“Hip Hop, Country, and the State of College Fashion”
January 2, 2009
NOTE: The following will appear in next month’s College Magazine.
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As a professor who believes there is much gold to be mined from all musical genres (with the possible exception of speed metal), I’m amazed by students who bizarrely claim to listen to only hip-hop and country. How is it humanly possible, inside this strange dichotomy of Kenny Chesney and Snoop records, to grab the variety of emotive strains necessary to match a complex life?
What’s worse, these two genres occasionally attempt to mesh, and America’s airwaves are flooded with Tim McGraw bemoaning to Nelly that 
“it’s all in my head.” I’m just thankful the public wasn’t subjected to an entire CMT crossroads session pairing these two – and we didn’t have to experience this ill-paired tandem “over and over again.”
Yet, as I was preparing to write this article about the state of college fashion (which must be located between the states of Arkansas and Oklahoma), I kept returning to a vision of the world where all taste selections were made from a similarly limited pool of material. After all, this must be the case for most of my students, who seldom adopt anything other than clothing from one of the two weirdly disparate trends that currently dominate campus fashion.
On one hand, before 12:00, most female students wear a huge sorority-emblazed hooded sweatshirt with either pajama pants or tights and UGG boots. On the other hand, after 12:00, most girls I see are dressed in revealing clothing appropriate for the club. And occasionally, because I happen to teach a class that meets MWF at exactly 12:00, I’ll see students wearing some WTF-provoking combination of the two – which is basically analogous to that Nelly and Tim McGraw duet.
This makes me wonder: Has Bloomingdale’s instituted a policy barring associates from selling footwear other than UGG boots or stiletto heels to undergraduates? Has Macy’s decided that tights, as opposed to pants, are now an appropriate form of outerwear? And finally, have Target and J. Crew recently closed, limiting school-shopping forevermore to Forever 21? If any of these three things has happened, then disregard what I’m about to say; otherwise, my recommendation is that you buy some normal clothes and start wearing them to class.
Just as there is no excuse to listen exclusively to country and hip-hop, there is no excuse to wear pajama pants to class, and no reason to wear a “going out” top at 3:00 PM – unless your school is surrounded by a satellite of afternoon, underground hip-hop clubs.
Students often defend the collegiate experience by arguing it’s a preparation ground for the adult-world. Yet, when it comes to clothing, this maxim is seldom followed. At no point in your future will it be appropriate to wear tights (without a skirt) to the office (unless business casual reaches a whole new level of laxity), nor will you be allowed to display your navel during a video conference call. If college is a training ground for life, then going to class is your job – and you need to dress the part.
Now, I’m not advising you start wearing power-suits to class (although I once had a ridiculous student who did this – I called him “Suit Dave”), but you should think about purchasing (and wearing) a couple of pairs of jeans, a sweater or two, and a pair of Puma sneakers. Consider these clothing items roughly equivalent to The White Stripes, The Decemberists, and Bright Eyes – meaning they’re totally appropriate for the 12:00 hour.
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CONTEST (AND ‘08) WRAP-UP…
December 15, 2008
All right, before we get to anything else - let’s announce the results of the first annual Dr. Wizard Holiday Contest!
In total, I received 36 email entries (plus “Jonesin’ for a Collegiate Fix” posted an entry to the comments section of the site - and was subsequently disqualified for not properly following the instructions) - which I thought was a pretty nice number for our first official giveaway, and enough to make it difficult for me to decide on a winner. After much consideration, I decided that there were 3 entries that stood out in my mind (all for quite different reasons), and that each of these three had its own individual strong points. So, rather than trying to decide how to break an interlocking 3-way tie (the basis behind such great conundrums as Paper-Rock-Scissors, Cowboy-Ninja-Bear, and Oklahoma-Texas-Texas Tech), I decided to just split up the prize package into 3 even parts, and mail everyone a piece. As for the site’s new official Tagline, we’ll rotate the header at the top of the website each month - so each of the winners will get four turns in 2009. Here are the top three entries:
Sean Hoge (Saint Louis University): “Where Pop Culture and Classic Literature Mix like a Red Plastic Cup and a Flunitrazepam” - $25 Borders Gift Card and a copy of Dead Man on Campus
Carlin Graveline (Vanderbilt University): “Shit Your Momma Won’t Tell You and Your Friends Don’t Realize” - $25 Borders Gift Card and a copy of Snakes on a Plane
Mike Williams (University of Virginia): “A Humorous Stroll across the Ivy-Covered Quads of Pop Culture America” - $25 Borders Gift Card and a copy of Consolers of the Lonely
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And now, a quick note about what to expect from Dr. Wizard over the Holiday Season:
While I’m pretty certain that my fictional alter-ego Dr. Wizard doesn’t get tired (because, after all, he’s a Wizard), I do get tired - and I need a little break. This fall has been GREAT for the website, and I’m excited to really go after it full throttle in 2009, but after a four-month stretch where I taught a new class on Chicago History, taught four sections of the Kaplan GMAT prep course, took my doctoral exams, worked on my dissertation prospectus, completed a television pilot with Matt, had my appendix removed, and launched a college-advice website with 45 posts, I think I’ve earned a couple of weeks off. I’ve got friends coming in from out of town and Christmas presents to buy my family; you’ve got old friends to catch up with and long nights spent studying for exams to sleep away; and there are a number of administrative things I want to do to prepare the website for 2009 growth. So…we’re gonna go on hiatus until shortly after the New Year, at which point we’ll come back “rip-roaring and ready to go” with the final 30 Dr. Wizard posts; more installments of Pencil, Paper, Craig; and a casting-call for a You Tube television pilot that we’re going to shoot in April, with episodes to stream from the website in 2009. So, I hope you have a wonderful Holiday, and I look forward to seeing you all back here with the start of the Spring semester!
