Seal Block Special Edition: Little brother from another mother

The name "University of Cristal" was also briefly considered.

If ESPN and TSN (aka ESPN Canada) were to somehow convince Canadian universities to care about varsity sports even a tenth as much as American universities do, the next round of Big Ten expansion would have two obvious candidates for admission: The University of Toronto, the centre of Canada's largest TV market, and my undergraduate alma mater, The University of Western Ontario, the home of Canada's proudest university football tradition. Both schools would have to make enormous facilities upgrades for this to happen, and Toronto would have to stop being terrible at football, but academically both would be excellent fits for the CIC. Having two Canadian schools in the Big Ten hockey conference would help replace the Canadian Hockey League with a slightly less corrupt player development model, which would also be nice.

UWO has recently announced a major new marketing push asking for people to call it "Western." To Canadians, this is hilarious as no other province has a western directional school. We all call it Western already. The American equivalent to this would be the University of California at Los Angeles spending tons of money on marketing to convince people to call it UCLA.

This marketing push includes a quote from the university president which may go down as one of the stupidest most WTF things ever said by a university president ever:

Harvard isn’t just Harvard. It’s Harvard University. But you don’t have to say university. How long will it take Western to get there, I don’t know. Our goal is to become such a recognized brand that just Western means us.

I've been trying to make a snarky comment in response to that and I can't. I'm so confused that the best I could think to do was put in a snarky post tag.

Old logo: We have a tower!
New logo: Stag and lion slap-fight! Winner gets maple syrup!

I didn't enjoy my undergraduate years. People bragged a lot about how great they were, but backed up their boasts with alcohol consumption instead of academic performance. I really don't like getting the alumni magazine because it's a lot of fluff about how great the school is and far too little about the interesting stuff people are actually doing. It's like the school has an inferiority complex. Recently it hit me: UWO is Michigan State. It's Toronto's little brother.

Crescat inconstantia, vita excolatur, or, roll 'em up in a carpet and throw 'em off a bridge

When I was but an undergraduate at the University of Western Ontario (before moving on to a superior school for graduate studies), my fellow engineering students would boast of the great pranks that engineering classes of yore had pulled, such as sawing a car in half, welding it around a flagpole, and rewiring it so that it could still start. But in the time I was there, the great pranks of yore were but legends, and we had been reduced to throwing paint filled balloons at buildings and calling pointless, needless, vandalism "pranks."

Such is also the case with College Football. In the halcyon days gone by, a prank against Big Football and Big Media would require complex planning resulting in stunning beauty: sabotaging a nationally televised card section stunt, for instance, or hacking into a PDP-8 computer in order to take over the game scoreboard. These days, such pranks consist of hacking a player's Twitter account or putting a sign that says "penis" behind Kirk Herbstreit on College Gameday. Though similar in spirit to the pranks of yesteryear, these efforts require little fortitude and little skill and will soon be forgotten by all except Google's cache.

But this devolution of pranking can be stopped, and the place where we make it stop is the inaugural Big Ten Championship Game. Much like Caltech objects to the Rose Bowl as a symbol of the perceived supremacy of athletics over academics, there is an institution in the Midwest that has the right to make the B1G Championship Game its prank playground. To put it in terms that geeks and nerds will understand:

Yes, the Big Ten's prodigal comrade, the triskadekic member of our conference and its Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the place where 65 years ago they cried "Enough!" and actually put academics ahead of athletics. The University of Chicago is the school with the brainpower, the deviousness, and the temerity necessary to restore pranks to their rightful place in big time college football. And what better place to do it than in Indianapolis, home to the headquarters of the moral turpitude that is the NCAA? And, seriously, Michigan State is playing. We need the possibility of non-Dean Winters related mayhem to have some reason to care.

As outsiders, we implore Chicagoans to take their rightful place as the kings and queens of Midwestern pranksterdom. However, we know that like all institutions, you may suffer from bureaucratic inertia that prevents you from forming new traditions. So, in order to help give birth to a new annual source of dread for Jim Delany, we humbly propose building upon your current traditions with the following.

For as true a scavhunt experience as we can provide, download the list in PDF or TeX format, or read it in HTML after the jump.