Cheese Grater Magazine - Freshers' Fayre 2009

TheCheeseGrater The Other Student Magazine of University College London Union

Freshers’ Fayre Issue September 2009 CS1CHE01

GOTCHA!

!

BENTHAM CAUGHT IN FRESHER SEX ROMP

THIS MONTH Freshen Up Vladimir Nabokov on Second Year Sex Pests p.2

FRESHER: “I don’t usually go for older men...”

A Cock & Ball Story

Clarkson tackles a hairy issue p.2

Shocking photos, p.5

Cut-Price Cooking

The late Keith Floyd stuffs a bird p.3

Serious Shit A year in the life of an investigative journalist p.4

Grater Diary UCL Provost Malcolm Grant bares all p.4

2 TheCheeseGrater Freshers’ Fayre Issue September 2009

Not Getting Any Fresher It’s a Zoo out there.

Vladimir Nabokov

THERE they stand, one thing on their minds. The dirty bastards.

The bars of UCLU will be awash during Freshers week with swathes of Second and Third Year boys, eagerly eyeing the latest talent to join the ranks of UCL. If there’s one thing more gratifying to a fresher than pulling, then it’s pulling someone who has been rejected by the entirety of the opposite sex in the year above. And they know it.

Why are these older students at Vodpop?

Don’t they know it’s shit by now? Of course they do - Vodpop IS shit and everybody knows it… but in the quest for the easy lay, this herd will sink to any depths.

Please, you sweet innocent young thing, ` DON’T FUCK THESE MEN, you will only be encouraging their sort. And the truth is this: you will make many more friends if you stick to fucking other first years.

Wangers & Gash

Jeremy Clarkson

THE athletics community was up in arms this Summer following the news that Caster Semenya, Women’s World Champion over 1500m, was actually endowed with both male and female genitals.

While the world turned away in horror, The Cheese Grater Magazine commissioned me to look back at some of history’s great female achievers. Prepare to be surprised at what I found when I lifted up some very distinguished skirts:

Joan of Arc

‘Beardy Joan’, as she was known to those who got close enough, was a recognised hermaphrodite. But her true gender

was masked by a Catholic Church desperate to cultivate the myth of a female figure possessed with the power of the Virgin Mary. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire springs to mind. Because she had testicles.

Elizabeth I

‘I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king’ said Good Queen Bess, before defending our great nation from the Spanish Armada. But as we discovered, she possessed not only heart and stomach but a cock and some balls to complete the set. Britain’s greatest monarch a woman?

Bollocks to that, metaphorically and literally.

Margaret Thatcher

She fucked the kids, she fucked the

miners and she fucked the Argies, but by God she didn’t need a strap on to do so.

Sources from deep inside the Conservative Party have informed us that the Iron Lady always left the toilet seat up in the House of Commons. Frankly it’s no surprise - are we really expected to believe that a woman led this country through an entire decade and won a war? Those are man things.

Beyoncé

Yes, that’s right. In the greatest celebrity cover-up of the century - other than the extent of Richard Hammond’s brain damage - the R’n’B singer has kept her penis secret for a decade by diverting the public’s attention to her ‘booty’. I’d still have her in a reasonably-priced car any day.

Contributors: George Potts, Thom Rhoades, Adam Gillett, Alex Ashman, Jenni Hulse, Alex McKenna.

TheCheeseGrater Freshers’ Fayre Issue September 2009 3

Gourmet Grater

UCLU JobShop

This issue, the late Keith Floyd is in the Cheese Grater kitchen, showing us how to prepare a regional speciality.

1. Cleaning/ Administration, London Working for Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, cleaning and running her home in Mayfair. Vibrant multi- cultural environment.

No visa required. Experience Required: Light Cleaning, Document Burning, Corpse Disposal. Mon-Fri: 8am-late

Starting University should be a time for culinary experimentation. Freed from domestic drudgery, no more shall you be forced to eat the tasteless, greying morass served up night after night by your talentless parents. It’s quails’ eggs and Beluga caviar from now on!