LESSON #44: YOU KNOW WHO DOESN’T SUCK? DESIGNATED DAVE
December 10, 2008
One of the things that critics often praise most about the show Entourage is the fact that Vinnie Chase seems incredibly believable as a movie star – in large part because Adrian Grenier has never really done much else, and thus the audience doesn’t associate his previous performances with those of his fictional character. While I understand their larger point, it must also be noted that these critics aren’t exactly correct. I, for one, was well-aware of Vinnie Chase before he stepped foot onto the Red Carpet in Entourage’s 2004 pilot (although for a long time I kind of confused him with Heath Ledger). You see, in addition to being a member of the L.A.-based band The Honey Brothers, Grenier starred opposite Melissa Joan Hart in the vastly underrated 1999 date-movie Drive Me Crazy, where he played Chase “Hambone” Hammond, a poorly cast nerd who gets made over into a “cool guy” in order to make the school’s basketball star jealous enough to take Sabrina the Teenaged Witch to the Centennial Dance. (By the way, the previous four sentences lead me to three tangential points: #1 – I love the predictability of Hollywood movies, and sort of wish life operated along the same principles; #2 – I wonder if, when Doug Ellin was casting Entourage, he was at all swayed by the fact that Grenier had 
already successfully played one “Chase” character to perfection; and #3 – Part of Drive Me Crazy’s packaging was a nifty tie-in to the Britney Spears song “Drive Me Crazy,” whose video featured Melissa Joan Hart and Adrian Grenier doing an awkward courtship dance at a space-age Dog ‘n’ Suds, and I wonder whether the movie launched the writing of the song, or the song launched the writing of the movie.)
Anyway, back to the point. As all nerds do (according to Hollywood), Chase Hammond ran in a pack of three nerdy kids (think about it – Drillbit Taylor? 3 nerdy kids. Superbad? 3 nerdy kids.), and one of the other nerds in Hambone’s posse was a guy lovingly referred to throughout the movie as “Designated Dave.” Now, as far as the movie’s other high school students were concerned, “Designated Dave” was basically a one-trick pony – his job was to pick them up from parties after they got hammered on Jello Shots and Tequila, and for this he usually received multiple punches to the face and buckets full of vomit in his car’s back seat. This seems like an inadequate trade-off from any logical perspective, but to paraphrase the character Eddie, this trade-off was fair because Dave sucked – and was just doing anything he could to hang out with the “in-crowd.” Note: if this sounds like the 
plot of an after-school special, that’s because I’m certain that this is the plot of multiple after-school specials (it’s number three on the list of top ten topics – right behind “teenage girl gets pregnant” and “athlete experiments with steroids”). And just like any good after-school special, one of the things that Drive Me Crazy made so very clear (by letting Dave take “Dee Vine” to the Centennial Dance) is that “Designated Dave” didn’t suck at all. In fact, he was actually kind of cool in his own nerdy way – which is a nice message that I’d like to hammer home. The truth of the matter is that SOBER DRIVERS ABSOLUTELY DO NOT SUCK. At all. Ever. Even if when you get into their car, they make you listen to Flock of Seagulls or Jonas Brothers songs. DRIVING DRUNK SUCKS – and it’s extremely dangerous.
Don’t believe me? Well, you should – because car collisions involving drunk drivers have a very real way of making everybody’s lives worse.
Luckily, I’ve never been involved in a drunk-driving accident – but plenty of my friends have – and it’s not like I couldn’t have been involved in one during that stupid point in my past when I often just jumped into the car and tried to keep the four wheels somewhere close to the middle of the three roads that I saw. Two of my grandfather’s brothers killed themselves in this manner, so did two girls from my high school, and at least three of my friends have wrapped their cars around a tree. And these are good examples of why DRIVING DRUNK SUCKS. But none of these situations is equivalent to the worst thing that can happen to you if you drive drunk. The absolute worst thing that can happen is that you can kill somebody else – and then recover yourself. And this is a situation that happens all too often – in large part because alcohol acts as a means of keeping the body relaxed during an accident.
