Freshman NYU ladies come running to windows of their dorm every time Jude Law comes out on his balcony. The reason for this, again: Jude Law lives in a condo with a balcony that is towered over by a dormitory full of 18 year-olds. He has not made friends with his neighbors, according to the NYP:

"He noticed we were there and we started waving at him. Then he went inside and came back with two oranges," freshman Neha Najeeb told The Post. "He threw them at our window, but he missed." Law then went back inside and returned with two additional oranges, she said.

In four tries, he landed two oranges on the windows next door. I see several problems here:

1. They don't play baseball in England. Try kicking the oranges next time, Jude. Heh.
2. Jude Law goes out on his balcony to exercise with a personal trainer, then gets upset when people look at him. Go to a gym, you bizarrely attractive yogi. Rich people seem to enjoy Equinox.
3. Look at these pictures of his totally comical workout outfit. Heh.
4. Just be thankful you're not located next door to a state school dorm, Jude Law. Your balcony would be covered in shattered beer bottles at all times. It's not as bad as you think. Your every move is an object of fantasy for dozens of young women, just enjoy it. God.

A member of the NYU revolutionary vanguard alerted us to the pie-ing, and her note is reprinted in full below. The victims were Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, and Robert Spencer from "Jihad Watch," both of whom were there to talk about how there is apparently a Jihad, threatening America? Did you know about this?

Anyhow the kids were not about to let this intolerance of opposing viewpoints stand, so they interrupted the guys with a pie assault. Spencer himself writes about his close brush with whipped cream here. One eyewitness account says the two speakers "ended up largely unscathed." Our tipster tells us that the revolutionary cameraperson assigned to film the pie-ing for propaganda purposes "was tackled by security at the very beginning and didn't get any footage."

How are we supposed to repel the Jihadists if our military-age youth can't even stage a proper pie attack? Very troubling indeed. Full revolutionary press release-type thing below.

Islamophobic Warmongers Pied at NYU!

Tuesday, November 17, 7:15PM

NYU students disrupted a university event this evening featuring Robert Spencer from "Jihad Watch" and Elan Journo from the "Ayn Rand Institute for Individual Freedom." Students called out the panelists for their Islamophobic, warmongering hate-rhetoric, shouting and launching pies at the speakers. One student was detained, and several were escorted out of the building.

The event, entitled "The Jihad Still Threatens America," encouraged viscous Islamophobia and promoted aggressive military intervention in majority Muslim nations. Speaker Elan Journo actively promotes devastating attacks on Iran, claiming that "victory in World War II required flattening cities, firebombing factories, shops and homes, devastating vast tracts of Germany and Japan.... Victory today requires the same: smashing Iran's totalitarian regime and thus demoralizing the Islamist movement and its many supporters, so that they, too, abandon their cause as futile." Fear-mongering comments such as these promote the expansion of US imperialism, and contribute to the wave of anti-Muslim hate that is sweeping our nation.

The pieing came on the heels of an anti-hate sit-in hosted by the Islamic Center at NYU. The event was a response to NYU professor Tunku Varadarajan's recent article entitled "Going Muslim," a new term he has coined in the vein of "Going Postal" (article available at ).

While it is disturbing to see hate being expressed on such institutional levels on our campuses, the students' refusal to be silent is an inspiration to us all.

[Pic via]

It wasn't enough for Franco to sleep in class at both Columbia and NYU, where he is currently getting his MFA in creative writing (we have one too, James!), now he's going to go to Yale to get his doctorate in English. At least that's what a close reading of the subtext of this article told us. Let's just hope he doesn't get anxiety of influence from Harold Bloom, whom Franco seems to have an inappropriate man crush on.

Speaking of influence, the Yale newspaper has no problem at all ripping off Bop! (the article is below, or you can read it here). Is this supposed to be ironic? Because there is nothing that seems tongue in cheek about the big sloppy kiss of an interview where Esther Zuckerman does everything but lay down and ask Franco to father her children. She loves Freaks and Geeks! She's seen all his movies! She writes Esther Zuckerman-Franco in little hearts on the cover of her binder for Post-Colonial Structuralism and the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop seminar!

We shouldn't be too mean to her, because we love him just as much, especially now that he's trying to bridge high and low culture with a role on General Hospital. The first promo for his stint on the show came out yesterday, and it looks amazing. He plays an "artist whose canvas is murder." So he's a highbrow artist on a lowbrow soap. He's an A-list actor in a D-list genre. He he plays a character named Franco. META! Harold Bloom just let Franco into his PhD program just based on this stunt alone. PS—9 days and counting until it starts!

