Man, I'm writing way too much Penn-related stuff. Someone from one of the other schools please email me and give me something else to write about.
Thing is, though, there was something in this morning's Penn student paper that just begs to be ridiculed. For yet another year, the Daily Pennsylvanian and Daily Princetonian exchanged dueling trash talk columns penned by the sections' top sports editors.
They are sort of funny, in a very Ivy League holier-than-thou way. But by just about any reasonable Philly standard, they are about as weak as you can get for trash talk.
For starters, both sides start out by conceding that the other one's better. At Penn, Andrew Scurria tries to help Princeton out of its apparent self-loathing by offering to "extend to you a friendly hand." Later, in writing about the Tigers' 1-5 record in Ivy League play, he says, "we hate to see you doing this to yourselves."
At Princeton, the triple-byline of Karl Micka-Foos, Ashley Wolf and Trent Magruder write in their first sentence that "you guys are probably gonna beat us tonight."
(And in so doing, they lost the battle over which side has the better writing skills. Which I would have never expected from Princeton.)
"We lost to Dartmouth Saturday night," they write. "Yeah, that Dartmouth."
What the hell kind of a rivalry is this, playing nice with each other?
I mean, yeah, it's the Ivy League, and all these people are probably going to go on and make 10 times what I'll make in my career after only six months on the job.
(As an aside to my boss and everyone else up the food chain, that is in no way a statement on the nature of the pay scale in this building, just so I'm clear. Investment banking is what it is.)
Scurria, who goes on about "the spirit of friendship" in which he's writing, puts forth a total of three lines of anything that could even remotely be considered smack.
We relish life in urban America. You detest life in crappy New Jersey.We are beautiful. You are not.
Amy Gutmann likes us more.
And then he says, "Believe me -- I could go on and on." But he doesn't. Jeez.
Now, as for Princeton, the author-trio does better by devoting a lot of space to the fact that while their basketball team stinks, they actually kick everyone else's butt at all the other sports in the Ivy League. Which is true: the Tigers have won the most Ivy League championships across the board for 20 years in a row.
But they lose just about all the credit they gained from that by invoking the name of Princeton economist (and New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman in order to come up with an economics-based rationale for why it's better to spread resources across sports instead of focusing on hoops.
Only in the Ivy League does trash talk involve economic theory. Come on now. And it's not like the Wharton University of Pennsylvania is lacking for economists, by the way.
The Princeton writers do get one thing really wrong, though. They're way off in this assertion:
Even if all else were equal, how can you expect any self-respecting road basketball team to play well in a venue called "The Palestra"? It sounds like a venereal disease. The kind of malady that leaves you with an ibby jaaber.
Leave aside the fact that Jaaber was Ivy League Player of the Year last year. I would think that such an esteemed academic institution as Princeton would have a pretty good appreciation of ancient Greece, which is where the term Palestra was coined. Then again, the school's Program in Hellenic Studies has only been around since 1979 -- coincidentally, the year Penn went to the Final Four.
Really, this stuff is all pretty lame. Hopefully the basketball will be better tonight (though I'm not exactly convinced that it will be).
And maybe, one of these days, those writers will learn a thing or two about real trash talk.
