This is a Call

Turning away from the rotting newspage for a moment...

T-shirts being made up now:

Rob &
Dave &
Whitney &
Squeaky.

TR &
Zman &
Marls &
Rootsy.

TJ &
Jerry &
Dennis &
Mayhugh.

Greg. 

...and a number of other FOGTB and commenters in this space...

What do they have in common?

We are all members of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity's Virginia Psi chapter.  Pi Lams.  Frat guys.  Yippee.

A little backstory...

"Founded at Yale University in 1895, Pi Lambda Phi was the first non-sectarian fraternity in the United States, accepting men of good character without regard to race or religion. There are presently 37 chapters in the United State and one in Canada. The Psi Chapter (also called Virginia Psi) at The College of William and Mary was installed in June 1929..."

Skip a bit, brother...

In 1989, Rob, Dave, and I (and this guy... and this guy... and this guy... and a guy named this...)
decided to enlist in the service of fraternal life. A semester of hijinks ensued. Three-plus more years of antics congealed. A life of friendship endured.  A blog of dipshittery materialized.  All this and more, on a very special episode of Gheorghe: The Blog.

We learned along the way that all men are created free and equal.  We learned the expression "not four years, but a lifetime." That the Pi Lam flower is the woodbine.  That the Pi Lam bird is not the nuthatch but is instead something else.

We learned that you can meet random idiots in a dormitory when you are 18 and create friendships that will last you a lifetime.  But that not everyone has a palate for Random Idiots.  We learned that being sarcastic and intoxicated and slovenly is not a successful formula for courting ladies, and that "getting lucky" is not a misnomer.

We learned the expression "four years, maybe five, but nary a credit hour more." We learned that the era of unbridled fraternity, rugby (or lacrosse), and alcohol at universities of tradition and prestige in the American South has come to a close.  And that filling a frat house with our kind of complex creature became increasingly, then impossibly hard.  We finally learned that if you smash a board over someone's face, even a friend's, and videotape it, the Man will come for you.

And that he did.  And the little social club thrown together in the year of the great stock market crash was suddenly no more in 2004.  And there was great depression.

* * * * *

Yesterday morning at our office in Hampton, VA, we had a networking event that drew a few dozen folks for coffee. Among the group was our fratre Chris Old's older brother Hunter, a Phi Kappa Tau at W&M while we were there. I talked to him at length.

Randomly, another guest was a much younger Tribe alum who had graduated within the past 10 years, and he was also a ΦΚΤ.  He told the tale of them being booted off campus (again), and that when it happened, they snagged a bunch of the old composites.

Here is the one he grabbed at right.

See anybody you've heard of?

As fraternities come and go and finally wither away from our alma mater, there's probably no sense in hoping against hope for a resurrection of our gang's chapter.

Instead, my ask is simple: did anyone grab the old composites when the house was eradicated from W&M?
Doesn't it seem like the Martha Wood Cottage might be a fine place to honor the misspent youth of our heydays?
Or did the powers that be in William & Mary's administration order those nostalgic snapshots of maturity gone by be unceremoniously burned to ashes?
If the Phi Tau's can do this, why not the Pi Lams?  Why not us??

Inquiring minds like mine want to know, and deep thoughts like this keep me from mulling over the state of the nation.

That is all.

My email has stepped into the wayback frat machine

Yesterday, these two messages were atop my phone's email...very kind of Dr. Sam Beckett to check in every now and again.

Clarence Explains It All . . . Again

Clarence is not a role model. He’s not even human. He’s a cartoon. Some of the things he does could cause a person to get hurt, expelled, arrested, possibly deported. To put it another way: Don't try this at home. 

So the locals were aghast with an incident at ODU over the weekend.  Thanks to the pervasive nature of social media, now the world is aghast.

Some frat guy knuckleheads spray-painted some remarks on bed sheets and dangled them from balconies, remarks that are characterized anywhere from mildly obnoxious to criminally offensive, depending upon your mindset.  Here is Deadspin's take on it, with pictures.

I have a question not just for Zman Esq and the handful of other attorneys in our GTB midst, but all of you higher-minded cohorts of mine.  Here are the words that were printed on the sheets:
“Rowdy and fun [highlighting the O, D, and U]"
"Hope your baby girl is ready for a good time”
“Freshman daughter drop off [with an arrow pointing to the house's front door]”
“Go ahead and drop off mom too...”
Universally accepted as stupid, immature, and largely inappropriate, without question.

But, either taken literally or even infusing some suggestion in there, are they, as accused by many, words that espouse rape or sexual assault? 

It seems to me that as we elevate community awareness and the severity of the punishment that fits rape in America, we must also elevate our caution when labeling or accusing our citizens of this crime.  It's a complex issue that affected my alma mater in a case whose public opinion verdict rang louder than the actual facts or result of the case.  And whether or not the UVA story was debunked last year (as predicted), the problem still exists and remains a justifiably incendiary topic.  It's one not likely to fade away any time soon, simply because men have sexually assaulted women for the 100,000 or more years we have been on the planet, and we have yet to come up with the appropriate tools to fix ourselves.

