- Via Brutal Women, this is way fun: Make your own South Park character. In two languages!
- Also, Brutal Women linked to this NYTimes article, explaining that it describes NYU’s newest suicide-prevention measure. Does it say something terrible about me that reading the headline, after that setup, cracked me up?
- It would have been more timeless, and hence funnier, without the Terri Schiavo reference, but this post nonetheless is pretty brilliant. Via Balloon Juice, who calls it “The Greatest Blog Post of All Time.”
You might be right! I was seeing it as a plastic disposable knife, but it could be a spoon. What…
I’m missing the humor in “After Suicides, N.Y.U. Will Limit Access to Balconies.” Describing it as “NYU’s newest suicide-prevention measure” seems pretty straightforward. Is there something I’m missing?
It’s a good move on their part, too.
I don’t know. Are students really more likely to commit suicide because they have access to balconies? Or is it just that jumping off a balcony is a spectacular and public enough method that it’s likely to make the news?
I hate to be cynical, but spending a lot of time on a university campus will do that to you.
I don’t want to go into all the details but, yes, I had friends tell me that they were thinking of killing themselves by jumping off campus buildings, and gave up after they found out that the doors to the balconies were locked. Most likely, they wouldn’t have actually done it. But of the hundreds who think about it, a few would go through with it. Some students actually do kill themselves that way.
On a lighter note,
FoolishOwl in Southpark
I believe the crack up is a wording thing.
it sounds more like “after leaving your room, please remember to lock up”
so “after killing yourself, a bouncer will be left in place to card everyone attending the balcony”
Barry, how did you save the South Park image and post it on your blog? I tried to right-click after I finished mine, but I’m not sure how to save the picture. I’d like to post mine on my blog.
Trish:
I did a screen capture (on a machine running windows, usually you do this by pressing the “print screen” key). Then I opened a new file in Photoshop (but any image editor should work), pressed “control V” to paste the screen cap into the new file, and cropped it down to just the South Park image.
For what it’s worth, my highschool paper ran a story on suicide. The initial lay-out had a headline over three columns, as follows:
“Growing Societal Demands
Prompt Teenage Suicide.”?
But the final lay-out had to make the headline fit over two columns, reducing it to:
“Growing Society
Demands Prompt
Teenage Suicides.”?
That sparked a memorable journalism lesson!
I could waste hours with the Southpark character generator.
And that blog post is freaking hilarious if only because, honestly, I can’t tell the difference between it and two-thirds of the comment threads out there.
Um, “The Greatest Blog Post of All Time” is supposed to be the one that calls people imbeciles, retards, morons, and cretins? No thank you. Maybe if it were sexist or racist slurs.
Gotta agree with blue. I am still trying to figure out why you consider “the greatest blog post of all time” such a great post.
It ticked my funny bone, and I was thoughtless about the politics of it. My bad; if I could do it over, in light of Blue’s crtiique, I wouldn’t link to it again. Sorry about that.
I wrote the NYU newspaper editorial the Times quotes, and I currently live in one of the rooms with a balcony that will be closed next year (though I’ll be long gone by then). The decision to close the balconies is pretty silly. Yes, there has been a rash of suicides at NYU over the past year and a half, and that obviously needs to be dealt with. But locking doors and windows isn’t the way to go about it. The NYU community is disjointed and can be isolating. The administration is a bureaucratic mess that rarely accepts student input. There’s a mutual antagonism between the students and the university itself. All of these things make students here unhappy. The sense of isolation can be overwhelming, even for people like me who are outgoing and have a wide social network. And I say all this as someone who loves NYU and really enjoys going here. I can only imagine what the kids who really hate it think.
Perhaps greater attention should be paid to the fact that NYU closed its office of sexual assault prevention, support and education in favor of opening a wider “health exchange” in the wake of the suicides, with no single person specializing in sexual assault issues. This, despite a two-year effort on behalf of NOW-NYU to simply start a 24-hour sexual assault hotline. I’d like to see The New York Times cover that.