Tag Archives: broad and cecil

Craig: New Twitter brilliantly documents party hookups

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Close your eyes for a second. Well, keep reading this, so don’t close your eyes. Never mind, just clear your mind for a moment.

Picture yourself in a filthy basement, your vision fuzzy and personal censor removed. Drenched in sweat, a remixed version of some top-40 hit is blasting so loud you can feel your eardrums trying to pop out of your skull.

Your friends are texting you frantically to come get Chinese food with them, but you’re a bit preoccupied. There’s no room in your mouth for General Tso’s chicken, because it’s currently being occupied by the tongue of someone you’ve just met. They taste like a combination of flat keg beer and cigarettes, but that doesn’t stop you from groping and necking like the world is about to end and this is the last person you’ll ever have any intimate interaction with again.

Chances are, you’ve been in this situation before. A party, a dance, a random hookup; most have enjoyed  – or regretted, depending on who you ask – the occasional consequence of party life on a college campus.

Yet no worries, because this embarrassing display is just a moment lost in time, a brief footnote in the history of your college career to laugh about the next morning. Right?

Wrong. So, so wrong. Because an incredible new Twitter account, @TempleMakeouts, is documenting these scenes from the underbelly of Temple’s weekend nights, and you’re only a friend’s iPhone away from being exposed to almost 2,000 followers for your actions.

“If someone doesn’t want to be put on @TempleMakeouts, they have to realize we have created a campus-wide social networking game on the weekends,” said one of the six admins for @TempleMakeouts, who all remain anonymous, “People go out targeting to submit pictures of people getting freaky on the dance floor.”

That’s right, partygoers. Watch out, because @TempleMakeouts is the new social equalizer. It doesn’t matter who you are, because the camera shows no mercy. @TempleMakeouts gives us the gritty portrayal of a side of Temple that you won’t find in the school brochure; a beautiful canvas filled with brief encounters of lust and substance fueled acts of desire. And I can’t get enough of it.

For a longer commentary piece on @TempleMakeouts, check out the Opinion section of the March 19 issue of The Temple News.

Daniel Craig can be reached at daniel.craig@temple.edu.

Iannelli: Responding to the the response to the State of the Union

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There are very few things that I hate more than being talked down to, which may very well be why your much-discussed State of the Union response last week rubbed me in the exact opposite direction of my fur on Tuesday, Mr. Rubio.  I caught every single word – and gulp –of your address, Mr. Senator, and to be frank, I demand an apology of sorts.

You see, my compatriots and I are the most connected generation in history.  We are able to, in a moment’s notice, use the spooky magic of the Internet to fact check every single word you broadcast into the public sector in real time.  And we enjoy doing it.  We appreciate facts, and we expect you to use them, abuse them and make them up as you please, like a real politician.  So when you turn in a speech full of enough sweeping generalizations to make a teen abstinence activist blush, inquisitive college kids like me get a tad ornery.

Thank you for kindly informing me that the government creates “complicated rules and laws.”  If you could hang out in my living room and inform me when my fireplace is hot, that’d be a massive help as well. Your job as a Senator is to create “complicated rules and laws,” Mr. Rubio.  You are the government.  If you refuse to make the scary, scary rules that allow our country to operate and keep businesses from dumping asbestos into my local water supply, who will?

Another gem from your rebuttal speech: “Our government can’t control the weather.”  Why not, Mr. Senator?  The Chinese claim to have built weather cannons for the Beijing Olympics that destroyed the city’s typical life-smothering smog.  What say you to that?  Is this why your party fears the Chinese so much?  Can I now blame Philadelphia’s inconveniently snowy February on menacing Chinese weather guns?  I demand answers.

Jokes aside, I wanted to like you, Mr. Rubio.  I wanted to believe that you really were the “Savior of the Republican Party,” as Time Magazine was so quick to anoint you this month.  I wanted to believe that your party’s recent thrashing at the Presidential polls had forced your constituents to modernize and align yourselves with causes that young people could get behind.  Like any semblance of science, for instance.

Instead, you denied global warming, blankly ignored the raging gun control debate, and served the American public more clichéd statements about Republican values than a seventh-grade Social Studies class.  Thank you for informing me that you think government is a bad, bad thing.  It’s great to know that you hate taxes more than Ke$ha hates disinfecting herself.  It was nice to hear that you think that I should be able to afford college, Mr. Senator.

It would have been even nicer if you told me how.

Jerry Iannelli can be reached at gerald.iannelli@temple.edu or on Twitter @jerryiannelli.