Those of you who have been hanging around these parts for awhile have by now stumbled onto the page entitled “Pencil, Paper, Craig” – and it’s from one of Craig’s college experiences that we draw the lynchpin of today’s lesson. Around five years ago, while Craig was an undergraduate at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, one of his fraternity brothers hopped behind the wheel of his car after a night out at the IU bars in nearby Bloomington. At some point during the 45-minute drive home, this poor guy fell asleep, got into a wreck, and killed another driver. Now, some of you may take offense at my calling this young driver a “poor guy” – and certainly you’re right in feeling worse for the family of the victim in this accident. That’s natural. But from my perspective, in a situation like this – nobody wins. I can’t imagine what it would be like to spend time in prison for committing manslaughter, or what it would be like to return to campus after a year spent in the joint and to see people in class just staring at your ankle monitor, or what it would be like to live with the horrible guilt that must still hang around this kid’s neck like an albatross. His life must just be Purgatory (and there’s a reason that that Bryan Adams song that got remade a few years ago into a techno-hit wasn’t called “Purgatory is a Place on Earth”). Driving drunk, something that so many college kids (and adults) do, is like playing a game of Russian Roulette where the bullet metaphorically represents this Catholic torturous wasteland.
Now, I’m not going to say much more here. One of the things that I’ve vowed to stay away from at Dr. Wizard’s Advice is being overly preachy – because I’m not a licensed minister. But it’s just a horrible mistake to not arrange for a sober driver or a cab when going out for the night, and we all owe the people out there in the world like Designated Dave a large debt of gratitude. Right now, at a time when most of us are going to two holiday parties every weekend, let’s make sure to take our turn with an occasional night off from the boozing, so that everybody makes it home safe. And if one of your friends volunteers to stay sober for the night, make sure to tell them thanks. It’s so much nicer than punching them in the face.
LESSON #43: EXAMS MADE SIMPLE
December 8, 2008
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I may not always be the most astute observer of the natural world, but as I’ve been walking my dog through the streets of the Central West End the last few mornings, it’s been difficult not to notice that it’s getting really fricking cold outside. Now, I’m not sure how this whole “Long December” thing snuck up on us so fast, because it seems 
like less than a month ago I was still wearing flip flops for a good portion of the week, but evidently there’s already been a dusting of snow across most of the Great Plains, the Rust Belt, and the Upper Northeast. This can only mean a couple of things. It means, first of all, as you read this, I’m certain that somewhere in America the Trans-Siberian Orchestra is hurtling towards a local opera house to play yet another horrific mash-up of Christmas Carols. And it means, more importantly for you, that it’s time for one final push towards the end of the semester before we all go home to play Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel and “Rock Around the Christmas Tree.” It is time, in short, to “get yo’ muthatruckin’ exam on.”
Now, the context for this post is more or less the same as the context for THINK BRONZE MEDAL and HOW TO WRITE AN ‘A’ PAPER. That is, I am much more qualified to give you information about the way the exam writing process works in the Humanities than I am in, say, the Natural 
Sciences. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t give it my best shot on all accounts, because I think a lot of the information is applicable to multiple subjects. Hell, George W. Bush was more qualified to run the Texas Rangers than he was the United States of America, and he did…well, hopefully, this post, whatever else it accomplishes, won’t alienate us from the rest of the world’s leaders. So, just like Toad says when he picks up a turbo-mushroom in Mario Kart, “heeeere we go!” with four simple rules that should simplify the exam process and make it…simpler.
Rule #1: Most professors have enormous egos. When it comes right down to it, most of your professors think that they are awfully smart – and this is because, in general, most of us are smarter than the average cat. Unfortunately, even though this is true, most of us also probably overvalue our intelligence in comparison with the rest of the world – but this is material for a different post. The way this useful piece of information about your professors comes directly into play during exam week is this: if you are 
forced into making a decision between placing your studying emphasis on the original material as covered in a textbook and the meta-textual comments that your professor makes on that material during his or her lectures, go with the careful perusal of your notes. In the real world, Eddie Van Halen’s guitar work on “Eruption” is way more important than anything your professor could possibly ever say about it, but in the world of semester exams, your job is to regurgitate your professor’s opinions regarding Mr. Van Halen’s tap-tap-tapping as close to verbatim as you possibly can. Because, in the end, given our enormous egos, we mostly are looking for validation that what we say is important, and we look to you to give us that support – even though the premise of this artificial construction is completely ridiculous.
Rule #2: If your professor gives you a study guide, that’s what you should study. I realize this seems like common sense, but you’d be amazed how often students obviously neglect the study guide when preparing for an examination. Now, let me tell you why this is a bad idea. 
While most of your professors have entered the teaching world because they derive genuine satisfaction from helping students learn valuable material, you must realize that we are also human. Just like you, by this point in the semester we are tired – we’ve spent the last four months preparing for classes, writing letters of recommendation, and working on our own research projects – and just like you, your professors are looking to use their time as efficiently as possible. The creation of a study guide represents additional, unnecessary work on the part of your teachers, and if we do this, you can be certain that we have two goals in mind: 1) to help our students because we want them to know what is important, and 2) to make the grading process go more quickly. The better an examination is, the easier it is to grade. If your professor gives you a study guide, use it.
