HAMILTON, NY — If necessity is the mother of invention, then sobriety is the big daddy of unprecedented collaboration. This month Colgate’s campus has experienced a surplus in underground trade, as thirsty freshman exchange illicit goods with famished upperclassmen. Both armed with powerful identification cards, underclassmen offer their elders the bounty of their unlimited meal plans in exchange for blackout quantities of booze. We asked one of Colgate’s top economics majors -who couldn’t remember his full name after losing his Gatecard at the Jug a week ago but thought it was probably Tyler- who helped to shed some light on this dark corner of the Colgate economy. “So like there’s this pretty complicated economic theory called Supply and Demand. I don’t want to have to “mansplain” it to you but basically these little Garbage Pail Kids have access to all the breakfast sandwiches in the world, but all they want is enough Recipe 21 to marinate their organs. So the two exchange, and we call it comparative advantage.” 

Most surprising is the imbalance of power between these two economic forces; with upperclassman being the more desperate partner within the trade. Marissa Bacardi, one of the major booze distributors explained: “we have at this point an exchange rate of one handle for a plate of chicken tendies. One plate, if they’re generous we might get a side of ketchup or get to hear what Cathy said about the weather. I’m lugging four bottles of Recipe 21 from my ToHo just to get through the day. Prostitution might’ve been easier but with all this booze those pre-pubescent fucks are getting more ass than a SoundCloud rapper.” 

Measures have been taken by staff to diminish this flow of contraband, offering solutions like greater border security in the underclassmen dorms, higher surveillance in the Coop, and more powerful automatic weapons carried by kitchen staff. Many organizations on campus -having watched like half a season of Narcos- recognize the infectivity of oppressive law and order regimes on thriving illegal markets, and have taken alternative routes to help their desperate peers. The Junior Conservatives Club has founded TARE (Tendy Abuse Resistance Education) a program to help students find long term solutions to their calorie dense addictions. President Thad Thadderson elaborated, “we saw how well Nancy Reagan’s program worked. We figured it was the least we could do. I was one of them once, I would loiter around outside until I saw some kid with a copy of the Odyssey or Darwin and I’d offer them a whole rack just to sniff the inside of a smoothie cup.”

Stories like Thad’s offer us hope that one day this vicious cycle will end, that the rates of addiction will fall, that peace and prosperity will be restored, and the freshmen will have to buy a fucking fake like the rest of us.

HAMILTON, NY — On August 30th, the first meeting of the Physics 171 class, Matter and Other Things We Just Don’t Understand, was stopped short by a sudden break in the fabric of reality. Experts have traced its cause to a contradiction in the class’s syllabus, which contained two separate dates for the third exam. The difference of three days between them was paradoxical enough to break the binding energy of the universe, causing space and time to interweave in chaotic, fully unpredictable ways, eliminating the past, present, and future in one awesome stroke. 

 Rather than destroy all existing life, this blunder has eliminated the very concept of ​existence, essentially making it as though any life and creation had never transpired. In a single typo, the building of the Hoover Dam, the Battle of Waterloo, the Middle Ages, the reign of the pharaohs, and the dawn of man had been erased in an intergalactic event of profound nothingness.  

“Shit was wild,” says one Colgate student, who was relaxing in the Lathrop lounge when the dimensionally transcendental anomaly ended reality, “This is why I’m majoring in humanities, I can’t deal with all of that, ‘The fabric of space-time is unweaving’ bullshit, you know?” 

Earth’s people were not the only sentient beings who witnessed the end of the miracle that is self aware matter. Neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, agreed to do an interview. In response to this cosmic clusterfuck, their representative had this to say, “↱↲⇚⍇↭ ͒͑ , ⬅⬌⬍,〘〙〓〓】【⃠.” 

Colgate, the epicenter of this intergalactic event, remains the last bubble of reality, floating in the multiplex of the n-dimensional space that once contained infinite parallel universes, a spatial temporal result of a history that has now never happened. The administration urges students to remain within campus so as not to remove the last traces of the set of physical laws and phenomena that now describe no existing universe. 

At press time, a group of freshmen girls was seen heading for the Jug, saying, “There probably isn’t a line now.”

HAMILTON, NY — On Friday, a joint task force made up of officers from the Hamilton Police, New York State Police, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation carried out a raid on what they believed to be one of the largest theft rings on the eastern seaboard.

Operating out of popular local watering hole The Old Stone Jug, federal investigators allege that the ring has been responsible for the theft millions of dollars of personal property, primarily jackets, over the past decade and a half. Led by the shadowy figure known only as John Jug, the ring communicated over Snapchat. Phrases like “Come black-out at The Jug,” were signals to members that there were particularly high value items, like a Canada Goose or Patagonia jacket, that had been left on the coat rack. Once stolen, the items were stored in a secret apartment above the establishment, and potential buyers were made aware of available merchandise by phrases like “Jug Dogs available tonight.” One member of the ring interviewed by the Rag said that this made the perfect code, since even the drunkest freshman would never try to buy a hotdog from the Jug. Profits would then be laundered by a mysterious partner in Florida who Jug had previously identified as his daughter, but who members of the Colgate community were relieved to hear was not actually related to him.

Sophomore Harold Fitzpatrick told the Rag “Honestly I’m just glad to know that that chick from Snapchat is not actually his daughter; that shit was really creepy.” Arrests have been made, but federal investigators have announced that they have not finished their investigation, and they are pursuing alleged links between the ring and several Chinese Triads and a Belarusian human trafficking organization.