The hearings start next Monday and with endorsements from the ABA, the Fraternal Order of Police, and former FBI director Louis Freeh, Sotomayor is likely to be confirmed as the first Hispanic Justice and the 1,000,000th Ivy League graduate on the Court. This is despite drawing fire for supposedly claiming a “wise Latina” would make better decisions than a white man. Analysis of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s sympathy for Princeton grads after the jump.

The Senate Judiciary Committee conducting the hearings will probably be a cakewalk for Sotomayor. With crazy Joe Biden being Vice President he can no longer hate on Princeton like he did during the Alito hearings:

‘I didn’t even like Princeton,’ Biden told Alito Tuesday. ‘I mean, I really didn’t like Princeton. I was an Irish Catholic kid who thought it had not changed like you concluded it had.’

Even better than having crazy Joe Biden off the Senate Judiciary Committee is having crazy Al Franken on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Franken probably has fond feelings for Princeton Trustee Sotomayor because his son Joe got to attend the university despite the Senator’s alleged hijinks. Sure, Sotomayor might face some tough questioning from Republicans, but it doesn’t really matter. The Democrats have a super-majority thanks to Franken and a few defections. They could get anybody confirmed at this point if they wanted. If only Jackie Chiles were real…

Blog author Amanda Hess does a good job ripping the unnamed Industrialization-era Times writer so we won’t run through the entire article. Here’s our favorite part:

The traditional beauty of the Cuban women has not been exaggerated by travelers. In the party now in Cambridge are numerous types of pure beauty; indeed most of them are above the average in looks. Among them is at least one girl with red hair, although the prevailing complexion is brunette.

It’s comforting to know that even back in 1900, the most important news on campus was, “Did you see the new hot chicks?” The article also stated that the showering of attention upon the young women was due in part to “their ignorance of our language”. That’s the same reason Valley Girls were so popular.

Sure this article is sexist and it’s slightly embarrassing for Harvard. But is it any more sexist or embarrassing than Larry Summers? You need to put these things in perspective.

     1. She’s not actually going to Brown, right?

     2. Harvard and/or Yale must have rejected her, correct?

     3. Holy fuck, why is she going to Brown?

Three months later, these questions can be finally put to rest. With Half-Blood Prince coming out this month, the Harry Potter kids are on the interview circuit. Daniel Radcliffe took a break from being nude to say this to The Guardian about his co-star:

[Emma Watson's] very clever. Do you know her GCSE results?” His eyes boggle: “I was thrilled with mine – seven Bs, two As and an A*. I think Emma got three As and seven A*s – she’s incredibly academic, it’s frightening. Me and Rupert [Grint] to all intents and purposes dropped out of school. And she’s going to Brown.”

Not much reading between the lines needed there. Although Watson may have used the Imperius Curse on Radcliffe to keep him from revealing that she’s going to Tufts.

Whether Emma Watson is truly “incredibly academic” or just really devoted to method acting in playing Hermione Granger, she aced her A-levels. That plus $4.5 billion worldwide gross is more than enough for her to get in at Cambridge, so it’s unlikely that Harvard and Yale would have rejected her (assuming she even applied to them).

As for the third question, Watson was a guest on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross this weekend. The video of the interview is below and the discussion of her academic plans starts at 3:35.

She wants to study in America because “in the States, you can study this really broad curriculum” and “it’s very open, they encourage you to do different stuff.” That certainly sounds like a person who wants to go to Brown (or at least someone who doesn’t want to go to Columbia). And here we were thinking that she loved the Providence Mall. I guess that was just a bonus.

Dartmouth grad and former Wall Streeter Maia Josebachvili started Urban Escapes NYC, a company that organizes outdoor expeditions–backpacking, rock climbing, fruit picking, and the like–for yuppies bored with New York. Excursions on offer for the gainfully employed range from one-day hikes for $55 to a week in the Yucatan Peninsula for $600. Of course if you opt for the latter, you may not be gainfully employed for much longer once those photos from that nightclub in Playa del Carmen are posted on Flickr.