Rule #3: Memorize a quote or a few historical dates and use them during the exam. Despite the prevailing notion that academia makes the majority of people cynical (and in many ways, it does), there’s also another common thread that can be traced among the professoriate. At some point deep in our souls, we hate this cynicism, and as a reaction against this 
entropic force, we all become roughly akin to six-year-olds watching an amateur magician performing tricks at a birthday party when grading exams. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge would say, we become very good, when dealing with our students, at willingly suspending our disbelief. In fact, we want so badly to be impressed by you that we’re just waiting for you to pull a rabbit out of a hat – and, in the parallel world of the final examination, the metaphorical rabbit is a smart quote or an obscure piece of accurate history. If you can do this well, you’re virtually guaranteed a high grade on any essay or short answer question. But, you must also be careful, for although we are more than willing to be impressed, our cynical side becomes fiercely agitated if you perform this magic clunkily. You must, first of all, be correct when presenting historical data, and the quote you select must make sense in the context of your answer. We want to see the magic, not the rabbit’s ear sticking out of your hat’s trap door.
Rule #4: Answer the question, but answer it in a way that accentuates your strengths. The most common mistake that students make when answering essay questions on an exam is to completely ignore the original question. Sometimes, this is the fault of a poorly constructed prompt. More often, however, this is fundamental breakdown on the part of the student to recognize his or her primary responsibility – that of actually providing an answer to the question that has been asked. That being said, you have a significant amount of leeway when writing your response. Once 
you’ve answered the question, spend the remainder of your time giving examples (that are at least tangentially relevant) from what you remember best. So, for example, if you are asked a question about the way Upton Sinclair’s literary naturalism depicts Chicago as a destructive environment in The Jungle, but you happen to also remember similar constructions in Native Son, feel free to impress us by telling us about Richard Wright’s dungeon of iron and steel – once you’ve at least briefly addressed the initial question. This way, your answer shows depth and the ability to contextualize against other works – which is always a good thing.
So, there you have it. Four quick, simple rules to guide your way through the next week and a half. Then, once it’s all over, we can all use our GPS systems to guide us over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house (we go). Mine will be making cookies, and I’m quite certain they’ll be delicious.
LESSON #42: USE YOUR CAMERA
December 5, 2008
If I were to change one thing about my family from back when I was growing up, I think it would be this: I would make us a more picture-friendly bunch. You see, it’s not as if the Webb family is a completely non-photogenic clan of people – my parents are fairly well-constructed folks for being in their early 50s, and I don’t think I’m likely to break your camera lens if you take a picture of me (in either the metaphorical sense, or in the literal Alec Baldwin or Kenny Rogers sense) – we just don’t take any pictures. How bad is it? Well, believe it or not, there’s a seven year gap between my eighth and fifteenth birthdays where there’s not a single picture of me in a family photo-album. In fact, I have no idea what I looked like when I was thirteen, and therefore just sort of assume that I looked like a brown-haired version of Ron Weasley from the first Harry Potter movie – because that’s what most thirteen-year-olds look like.
Luckily, genetic evidence suggests that this problem is not insurmountable. Somehow, my little sister has overcome our family’s inability to take photographs – in fact, today is my niece’s second birthday, and there are already more pictures of her from her first two years on this planet than there are of my entire twenty-eight – but for some reason I can’t seem to climb the hurdle. You see, almost every time I get ready to go anywhere, I look at the camera on my desk, and I think about taking it with me…but I never seem to get around to actually bringing it. The problem is that I never know what to do with the damn thing. Do I put it in my front pocket? Do I put it in my back? I don’t carry a purse, so do I just kind of carry it around and leave it sitting on the bar table or one of my friend’s counters? And if I do bring the camera, I always feel awkward (quite honestly, what I want to say here is that I feel “a little gay” – not in the homophobic sense, but in the sense that “this seems counterintuitive to my Midwestern hillbilly orthodox masculinity”). These are the tremendously difficult camera questions with which I struggle.
Yet, I don’t want it to be this way, because every time I do take a look at one of the rare pictures from my past, it always makes me extremely happy – even if the moment in which the picture was taken was actually quite sad. And, this is doubly the case with photographs from college. As has been touched upon in other lessons from the Dr. Wizard canon (which updates way more regularly than Dr. Wizard’s Canon-Minolta), we live in a world that highly romanticizes the undergraduate experience, and, consequently, as we age and move further away from our own collegiate days, we tend to do the same. But it is much easier to feed this romanticization of the past with photographs.
Twenty years from now, when I look back on my life in 2008, thanks to my tendency to write prolifically, I’ll have a very good idea of what it was that I was like, and what it was that I liked (this project alone, in addition to serving as a hopefully valuable tool for undergraduates, has over the course of the last four months become a de facto patchwork biography of my own life and a testament to all of the pop culture things that I love), but I won’t have a very good idea of what I looked like. Unfortunately, because we are such visual creatures, I am certain to feel this absence strongly. Then again, all this reflection does is lead me to an obvious answer – I should surmount my hesitancy and just take my camera with me when I go places that are unusual, or important (like Europe, or Christmas dinner).
Will I do this? I don’t know. But like the two-pack-a-day-smoker who grounds his son for a week after catching him lighting up, I’ll use the old logic of “do as I say, not as I do” (which will, incidentally, be more or less employed again on Lesson #46: Them Smokers Will Test Ya). So, today’s lesson is this: Don’t Be Like Dr. Wizard. Bring your camera with you and use it to take pictures. In the long run, it’s so much easier than writing a thousand words (even if you are Mavis Beacon).
