Travisty 27 (#92)

Travisty Valentine’s Day Edition

FEATURING May Ball Substitutes - The Editors Russell Group On the Rocks - Andrew Ng Laugh Breaks Out at Travisty Meeting - Arun Prabhakar

Floreat Pica

Floreat Pica

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Letter from the Editors

It’s early February, and it’s snowing in Cambridge. It settles on the grass like fairy dust on a Mr. Kipling angel slice. You prance down your staircase and out the door, and hop and skip across the court, even touching the grass a bit, because there’s no one here to spot you. You look up and take in the [good/acceptable/Wolfson – delete as applicable] architecture, and then head further on.

Great Gate either approaches you or doesn’t, depending on which part of college you started off in (tbh I could probably make a fair guess because of how few people read Travisty, but I assume you know where you live). You turn a corner now, and

enter the mail room. You find you pigeonhole, as you’ve done hundreds of times before, but this day is different. There’s a letter! Could it be? Could it be… from Her? Could she have written you a love poem, while sitting on a crag somewhere in the mid-to-North region, with the wind cinematically blowing through her hair, gazing pensively out at the ocean? Or Him, if you lean that way? You pull out the letter, and open it. No; it’s from the Senior Tutor – you’re being kicked out of college accommodation. The envelope flutters down and lays at rest amongst the unspoken numbers of discarded Christian Union leaflets.

Arun Prabhakar has overseen a curious increase in the number of ‘editorials’ published in his time as editor.

Eoin Walsh was reported missing between 5th and 7th January.

Andrew Ng has angered numerous Wall Street bankers through means he declines to divulge.

Agnijo Banerjee’s sudokus have been rumoured to contain the US nuclear codes. He denies any and all – OK, most – knowledge of this.

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Table of Contents Page 4

May Ball Substitutes

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Lidija Beric has not responded to my requests for an article, and so will shortly be met with a cheese knife.

Editorial

Ludvig Brekke is expecting his Father Valentine costume to arrive in the post any day now.

Page 5

Build your own New Year Resolution Arun Prabhakar

Page 6

Russell Group to Face Reckoning over AntiCompetitive Market Practices Andrew Ng

Page 8

Christian Owen has not done any work since 2015.

Cartoon Corner Misha Medvedev

Page 9

Sudoku Agnijo Banerjee

Misha Medvedev owns a rather large camera.

Page 10 That List of Foolproof Chatup Lines in full Editorial Page 11 Caption Competition

Vanessa Tang still hasn’t forgiven those continentals for replacing Ptolemaic cosmology.

Page 12 Laugh Breaks Out at Travisty Meeting Arun Prabhakar Page 15 Letters to the Editors Editorial Page 16 Horoscopes Vanessa Tang Floreat Pica

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May Ball Substitutes Now that our editorial team is three-quarters STEM, we can offer you truly practical advice.

How can You Spend your £186.50?

A sweat broke on my brow. My heart palpitated, and my breath, too, …palpitated.

Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. And then, once I had sent off that absolute Chernobyl of an essay, I leaned back and settled down for a nice Travisty writing session. Then an email arrived, informing me that the May Ball had been cancelled.

Well. We can't just let that money go to waste now, can we?

1. Fourteen bottles of Trinity Ruby Port. Not all for one night, of course.

Unless…? Haha, just kidding. Or am I – ! No, really. Or… 2. Try Living in Great Court Q for just a single week. Seriously, the rent on those rooms.

