TIDBITS

CURRIER CLAMOR

Currier diners let out a primal scream a few weeks early during last Sunday's dinner. The fun began when one table began clapping, apparently in response to a humorous comment. Immediately, other tables followed suit, and soon nearly everyone in the dining hall was clapping. The noisemaking increased, however, as students began yelling, screaming and making up table cheers. One table engaged in a "Penis War," in which participants progressively escalated their volume levels while shouting the word "penis." Several minutes into the revelry, one table's diners stood up and began to do the wave. Dining hall workers, meanwhile, stood to the side, looking bemused and ensuring that no food was launched. According to one observer, the carnival atmosphere lasted at least five minutes.

AND SNOW IT GOES...

During the blizzard a few weeks ago, I was walking down Mt. Auburn St. with a friend when, all of a sudden, an enormous amount of snow fell from a building above me and knocked me down. Uninjured, I emerged from underneath a blanket of snow only to discover that pedestrians for blocks around were calling out things like "are you OK?" and "You should sue!" If you want to make friends quickly, try getting hit by several pounds of precipitation. -Pamela S. Wasserstein '00

NO CAUSE FOR ALARM

What caused the Currier House fire alarm to go off last Friday night? Lorena E. Duarte '98 said that originally she thought it was her burnt popcorn that had caused the evacuation. Duarte had been making popcorn in the House microwave and accidentally burned it. When she arrived on her floor via the elevator, the alarm sounded. "I really smelled smoke and I thought I had done it," Duarte recounted.

DO NOT DISTURB

While lecturing in Literature and Arts C-37: "The Bible and It's Interpreters," Professor of Comparitive Literature James L. Kugel was interrupted by multiple fire alarms, which had the unpleasant side effect of cutting off the P.A. system in the theater. Luckily an old portable amp was brought out and the lecture continued. Later Kugel explained why events like this don't faze him anymore.

"Before I taught at Harvard, I taught for a couple of years at Yale. My very first class was a lecture at 9 a.m. I was about halfway through when this enormous garbage truck pulled up next to the windows at the back of the lecture hall and began crunching, with great gusto, about five minutes' worth of garbage. I was a little rattled, but more or less shouted my way through until it left. It was not long before I discovered that the garbage collectors of New Haven made this particular stop regularly every Monday morning at the same time. By the end of that semester, noise or other little disturbances really didn't faze me--well, within reason--and so it is to this day."

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