LESSON #41: MEET MAVIS BEACON
December 3, 2008
You want to know what I don’t understand? I don’t understand how it is humanly possible to be a college student in the twenty-first century and to not know how TO fucking TYPE. Seriously, it’s not as if computers are going anywhere, and every time you punch out your paper with two fingers, you’re just throwing hours of your life away. I’ve spent the last twenty minutes sitting here (and I can afford to take this time to stop and think because I type 70 words a minute), trying to come up with the proper parallel for not knowing how to type and/or typing with two fingers, and here’s what I’ve got: this phenomenon is like… a) not knowing how to drive if you live in Los Angeles, and/or b) only knowing two guitar chords if you are a songwriting musician. Now, I hear your silly arguments – right now as you read this, you’re saying to yourself (if you are one of the students I see doing the two-finger keyboard shuffle in the computer lab every day), “It’s possible to get the job done adequately with 
only two fingers. I’ve been doing it for years.” And to a certain extent, you’re right, it is possible – just like Vinnie Chase somehow manages to survive in LA without a driver’s license and that song by Jane’s Addiction where the girl is “done with Sergio” somehow became a hit – but it’s not recommended. So, if you’ve been procrastinating learning this life skill for the last 19 years, today’s the day to bite the bullet and learn how to use all ten fingers when you write. Unless, that is, you accidentally blew off the other eight fingers in a childhood fireworks accident, in which case, this lesson becomes a little irrelevant.
Now, assuming your parents were responsible and didn’t let you play with fireworks as a small child, and you decide to take this important step of learning the art of keyboard wizardry – what do you do? Well, there are a couple of possibilities. The first is enroll in some sort of class on campus that teaches keyboarding, and if your college doesn’t offer one, then to visit either the local community college or the local adult education center. But I can understand the reasons why this may not be your cup of tea. So the next best option, and the one that I 
would recommend that most of you take, is to introduce yourself to Mavis Beacon. Who is this lovely lady? Why, she’s only the (fictionally constructed) grand-dame of twentieth century typing, that’s all! You see, all the way back in the stone age of 1987, “she” started a company dedicated to helping students just like you learn the proper way to type by introducing them to software designed to teach them all the basics of the home row, and in the process she’s made countless papers move more swiftly, and millions of dollars. In fact, what Tom Brunansky is to Little League Baseball and Rodney Yee is to Yoga, Mavis Beacon is to the QWERTY keyboard. She’s wonderful, she’s kind, and she offers a number of games you can play if you buy her software – so go to the nearest Staples and introduce yourself. It will make you a more efficient student.
Now, before I take off for the day, I’ve got one little request. The first piece of advice was for you, and overall, of course, that’s the point of this website, to offer you information that will be helpful in your collegiate life. Personally, I suppose, it doesn’t make much of a difference to me how long you take to type your papers as long as they make it to my desk on time. So learning to type is really something that you need to do for yourself. There is, however, something that you can do for Dr. Wizard. While you’re at Staples, meeting Mavis Beacon, do me a favor: buy a backup black ink cartridge for your computer and a fucking stapler. As Lesson #13 makes perfectly clear, my biggest pet peeve is the student who wears too much cologne to class. Students who turn in unstapled papers printed in blue or purple ink, however, run a close second. And I promise you this: among your 
professors, I am not alone in this hatred. The beautiful part about this proposal is that neither of these two items is very expensive, and they will both raise you in your professors’ esteem immeasurably. Or, if you happen to be a University of Scranton or Wilkes University student interning at the Scranton Business Park, you can probably pick up Dwight’s stapler in the Dunder-Mifflin vending machine for a dollar – which is better still.
Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica. And like Paul Harvey says, Good Day!
LESSON #40: ENGAGE IN AT LEAST ONE MASSIVE (HARMLESS) PRANK
December 1, 2008
All right!!! Here we are – back from the break – and the Wiz is back with a mother-trucking vengeance! Today, I’m going to go on the record – and I’d like you all to serve as my witnesses – so, like Van Wilder says, write this down. Here’s my testimony: If some random Crazy out there (like Charlie Krupe – see Lesson #5) ever designs a breed of artificial intelligence that overtakes humanity, but needs our brains for energy, in a world-situation much like that inhabited by Morpheus and Neo, my vote is that we ask the machines to construct a Matrix that places us all inside the world of Saved by the Bell. Think about it – there’s enough conflict to keep our lives interesting, there’s always a nice tidying up of all plot details with a funny resolution every thirty minutes, and we could stage elaborate judo fights inside The Max diner that disprove the laws of physics, all while wearing the totally dope clothes of the early 1990s. In addition to being totally awesome, this world would have a couple of very tangible benefits that our own does not possess:
#1) Bike shorts.
