In a stunning revelation that is sending shock waves throughout East Campus, Otero freshman Taylor Cooper is facing allegations of showing up to Math 51 office hours last Tuesday with no motive other than to brown-nose the professor and get help completing his problem set.

The first report leaked to the media late last week when Cooper’s roommate claimed to hear him complaining about not having enough letters of recommendation for his summer job application.

“One day he’s stressed because he doesn’t have a letter of rec, and the next day he’s going to office hours? I’m just saying… it seems a little suspicious to me,” stated his roommate.

Once the story broke, accusations began pouring in from multiple sources. According to numerous members of Cooper’s study group, he had trouble completing Problem #8 on the p-set and talked about going to his TA for help.

Professors and TAs across campus have banded together and issued a joint statement on the unfolding events: “While we recognize that isolated incidents like Mr. Cooper’s represent an egregious violation of the spirit of Office Hours, we want to emphasize that the majority of students still come due to their deep intellectual curiosity and desire to build more personal relationships with their instructors.”

Flipside reporters tried to contact professors during their office hours for comment, but received no reply because they were all too busy helping students with problem sets.

After a whirlwind turn of events, the residents of 1035 Campus Drive have been informed by campus administrators that they will not be allowed to return to 1035 for the next academic year. Megan Wertzelbok, Resident Dean, justified the controversial decision, “Residents of 1035 are expected to conduct themselves with a certain maximum level of decorum,” said Wertzelbok as she pointed to pictures of 21-year-old 1035 residents drinking a moderate level of alcohol and having predominantly consensual sex. “Our office believes that the residents of 1035 have violated the trust of the campus community, and we are looking to move in another direction.” Residents of 1035 have already announced their intention to appeal the decision, claiming it was based on a series of “isolated incidents and overblown rumors.”

IHUM used to be a thriving forum where students sparred and matched wits, a place where students could break bread with such intellectual giants as Nietzsche and Marx. But starting a few years ago, everything changed. IHUM theses became vague and supporting evidence faded away. Attendance fell and Facebook usage in lectures rose. Soon, IHUM was a husk of its former self, and Stanford administrators have made the difficult decision to pull the plug.

However, this move ignited a firestorm of protest across campus. IHUM kids past and present have picketed White Plaza with signs, bearing slogans such as “Half-hearted Powerpoint Presentations are Signs of Life!” and “I Need My External Validation!” One IHUM advocate likened the program to Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey, “during whose long absence many young suitors assumed him death and courted his wife, only to be disgraced upon his arrival, in disguise, which is a recurring motif throughout the epic poem…” and went on as one by one everyone stopped paying attention.

But Dr. Hofferwitz, the physician in whose care IHUM has spent recent years, disagrees. “The occasional non-B grade you see coming out of this program is just the random firing of synapses in an already dead brain. They are meaningless, like the discussions we hear during IHUM sections.” Hofferwitz continued. “Although, when prodded, IHUM may produce a metaphor or a quote from Machiavelli’s The Prince, these are just knee-jerk reactions, no more. The best we can do now is to end its suffering and give it the rest it deserves.”

On Thursday morning, February 2nd, Sophomore Henry Mathis allegedly pulled out his iPhone and took what is certainly—if it is, in fact, real—one of the most powerful photographs of the decade. Mathis’ picture featured the Main Quad lit by some pleasant morning sunshine, a picture he uploaded to Facebook with the caption “can’t believe it’s February.” The picture immediately went viral, stunning thousands and stirring controversy worldwide. “It’s faked. I can tell,” reported a Cornell student on his tumblr account, “I know what February weather is like, and this simply isn’t possible.”

Art critic Johannes Sveru, a curator and art historian at the San Francisco Institute of Art, overheard his colleagues converse about the photo and rushed to his office to investigate the phenomenon himself. “I was totally blown away at first,” Sveru told the Flipside in an exclusive interview, “but after subjecting the photograph to the harshest of scrutiny, using a combination of carbon-14 dating and Photoshop zoom techniques, I just can’t verify that this picture was taken in February.”

Though the controversy and general incredulity is still very palpable, Mathis is sticking by the authenticity of his photograph. Whether or not it actually is February in the picture is up to the viewer to decide, but all agree that the world has never seen anything like this before.

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.

Cedro freshman Ralph Thomson, 19, was reportedly seen in lecture making an embarrassingly overt attempt to hide his erection in Making of the Modern World lecture the other day. Witnesses described the Ralph’s last ditch effort to hide the boner as sad, pathetic, and downright obvious.

“Really he’s putting his textbook on his lap? How is he even hard? The professor is talking about the slave trade in colonial Latin America,” said Jennifer Baxley, another freshman from Wilbur.

