The Biddie: an Unwelcome Visitor
On any night Thursday through Saturday, swarms of Ugg boot-wearing, miniskirt-clad collegiate females can be seen making a ritual migration to various Allston bars (most notably the appropriately named “Tits”) in search for a temporary mate (see: Bros).
In the urban jungle of Boston University, a previously undiscovered creature has recently come to light. Here, I take an exclusive, never-before-seen close-up look at this creature, the biddie (Uggbootus blackoutus).
The direct origins of the biddie are unknown, but legend has it that overexposure to shitty television such as Jersey Shore (the “Snookie Syndrome”), liberal allowance with daddy’s credit card, and general lack of self respect all contribute to the biddie population explosion. Although commonly thought to be a direct relative of the sorostitute, this is unsubstantiated.
These individuals are generally characterized by a short, petite frame, often seen wearing spandex and miniskirts leaving little to the imagination. Biddies can also be seen wearing American Apparel attire (the more ridiculous and obscene, the better) and Ugg boots or heels.
A nocturnal animal, the biddie flocks to Allston “bro” bars, particularly Tavern in the Square (or “Tits”), White Horse, Wonderbar, and the infamous “J Tree” (Joshua Tree) on weekday and weekend nights. These creatures can often be seen communicating in an undecipherable language (drunken cackling), texting on their Blackberry phones, taking scandalous photographs for Facebook that would render them unemployable if leaked. The diet of this creature generally involves Smirnoff Ice, colorful and fruity cocktails, as well as shots of Southern Comfort and flavored vodka.
The biddie’s mating rituals are peculiar and defy normal social conventions. Rather than selecting a monogamous mate, these individuals can often be found in their natural habitats waiting to be courted by a bro several times per weekend. Bros may or may not utilize “peacock”-style features (bright colored shirts or hats, ridiculous and unfashionable attire) to stand out from their fellow bros. Biddies generally become more liberal with their mate selection as they become increasingly more intoxicated. A particular subgroup of biddies “Harvard Hoochies” are highly selective with their mates and almost exclusively select Harvard males belonging to elite social clubs (Final Clubs).
Other creatures that coexist in the biddie habitat are quite varied. One creature, the “Comm Ave Runway Model”, is characterized by excessively designer-dressed girls who strut (literally) up and down Commonwealth. Another, the aforementioned bro, a man, possibly belong to a fraternity, who wear rugby shirts/baseball caps and drink to the point of blacking out while getting their prowl on at bars and parties. Finally, the hipster, the tight jeans-wearing prophets who were here to save us mere mortals from the culturally-sheltered mainstream, while being snarky and drinking a PBR or two along the way.
The biddie has existed within the BU biosphere for quite some time, but the taxonomical original seems to be from two sources. The first being the (unofficial) Boston University Department of Snow and Weather twitter account @BUSnowAlert which referred to the particular habits of biddies, e.g. “If you can walk to an Allston party in the snow wearing high heels and a miniskirt, then you sure as hell can make it to class today. #BU” The second source is the infamous “Harvard Hoochies”, self-described BU biddies that “husband hunt at Harvard Final Clubs… [and] ward off RUHGs (random ugly Harvard girls)”.
This influx of the biddie population has had devastating impacts on the BU community, not unlike the zebra mussel invasion of the Great Lakes. Do not be fooled by the @HarvardHoochies’ (Uggbootus blackoutus Harvardian) witty banter on Twitter. Based on the ability to form sentences and utilize complex literary techniques such as satire, it seems that this subgroup has evolved beyond the extreme level of stupidity common among their fellow jungle peer group and actually contributes to society.
The demonstrable stupidity of the Uggbootus blackoutus is easily demonstrated by reading a short passage from the about section of the “Rants of Pour Girls” blog:
Rants of Pour Girls is a tastefully unrefined Blog currently composed by three 21+ females living in Boston and the Greater Boston area. MyBarNameisLola, ItsLyddieBitch, and CallMeWeezyFsBaby are dedicated to bringing you all the gory details about shit that pisses us off… Inspired by the plethora of grammatically incorrect Tucker-Maxish garbage blogs out there written by guys, we felt the world was in need of some estrogen-driven ranting and pouring. And damnit, we were right…
This typifies the average biddie intelligence:
- Run-on sentences used in a passage insulting someone’s grammar
- Ignoring the fact that the subject of criticism (one Tucker Max), is a Duke Law graduate, while these individuals attend a barely-top 50 undergraduate institution
- Many of the so-called rants on this blog provide a unique window into the depraved thoughts of the biddie, especially one entitled ““The Get MTV Off of DJ Pauly D’s D Rant.”
- Though it may be tempting (particularly for the bro strata) to exploit this newfound creature for its sexual proclivities, it is highly ill-advised as there is a high chance of brain damage. It is the hope of this columnist that the BU community will rise up and halt the spread of the biddie population. Though inconvenient, the truth is that left unchecked, the limited resources of this community (esp. straight males) cannot support the continued growth of this population.
