It’s a busy time of year, so I’ve turned to all sorts of crap to distract me. (The year is not busy enough for you yet? Oh, aren’t you just the luckiest duckling!)

Actually, my “snark attack” on your lack of work is quite apropos to this week’s theme, sort of.

Lemme explain: remember in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing when the dude put up the two four-finger rings next to each other, one inscribed with “LOVE” and the other inscribed with “HATE”? This week, I’m holding up only one fist. And I’ll give you a hint: it ain’t the fist of love.

Ten years later, people everywhere are still quoting the sharp dialogue and witty one-liners of Mike Judge’s first feature length film, Office Space, but the only thing people in Ithaca may remember about their trip to the theater on Saturday to watch Judge’s newest flick, Extract, was how loud and excessive the two people in the middle row laughed throughout the entire film. Sure the movie had its funny moments, but none deserving more than a chuckle. Certainly not the hysterical laughter the middle row was providing them. No, Extract won’t go down in history as one of the worst movies ever, it will just become one of those “forgotten” movies that get subconsciously passed over in Blockbuster.

Over the last month and half, we’ve been drinking a lot, but it hasn’t been happy drinking. It’s been filled with stress, fretting over the lack of jobs and internships, and mourning the downfall of our University’s once-robust budget. But, alas! Slope Day is near — the one day where we can drink, dance and sing along to shitty music without a care in the world. We may not have our papers done. We may not have jobs. We may not have language classes, but at least we have alcohol and Asher Roth. Without further ado, Berry Patch presents the top four people we’d like to drink with on Slope Day ...

Mary Beth Grant

Judicial Administrator

Even before he opened his mouth, British actor and screenwriter John Cleese was already exercising the craft that lifted him to fame — making the audience laugh.

“He is part comedian. He is part psychologist, part master-teacher and fully, a public intellectual,” said Provost Kent Fuchs as he introduced Cleese, whose serious nods to Fuchs’s words enticed laughter from the 700 audience members in Statler Auditorium.

President Barack Obama just can’t quit his Blackberry. Even though the U.S. Commander in Chief is not allowed to have a personal cell phone, Barry has bucked the trend and kept his fingers typing away on his crackberry. But closer to home, rumor has it that our very own President David Skorton also suffers from the same cell-phone related addiction. Though most administrators have decided in favor of the iPhone, Skorton has chosen the Blackberry Bold, and we hear he has a bad case of Blackberry thumb. We got a hold of his PIN (it’s 31b0c98e, btw), and contrary to popular belief, not everything the president says sounds like a polished press release. Here’s our exclusive bbm conversation with Skorton ...

Cornell Sun: Yoooo! Back from break?

It's been a rumblin’-tumblin’, rough and wild, but altogether HEROICALLY SA-WEET first week on the job down here at HEROES & VILLAINS. We’ve been on a HEROICALLY wild ride getting things in order and figuring out what the heck we’re supposed to do now that we’re in charge on the 127th. Scary, scary thoughts. Despite the ensuing misery, chaos and debauchery that is a — HEROIC? Naw, more like VILLAINOUS — Sun editorship, we’ve got the HEROIC Spring Break on the horizon and things couldn't look brighter.

Stocks crashing! Endowments disappearing! Budgets trimming! The start of this semester has seen incredibly trying times as establishments across the country fall to shambles. In light of the times, the University plans to cut budgets across the board. Our crack team of Berrypatch reporters have also discovered that in order to pick up some of the fiscal slack, the University Board of Trustee’s voted to incur its own budget cuts for its upcoming Trustee Weekend. The following provisions are to take place ...

Pack ’em like Sardines

Add/drop. What a miserable phrase. Add/Drop. Ain’t no passing craze. It’s not even hyphenated like self-respecting series’ of connecting words. It uses a forward slash, which is the bastard redheaded stepchild of Father Punctuation. But what’s really terrible about it is the fact that it means pretty much nothing beyond a headache with Cornell software.

Why do we not have a shopping period here? And why do we kind of pretend we can add courses three weeks into the semester? Every Cornell student that has yet to receive a major blow to the head realizes that if you add a course after the first week you are behind. And after the second week, well, you’re drowning in a rapidly flushing toilet filled with a Big Red deuce.

Being that I am incredibly poor and even more incredibly unemployed, I thought that Cornell students could benefit from some of my job-seeking wisdom. I will not make any illegitimate claims to job-hunting greatness, but let me just say that I have worked summers at a guitar store. Impressive, no?

The first thing that any good-to-great career counselor will tell you is that you’re going to need a great resume. And any great resume is going to start out with a great objective. For this step, it will be sufficient to reword the phrase, “please employ me so that I can pay my loans,” in as flowery a way as your sense of morality allows you.

In Yiddish, dank is the opposite of kvetch, and means “thanks.” Dank to Cornell for holding the first week of classes during Inauguration. Once I got past being bitter at not being able to go to inauguration and having school on MLK Day, I was able to see the positive side of things: not having two of my five classes this week because of Inauguration. So dank Cornell for keeping me in Ithaca while my profs woop it up in DC.

— JM

Both of my parents called me today. Not because they were concerned about their daughter, wanting to tell her how bursting with pride they are at my mere existence. They wanted to talk about the weather. “Oh, it’s an uncomfortable 80 degrees here, sun shining, not a cloud in the sky ... How’s it there?”

Very funny, Dad.