled start, but those unable to secure a spot can enjoy a nice bit of schadenfreude knowing that the actual evening turned out to be 30 minutes of waiting followed by 45 minutes of Q&A followed by 1 minute(s) of “Get the fuck out of here, our projector’s broken.” 

[Read more →]

I’ve been here a full semester, and I still cannot gracefully enter or exit a building at this university. This could be a #freshmanproblem (#unncessaryhashtags) but I really don’t think it is. And I really don’t think it’s me. There are serious door problems at this school.

At least twice a day I encounter a door that seems to be “just for show” at this university. And it’s always at legitimately the most inconvenient time to be unable to enter a building.

First of all, the SciLi. This building has probably the most confusing door rules that a building could have. I don’t understand why the revolving doors are the ones you’re supposed to go for, because its obviously natural to want to use the push-y ones, which are just are quicker and simpler. But no, I see people every day go up to push, and then become confused and have to switch to the revolving door. I’ve also seen people get up and push these doors open for fellow Brown students. While that’s lovely, and shows how great we all are, it’s probably the most unnecessary good samaritan act ever. We could just have functioning doors. [Read more →]

Many students at Brown, regardless of their present concentration, grew up reading fabulous literature — classics such as Frog and Toad, In the Night Kitchen, and Shel Silverstein’s various nightmare visions of poetry.

Shel took all his classes S/NC, and look where HE went

When we grew older, we learned of the glories of science fiction, that magical realm where galactic empires rose and fell, robots battled from dusk til dawn, and farm boys from desert planets made out with their sisters. Truly, those were the boldest visions of the imagination.

Occupying one of the loftiest positions in the genre was, is, and forever shall be Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card’s classic novel of youth-turned-soldier in the service of humanity. Without giving too much away, at one point in the novel a group of child-commanders are controlling a computer simulation of a space battle. Their ships are equipped with an amazing weapon that, when detonated, forms an ever-expanding sphere of energy that basically turns whatever matter is around it into space dust. Every time the wave of destruction hits a new thing, it grows more powerful until it finally eats up all it can and then dissipates.

The aliens in the simulation start out ignorant of the weapon’s power. The children fire it into the tightly-packed ships and the cosmic death sphere expands rapidly, eating them all up. Easy victory. In later computer battles, though, the enemy’s AI gradually realizes that if the ships spread themselves out and avoid bunching up, the explosion of one won’t allow the wave of destruction to reach the whole fleet. They become harder to eradicate and better equipped for revenge.

All of which is to say: don’t take the carrel right next to someone in the library.

[Read more →]

There’s a devastating scene in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, in the opening, tone-setting portion of the movie. C-3PO and R2-D2, droids carrying fabulous secrets, crash land in the barren wastes of the planet Tatooine and immediately survey their surroundings, intent on making their way to civilization. As they gaze about, nothing but sand dunes and craggy, parched rock stretches away to the horizon. It is a landscape devoid of culture, of habitable climes, of — we might say — emotion and morals. They are alone in the caustic backwater of the galaxy, and there is no way out.

To make a long story short: let’s get the quad in front of the SciLi renovated already.

[Read more →]

You know the sound the guy makes in Alien as the chestbuster is trying to emerge? That feral whine, part dying ox and part Joan of Arc mid-burning? Sigourney & co. are trying to hold him down while being sung to by Goody Proctor’s howler monkey.

Brown is no stranger to that sound. [Read more →]

It’s a familiar scenario: it’s late at night and you’re walking home. You want to get there as fast as you can to get to sleep and out of the cold. Even though you know that a yellow-jacketed security guard is probably waiting right around the corner, crime alert emails and stories of rogue masturbators can’t help but fill your mind. Then you walk by the MCM building, and the streetlight turns off as you pass. Creepy, right?

[Read more →]

There are a great number of things here at Brown that, as Rhode Island’s own Peter Griffin would put it, “really grind [our] gears.” Whether it’s unyielding precipitation, the lack of anything to eat after 2 AM, or the absence of cone-worthy food items, there’s an awful lot  to complain about when one’s feeling particularly piqued. That’s why we at BlogDH have decided to roll out our newest recurring feature: FlogDailyHerald, a chance for us to bring to the attention of the Brown community those things that are particularly irksome to the entire campus. You know, those little details that can take a glorious holiday like Chicken Finger Friday and reduce it to little more than a Sunday night dinner at the Ratty (#mysterymeat). Think of it as a chance for us to shout from our electronic proverbial soapbox, “REALLY?!.”

To begin what is sure to be a long and storied tradition of complaining, I would like to bestow upon Disability Services 4 flogs from the BlogDailyHerald staff. Why, you ask? The reasoning is simple. Flog the first comes in light of the news that Disability Support Services (DSS) has jumped on the increasingly popular bandwagon of changing its name from something easy to remember to something ridiculous and counterintuitive. Somehow its new moniker, Student and Employee Accessibility Services, just doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely. Yes, the new acronym (SEAS) may be more… nautical in theme, but if I actually found things accessible, why would I be calling you to drive me a block and a half to Starbucks? [Read more →]