From: NYU President John Sexton
Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 12:19 PM
Subject: The Death of an NYU Student

It is with great sorrow that I must tell you of the death of a student — a
junior in the College of Arts and Science — early this morning in Bobst
Library. While the cause of death is still being determined, indications are
that he took his own life.

Suicide among people of college age is a national problem, a leading cause of
death among the young; each year, campuses across the country must cope with
these tragedies and their aftermath — the pain, the heartbreak, the upset it
causes to those who are vulnerable, and all the terrible, persistent questions.

I have taught young people for some five decades, drawn by their energy and
their promise and by the unique bond that forms between student and
professor. The impulse for self-harm — particularly among young men and women
with so much talent and so much to live for — is incomprehensible to me.

And so I would like to speak to the NYU student community as I would speak
with a student of mine sitting and talking with me in my own office.
No matter how difficult things might seem at any particular moment, your life
is filled with promise, you belong in and are part of a community that
cherishes your presence, you are loved, and there are many people at hand
ready and willing to help you — your professors, the staff in the residence
halls, the Wellness Exchange, your family, and your friends. I am certain of
this: there are many resources to help you, and harming oneself is absolutely
the wrong choice.

We are a close knit community, a large community of small communities; we
should remind ourselves that there will always be people among us who will
need our help, and we should never hesitate to reach out and offer a hand or
an attentive ear, or to direct friends and peers to the many excellent
professionals we have at the Wellness Exchange (212-443-9999, or 999 from any
campus phone) to help students work through problems.

If you feel upset by this news or anything else in your life, do not hesitate
to call the Wellness Exchange. If you have a friend or a student or a
colleague who seems vulnerable, call on his or her behalf.

I know I speak for the entire NYU community when I say that this student's
family and loved ones are in our thoughts and our hearts and our prayers. The
family has asked that they be accorded the greatest possible degree of privacy
and sensitivity in this difficult hour, and I would hope that we all shall
strive to comply.

To each one of us — student, faculty, administrators, or staff: take care of
yourself, take care of one another.

According to a Times City Room post picked up by NYU Local, NYU journalism grad student Ryan McLendon, who is almost $100,000 in debt and about to graduate an expert in a dying industry, has applied for food stamps. Breaking! McLendon makes $450 a month as a freelancer. So, you know, he qualifies.

This scares NYU Local!

It is unfair and terrifying that a fellow student, with a degree supposedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, has to get by on food stamps that he waited seven hours in line just to apply for.

Seven hours in line! Didn't they know he is getting a graduate degree?

We happen to think the collapse of journalism as a viable career is, on the whole, a bad thing. But: if you are underemployed, no matter what degree you are getting, you should be on food stamps. That is the point of the program. Everyone with an income at or below 130% of the poverty line should be taking advantage of it, regardless of their alma mater.

In fact, you, right now, reader, should head over to this handy webpage from the City of New York to see if you qualify for food stamps or any other federal or state assistant program! It will take 20 minutes of your time.

Basically, if you make $1,174 or less a month (for a one-person household), you might be eligible to receive up to $200 a month that you can use to buy food, to feed yourself, to stay alive. It is a good thing. And good on this Ryan McLendon person for taking advantage of it.

In a recent profile of Lady Gags, Gawker alum Joshua David Stein pens for Out an awesome description of the Gags as an up-and-coming village artiste:

Things weren't going well for young Stefani Germanotta, an 18-year-old from the Upper West Side, at the Bitter End. It was Friday night at the famed Greenwich Village club and the chattering NYU kids in the audience — there because the place didn't card — outnumbered the handful of misfit East Village friends who had come to see her play. "See the lonely girl," she sang in her agile and slightly husky voice, letting her fingers fly up and down the keyboard of the beat-up house piano like the child prodigy she once was, "out on the weekend, trying to make it pay." Set up on the piano's soundboard, Germanotta's own portable disco ball spun tiny shards of light and her laptop spat out beats, but no one was listening.

And if a picture's worth a thousand words, video's worth plenty more, and the above would absolutely be the first ones the following one produces. Dug up by Boy Culture (via Popnography), a video of Lady Gaga pre-Gaga. Before the dresses, the hats, the crazytalk, and the penis. Lady Gaga, pre-Lady. Observe:

Oh yes. That's definitely The Bitter End, which is still around to this day, which cards kids with a slightly heavier hand these days, but it's nice to know our pop royalty wasn't always, well, yeah:

Cute JAP-y girls, you too, can maybe one day have lots of money and your own Dr. Dre-approved headphones with space-ears on them and me talking about your penis nonstop. Dreams! They are real and really happen to real people.