*Special thanks to the BU Quad and Harvard Hoochies for inspiring this piece.
Sucks to BU: We’re dancing this month, no thanks to BU administration.
I just returned from one of the most exciting experiences of my entire four years at Boston University: the Men’s Basketball America East Championship. The Boston University just beat Stony Brook 56-54 to secure a spot in the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball championship. Let me say that again: Boston University is in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championships. For those of you who don’t go to my fine University, let me put this in perspective:
Never have I ever… looked at BU as a basketball school.
Spirit fingers before John Holland’s free throw to win the game with 2.4 seconds left on the clock.
The Class of 2011 has had quite a few notable sporting events in their time. We rioted in Kenmore when the Red Sox won in 2008. We won the NCAA Hockey Championship in 2009, for the first time since 1995. And now, the 2011 America East Championship, to secure a bid in the March Madness tournament.
Un-fucking-believable.
BU’s fans getting ready to rush the court after the 2.4s Stony Brook attempt at scoring.
Though, this win is not without a slightly heavy heart. I stood at the game alongside some my friends and peers, yet I did not feel my administration was standing with me.
Time and time again, it seems as if the Boston University administration completely disregards the student body in their decision-making process. In fact, it was once summed up to me as “the students at this university succeed in spite of what the administration does.”
I agree.
Stony Brook University showed up in full force with about 11 buses filled with 600+ students, including the full marching band, dance team, cheer squad, and two sections worth of belligerent students.
Stony Brook’s student section, complete with marching band, dance team, cheerleading, and two full sections of the Agganis Arena stands.
Boston University showed up with our pep band, dance team (wow, where were you in the last three years of my life?), cheer squad, and an anemic student section behind one of the hoops.
BU’s student section. Looks kinda empty, hm?
BU’s chant “Where is Stony Brook?” said it best: where the hell is this school?
Okay, by my count, this school is nearly 200 miles away and they have to take a ferry to get to BU. Spring break aside, how do you mess this up, BU administration? How in the hell did our student section not dominate damn near the entirety of Agganis Arena?
Concession #1: it’s BU’s spring break. Many of my friends left on Thursday, Friday, or earlier today for flights to places with much better weather. Understandable.
Concession #2: BU has rarely, if ever had a legitimate basketball team before. I had never been to a basketball game before today. Call me a bandwagoner, I embrace the term. GO BU!
That said, there were numerous things that the BU administration could have done to help facilitate better student involvement at the game.
1. Make tickets available and accessible. Stony Brook GAVE AWAY (you hear that BU? yes, for free) tickets to the game. The only thing students had to pay for was transportation to the game. BU basketball ticket sales were not only confusing and unpublicized, but obnoxious. If you had a sports pass, it was free. If you did not, it was $10. If you wanted to get a ticket, you had to go all the way to Agganis (not centrally located) to pick one up.
Normally, this would not be a problem, but this was one of the most important basketball games in the last decade and it fell during our spring break. I, of all people, understand the business side of things, but BU/Agganis should have put aside its revenue-generating motto in light of the basketball team’s success and given away free tickets in the GSU during the past week. Considering the amount of sports pass tickets that were not used due to spring break, this barely would have cost BU a thing.
2. Keep dorms open to allow student attendance at the game. Once again, spring break is happening this week. One of the side effects of that is that the Boston University dorms (Warren, Towers, 1019 Comm. Ave, HoJo, Myles, Danielsen, etc.) close at 12PM on Saturday (today) until after break. Despite our team being the favorite to win a conference championship, no one thought that maybe we should leave the dorms open for 4-5 hours to allow students to actually go to the games.
Putting aside all of the people that had already booked plane, bus, and train tickets – this would have at least helped convince New England/New York “locals” whose parents were driving in to pick them up.
3. Tell RSIG to chill out: it’s a basketball game, not a national security concern. The blatant nepotism of using RSIG (one of the board members is allegedly related to one of the co-founders) aside, RSIG consistently ruins the experience of BU student fans, and this game was no exception. Despite seats being open in our anemic student section (which was broadcast on national television via ESPN2, by the way), RSIG personnel were limiting BU fans entrance into the student section. Unless you had a special ticket, you weren’t getting into the “fan” section.
To close this article, let me just say that I am incredibly happy that our basketball team has been successful, but I wonder, if I had not been browsing random articles about the hockey team, would I even have known that BU was one game away from March Madness? Once again Boston University administration has missed the boat on an amazing opportunity. We hired a fantastic coach from Villanova, a team consistently in the March Madness tournament but yet the school fails to engage the students in a critical game.
Even the ESPN 2 announcers pointed out how much bigger the Stony Brook University section was compared to Boston University’s.