#2) We could eliminate the Jonas Brothers. As Lesson #12 makes all too clear – I don’t understand this phenomenon one bit, and it’s not like I haven’t given it the old college-try. You see, just like any other self-respecting, football-loving alumnus of Eastern Illinois University, I have a strong case of Tony Romo Fever. As such, after ingesting enough tryptophan to sedate a small horse on Thanksgiving, I happily plopped myself down on the couch to watch the Dallas Cowboys destroy the Seattle Seahawks – which went completely according to plan. Yet once my partial paralysis was more fully realized, I found myself unable to even change the channel with a remote control – which was not part of the plan – and was thus sentenced to the fate of watching the Jonas Brothers perform their schlocky Disney Rock at halftime. For the duration of the fifteen minute performance, I found myself contemplating just what exactly it is that people like about these kids, and at the same time muttering that Zack Attack! would have been so much better. But if 
the world were more like Saved by the Bell, we wouldn’t have to consider this strange phenomenon. Zack Attack! would be the marquis act at every Super Bowl Halftime Show, and Kelly Kapowski would be up there in the press box with Jessica Simpson, falling ever more deeply in love – although I guess I’m cool with this year’s selection of The Boss to highlight America’s greatest holiday.
#3) The number of massive (harmless) pranks would increase exponentially. You see, every third episode on Saved by the Bell, the crew at Bayside High School was either stealing some other high school’s mascot, or the rival high school was kidnapping Screech Powers and holding him for a hilarious ransom prize – insisting that Mr. Belding shave his head, or some other such nonsense. My question is this: why don’t these types of things happen more often in real life?
Look, college is about knowledge – that’s for certain (otherwise the two words wouldn’t rhyme) – but it’s also about having a lot of awesome stories to tell your grandkids someday. This is why we swallow live goldfish (see Lesson #1) and take road trips (see the forthcoming Lesson #47), and it’s also why you should engage in more massive (harmless) pranks as college students. Now, I’m not saying that you should create a computer virus and send it to all of your classmates, spray-paint a building, blow up a major campus landmark, or forge government documents – those things aren’t harmless – but here’s a list of questions for you to consider:
Do you know…How many people it takes to move a parked car? How quickly a dorm room’s furniture can be moved outside? How many of your university’s buildings have easy roof access? How to dye a fountain with food coloring? How much it costs to bribe a campus radio station DJ 
to let you on the air for five minutes? How many people it takes to play “The Final Countdown” at the university bell tower? How much costume-shops discount their merchandise during the non-Halloween season? How many Barack Obama yard signs it takes to fill the front lawn of the Campus Republican headquarters? How to hang a sheet offering some sort of hilarious picture or message over a very visible billboard? How to photo-shop your university president’s head onto Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body? Or how to make a funny crop circle? If your answer to every one of these questions is NO, then you aren’t living the full collegiate experience – because I guarantee you that between Lisa Turtle, Jessie Spano, Kelly Kapowski, Zack Morris, A.C. Slater, Screech Powers, and Mr. Belding, every one of these questions can be answered by at least one member of the group. So, today’s lesson is simple: Engage in at Least One Massive (Harmless) Prank – your life will be all the richer for doing so. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to try to figure out how to get my car off of the roof of the Student Union Building.
Note: We can only assume that Screech has constructed this robot in his bedroom in order to infiltrate rival Valley High’s football team. If all goes according to plan, he’ll be such an awesome defensive back that no one will ever realize he’s a robot…until it’s too late. Then Zack Morris will reveal Screech’s clever prank to Valley’s cheerleaders, who, because they secretly wish they went to Bayside where they could listen to Zack Attack! perform at the Prom, notify the game officials causing a forfeit. It’s a catastrophe for Valley High, and an even greater catastrophe for the cheerleaders - when they find out that Zack must turn them down because he has already agreed to go to Prom with Jessie Spano in order to make Kelly Kapowski jealous. But, the situation is peacefully resolved when all the Valley cheerleaders decide to go instead with A.C. Slater, who buys six corsages and a gallon of whey protein on his way to the dance. Screech takes the robot.
LESSON #39: COCAINE = NOT THE BEST IDEA
November 24, 2008
Occasionally, I’ll find myself in a conversation with one of the more conservative, senior members of our department, and that professor will say something like this: “I just don’t understand why these kids today keep getting messed up with drugs. It’s all so pointless.” Well, this is kind of a silly question, and, while I don’t respond this way, in my head, I think about the truth. The reason that people do drugs are that drugs are fun as shit. The problem, however, with drugs, is that they are also addictive, and depending upon what type of drugs you are addicted to, they can pretty much derail your life. So, today, in the interest of showing why dabbling in hard-core drug usage may not be the best choice for Johnny Undergraduate and Suzie Front-Row, let’s explore these two scenarios.
Cocaine: Imagine that, like Dr. Faustus, you one day awaken to find Mephistopheles just kicking it in your dorm room, ready to offer you the following temptation: If you so agree, The Devil will arrange 
things such that you are able to have sex with Angelina Jolie as often as you’d like – but there’s a catch. Every time you engage in conjugal relations with the world’s sexiest woman, Mephistopheles gets to remove one of your appendages. So, the first time you have sex with Lara Croft: Tomb-Raider, you lose a pinky. The second time, you lose a ring finger, and so on. Eventually, once all of your fingers and toes have been removed, the Devil hires Lorraine Bobbitt to slice off that other thing on your body that looks (for some men) like a finger or a toe. And there’s more…
Certain people in the world have the ability to enjoy this act once, and then to move on with their lives. They find that they are capable of dabbling in Miss Jolie for one isolated incident, and then are completely able to live normal, healthy lives with only nine fingers. Other people have been hardwired differently. Once they get a taste of the bliss that is Angelina’s bedroom, they are unable to keep from returning, and it becomes something that they need in order to function. 
