If you missed the last Overheard on Twitter, you can check it out here.

• @Lisa_Dunn: “U of T just called me to ask for money for students to be able to sleep over in Robarts library. Ew!”
• @scarletqueen: “if U of T taught Buffyology (aka Buffy studies, i mean we have women studies, why not?) i would totally major in that shit. MAKE THIS HAPPEN”
• @hughdashhyphen: “I am the urinal cake to U of T’s disintegrative parabola of piss.”
• @otakupeter: “family.utoronto.ca is a REALLY BAD IDEA, I will PERSONALLY deliver letters explaining why to David Naylor’s house if you give them to me”
• @carmisandiego: “i hate when people say “UFT” instead of “U of T”. please tell me what the F stands for. fools.”
• @moepickles: “This reading “week” is only going to make me procrastinate more. #UofT“
• (more…)

Do you have a cohort of midterm exams staring you in the face? Are you feeling stressed out? Are you alternatively feeling not stressed out enough? What better way to deal with the myriad of horrible, crippling problems that you must have than to fake your way out of school? Sure, it sounds easy in principle, but without the grim specter of the cross-country running unit in Grade 7 gym class to spurn us all onto greater heights of Munchausen’s Syndrome, how are we university students ever to get out of class? Never fear, for here is a list of the three ways to fake your way out of school!*

The War Resistor Classic

This is one of the more simple of our Get out of Class Schemes©. It involves going to a pawnshop, buying a pistol, and shooting yourself in the foot.

• Pros: No professor is going to hold you to the syllabus when you present him or her with your mangled appendage. Plus, this worked for my dad’s friend when he needed to dodge the draft to Vietnam in the 1970s.
• Cons: The Sisyphean task that is finding ironic, rare Nikes will be further complicated by the missing toe.

The Spanish InFAKEluenza 2.0

This entails logging onto ROSI and clicking the “Declare Flu Absences” button. If you are asking yourself questions like, “Do I need to have the flu to use this?” or “Will I need a doctor’s note to verify my absences?” the answer is “almost certainly not.”

• Pros: It is, as the system currently exists, impossible to verify whether or not you have swine flu. This could allow you to, say, take a strategic break right at midterms and resume classes when you are feeling more refreshed. And when we say, “Refreshed”, we really mean “Back from Burning Man 2010.”
• Cons: We strongly council against using “Swine Flu” as an excuse for non-consecutive absences. You can also be sure that, as soon as you put your name on that list, the RCMP is going to be encasing your house in an enormous plastic bubble, ET style.

The Heene-dinburg

This is a somewhat more elaborate operation than simply blowing off extremities until your professors relent. The Heene-dinburg involves multiple steps.

1. Make an enormous hot air balloon that looks like it has been wrapped in tin foil; also find fake glasses and beard. (more…)

Were you part of the “ROSI incident”? Yesterday at 6:00 am, the gates opened for everyone trying to get into courses with an enrolment indicator of “P.” Then hundreds of U of T students everywhere spent almost 12 hours unsuccessfully trying to enrol for courses.

The night before I planned to wake up at 5:45 am to prepare for battle. Unfortunately, I ended up sleeping in until 6:30 and spent two hours doing this (repeatedly logging in and clicking on “Course Enrolment”): (more…)