Flashback: It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. The year was 2007. The place, here. And two newly sororitized girls awoke in a haze. Where specifically they were, we cannot say, and whence specifically they were, we cannot say either. Except that it was a Tuesday morning, they were outdoors (?) and sobriety managed to elude them. Nothing new. Those days it was drunk on the reg, yachts on the reg, poppin’ caps on the reg, stealin’ cars on the reg, run-on sentences on the reg …

R: that’s enough.

Number 38 on the list of 161 things to do during your undergraduate career at Cornell: Go on a wine tour. A prime tourist activity of the Finger Lakes, wine and winemaking is a process has been perfected over the years, culminating in a myriad of colors, textures and flavors that can appease any palette. Ramon Mira de Orduña, viticulture and enology, studies the microbiological aspect of winemaking and how it can improve the winemaking process in light of environmental change.

Wow! Bro, I don’t want to kill your buzz, or anything, but you got to hear this. I just found out how beer is made!

Talk in my last column of lace- and otherwise scantily-clad women on the Fall ’09 Runway generated conversation among some of my friends and my editor about Cornell students’ most frequent occasion for getting scandalous: going out. I was going to say: “Friday and Saturday nights,” and then I remembered how the weekend apparently starts on Wednesday. As if there were not enough to figure out, getting dressed to go out is complicated by our lovely fall / winter weather.

Dudes can be cruel to be kind. As a womyn, I can say that. Dudes, you can be cruel — to be “kind” — either to embarrass us or reproduce with us.

Case in point: about a month ago I was walking to a party with my gal pal. We were gabbing about, you know, Sex and the City, and which character we’re most like, and what sort of vodka-tinis we’d be imbibing later, and then we talked about doing our nails, and kissing boys and having the red tide come visit us every 28 days.

Hello everybody, and welcome to a new season of Ithaca Bites, the Red Letter Daze food column. Every week, I’ll discuss a different dish or ingredient, from the humdrum to the exotic, with a little bit of science thrown in for flavoring.

As the fall semester roars into gear and leaves things like relaxation and sunshine in the dust, the average Cornell student’s diet becomes much less dependent upon picnic staples like watermelon and hamburgers as beer consumption returns to its nine-month plateau.

Still, each swig of Keystone and Pabst Blue Ribbon has a key ingredient in common with those fluffy hamburger buns, and that is a nifty little creature called a yeast.

After less than six months since its grand opening, the Green Café is already making a major addition to its offerings. This Thursday, Green Café, at the corner of College Avenue and Dryden Road, will be opening a full-service bar and adding alcoholic cocktails to its burgeoning selection of upscale food and drinks. According to staff, the bar will offer over 200 varieties of liquor, beer on tap and a special bar menu prepared by a new chef.

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

As you could tell from last week, I’m on a reflecting bender, which is something I like to call a reflender. But this week it’s turned into a productive exercise in my literacy. I did it. I read Things Fall Apart. I chillaxed with Okonkwo, finished up my Freshman Reading Project, only, approximately, 1369 days late, give or take. Again, since I’m on a roll in the spirit of reflending, Okonkwo and I have decided to tell the story of how things fell apart in my life, also known as “Freshman Fall.” We shall tell this story through a series of quotations that I found particularly illustrative from the book, quotations that did not make me sad when I hadn’t read the book before, because, in fact, it is the worst book ever written.

As the end of the year approaches, campus officials have begun a thorough review of various public safety measures in light of the University’s recent budget cuts. Representatives from the three colleges in Ithaca — Ithaca College, Tompkins County Community College and Cornell — met last night in the Africana Center for a panel discussion of the challenges facing their respective student bodies.