In a recent Flipside editorial meeting, the publication’s staff voted unanimously to resist changes to the university’s IHUM program, claiming it would eliminate the most convenient source of jokes in upcoming years.\

“To be honest, its tough to come up with consistently biting humor to satirize the political, economic and cultural realities of our day, so its nice to always have an IHUM joke to fall back on,” explained a Flipside writer who preferred to remain anonymous due to his connection with a particularly risqué FMOTQ article this fall.

“It also gives us an instant way to connect with freshmen when they arrive on campus,” the writer continued, “For them, the Flipside starts as a sheet of paper that gets thrown in their soup bowls every Monday. Once you mix in a few IHUM jokes, though, they begin to see it as an empathetic document that really speaks to their hopes and their anxieties.”

With the elimination of the IHUM joke safety net, Flipside writers have been working overtime to develop PWR and IntroSem jokes. It’s not like these writers have anything better to be doing; after all, they can clearly just bullshit a B+ quality paper for their IHUM classes later tonight.

After a record 37,000 applications were submitted to Stanford University this year, hipsters across the country have started indicating that they no longer find the school attractive. Almost an hour after the statistics were released, numerous threads on collegeprowler.com, collegeconfidential.com and similar websites bemoaned the loss of the University’s alt-factor.

“I was into Stanford when I was like, twelve,” read one comment posted by NeutralMilkIvy on the forum. “But ever since it’s started making top ten lists, I just can’t take it seriously.”

Many posts also cited the University’s number one spot on the Times Higher Education’s rankings of ‘Arts & Humanities Schools’ as another turn off for college-bound hipsters: “I can’t believe they sold out like that.”

Forums were also buzzing with rumors surrounding Pitchfork’s annual college rankings, which are due to be released in two weeks. “Although it’s always a little tough to tell,” said one industry analyst, “I would suspect that Stanford isn’t going to get higher than a 4.7 tops.” He also added that while it’s “somewhat alt” for such a prestigious school to be located on the west coast, he didn’t think that fact would help the university’s chances at ranking higher than such “hipster stalwarts as, say, Hunter College.”

A concerned administrator, responding quickly to the negative reaction, indicated that the university might consider altering its image to recoup. “One possibility,” he stated, “is that we subsidize skinny-jean purchases for all professors, or just replace the Panda Express with an American Apparel store.” (Wilcox)

Flomo Dining—Jeffrey Golin, a sophomore who lives in Cardenal this year, has been officially declared “too busy to breathe” by the Vaden Health Center, who conducted the study. The study, which was recently completed, found that between his load of nine classes, two sports teams, one intramural team, two fraternities, and five charity groups, he does not have enough time in the day to take in the minimum necessary amount of oxygen.

“See I tried,” said Golin, who brushed his teeth while he combed his hair while he read Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. “The issue was that I was already taking two units of breathing for a grade, and I had already asked for permission twice to extend my unit cap beyond twenty units. So there just wasn’t possibly time for more units of breathing.”

Doctors suggested that Golin drop one of his fraternities to try and achieve a “more reasonable load,” but Golin promptly declared that was impossible because he was tied in the bonds of brotherhood that you can only share with one building with Greek letters and lots of beer.

When they suggested he drop one of his charity groups, since it was essentially the same as another one of his charity groups, he started yelling in Tibetan at a third year level.

The Flipside asked Golin if this schedule was possibly maintainable for the long term, and between swimming strokes he gasped, “No.”

Stanford sophomore Marcus Stevenson took considerably too many peppermint-flavored mints after a recent meal at an upscale Italian restaurant on University Avenue, which authorities have refused to identify.

Traumatized witnesses reported seeing the twenty-year-old suspect seize anywhere between a “veritable shitload” and a “kilometric fuckton” of the red and white striped candies from the courtesy mint bowl sitting near the door. There have been no reports as to whether the porcelain bowl sustained any structural damage after such a significant percentage of its contents were suddenly removed.

“The hostess was standing right there getting ready to seat the next party,” said trip-organizer Ryan Dunfield in a statement intended to relieve some of the group’s collective guilt, “I guess we tipped generously and what not, but I don’t know if I’ll feel comfortable going back to that restaurant anytime soon.”

Stevenson did made a token effort to offer a portion of his mints to the other group members, especially those who had not been able to grab any due to the large crater he had excavated in the middle of the bowl, but the sweet peppermint flavor did nothing to assuage the nauseous feeling of guilt that most of his friends were experiencing.

“I totally wanted one of those mints cause the cannoli kinda left a weird taste in my mouth,” admitted Dunfield, “But after seeing how Marcus ravaged that bowl like a third-world colony, I just couldn’t stomach it anymore.”