Numerous attempts by his friends to converse were rebuffed due to his humiliation and nervous attempts to conceal the bulging pocket rocket.

“Sweatpants…beginner’s mistake,” commented his roommate as he demonstrated his foolproof waistband tuck technique, “Works every time.”

As of press time a mortified Ralph was seen awkwardly sitting in the lecture hall minutes after class had let out to avoid anyone seeing the stiffening situation and subsequently scampering out of Dinkelspiel holding his laptop in front of his waist.

Alvin Peterson, a freshman who is enrolled in Econ 1A, has recently announced that he has discovered the solution to all of the country’s economic problems.

Having covered the first three chapters of the introductory textbook, which Alvin apparently obtained through a “sweet deal on Amazon,” the FroSoCo resident has gained a sufficient understanding of the subtleties of the nation’s political economy to instruct the Federal Reserve Board, the President’s advisors, and the executive cabinet on fiscal and monetary policy.

“We should cut the interest rates because then people spend more and that’s good”, said Alvin, while drawing a shaky supply and demand graph with a ballpoint pen in his wide-ruled notebook, “I mean, I did get a 9/10 on my first problem set. I think I know what I’m talking about here.”

By A SLAC Employee

This is hard. I don’t want to make things awkward between us, but there’s something on my mind I think we need to discuss. Every day we come to work—we try to solve the mysteries of the universe, try to develop a better understanding of the atoms that surround our existence. But somewhere along the way, I think something got lost in translation.

I think it’s time. We need to talk about the giant particle accelerator in the room.

I know what you’re thinking. “What are you talking about? We work at SLAC—we talk about the particle accelerator all day, every day.” But I’m not talking about that giant particle accelerator. No. I’m talking about the other one. The particle accelerator that keeps you up at night, the one that haunts your dreams and invades your thoughts. I’m talking about the giant particle accelerator in your heart. Sometimes it’s hard to see—sometimes we look at it and think, “Hey, that’s a real particle accelerator.” But at the end of the day, we’re deceiving ourselves. We know it’s not real.

The only particle accelerator is the one in our minds, and the longer we try to delude ourselves, the longer it will take us to realize that those “particles” that seem to be bouncing about are nothing more than figments of our imagination, colliding with each other in some tragic Shakespearian drama.

But that all stops today. I’m not going to let this particle accelerator control me, and neither should you. At stake are not only our lives, but the lives of our husbands and wives, our sons and our daughters. What most people don’t realize is that everyone has a giant particle accelerator in their lives. Some people call their giant particle accelerator “mother-in-law,” others call it “pepper spray,”—I call mine “a giant particle accelerator,” but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what we call it. What matters is that everyone has two giant metal tubes in their mind, working day in and day out to smash tiny things together, and until we have the courage to talk about it, nothing will ever get done.

Friends and acquaintances of sophomore Will Bradley report that his latest idea for a start-up consists of a product that is functionally indistinguishable from Google Docs. The “revolutionary” product, which Bradley is calling myDox, would allow users to save their documents in the cloud, work collaboratively in real time and “make spreadsheets and stuff.” His plan for myDox also includes a chat sidebar, “once they get most of the initial kinks worked out.”

Bradley rolled out the idea for myDox while leaving chemistry lecture last Thursday, but was disappointed by the lukewarm response it received from his peers. “It’s a good idea. That’s why Google made it, like, 10 years ago,” noted one friend. “He seems to think he’s going to get VC money. He really doesn’t understand how all this works,” added another.

After significant ridicule, Bradley eventually added that myDox is somewhat similar to Google Docs, but added, “myDox is going to be the MySpace to Google Docs’ Xanga. It’s going to be a game changer.”

Stanford, CA — In an embarrassing incident Monday, staff members at the Arillaga family dining hall accidentally displayed a poster depicting famous actor Morgan Freeman, mistakenly claiming he was Martin Luther King Jr.

Trying to cover for their most recent mistake, Arillaga issued a statement saying that the dining hall “made a grave mistake” and was “deeply sorry for offending any members of Stanford’s African-American community.” Arillaga also plans to send a formal apology letter to Morgan Freeman, as they do not want to incur His wrath.

Surprisingly, however, many members of the Stanford Community did not notice the mistake until it was explicitly pointed out. Hu Huang ’13 explained: “Morgan Freeman, Martin Luther King, they all look the same to me.”

Another student, Mark Christenson ’14 actually appreciated the mix-up. “Martin Luther King is important and all, but Morgan Freeman is really under appreciated. It was nice to have the opportunity to reflect on everything Morgan Freeman has contributed to society.”