A Merry Mix of Frost and Fire

The students of the Yale Law School (tYLS) were this day summoned to arms. The hot wrath and fiery indignation of the student body was kindled by one Amelia Rawls, a first-year student at tYLS who, in the pages of today’s Washington Post, had the temerity and gall, the impudent audacity to suggest in an op-ed that the students at tYLS (and at Princeton, where she was an undergraduate, and presumably at other elite institutions) are not always nice.

See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/30/AR2008043003263.html.

This, in the eyes of Justin’s classmates, was an unpardonable act of defecting, deserting, turncoat treachery unworthy of Benedict Arnold or (to Red Sox fans) Johnny Damon.

The Yalies were in high dudgeon. The e-waves of the YLS list-serve hummed and roared and bombinated with peals and claps of textual thunder. Inboxes were overwhelmed by a fiery deluge fed by ever-burning sulfur, unconsumed. America’s best and brightest and allegedly not-nicest arose as one man and declared through Niagaratic cataracts of trenchant, truculent, vehement, vitriolic, bombastic bellicosity that they are indeed Nice, and woe to she who insinuates otherwise. The messages continued late into the night, and well into the next morning. In the afternoon an unsuspecting Kirk Cheney returned from New York to find the thread had run to 126 messages in his inbox. The end is not yet.

Justin’s favorite contributions were a pair of poetic interludes, offered in a lighter spirit (note that "The Wall" is the name of the YLS listserve):

There once was a "Post" on The Wall,
That had the whole school in its thrall.
It asked "Are we nice?"
"If we're Ivy schooled twice?"
And brought all our work to a crawl.
—Vivek Krishnamurthy

Nice, nice, baby.
Nice, nice, baby.
All right stop, collaborate and listen.
Nice is back with a brand new mission.
Rawls. Has a difference principle:
Check yo'self so you're not hypocritical.
Will it ever stop? Yo, I don't know.
Amelia bigheart would like us to think so.
To the extreme is our telescopic philanthropy.
Light up the Wall and watch the misanthropy.
If there was a problem YLS'll solve it.
Check out the mirror while our egos revolve it.
Nice, nice, baby.
etc.
—Justin Shubow

At lunchtime Justin was in the kitchen minding his own business—i.e. snacking—when he heard frantic calls for help from the living room. He raced toward the pleas of the distressed damsel, and found Eli lying face down on the couch, her nose and forehead (but nothing else) hanging over the ledge as she cried in desperation that she was “falling.” Happily, she was rescued by a father much amused.

In the evening Lia went to girls night out where she learned about graphic design (i.e. having a cooler blog). She came home all a-fire and in search of a new template for our own illustrious blog. She found one, but the combined efforts of all our editors failed to make it work. So we settled for the more modest fare against the backdrop of which you now read these immortal words. This change in format is only the latest evidence of the fearless and imaginative impetuosity which, together with the sterling caliber of our shining English prose, make of this the first blog of the world.