Well, perhaps not quite. If you live on a student loan, or if Pappy is a little unpredictable with his handouts, you may find yourself with the food budget of a tongueless troglodyte.

Fear not! I, Keith Floyd shall show you how to eat extravagantly for (almost) nothing.

1.

Open a bottle of good quality red – a Louis Latour should satisfy for this recipe.

Pour yourself a glass and imbibe.

2. Event Staff, Various, London Are you a confident, approachable person with experience working in hospitality or Events? Do you look good in a gilet?

The Rough Hill events company is looking for popular people with low self-esteem to shamelessly promote and organise their club nights around London.

Mon and Thurs: 7pm-Drunk O’clock. Free drinks/sex.

of Latour.

7.

Repeat the gorging process daily for 12-15 days, depending on the size of the pigeon (and of your wine cellar).

8.

Take the pigeon to the nearest medical student for slaughter and dissection.

9.

Spread liver thickly on stale bread – remember, mould is the poor man’s truffle.

10. taste.

Open another bottle of wine to

Bon appétit! Love! Kisses! Etcetera!

2.

Select your pigeon. Luckily London pigeons are not seasonal, and can be found all year round across the city. Hampstead will provide a better bird, but those around Trafalgar square rarely have two legs and so are easy to catch.

3.

Have another swig of red.

4.

Tether your bird securely to table leg/door handle/fellow student.

5.

Take a funnel (most definitely in season during Freshers’ week) and insert into your pigeon’s oesophagus. Pour in 250g mashed grain. If you have trouble finding grain, Sugar Puffs will work equally well.

6.

By now you’ll definitely need a stiff one – top up your glass and have a sneaky slug

Investigrater

The Cheese Grater doesn’t just do jokes, as its Investigative Editor explains.

Alex Ashman

Pi Magazine

Last year, we reported that Pi Magazine had wasted an estimated £600 on printing excess copies of issue 668 (see CG 17). This sort of thing became a regular occurrence, with Pi spending perhaps one third of its Union money printing copies nobody would ever read.

“Consistent Lack Of Quality”

Despite still hanging onto a runner’sup award from a 2004 tabloid competition as evidence of non-shitness, Pi’s writers were brought down a notch earlier this year when the Union said their magazine suffered from a “consistent lack of improvement and general lack of quality”.

Pi’s budget was later cut, despite an online petition from a staggering

3 people. The money saved is now instead wasted on The Onion, a glorified events calendar that costs the Union an estimated £6,000 per year to produce.

Bursaries

Having refused a Freedom of Information request from The Guardian, UCL eventually revealed its undergraduate bursary figures to The Cheese Grater. We now know that more than a million pounds’ worth of maintenance bursary money from the last three academic years was not allocated to students.

Disappearing Cash

The bursaries are intended to counterbalance the £3,000 top-up fees, with one third of the extra money made from top-up fees going into the bursary budget.

The Sanctuary

Last year, Pi kicked up a fuss after 3,000 copies of the profit-making Sanctuary newspaper were binned by the Union (see CG 18). This was hardly a scandal: the advert-ridden Sanctuary was not affiliated with UCLU, and copies were officially banned from Union premises. Meanwhile, the offending newspaper had rebranded itself as UCL | LSE Sanctuary and targeted the London School of Economics. According to an LSE Union Officer, their student union tried to clamp down on distribution, but had no official policy on Sanctuary “other than widespread agreement about how shit it is”. Despite this, the pisspoor paper is rearing its ugly head again.

UCL Academy

Before Christmas, we looked at UCL’s sponsored construction of an

Academy in one of the more affluent parts of the Borough of Camden (see CG 19). With both UCL and the local and national government standing to gain, widespread complaints from students, staff and locals were ignored. Local parents even lodged a case at the High Court claiming that UCL had been handed the contract without any competition, but the case was dismissed.

Widespread Complaints

Back then, this rag commented that UCL Provost Malcolm Grant might be after ‘the power to fast track gifted students into UCL through his own pet secondary school’. We may have been right – during the summer, it emerged that Camden council will be bringing in an aptitude test that would allow the UCL Academy to bring in high-scoring students from other parts of London.