The interaction of intercourse will become the one meaningful event in their lives, and they are willing to sacrifice everything else in their world for the return of that rush – including, because now all they have are a set of nubs for hands, typing their terms papers by holding a straw in their mouths and punching the keys on the computer one at a time. Lastly, for a select group of individuals, say one in a thousand (like Len Bias), sex with Angelina Jolie mixes with their natural body chemistry in such an earth-shatteringly intense way that it stops their heart on the spot, killing them instantly. The greatest catch is that you don’t know what type of body chemistry you have until you try the game for the first time.
So, do you choose to accept this offer? Many people, in fact, do choose to play this game. Like Rick James says – “Cocaine is a Helluva Drug.” The question is, at the end of the day, which joke will get to be yours. Will it be A) “What did the five fingers say to the face?” “SLAP!”, or B) “What did the five fingers say to the face?” “I remember when I wasn’t a set five bloody removed appendages sitting in the Devil’s trashcan.”
Marijuana: Smoking weed, on the other hand, is sort of like getting to hang out with Ellen DeGeneres. She has a way of making everything funnier, even the little things in life, and she’s less dangerous in that it is basically impossible to cheat on your girlfriend with a 50-year-old lesbian (unless you happen to be a lesbian yourself). 
You come home at the end of the day, turn on the television, and something about Ellen makes you think it would be nice to have some cookies. Still, even though Ellen is less intoxicating than Angelina Jolie, there is a certain amount of risk. Some people, after hanging out with Ellen at the end of the day, start to enjoy themselves so much that they choose to order the Oxygen network from their local cable or satellite provider, and decide to spend all day every day sitting on the couch – because hanging out with Ellen’s just more fun than going to class. Also, your parents might tell you that hanging out with Ellen is a gateway to having sex with Lara Croft: Tomb-Raider.
Now, the great thing about life is that each of us gets to make our own decisions when offered these scenarios by Mephistopheles. You can choose Option A; you can choose Option B; or like Richard Pryor in Brewster’s Millions, you can choose “none of the above.” Personally, when I was in your position, I decided that Cocaine probably wasn’t the best idea. I’d seen too many of my friends do things like jump through a plate glass window, bong a fifth of Jack Daniels and pass out in a phone booth, or wake up on a bus in Clarksville, Tennessee. I have friends, in fact, who are still in and out of rehab (and other friends, who like Amy Winehouse, just refuse to acknowledge that they need to go). So I decided that drugs were probably a lot like produce – the organic ones were safer. But I won’t tell you what you should decide – I just want to lay out the options in a way that’s a little more realistic and relevant than advice delivered by Nancy Reagan.
NOTE #1: Evidently, in real life – not the metaphorical world I have constructed for the purposes of this post – having sex with Angelina Jolie carries with it other consequences. Just ask Brad Pitt. Every time Achilles has sex with Lara Croft, she either spawns or adopts another child. Somebody’s gotta get him some help, or at least a few more nannies.
NOTE #2: Dr. Wizard’s Advice will be taking a short break for the Thanksgiving Holidays, and will not update on Wednesday or Friday. So, if you’re new to the site, now’s the perfect opportunity to catch up – and to tell all your friends about The Wiz while you’re home over break. (And, by The Wiz, I don’t mean the Wizard of Oz adaptation starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, although that’s good too.)
THE DR. WIZARD HOLIDAY TAGLINE CONTEST!!!
November 24, 2008
As we enter this season of Thanksgiving, I find that I am extremely thankful for a number of things – and one of them is the rapid growth of Dr. Wizard’s Advice. In three short months, we have gone from receiving barely a hundred hits a week to over five thousand, and now it’s time to share a little of the love. And so today, the Dr. Wizard Creative Group is proud to announce our First Annual Holiday Contest!!!
Here’s the deal. We’ve ridden the website’s recycled Anchorman tagline about as far as we possibly can, and as much as I love Sex Panther, it’s time for a more original subtitle. If you’d like to be a part of this process, then we invite you to submit an entry.
The Contest: In 15 words or less, help us sum up what Dr. Wizard’s Advice for College Students is all about. We’re looking for something that we can post on the website for the foreseeable future, and something that may one day end up on the cover of the book version.
Prizes: In addition to the pride you will feel when seeing your entry prominently displayed on the website, we’re offering a prize package full of Wizard-referenced materials, along with a little something extra.
The First Prize Winner will receive a copy of Consolers of the Lonely by The Raconteurs (to be cranked up as you drive around with the windows cranked down), a copy of Dead Man on Campus (to remember the intricacies of that first-semester college experience), a copy of the most recent issue of The Economist (to stay up to date on world events), and a $50.00 gift card to Borders (to shop for Holiday gifts for your family, or to get a head start on next semester’s books).
The Second Prize Winner will receive a copy of Snakes on a Plane (the movie that will be deemed America’s greatest cinematic masterpiece by future archaeologists) and a $25.00 gift card to Borders.
