A bit of SigEp Trivia...

Woody Herman was a popular band leader in the "Big Band Era". He was also a Sig Ep and wrote this piece, which he titled  - what else? - "Sig Ep"

Bloomsday coming up - SigEp reference?

We received this 'tidbit' today in the morning mail. Thanks to Will Terrell by way of Wade Hutchens for the info.

For those of you not lucky enough to know about TN Alpha, they have called their "party area" (never a bar!) by the name "Ye Olde Shebeen" since since at least the 1950s. The tradition endures but many don't know the origin of the name.

On June 16, James Joyce aficionados the world over celebrate Bloomsday.

The day is named after advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, protagonist of Joyce's novel Ulysses. The entirety of this book recounts an ordinary day, June 16, 1904, as various characters go about their ways in Dublin, Ireland.

If those 700+ pages are too much, here's an illustrated and irreverent summary of the book:

To mark Bloomsday this week we'll examine five words borrowed from the Irish language.

shebeen (shuh-BEEN) noun:
   An unlicensed drinking establishment.
   [From Irish sibin, diminutive of seibe (mug/mugful). The word is popular in the south of Africa and in Scotland and Ireland.]

Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=shebeen

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

"The controversial drinking den has been raided four times since it opened two months ago. But shebeen operator Francis Kelly, 33, says it's a 'private club' for his pals -- and insists he doesn't sell any booze."
Owen Conlon; Shebeen and Gone; The Sun (UK); May 9, 2008.

Coed dorms rooms about compatibility, not hanky-panky

My first thought when I read the article was "How will a trend like this affect/threaten Greek housing"? My second thought, as a been there and done that Baby Boomer was "Gosh, that kinda takes the fun out of panty raids."

At least two dozen schools, including Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, Clark University and the California Institute of Technology, allow some or all students to share a room with anyone they choose — including someone of the opposite sex. This spring, as students sign up for next year’s room, more schools are following suit, including Stanford University.

As shocking as it sounds to some parents, some students and schools say it’s not about sex.

At least, that's what they tell Mom and Dad.

Parents aren’t necessarily thrilled with boy-girl housing.

Debbie Feldman’s 20-year-old daughter, Samantha, is a sophomore at Oberlin in Ohio and plans to room with her platonic friend Grey Caspro, a straight guy, next year. Feldman said she was shocked when her daughter told her.

"When you have a male and female sharing such close quarters, I think it’s somewhat delusional to think there won’t be sexual tension," the 52-year-old Feldman said. "Maybe this generation feels more comfortable walking around in their underwear. I’m not sure that’s a good thing."

Yeah, those XXL "Scooby-Doo Underoos" really don't make a positive statement about your maturity. Ought to be Batman or Spidey, at least.

Coed dorms rooms about compatibility, not hanky-panky - BostonHerald.com

What happens when the iPhone's stopwatch runs for 1,000 hours

Who says SigEps only think about parties? Here is the answer to the burning question "What happens when your iPhone stopwatch hits 1000 hours?".

If you go to the link be sure to scroll down and read the comments. They are, well, "less than charitable." So much so that we are hard pressed to add anything new.

If you know the chapter please leave a comment so this guy gets all the credit he deserves.

Clips: What happens when the iPhone's stopwatch runs for 1,000 hours

How do people find S&P?

Good question. We have actively talked up the blog at any Sig Ep opportunity "where 2 or 3 are gathered together" over the last 3 years, and we have garnered a nice steady readership. We are considering how best to make sure that any SigEp who is interested can find us and so we did some data mining to see how things are today.

We were looking over the stats (instead of working) a few minutes ago. It is intriguing to see where people come from to get here.

Looking back over the last 100 visits (that is all you get to see with a free Sitemeter.com account), most of the hits come from "unknown" - which generally means someone typed or pasted the url into the address line of their browser, or maybe from a bookmark. That is not really a surprise, since everyone has S&P as their start page! Another no-brainer is the 25 referrals from
google searches. We get a few from Yahoo!, Ask.com, and so on also.

The list gets a bit more diverse after that.:

• Facebook's Sigma Phi Epsilon group (4 hits). There are other SigEp groups, but this one seems to be the largest and the one we get referrals from most often.
• Blog Catalog - a listing service for lots of blogs (3 hits). You can do a tag search there for topics - like, oh, SigEp for instance.
• I just found "Prepular." No comment on the content, except to say it seems to be written by a girl who has a 'thing' for fraternity guys.
• The Chapter at the University of Rhode Island.
• A blog about colleges.
• And a site run by one of the "Friends of S&P."

Most of these sites have a link to S&P somewhere on them. We love the exposure even if we didn't know about it before.

Leave a comment and let us know how you got here. If it is a really cool site we might just link back.

Top 10 list on David Letterman

We have noted this before, but it has been a while. Besides there might be some folks that actually enjoy watching Dave and find these tidbits interesting.

A Top Ten list from Letterman's own life...

[...]
7
Letterman first pledged Sigma Phi Epsilon as a student at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., but, in the fall of his sophomore year, instead became a member of Sigma Chi.
[...]

Top 10 list on David Letterman