3. Commission a tailor-made box of Valentines chocolates for Stephen Toope from a master chocolatier in Belgium.

4. Finally buy that Cambridge Union membership you meant to get two and a half years ago.

5. Actually, don’t do that.

6. Buy 161 paper copies of this edition of Travisty – our printing company charges £186.50 for this, with free delivery!

7. Buy shares in Melvin Capital (and refuse to sell).

8. Acquire 18650 penny sweets and use them to change the flavour of the Great Court fountain.

9. Pay one and a half days’ wages to a porter and have your own personal bodyguard to rival those at Cindies.

10. Bribe the editors of Travisty to stop sneaking in list articles under the radar.

11. Go to 15.5 formals and pretend you're a junior scholar and got them for free.

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Build your own New Year’s Resolution Arun Prabhakar lost his calendar Where you live

Tripos

Favourite SALTO door lock

Angel Court

Take up

Mathematics

Establishing your presence in the gym

Wolfson Court

Shun

NatSci

Completing at Whewell’s least 56% of your entrance supo work Trinity Street

For the CV

Blue Boar Court

Try

Compsci

Jousting

Whewell's entrance Sidney Street

In Mainsbury’s

Whewell’s Court

Become a hopeless shill for

Philosophy

Dipsomania

Blue Boar Seedy Side Entrance

In black tie

Great Court

Start a college society based around

History

Occupying Senate House

Bishop’s Hostel Trinity Lane entrance

Because you were told to in a dream

Bishop’s Hostel

Write a dissertation on

Theology

Sedevacantism

New Court back gate

While rowing

New Court

Get irritatingly enthusiastic about but not actually do

History of Art

Reading Proust in the original

Garrett Hostel Lane side entrance

Sponsored by Ryder & Amies

Pearce Hostel

Vocally condemn

Classics

Catullus

Burrell’s main entrance

On the way to West Cambridge

Burrell’s Field

Give up

Law

Scamming freshers

Burrell’s side entrance - UL or thereabouts

While sober

Offsite

Write a Travisty article about

MML (not MMLL; we’re traditional here)

Not responding to DMs

Burrell’s back gate

In LaTeX

Gym door

In college stash

Land Economy Buying shares in Wetherspoons while they’re cheap

On Strava

Eating the eggs hall serves at breakfast

Anything else

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Angel court side entrance

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Russell Group to Face Reckoning over Anti-Competitive Market Practices Andrew Ng puts the ‘gate’ back in ‘investigative journalism’

BREAKING – The National Union of Robbers and Burglars (NURB) has filed a lawsuit suing the Russell Group, which represents 23 of the UK’s leading universities, including Cambridge (if you didn’t know this, your lectures are either at the CMS or Sidgwick site) and Hull, as well as an imposter which shall remain nameless as decreed in the latest email from Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope in these unprecedented times.

The lawsuit alleges widespread abuse of monopoly power and collusion with other universities not in the Russell Group. The charge of collusion mentions pricefixing, which has led to tuition fees for home students being uniformly around £9,000 per annum. Economists have explained that this is how free markets work: an equilibrium is reached and those who charge more risk pricing themselves out of the market. The handful of NURB members capable of understanding that sentence had the sense to ignore the economists. Nevertheless, the main charge is that continuing to charge tuition fees while students stayed at home gave them a grossly unfair advantage in the burglary industry. One union representative, wishing to remain ‘anomous’, said business was becoming impossibly difficult as working families around the country had been fleeced dry. He cited the experience of several home invasions where he was ignored when he entered. After saying he was there looking for money, one family laughed and offered to look with him. Getting increasingly desperate, he brought firearms, but when given the choice between death and handing over all their valuables, students unanimously opted for death, to his great frustration. His frustration is shared by thousands in the burglary industry, who lament big corporations squeezing out small independent contractors such as themselves. Their profit margins are simply incomparable with the Russell Group: it takes weeks to plan a heist, netting an average of £15,000 a month, while muggings have become increasingly unprofitable due to students staying at home and not getting shitfaced at clubs, as well as the overall shift to cashless. In contrast, thousands of students paying thousands of pounds a year, on top of government subsidies, for online lectures makes for relatively easy and painless money. Other companies such as Spotify and Netflix will want to pay close attention to the ultimate ruling: the idea of a price hike was first floated after observing the tuition

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fees Harvard charged (it remains the world record for most expensive streaming service), but they will think twice if the NURB prevail.