I applaud John Holland and the Boston University Men’s Basketball team in making it to the March Madness tournament and I wish you luck against the #1 seed. As for the BU administration, once again, you have proven that it sucks to BU.
Pat Chambers cuts one of the loops off the net, sharing the experience with the rest of the team. BU Admin, take a lesson: sharing is caring.
#DoesSocialMediaMatter? #IslamicUprising #Egypt #Tunisia
As I wrote this article, breaking news was released announcing a speech by Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak this evening where many incorrectly anticipated he would step down from power after 17 days of protests. This is the second of what seems to be a string of protests and uprisings (see: Tunisia, Syria, Jordan, Yemen) and across the Middle East, which many claim that popular social media websites including Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook have had a strong role in facilitating.
There is a revolution afoot in the Middle East. The first domino to fall was Tunisia, where Twitter was instrumental in promoting the activities of protestors to an otherwise apathetic world media. A second domino has been knocked in Egypt, where protests were coordinated through a Facebook group started by Google’s Head of Marketing for Middle East and North Africa, Wael Ghonim. The contagion effect of these protests in Tunisa and Egypt has already made waves throughout the rest of the Arab world with political unrest coming to light in Syria, Jordan, and Yemen.
One of the more interesting facets of these protests is the impact that social media has had in helping facilitate them. I mean to say exactly that: help facilitate. Not catalyze, but rather, act as a utility in sending a message out to a decentralized mass united behind a cause in a way that we have never seen before. It is particularly telling how important social media is in an area of the world where freedom of the press is not guaranteed and the government shuts down all Internet Service Providers and SMS in the wake of such protests, yet the message still finds a way to reach the world. As both an internal and external communications platform, Facebook and Twitter have been instrumental in organizing the so-called “Facebook Youth” who are behind the protests and getting their message out to the rest of the world.
Another key point to consider: traditional media has failed us in many ways, including speed, accuracy, and relevancy of coverage. I can open Twitter, search the “Egypt” hash tag, and obtain insightful information from people on the ground. If I flip on MSNBC, chances are I’m going to be listening to something about Martha Stewart’s dog or something similarly irrelevant to my life. I agree that the drawbacks are significant, especially the lack of analysis, information overload, and decentralization of information. However, it is important that most people do not get their news from the Economist or Foreign Policy magazine, so the insightful analysis noted above is mostly absent to begin with.
It is easy to become jaded watching the world news or reading a cursory overview of affairs abroad from NY Times or USA Today. Chances are, I wouldn’t pick up a newspaper and read a random story about protests in a Middle Eastern country, but if I saw one of my friends post on Facebook about it, that brings the issue home. And it’s hard to be jaded when you hear something like this recording.
Of course, there are plenty of naysayers about the importance of social media, who claim that this is not a “Twitter Revolution” and that social media has had no real impact. Most notably, Malcom Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, who wrote a rather lengthy article in the fall of 2010 that opened with an important tale of social activism in the 1960s: the Greensboro Sit Ins. He also saw fit to address Egypt, in particular, with a brief piece that’s an outcry against what he claims is an overemphasis on the “how” of communication, rather than the message itself.
Gladwell even went so far as to say, if Mao’s comment “power springs from the barrel of a gun” were to have been said today:
We would say that Mao posted that power comes from the barrel of a gun on his Facebook page, or we would say that he blogged about gun barrels on Tumblr… the verb would come to completely overcome the noun, the part about the gun would be forgotten, and the the big takeaway would be: Whoa. Did you see what Mao just tweeted?
TechCrunchTV anchor Paul Carr argues similarly that Twitter is not the cause of these revolutions, that people would have risen up without social media.
Let me reiterate. No one relevant is saying that Twitter caused these events. That is not the point. The point is, as TechCrunchTV’s Sarah Lacy says, “as media changes there are inherent characteristics of any new media that necessarily redefine how we all experience the news, and by the same token, frequently have ripple effects that define real policy, how people react, pressure put on governments…”
I honestly do not think Gladwell “gets it.” Of course the point is not that Twitter has allowed the people to rally around something and protest. The Tunisians and Egyptians have been living under dictatorship for decades. It would have happened without Twitter or Facebook. The relevance here is the evolution of activists ability to communicate through social media and to communicate their message where the traditional media does not.
The final point I would like to make is about the importance of Facebook and Twitter as a chronicle of history. These events in Egypt, Tunisia, and the rest of the Middle East are momentous. They are quite literally “history in the making” and the implications for future political scientists, historians, students, and documentary producers of having access to pictures, tweets, Facebook statuses, and video from the event unfolding are astounding. Imagine being able to piece together pictures and camera phone footage of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the start of America’s revolution, for example. These social media platforms are serving as an mechanism to record the uprisings as they happen. Regardless of the significance of Twitter, Facebook, and the like in facilitating the uprisings in the Middle East, the fact that the data can serve as a primary source record is as important for the people of these nations as anything.