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Diary of a Grate Man Extracts from the private journal of the Provost. nets. And yet there he is, waiting upon me like a dutiful Maori houseboy!

Tuesday 22nd Sept.

Only back a day and am already summoned by that cunt Graeme Davies to his office at the top of Senate house. Just because he’s the fucking Vice-Chancellor of the University of London doesn’t mean he’s my fucking boss.

***

M.G. - A really grate bloke.

Monday 21st Sept.

Returning to the office really can be a bore. Frankly, I would have thought that Michael Worton could have kept things ticking over for a few extra weeks whilst I was back in New Zealand. After all, what are Vice-Provosts there for if not to cover for me while I’m off globetrotting for business and/ or pleasure?

It really is amazing that Mikey-boy still greets me like a grinning, anthropomorphised cane toad, despite the fact that I’ve spent the best part of the last decade metaphorically slamming his dick in filing cabi-

In the end, a most productive meeting! After the old bastard asked for my assurances that UCL wouldn’t leave the University of London, I glassed him in the face, before boshing him square in the chest with an Art Deco hatstand, leaving him gasping for breath on the floor, powerless to stop me from hurling his personally-signed desk photo of Princess Anne out of the window, where it was immediately set upon and burnt by a group of swarthy SOAS students. UCL one, UoL nil.

Wednesday 23rd Sept.

As if work couldn’t get any worse, today I went to meet the new Sabbs/lackeys at the Union. According to them, Doritos and Jacob’s Creek (served by a black bloke who I presume was part of the catering staff) constitute a buffet – a fucking buffet! Not that it mattered anyway after Student Activities Officer James Hodgson drunkenly ploughed into the table in search of more corn-based sustenance, like a teamster’s juggernaut, collapsing it in its entirety and leaving him drenched in cheap wine and his own filth,

giggling like a tickled pig. Disgusting. At least he was more entertaining than that slaphead Education Officer, Blacker, or the Finance and Democracy bloke, Caddy. Having said that, Worton is sure he’s seen the latter listed as ‘F&D Twinkboi’ on Gaydar.

Thursday 24th Sept.

Lunch with the Prime Minister today.

“Well done for being a really great bloke” he said as he spasmodically smiled, rubbing his knees like some frostbitten Ranolph Fiennes and chuckling like a defective household water tank. “You’re a bonza bloke too, Gord” I replied.

Lunch itself was tolerable enough, bar the moment when Gordon lost his glass eye in the soup. But small-talk was unfortunately punctuated by MRSA, C. difficile and hospital ‘deep cleaning’, not to mention the size of Harriet Harman’s majority. However, it was certainly better than the muck they serve in the Lower Refectory at College.

The highlight of the meal was Peter Mandelson’s homemade banana fritters. “I try to eat Peter’s banana fritters at every opportunity!” remarked the PM.

Friday 25th Sept.

There really is no better cure for a stressful week than pooning a bit of junior secretarial flesh in one of the seedier hotels off Russell Square. Frankly, if this term has started as it means to go on, this tasty little blonde number from Estates & Facilities will be a quadriplegic by Reading Week!

Like what you see? Know any good jokes? Think this is shit?

The Cheese Grater is UCL’s only editorially independent student publication. We love what we do and apparently so do others, since we’ve won UCL Union’s ‘Student Publication of the Year’ award for the last four years. If you’re interested in satire, cartoons or hardhitting investigative journalism come to our Freshers’ meeting!

Tuesday 6th October, 5:45pm Meet outside UCL Union Gordon Street UCL Union Cheese Grater Magazine Society www.cheesegraterrmagazine.org Student Publication of the Year - UCL Union Arts Awards 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 President and Editor: A.Z. McKenna Treasurer: Thom Rhoades E-mail : cheese_grater_magazine_society@ucl.ac.uk Humour Desk: ascheesegrater@gmail.com UCL Union Cheese Grater Magazine Society, UCL Union, 25 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AY The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of UCL Union or the editor.