Westminster has been uncharacteristically quiet on the issue: the Prime Minister’s advisors have managed to keep him from babbling on the issue: as a longtime member of NURB, it would be improper of him to use the power of his office to sway the outcome of the court case. Jacob Rees-Mogg released a statement: ‘Having left the treacherous bureaucracy of Brussels behind, we finally have sovereignty over our borders. We will weed out the immigrants from the EU, particularly Eastern European countries, who have been undercutting British burglars and robbers for years by taking less per break in, leading to households around the UK hoping to be robbed by Europeans rather than Britons. The people have spoken, and that stops now. The burglars and robbers in this country will be British burglars and robbers, and they will be happier for it. Keir Starmer declined to comment, but in a viral video Jeremy Corbyn was seen pacing around the area where demonstrators were trying to raise awareness and lip-readers made out the words ‘bloody Jews’.

Follow us for more as the story unfolds. ______________________________________________________________________

Cocktail of the Week The Valentine’s Special INGREDIENTS: - Rosé Champagne (see below) METHOD: 1.

2.

3.

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Use the money you’ve saved on rent to buy a 1990 Dom Perignon Rosé.

All the money.

Acquisition some crystal champagne flutes.

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Cartoon Corner Misha Medvedev cracks out the old pen and paper

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Sudoku Agnijo Banerjee ascends from words to numbers

Clues: 1.

2.

3.

Wait That’s not right See you next week

Think You’ve Solved It? Email travistytrinity@gmail.com by 11:59pm on Sunday 28th February with your answers, and you could win a piece of fudge!

Last week’s winner: Nobody.

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That List of Chat-Up Lines that are Sure to Work Even Better over Messenger without your Ironic Tone of Voice being Evident In Full 1. Hun, are you Hugh Hunt? Because you wind my Great Court clock 2. Oh, so you’re a blue? Wanna buy me a Trinity Blue?

3. [Warning: NSFW] *Whispered into their ear*: I want you to do to me whatever they do to those eggs for breakfast 4. Be the Simon Warrener to my inbox 5. I could stare at you for longer than the TCSU hustings lasted 6. Are you one of the Catering department’s cheese straws? Cause you’re priceless…

7. Be the Stephen Toope to my Graham Virgo 8. You may not have a safety net, but I’ll catch you 9. Yeah, I’ll divest – divest from hall by taking you out to dinner, lmAO! *dabs* 10. 🎵 And I~~~ would roll to Gir-ton College/ And I~~~~ would roll back to Tit Hall/[Etc.]🎵 [Travisty’s legal team has taken every precaution to ensure that we will not be held accountable to what may happen if you use these.]

Travisty Investigates - How can you get a Valentine under Lockdown?

1. Who, me? How the fuck should I know?

That’s all we have time for, folks! Join us next time as we teach you how to top tripos, from someone who’s tried twice and failed both times!

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Caption Competition

Email your captions to travistytrinity@gmail.com The best suggestion will win a *mystery prize* - now a rollover from the previous issue!

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Laugh Breaks Out at Travisty Meeting Arun Prabhakar continues to deprecate a publication written largely by himself

Well readers, like an officer despatched to inform the modest 1950s housewife with the red-and-white flowery dress that her son has died a brave death at war, fighting for Queen and country against the dastardly - well, don’t ask me how he managed to die at war in the 1950s, let alone die bravely -, but whomst officer also has a completely debilitating stutter, I don’t know quite how to say this. So I’ll say it the only way I know how: at great, and florid, length.