When asked what would have happened if the restaurant had offered the green and black mints in addition to the standard red-and-white variety, Dunfield simply dropped his gaze and muttered, “God help us all.”

If you follow technology news, it will come as no surprise to you that the popular Silicon Valley social network Facebook announced that that they have reached 7.5 billion users, and surpassed their main competitor: Earth.

“People said we couldn’t do it,” said a hoodie-sporting Mark Zuckerberg, as he threw hundred dollar bills in the air. “But through the dedication of our engineers, and the narcissism of all of our users, we were able to achieve the impossible once again.”

The blogosphere has erupted with commentary on the subject. Chief Blogomaniac at FacebookStalkerWorld.com Corey “The Real Deal” Hector writes: “It’s no wonder people switched from Earth to Facebook. Earth has gotten stale. What has it done to its UI recently? Facebook just launches timeline, and boom!–everyone is there.”

As the Flipside tech columnist, I’ve been following social networks in depth for the last two months, and I have to agree. On Earth, you have mountains, and rivers, and skyscrapers. But on Facebook, you have pictures of mountains, pictures of rivers, and pictures of skyscrapers. Mountains go away when you leave the mountain. Facebook Photos are forever.

If your still an ancient Luddite and Earth-user, I say it’s time to hop off the bandwagon and hop on Facebook’s virtual-bandwagon-game, since everyone in the world is there, and then some.

In a study released last week by the Stanford Psychology department, it was found that those who identify as compulsive liars were found to have way more sex than the average individual.

“This is actually a shocking finding,” said Howard Fentburn, professor of behavioral psychology and lead of the study. “We hypothesized that liars would have less sex by a statistically significant amount, mainly because nobody likes a liar.”

However, the results proved the opposite. We got in contact with Joey Sagat, the undergraduate responsible for all the bitchwork, to find out more about the study. “I conducted over 400 interviews across campus with both liars and non-liars. The liars had way more sex, and I mean by a lot. And we found that across all dimensions, in number of partners, types of sexual activity, and how crazy the stories were, the liars just dominated.”

In order to find out whether the subjects were liars, the interviewers simply asked. No one was critical of this procedure.

It was found that the average non-liar had had two sexual partners in their lifetime, and the average liar had had sixty-four.

Want to know how this new year is going to go before it happens? Here at the Flipside we’ve taken some effort to peer into your future for you:

Aries: Today is no different than any other day. Despite your best efforts to improve your life for this new year, you will fail miserably. Things next year will be the same as this year, and most likely worse considering how badly the stars are aligned against you.

Taurus: You will litter today. It will haunt you, but there is nothing you can do to avoid it. Litter is your destiny, your fate.

Gemini: Your refusal to learn the definition of cosmic irony will come back to bite you this week when you attend a dinner party on a cruise ship named “Blissful Ignorance.”

Cancer: This week, you will inherit the Earth. Live large, go all out, eat a burrito, fly a kite–the sky’s the limit and the world is in the palm of your hand. You are the cat’s meow. People listen to you–make them regret it.

Leo: Steer clear of cottage cheese this week. Shit’s gross.

Virgo: Take the red pill. It’s ecstasy, and it’s fantastic.

Libra: One of the horoscopes you read today will come true. Not this one, though.

Scorpio: You will make a new friend this week. You will mistakenly give your phone number to this friend, who will then bother you for hours on end. This won’t slow down at all until police get involved.

Sagittarius: The stars suggest that you are like their good friend, Pluto; you used to be cool but now you aren’t.  Today, you should probably sign up for World of Warcraft, move into your parents’ basement, and become the bitter recluse that the stars say you should be.

Capricorn: Let it all hang out this week. And by “it” the stars don’t mean your genitals, pervert.

Aquarius: Tonight, you’re a shining star.  Your Pea Coat is sleek and your hair is freshly cut.  You’ll be the life of the party, the one everybody wants to be around, and the one who gets the chicks at the end of the night.  It is only tomorrow when you’ll realize that the girl you took home was your cousin, who was driving your drunk ass back to your parents’ house, and that she refused your advances because incest is gross and so is the vomit you sprayed all over her new dress.  Tomorrow, your memory will fail you, and for this you should be thankful.

Pisces: This year you will celebrate a birthday, most likely between the dates of February 19 and March 20. You will know it’s your birthday because dozens of people you don’t really give a fuck about will write something dumb like “happy birthday” on your Facebook wall, while your real friends (who are your friends because they have lives outside of Facebook) will not know it’s your birthday. Then your real friends will feel awkward when after talking to you for an hour on your birthday, someone you don’t know wishes you a happy birthday, while on a 10 minute break from Facebook.