As ODU seeks to mete out the proper punishment for this behavior, it's important to keep the furor within the confines of the act committed.  The university has responded publicly, using the likely words "outraged," "sickened," and "will not be tolerated,"  But they also reference "sexual assault" and "violence against women." Maybe it's a logical leap, but as a former fraternity knucklehead, the divide our guys kept between lascivious/crude and assault/violence against women was a huge one.

Anyway, as usual, at Gheorghe we like our grammar on point and our law and order to be argued and measured appropriately -- even when the idiots committing the acts are offensive enough not to warrant much defense.  I get to hear and read about this event plenty for the next week or two around town.  Just lucky that way,

Fratagonia is not, apparently, the frattiest mountain range in South America

Fratagonia is a website that sells "On-line retail store services featuring new and used clothing, clothing accessories, drinkware, home decor, and decorative art; Retail store services featuring new and used clothing, clothing accessories, drinkware, home decor, and decorative art; Second hand dealerships featuring new and used clothing, clothing accessories, drinkware, home decor, and decorative art." I did not make up this description of their services. Instead, I copied it from their trademark registration documentation as quoted in the complaint Patagonia filed against them for trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and unfair competition.

Fratagonia has at least two logos:

Pretty fratty. But clearly ripoffs of the Patagonia trademark--even the fonts are the same:

It seems perfectly acceptable for Patagonia to sue Fratagonia, but I feel bad for the fratguy after digging just a stitch deeper into the facts. The Fratagonia mark is registered to a person who I won't name, but based on a search of the Googles he appears to be a 25-year-old entry-level finance type living in a shitty apartment in lower Manhattan. I know it's shitty because based on the trademark registration Fratagonia appears to operate out of it and Google streetview doesn't present it in a kind light. I imagine a dingy one room fifth-floor walkup teeming with Smathers & Branson needlepoint belts and Harding-Lane hats.

If you're thinking of helping him out by buying a tshirt, don't. They're seeking "from Fratagonia its damages and lost profits, and Fratagonia’s profits, in an amount to be proven at trial." And they want that amount trebled! So every dollar you give him could cost him three. Kudos to the kid for incorporating as an LLC though. Perhaps as a result he'll emerge from this litigation personally unscathed. He better hope that Patagonia doesn't try to pierce the corporate veil.

In light of the foregoing I'm surprised Patagonia didn't send a cease and desist letter. And if they did I'm surprised our enterprising young fratistician didn't do the math and shutter the Fratagonia website. I guess he doesn't know about how these things pan out for the little guy.

A Curious Confluence

Nils Lofgren is a pretty cool guy. I kind of figured it before -- I mean, anybody who can claim legitimate membership in both Crazy Horse and the E Street Band has to be fairly impressive. But hearing him interviewed on GTB-heralded WXPN Thursday afternoon, I learned he's a solid, very humble dude who still speaks of the awe that it was and still is to play guitar onstage with Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, and many other acclaimed rock and rollers.

But Nils is quite accomplished in his own right. His DC area band Grin and his solo work have garnered some critical kudos, and he's a respected guitarist in the business. If Rob's not a fan, he should be, what with Nils about an inch shorter than he is. All in all, Nils Lofgren isn't just an Italian-Swedish rock guitarist from DC with a cool name -- he's a fairly Gheorghey fellow.

All of that said, here's a pair of completely awesome Did You Know facts about Nils Lofgren. He grew up in Garrett Park, MD, not far from the District. In 1978, with the sad sack Washington Bullets surging in the standings en route to their only NBA title ever, Nils penned and recorded "Bullets Fever," a musical tribute to the team. It's fantastic.

I have uploaded the mp3 because I don't think it's available for purchase anywhere, but if someone can point me to a place where it is, I'll gladly delete this song. (And buy a copy immediately.) You can also go to Wizznutz's jukebox that features more than one version of the song, and go read more about Nils and the song here at Mohut.



The second piece of trivia is even closer to home for many on the GTB roster. Also back in the 1970's, Nils also wrote and recorded the jingle for Jhoon Rhee's TaeKwonDo studios -- a locally famous song and commercial featuring "Nobody Bothers Me" as the catchy chorus/slogan. Jhoon Rhee is known as the Father of American TaeKwonDo, but more pertinently, he is also known as the father of Chun Rhee. Chun is the little boy winking at you in Nils' TV ad below, and he's also one of our fraternity brothers. Like Nils, he's a humble guy, even as he knows he can floor you with the one-inch punch and put his foot through your face in half a second. He's running the Jhoon Rhee TKD studios these days, so sign up today so that nobody bothers you.