The new College Republican shirt for this year is a picture of Ronald Reagan and the text “What He Said” (similar to the one above). So, what did he really say?

“If you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all?” (on forest preservation)

In 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store

“You can’t help those who simply will not be helped. One problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, is people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.”

He cited a Chicago “Welfare Queen” who had ripped off $150,000 from the government, using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen social security cards, and four fictional dead husbands. The country was outraged; Reagan dutifully promised to roll back welfare.

Charming!

Picture from Thoseshirts.com

The offending email that went out a few hours ago:

Dear students,

At the end of July and the beginning of August, University Information Services will be moving faculty and staff to a separate e-mail system. We will require two weekend long outages to accomplish this, scheduled for:

July 25 at 6:00 PM to July 28 at 8:00 AM
August 1 at 6:00 PM to August 4 at 8:00 AM

During these outages, you will not be able to access GUMail e-mail.

If you have a critical need for e-mail during these outages, please contact the Student Help Desk for assistance…

What constitutes a “critical need for e-mail”? Weekend tasks from your Devil Wears Prada-esque boss? Love notes from your significant other? The secret code word for a Kidz Bop concert presale? UIS doesn’t provide any criteria for what makes an excuse legit. Everyone should apply for a dispensation just to see if they’re favored students.

It’s good that Georgetown is attempting to improve faculty and staff email service; students should be next. And for most students, any important messages of a non-Georgetown nature are probably going through Gmail anyway. But 62 email-less hours in a row, two weekends in a row? It’s going to be rough.

In April, we complained that cities across the country were getting Google Street View while Washington, one of the nation’s most interesting-looking cities, went unphotographed. Now even Paris is on Street View. I guess it’s good that people can see some world capital, even if it’s not ours.

Speaking of Street View, it recently came to Houston (home of the Blog Summer White House) and I understand what people in the first cities to get Street View were saying about creepiness. Just looking for directions, I was confronted with the back of my car and my mom doing yard work.

Can you believe DC’s missing out experiences like that?

Flickr photo from user 0h used under a Creative Commons license

Losing your GOCard sucks. You can’t get into your dorm, the library, Leo’s, or anywhere else on campus that matters. Non-college student D.C. residents will soon get the same feeling when the One Card–a new centralized identification system which will be their library card, public school attendance sheet, rec center pass, and more –spreads its mark of the Beast all over the District.

At first I was a little freaked out by the 1984-ishness of the new card, but then I remembered how excited I got when I found out that the new GOCards come with SmartTrip.

Plus, the ACLU gives it the thumbs up, and as people better at spotting threats to civil liberties than me, I’ll believe them when they say the One Card doesn’t infringe on privacy. Hopefully the city will ignore Georgetown’s lesson and not charge $25 for a replacement.

So, the overpriced Robin Williams show and the new mascot were both a little lame. Still, something tells me our friends over in Foggy Bottom will be all right–GW is switching its student email service to Gmail in the fall.

The change comes with benefits: larger storage capacity, liberated server space, and University savings. If only Georgetown could have those things, too–but we can! Hopefully a successful switch to Gmail at GW will encourage our own administrators to follow suit.