STANFORD, CA – The Salvation Army has partnered up with the Haas Center for Public Service in the first annual Stanford Turkey Drop. In addition to celebrating the fact that a bunch of white people didn’t starve to death, Thanksgiving marks the deadline at which long-distance relationships maintained during the first quarter of college must end. Severing ties with significant others who live on the other side of the country unfortunately results in a massive number of girlfriends who are no longer taken.

Student activist Brenda Shaffer, upon realizing the wastefulness of the tradition, decided to take action. “It just seems wrong to have all of these girls whose boyfriends can no longer have them, you know? I thought, why not give them to people who really need them? Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday for giving back, and so we’re having a girlfriend drive to collect whomever people don’t want, and then we donate them to needy, lonely Computer Science majors.”

Marc Welkins, a grad student specializing in machine learning, devised an algorithm for sorting the candidates based on such characteristics as hair color, height, knowledge of binary, and preference to Star Wars versus Star Trek. Depending on where they fall in all of the categories, the girls will be stationed at various tables where their future mates can decide what they care about most in a woman.

“Many of these guys have never actually spent time with anyone of the opposite sex,” explained Welkins. “My algorithm makes it so their utter inexperience becomes a non-issue. The preference cases are clearly laid out for them; all they have to do is see which one evaluates to ‘true.’”

Quentin Chase, a senior and excited attendee, anticipates that the system will greatly simplify the complexities of male-female interpersonal interaction. “I don’t understand why I can’t just pass dating criteria as parameters,” he lamented. “I’ve never even held hands with anyone. The closest I’ve come to getting any was when a girl put her arm around me for a group picture freshman year. Now I can finally see what human breasts look like in 3-D, and not as a pixel array.”

This year’s handout will take place next Monday in the lobby of Gates, where police are already preparing for the hordes of pale, skinny programmers expected to attend.

Last week in a meeting with a select group of high-ranking religious officials, God took the opportunity to assure his followers that the popular reality show “Jersey Shore” is, in fact, part of his divine plan for humanity. While it has long been accepted that tragedies like natural disasters, drought, famine, poverty, cancer, malaria, AIDS, racism, sexism, homophobia, murder, rape and Karl Rove are all important parts of God’s plan for mankind, religious scholars have struggled to explain the absurdities that pervade everyday life. Worried about how mankind might interpret certain “outliers” that don’t fit into a good/evil binary, God decided to clear the air on parts of his plan that seem to defy all logical, moral and spiritual explanation.

Clergy the world over are thrilled and relieved by the recent announcement. “Last Sunday, one of the younger congregation members asked me if God loved ‘The Situation,’ and I didn’t know what to say. I mean, the guy is caricature—he’s barely human, let alone a Christian,” reported Rev. Wilbur Bushman, an Evangelical minister. He added, “Sometimes God’s intentions are clear, like with Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Japan, but other times the message is more opaque. It’s a relief to know that we don’t have to chalk it up to ‘mysterious ways’ anymore.”

Additionally, it was reported that God, speaking through the reanimated corpse of Jerry Falwell, took the opportunity to clarify that chicken nuggets, the Snuggie, Carrot Top and edible underwear are parts of His plan for humanity, assuring followers that “their purposes will be revealed to those who truly believe.” God closed the meeting by clarifying that He did, in fact, tell Michelle Bachmann to run for president.

It was something of a disappointment when, last Thursday, the world failed to take notice of freshman Anita Woolworth’s brief but earth-shaking existential crisis. Woolworth reports that she was sitting in IHUM lecture, struggling to stay awake, when suddenly she found herself questioning everything she thought she knew. “The professor was talking about Descartes and the mind/body problem and whether we can be sure there’s an external world and I thought…who am I?”

Although Woolworth was later informed by her TA that she has completely misunderstood the point of the lecture, she cited this moment as “a brush with transcendence.” “I just started thinking, you know, what am I doing here? Do I have free will? Should I call that guy I hooked up with last weekend? I didn’t know what I believed in anymore.”

Sources present in the lecture report observing no indication of the existential turmoil Woolworth was experiencing. Said one student sitting a few seats away, “I saw this girl get all wide-eyed and then she started looking around frantically. I just assumed she really had to pee.”

Although Woolworth reports that she has since regained her intellectual bearings, she’ll never be able to look at the world in the same way. Woolworth was last seen wearing a beret and turning in paperwork to declare her major as film studies.