Franco is currently on the pineapple express to Homotown while studying writing at Columbia and taking some at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Word is that he enrolled in an undergrad queer film class, but missed his first session. Considering his penchant for napping during lectures that's not much of a surprise. If he manages to show up in future week's he'll be treated to learning about things like "'Bottom Values: Anal Economics in History of Black Neighborhoods' and 'When are Dirty Details and Scenes Compelling? Tucked in the Cuts of Interracial Anal Rape.'" Sounds just like a class from an all-boys Catholic high school!

Back in the day, actors wouldn't touch gay roles for fear of being labeled as gay or typecast in only homo parts. Franco's last project was playing a big ol' Mary in Milk and his next gig lets his limp wrists wiggle as gay poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl. And if his turn in gay indie film Blind Spot and as probably bi actor James Dean in the made-for-TV biopic weren't enough, he's even directed some hardcore man-on-man action. His last student film for Tisch was a dirty gay fantasia that featured a boy dreaming in graphic detail about the jocks on the basketball court.

With all this hardcore action, can his next big deal be signing a an exclusive contract with Colt Studios? Or maybe he'll cast future pornstar and gay icon Levi Johnston in his next film. That would be more priceless than a million Spider-Man sequels!

[Image via Getty]

Zuckerman had been the benefactor of "The Zuckerman Forum," a debate competition at NYU that annually awarded thousands of dollars in scholarships to undergraduate students. Tonight Victoria Keenan, the in-term Administrator of Student Affairs at the school, sent out the following email to Zuckeman Forum participants announcing the termination of the competition and scholarship money.

Dear Students:

As many of you are aware, the economic downturn and the Madoff scandal had a particular impact on our benefactor, Mr. Mortimer Zuckerman. Unfortunately, funding of the Zuckerman Forum Scholarship Program was one of the casualties in Mr. Zuckerman's necessary reduction of charitable giving. I regret that I must inform you that the Zuckerman Forum will not be held for the foreseeable future, including the 2009-2010 academic year.

It has been a great pleasure working with all of you throughout this competition. This has been a truly unique experience at NYU, and I want to thank you all for your dedication and enthusiasm over the past four years. I hope to see you at other events around the NYU campus; and I would be happy to put you in contact with other campus organizations that focus on debate, public speaking, and advocacy issues if requested.

Best of luck in all of your future endeavors.

-VIK

Sad. But will that won't stop the Post from taking a cheap shot at Zuckerman over this? It's doubtful.

Sometimes I wish that just one time in a situation like this Obama would walk up to the microphone and say, "you know what...screw all y'all!" But a boy can dream, can't he?

In a related story, Hillary Clinton gave the commencement address to graduates of NYU at the new fake Yankee Stadium. She also took batting practice and hit 5 out of 10 pitches over the right field wall.

Clip via Youtube.

Morgan had reportedly planned a shooting spree on campus targeting Jewish students, according to journals found in his car near the site of the shooting. But where did his obsessive targeting begin?

Justin-Jinich called NYU campus police after receiving 38 threatening emails from Morgan. Among his choice words: "[You're] going to have a lot more problems down the road if you can't take any fucking criticism, Johanna." Or this: "That is absolutely ridiculous! What is going through your fucking head?" Justin-Jinich did not press charges, and the university dropped the matter.

There always seems to be one creepy guy in gender-studies classes who seems to be there more to target his prey than expand his consciousness. Sexual Diversity seems to be a standard offering at NYU and though Justin-Jinich was enrolled in the summer 2007, a syllabus for a previous class gives a sense of pretty good sense of what was covered. It mentions the "intractable nature/nurture debate." Essay question: What made Justin-Jinich's killer snap?

The NYU "financial counselors" are calling up the applicants who got accepted but have large gaps between their family's income and their financial aid packages, and just making sure they understand that they are poor—probably too poor, for NYU.

Those who were the first in their families to attend college also were likelier to get a call.

Haha! Also likelier to get a call: Nerds, spazzes, geeks, gaywads, and dorktrons. And minorities.
[NYP]

Nyle, who's graduating from NYU this spring, told NYU Local that he made the video cover of Lil' Wayne with a $2,000 grant from the school and it took 30 takes to get right. His plans for after graduation: continue to pay rent by throwing parties in his Bushwick party loft and try to make it as a rapper. Or, from the song: "I ain't stressin' this recession if it leads to a depression / It won't be in my mind, I'll be all right / As long as I'm surviving off of beats and rhyming / Then I don't mind surviving off of eating no ramen." Ah, youth.

The torturer in the video is UAE Royal Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan. His brother is the Interior Minister, and his other brother is the head of the country, Sheikh Mohammed. He's the man whose name is plastered on NYU's Abu Dhabi campus, because he paid for it.

