I love Fordham. L-o-v-e it. I’ve got my school t-shirt and my string bag and, yes, that might have been me you saw at the basketball game singing along to The Ram. If you asked me to describe the essence of Fordham, I could tell you about the Jesuit education tradition, or the hard-working student body, or the thrill of studying in New York. Or I could just buy it for you.

Thanks to a new company called Masik Collegiate Fragrances, you can now purchase the scent of your school in perfume form. If scent is the sense most closely tied to memory, the kind folks at Masik have now made it possible to capture the memories of the best years of your life with just a whiff of their product. Want to show off your school pride in a stylish, subtle way? Buy a bottle of your school’s perfume!

I know what you’re thinking: how did they capture the distinctive smell of public-bathroom-disinfectant and Natty Light with just a pinch of mildew? And who on earth would ever wear that? But their methods are much more creative than that. Masik creates specific fragrances based on a variety of factors, such as school colors, traditions, and flowers found on campus. The goal is not to recreate a scent with which students are already familiar (i.e. spilled laundry detergent and leftover pizza), but a new scent that students can adopt and wear and begin to associate with their college memories. Not a bad idea.

Currently, they have developed fragrances for UNC-Chapel Hill and Penn State, with Auburn, UF, Tennessee, and others on the way. (Note to Masik: anytime you want to get started on Fordham’s, be my guest.) So if you’ve got any Tar Heels or Nittany Lions fans on your holiday gift list this year, $60.00 will get you a bottle of their school perfume/cologne. And be on the lookout in case your school is next; perhaps you, too could be spritzing a bottle of Eau du Alma Mater in the near future!

We all know how exciting it is to see a classic hit like “Don’t Stop Believin” by Journey pop up on a list of stealable downloads, saying it will only take 20 seconds until that baby is yours to keep forever. You say, “Dude. I have to download that. I don’t care if I’m stealing. It’s JOURNEY for gosh sakes.”

Tempting, I know.

And even though the government has been warning us to stop illegally downloading music, ever since the beginning days of Napster, we continue to do it anyway. We are such badasses.

Recently, however, there’s been an even bigger crackdown, and it’s college kids they’re after. With the rise of the Recording Industry Association of America, emails have been sent to hundreds of college students across the country and counting, warning them they have been caught in the act and if they don’t settle their cases out of court, they will be fined more money than college kids can afford.

MSN.com reports the case of University of Nebraska-Lincoln sophomore Sarah Barg, who received an email advising her of the fact she was caught downloading over 300 songs (some of which included songs by the Spice Girls – AWESOME!) on a campus computer using Ares – a site much like Kazaa, Limewire and Bearshare. At first, she brushed off the email, as we all probably would. Some one who downloads the Spice Girls doesn’t exactly scream “evil threat to society” to me. Read More »