NOTE: If the First Prize Winner is one of the ten following most-frequent commenters (MS, Jonesin’ for a Collegiate Fix, Funktified Acoustic, Carlin, UVA Mike, Meghan Jansen, Greece Lightning, Gina Palazzo, The Uncle Jesse Fan Club, or Green Wave Fever), then Second Prize will automatically be awarded to someone not on the above list.
Deadline: All entries must be received by 5:00 PM on Friday, December 12. The winners will be announced, and all entries will be posted, on Monday, December 15 – the day on which Prize Packages will be sent via USPS 2-day Priority Mail to their recipients.
Judging: Contest winners will be selected by Dr. Wizard, in possible consultation with Dr. Wizard’s Mom, Dr. Wizard’s Grandpa, and Dr. Wizard’s Agent.
Email your entries to jwebb16[at]slu[dot]edu.
CONTEST NOTE: By entering, you agree that your entry shall be a “work made for hire” with all rights therein, including, without limitation, the exclusive copyright, being the property of the Dr. Wizard Creative Group. In the event the entry is considered not to be a “work made for hire,” you irrevocably assign all right, title, and interest in the entry (including, without limitation, the copyright) to DWCG, including in any and all media whether now known or hereafter devised, in perpetuity, anywhere in the world, with the right to make any and all uses thereof, including, without limitation, for purposes of advertising or trade.
LESSON #38: THE WORLD NEEDS ELECTRICIANS
November 21, 2008
This may be the stupidest lesson I ever give here at Dr. Wizard, because if enough of you follow this advice I may someday find myself out of a job, but sometimes you’ve just got to say “What the Hell” and deliver a dose of honest reality, even if it’s a little personally painful. The truth is that I would be doing both you and my blue-collar heritage an extreme disservice if I didn’t point out the rather obvious fact that the world needs electricians, and it will continue to need them for the foreseeable future.
Without a doubt, one of the worst things that we have done as a society over the course of the last three decades is to propagate the myth that in order to be successful in life, you need a college education. In part, this myth has been driven by the modern University system, which, while being technically a not-for-profit 
enterprise, is in fact entirely dependent upon an ever-increasing stream of tuition dollars in order to finance the construction of more awesome, hideous modern buildings and to continue the hiring of a select portion of the overstocked pool of graduate students into the professoriate. But, in the process of propagating this myth and ensuring our own piece of financial security, we are allowing the American infrastructure to crumble into third-world oblivion. Have you seen pictures of some of our roads? Have you listened to my father talk every Christmas break about the lack of qualified tradesmen in the Electrical profession? The bottom line is that far too many high school students go on to college when they would in fact have better lives, and better financial stability, if they were to instead choose the option of attending a trade school.
In every high school graduating class in America, there are a certain number of students who have been given the gift of physical dexterity. Oftentimes, they have an innate understanding of the way things are pieced together, but find themselves uninterested in the rather esoteric world of Platonic philosophy and Malthusian economics. And what do we do with these students? Rather than point them towards a trade school where they can find the training for a useful career as a plumber or a diesel automotive technician, we tell them that all students, no matter where their talent lies, should go to college – and we let the trades sort through the pack of high-school dropouts who scored a 9 on their ACT.
But consider this. Here are the median annual income figures for a group of tradesmen in Chicago with five years work experience: Bricklayer - $60,274; Carpenter - $51,428; Electrician - $54,924; Pipefitter - $58,889; and Plumber - $55,538. Conversely, an Insurance Agent with 
5 years experience makes on average $46,092 a year, and a Consumer Credit Analyst makes $42,534. So my question is this: if you are an average business student, muddling through a Management degree with no strong prospects in the job marketplace, who happens to also possess strong technical problem-solving abilities, why wouldn’t you choose a trade occupation? Would you rather be a 23-year-old journeyman electrician with no student debt and $100,000 stocked away in home equity, or would you rather live in a crappy apartment as you pay a quarter of your much smaller paycheck each month on your $100,000 student loan principle? Furthermore, as the world continues to flatten in the 21st-century, consumer credit analysis and the sale of insurance are the types of jobs that will most-certainly be outsourced to India, but it’s much more difficult for an electrician from Mumbai to commute to Chicago to perform a rewire of your house.
In 1901, W.E.B. DuBois wrote “let us make philosophers of philosophers, and carpenters of carpenters.” His point, in my opinion, is that each of us has been gifted with a certain set of natural skills that predispose us to be more adept at one profession or another. If we were to 
more carefully follow this maxim, there would be less of a stigma attached to working with your hands in America. These trade-professions are honorable, and until we do a better job of making this clear to you, the college students of America, we’ll continue to be a country with a wealth of college graduates and a dearth of various skills.
So, as I close this post that may one day lead to my own unemployment, I’ll argue one last time that college isn’t for everybody. Don’t let your parents or your guidance counselors talk you into wasting four years of your time and a whole lot of money if you’d rather feel the joy at the end of the day of having accomplished something concrete and material. I mean, just look at LeBron James – he seems to be doing all right – and the last time I checked, his diploma reads St. Vincent and St. Mary High School of Akron, Ohio.