It happened one drizzly Thursday at Vespers. The weather wasn’t quite terrible, but it wasn’t very good either. It fell out of the realm of the pleasant, but lacked the conviction to dive so far down as to make it as a pathetic fallacy. It was the Selwyn of weathers: neither here nor there, and certainly not close to anywhere you want to be. I was walking back to college from a secret location in the tower of the University Library where we had been conducting Trinity Philosophy Society initiation rites on freshers. Portboarding: it’s traditional, you see. I was also being chased by some debt collectors who looked like something out of a Tintin comic, but who are most certainly not relevant to the matter at hand and should in fact be expunged from your memory, as should any and all allegations, suggestions, and even suspicions that I may have racked up a rather large sum of owed money on account of the veritably Bacchanalian quantities of wine consumed over the course of remarkably few individual evenings, and I wish to make it, dear reader, absolutely crystal clear that I have had no history at all with the courts in this regard (or any other), not least over any issue that father might have had to pay a hefty sum to hush up, on account of which he has cut off my Scotch ration for this term which I am not happy about at al- [Let’s get back on track, shall we? -Ed.]

I was walking back to college from the Sidgwick site, where I had been hard at work on my dissertation. The weather was, not to mince my words, dismal, and it was a Thursday evening. After grabbing a quick potato-fried potato with mash from hall, I headed to the JCR for our weekly writers’ meeting. (Since of course nothing recounted in this article really happened, we can simply stipulate that the Wuhan bat never left its cave.) Everyone was there: Skinny B, Skinny P, Divestronella, Vito Cannelloni, and the online thesaurus I use to help me write light verse. We gathered around the poker table to address the matter at hand. Then, once we had secured the shipment of transgender

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flags to Caius, we moved on to the question of Travisty.

It was the usual talk at first. New Year’s Resolutions, moderate puns, one-liners.

But we noticed that something was amiss. In the corner of the tavern sat a shadowy figure, wearing a long, dark trenchcoat, and a hat completely covering his face except for two oddly round white eyes which were clearly visible against a sea of black. All eyes now turned on him, and he stood up and walked, slowly and deliberately, towards us.

He held one side of his coat open as if to show us something, and whispered “Psst.

Kids. You want some jokes? I’ve got some really good stuff here.” This was puzzling, as there was nothing beneath his coat. I don’t know quite how he expected that one to play out. The verdict was reached (by referendum) that we did want some good jokes; after all, we were suffering withdrawal symptoms, you could say. Then the chap, who for diplomatic reasons I will name only as Pseudo-Dionysius the Anonopagite,1 leaned in over the table and said— “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

We waited to hear why the chicken crossed the road.

And then the punchline came.

First it was only a sniffle. I believe it was Divestronella who cracked first; the poor lass always did have a weakness for humour. But then the dam broke. We laughed for literally seconds, we did. It was the best laugh we had had in months. The best joke we had heard, too. We laughed with great mirth. The Skinnies B and P for some reason took this as a cue to knife the Anonopagite, but I wiped away the blood and explained that it was all just a misunderstanding. Vito Cannelloni actually laughed himself to death, and surprisingly early on in the story, too. In doing so he revealed that all along I had been stealing a joke format from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, or perhaps it was And Now for Something Completely Different (don’t ask me, it should be clear that I wasn’t paying attention during the comedy film). In a word, I was entertained.

So, there you have it. The whole story. From beginning to ending: from cradle to grave. Oh of course, the relevant authorities were called, the porters for a noise complaint, the Junior Bursar to defund us, etc., etc., I digress. But I ask you this.

Shocking though these events are, can we really be blamed? Nobody expects to find humour in their life. It’s like cancer, or a pair of odd socks that came out of the washing machine. So when it comes, sometimes it’s just too much for us to handle. We fail to maintain our composure, and fall away from our time-honoured standards. Normally

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Travisty has all the comedic value of a funeral, and normally swallows fly south in the winter. But every now and then, one of them thinks ‘fuck it, I think I’ll get an Egg McMuffin instead.’ And you know what? It goes and gets an Egg McMuffin. Indeed, sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder how I could have acted differently. Should I have paid my debts, in the normal, legal way? No, probably not. But for the inordinate outbreak of laughter, can you, dear reader, forgive us? God willing, at least we can safely say it won’t be a repeat offence.