The high costs of these trips are actually fair deals when you consider transportation, guides, and food. And when compared to other enterprises from Ivy Leaguers, Urban Escapes is a worthwhile venture. However, there is still this air of pretentiousness about Josebachvili’s company. Urban professionals who have already lost interest in New York paying a significant amount of money (whitewater rafting costs about the same as a senior week wine tour) to leave the city and rough it for a day or two. The website also says that on these trips you’ll “meet fantastic and interesting new people in a totally different setting.” Because it’s so hard to meet new people on your own when you’re in a city of 8 million people. You can’t really Facebook friend someone until you share a kayak with them.

Business may start booming for Urban Escapes NYC next week though. CNN.com ran an article/advertisement on Tuesday about the company and sent author Nkechi Nneji on one of the excursions. Although it’s hard to take Smith (or Smif) alum Nneji’s piece seriously when you see the excruciating detail she includes about her experience.

After perusing the site, I rather nervously picked a $59 six-mile hike…I hadn’t been hiking in years and still am sadly out of shape. My imagination ran wild with images of young, sporty folks racing up high peaks as I huffed and puffed behind. Terrifying.

After a rainy start to the morning, our upbeat guides for the day, director Bram Levy and guide Roget Lerner, drove a group of 12 north of the city to Harriman State Park. They encouraged us to get to know each other and joked that we would be quizzed on it later.

[...]

After an hourlong drive, we arrived at our hiking destination. Levy and Lerner checked our sneakers, water supply and told us a bit about how the day was going to unfold. And then we began the hike.

Wait, you left out important things! How did you get to the park? Did you take the Palisades Parkway or I-87? What flavor of granola bars did you bring? Did the guides play that “two truths and a lie” game with everyone? What was the barometric pressure? I need to know these things!

Urban Escapes just doesn’t make sense to me. Leave it to an Ivy Leaguer to create a company designed for Manhattanites with professional jobs who want to get out and experience the living in nature for a weekend. It just seems so much easier and cheaper to become a hobo.

The New York Times reported last week that Dr. Gary Kao of the Philadelphia V.A. Medical Center is the worst doctor since Doug from Scrubs. Dr. Kao–who has a Ph.D. from Penn–had been treating veterans with prostate cancer by using a common procedure in which radioactive seeds are implanted into the prostate to attack tumors. The obstacle for Dr. Kao is that you can’t find the prostate on Google Maps.

Most of the seeds, 40 in all, landed in the patient’s healthy bladder, not the prostate.

Yeah, that’s not good. So that patient had to return for a second implant. This time, Dr. Kao injected his rectum, missing the prostate again. According to the Times, Dr. Kao’s team at the V.A. Hospital had screwed up 92 of 116 cancer treatments over six years. That rate of failure is so incredibly high that Dr. Kao must have been trying to give veterans radioactive butt on purpose. One internal medicine doctor–upon seeing the 92 of 116 statistic–said, “He could have done better just by guessing.”

These were all serious medical errors, but Dr. Kao managed to get away with them for years. Part of the reason he was able to stay out of trouble for so long was by utilizing an old trick used in research. Just like a graduate student determining the objective of his research after performing the experiment, Dr. Kao pulled a similar tactic. After hitting the bladder in the above case, he simply rewrote his surgical plan to make his error the purpose of the surgery! Also, Dr. Kao was able to keep on injecting and missing thanks to no oversight and no peer review at the V.A. Hospital. Of course, why would he need any oversight? Dr. Kao and his team are from the University of Pennsylvania, a trusted institution. As the V.A. Medical Center’s website says:

The PVAMC is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Dental Medicine and provide [sic] training for medical interns, residents and fellows.

You see? It doesn’t matter that Dr. Kao had limited experience with the procedure he had been botching for six years. He’s there to learn. Only the best for our veterans.

Dr. Kao may finally have been exposed after his 92nd failed experiment with radioactive anal beads, but don’t feel too bad for him. As the Times says, he’s got a lot of irons in the fire. 

He is also on a team from Penn that won a contract this year from a NASA-financed consortium to study radiation in space.

See, he’s also giving snarky bloggers easy set-ups for Uranus jokes.

Congratulations Louis Leblanc. By being a French-Canadian hockey phenom and a Harvard student, you are officially the most loathsome hockey player ever.

Francis McLellan, a Brown Ph.D. and Princeton’s former head Russian language instructor, evidently had a different experience as a senior lecturer than the professors did. Lecturers are to Princeton what migrant laborers are to, well, Princeton. And it seems as if four years of teaching elementary language made giving up women, possessions, and meat an attractive option for McLellan. In January he was tonsured Iosaf, a hieromonk in the Russian Orthodox Church. Now he’s archimandrite of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, a city just slightly less dangerous than Cambridge. Sexy monk results after the jump.