NYU and its Abu Dhabi partners share important perspectives — a mindfulness of history, but a focus on the future; a belief that the evolving global dynamic will bring about the emergence of a set of world centers of intellectual, cultural, and educational strength, great magnets that will draw people of talent and talent-based enterprises (business, educational, and cultural)

NYU President John Sexton's great friend and money source, the crown prince is! This video, obtained by ABC News, shows the crown prince's brother torturing a man, allegedly because he cheated him on a grain deal. He shoves sand in his mouth, shoots a gun next to him, beats him, puts salt in his wounds, and runs him over with his SUV. Not shown in the clip is this part: "He uses an electric cattle prod against the man's testicles and inserts it in his anus. At another point, as the man wails in pain, the Sheikh pours lighter fluid on the man's testicles and sets them aflame."

The torturer won't be prosecuted, because the matter was "settled privately," and the government said "all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department."

Different cultures are educational!
[ABC, NYU Local]

Some enterprising young student took a picture of the Milk star and writing scholar dozing during at lecture at Columbia and sent it to TMZ, perhaps for a pretty fee. Franco was also Tweeted about while he slept out in the open in Bobst library at NYU, where he's also studying. So he's sleeping at both schools! Oh James. What would Lindsay think?

So what, is he out partying? Cracking the books too late? Narcolepsy? Chronic fatigue? What? What?? Look, James. If you need someone to come sit by your bed at night, and help you get a good night's rest, I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to do that. Though those same people are probably secretly hoping that you won't get any sleep, if you catch my drift. (Sex. I'm talking about sex.) So, maybe you'd better keep trying on your own.

Either way, goodnight moon.

The tragically confused radicals took over NYU's student center in order to protest everything in the world, without consulting with the various organized groups on campus working on all the various issues they were protesting, and they hung out in the cafeteria for a couple days and then they all got arrested. Well, two of them were arrested.

This was apparently very terrible for NYU:

"The financial impact ... upon the university community is anticipated to be substantial," the letter stated, signed by Marc Wais, vice president for Student Affairs. "In fact, is expected to exceed $80,000."

All 18 students will be on disciplinary probation for the rest of their enrollment at the university. They also face several long-term consequences preventing them from taking leadership roles in student clubs and are prevented from serving as RAs, peer counselors, orientation leaders, peer ambassadors or student senators.

Oh no, they can't be peer ambassadors? Amusingly, a residence hall guard is quoted as saying NYU cares more about its property than its students: "NYU tells us that the building comes first, and the students second."

So now they've all been offered a deal: a one-week suspension that allows them to go back to class on Monday. Most of them will accept the deal rather than face a judicial hearing, because they're all counter-revolutionaries. Hilariously, the kids have pro-bono attorneys!

Now it's time to party!

Many of them were "ecstatic," according to Caitlin Boehne, a senior and a CAS student senator, who was not one of the 18 suspended students but was involved in the protest for the majority of the time.

"There's a party in Brooklyn tonight," she said.

Hey everybody, we're all gonna get laid!

"You may not come in here. This is student's free space," says the cameraman, as a security guard pulls apart the flimsy barricade that the administration had chosen to leave in place for the past two days. As soon as the guard sets foot in the food court: "Excuse me, brutality here. You are on camera...Do not use brutality. You may not detain us, you are on camera!" This, as two security guard were moving away from him. "We deserve to be explained what is going on," he says to several bored-looking cops. Here's what's going on dude: you're not actually allowed to take over buildings. Believe it or not.

This video is a blow to romantic notions of student activism. A hilarious blow! [via NYU Local]

(Also: "We need to look at the situation, the hierarchy, the power relationship here." Okay: you're surrounded by cops.)

Definitive Food Court Occupatory Journalism source NYU Local reports:

12:13 - Hey, all. Charlie here. I just spoke to Emily Stainkamp and she informed me that administrators and security guards raided the 3rd floor and rounded up the remaining protestors. They are all being suspended.

The team of five negotiators (before this raid) went to negotiate and were apparently detained and suspended as well. It's currently unclear if any negotiations actually took place.

This is the end I think. Will update with any new news.

12:26 - Lily Q is at Kimmel and informes me that people are still inside and on the balcony. They should be coming out of the building in about 15 minutes. Although the press release says that non-NYU students will be turned over to police, some tips are coming in that a few have left the building and were not give to police.

That press release from NYU basically said any students still in there are getting suspended. The last holdouts are up on a balcony now, soon to be arrested. Ho well.

Sure, you could say that this entire fiasco was a big failure marked by muddled thinking and incoherent goals, and completed with a total lack of any progress towards the laughably unrealistic set of "demands" the protesters set forth. And we said that. But then again, if you can't occupy a building while you're in college, when else are you gonna get the chance? Take over a building when you're 20 and it's Animal House; try it when you're 30 and it's Dog Day Afternoon. We hope you guys had fun, sincerely.

[Pic: NYU Local]