This is actually an intensely funny joke, not that anyone will get it. ______________________________________________________________________ 1

Think you can do better than us?

You probably can!

Why not come to our next writing group? Like our Facebook page, or email us at travistytrinity@gmail.com to subscribe to our mailing list. Or just send us an article with no warning! We’ll take anything.

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Letters to the Editors You may not be writing any love letters, but you can write a different sort of letter – to me.

Dear Editors, Roses are red, Violets are blue, You must have cocked up, For Travisty’s overdue.

The ghost of Lord Byron

Dear Mr. of Lord Byron: your frustration is understandable, for losing one’s Lent term hash browns is one thing, but not having a Travisty over which to chortle with them is quite another.

Fortunately there is a simple solution. It goes like this: Croci are purple, Lilies are white; Write an article, You lazy shi– Sorry, this is editor number two here. We apologise for the effluence of emotion; editor number one has just been working on his dissertation and in doing so has lost all capacity to communicate with other people like a normal human bei– What do you think you’re playing at, editor number two!

(Which one’s number two, anyway?) As we were: –te.

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To the humble typesetters,

I really must find out who this Mr. ‘Editorial’ you speak of is. He writes the most thigh-smacking articles, but he only seems to have one name, and a curious one at that; and no photograph. If you could put him in contact with me, I may have a proposition that he might on the off-chance find appealing: to fund an MPhil, in Philosophy, for the academic year 2021-2.

Sincerely,

Sebastian Hedge-Fünde

Even better, it’s not just the port I go for.

The incense is nice, too. And so I just wanted to thank your estimable publication.

To His Editorship,

Dear Mr. Hedge-Fünde, You see, every now and then our editorial team gets together to crack out a smacker of an article, if you catch my drift. We call these ‘editorials’, for they are written by our editorial team.

Best,

The Editorial Team

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and intelligent; New Court blossoms with the break of May, And still, your time is in library spent.

Oh, what sharp humour through those veins must run!

And such fine scotch your room must hold, For tho’ TCS and the Tab dearth fun, Your jokes, it seems, will never grow old.

Over TrinPhilSoc you rule august, A true Isaac Newton of our time, It seems that soon I really must Think up more words that vaguely rhym-

What’s diced, whole, and peppered all over, and also mashed, shaped, and put on a plate – not to mention fried, sliced, and awfully nice?

Jeez, just write a Crushbridge, okay?

Have Your Say Because at Travisty, we believe wholeheartedly in democracy!

Ooh, ooh, I know this one!

Is it… the potatoes in hall?

To whom it may concern,

Now I’ve never been a believer in astrology – I prefer the I Ching myself – but I was gosh-darn shocked out of my socks to find that my horoscope from your Bridgemas Travisty came absolutely true!

I’m now a devotee; I go to Compline almost every (other) week, and everything.

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Write to travistytrinity@gmail.com to ask your very own question.

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Horoscopes Vanessa Tang Dunlevie’d a new telescope

Virgo

Taurus

Capricorn

Treat yourself this Valentines Day! Oh, you do that every day? Fair enough.

It is the year of the Ox, this is fruitful for the Taurus.

You are only compatible with Scorpios. Cut out all other signs to live your optimum life. Bill Gates and Kris Jenner are scorpios, so you better get networking!

Leo Check in with your friends. Yes, horoscopes can be wholesome too!

Cancer You don’t usually believe in horoscopes but horoscopes believe in you more than you believe in yourself. If this won’t change your mind nothing will.

Gemini Have a shower.

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Aries Riddle hour: what can be touched but can't be seen?

Pisces Mercury is in retrograde! Jupiter is rising! Run! Aquarius You are only compatible with Leos. Barack Obama hasn’t been president for a while, he’d probably have time for you.

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Sagittarius The stars have nothing to say to you, you must have upset them?

Scorpio Invest in bitcoin.

Libra Download Tiktok. You have an android; the Chinese Government won’t even be able to make out the images on your camera roll.

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