Admittedly not much has changed: professor beard easily became a monk beard, one funny hat got traded for another funnier hat, and his ugly brown robes were replaced by more staid black. On the plus side Iosaf now has a fancy cross and the equivalent of tenure because I’m not really sure how you fire a monk–aside from actually setting fire to him.

More impressive about all of this is McLellan is in position to be the Ivy League’s first ever Russian Orthodox bishop after only six months in the priesthood. According to multiple sources (and Wikipedia!) Russian Orthodox bishops are frequently selected from the archimandrite ranks, especially the heads of the Jerusalem mission. This should be celebrated by other grad students, but they’ll likely use this as more motivation to get out while they still can–epecially the engineering students as they’re already essentially celibate.

Dear Current or Former Member of the Cornell Community: 

Last week, we learned that a Cornell-owned computer that was stolen earlier this month contained your name and Social Security Number. Please accept our most sincere apologies for this unfortunate event. 

In order to inform you of this situation as quickly as possible, we are sending you this email in advance of a formal notification via U.S. mail. 

Hooray! We’re all fucked!

The entire e-mail after the jump.

Dear Current or Former Member of the Cornell Community: 

Last week, we learned that a Cornell-owned computer that was stolen earlier this month contained your name and Social Security Number. Please accept our most sincere apologies for this unfortunate event. 

In order to inform you of this situation as quickly as possible, we are sending you this email in advance of a formal notification via U.S. mail. 

The official letter will detail the services that Cornell is offering you, at our expense, in response to this incident. There will also be a toll-free number you can call for additional information and assistance. 

In the meanwhile, we urge you to visit a web site we have created with frequently asked questions (an FAQ) about this situation and some steps you can take yourself: 

http://faq-june2009.cuinfo.cornell.edu 

We will be updating this web page as more information becomes available. It is, however, the official notification letter that will contain the details about activating the services Cornell is making available and whom you can contact with any questions or concerns. 

This incident underscores the need for ever more vigilant security processes. Cornell University is committed to maintaining the privacy of individuals’ personal information and takes many precautions to ensure its security. In response to incidents of theft like this one, and the increasing number of Internet-enabled computer attacks, the University is continually improving its systems and practices. 

Once again, please accept our apologies for this incident. We deeply regret any inconvenience it may cause. 

Thank you. 

Polley A. McClure 
Vice President for Information Technologies 
Cornell University 

Steven J. Schuster 
Director, IT Security Office 
Cornell Information Technologies

Although Cornell screwed up tremendously by losing a computer with the personal information of 45,000 people, at least they let us know about it as quickly as possible. That’s why they sent this e-mail just one week after they learned about the private information on the computer that had been stolen three weeks ago. I mean whoever stole the computer could have opened no more than three credit cards in my name by now. Four tops.

This is enough to upset anyone who entrusted Cornell with protecting their identity. Fueling the rage is the university’s official explanation as to how the personal data–normally only stored on computers located in physically safe place–ended up on a vulnerable computer:

 A member of the Cornell technical staff, who is responsible for supporting our central administrative systems, was using these files to correct transmission errors found in the processing of the files. The data was being used for troubleshooting.

I may not know what an organization does with my Social Security number after I give it to them, but I’m pretty sure using it as an alternative to “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” isn’t supposed to happen.

But what’s done is done. Cornell allowed SSNs to be used as example data and now some hick in Danby has four hundred new credit cards with which to soup up his tractor puller. Obviously Cornell students are upset about this. However, I believe that we can reach an understanding with the university.

You see Cornell, I just gave you over $150,000 in order to attend your prestigious institution, live in the middle of nowhere, suffer through bitter cold winters, and earn a degree in a major that I ended up disliking by Junior year. In return, you gave me the worst job market in history, booked the Pussycat Dolls for Slope Day, and with this catastrophe, potentially ruined my credit for the rest of my life. Seeing as how it will be difficult for me and many of my fellow recent graduates to make money with no job and no credit from here on out, what do you say we forget about those student loans? It’s only fair. And don’t call me for donations either.