{ Student Life: sidelight }

Chicago Card

Chicago Card (a.k.a. UCID): multipurpose card with magnetic strip and digitized photo. Use it for library, athletic, housing, and dining hall facilities; vending, laundry, and copy machines; and student activities. You'll be given one on the first day of Orientation. If you lose it, plan to shell out $10 for a new one ($20 if you’ve lost it more than once). Go to Regenstein Library, Room 100F; 2-3344.

The writing on the T-shirt

Some Chicagoans are accomplished in a form of tongue-in-cheek narrative that often centers on how cold Chicago winters are, how hot summers are, how windy it is, how gray it is; how corrupt the city is, how uncivilized, or how uncosmopolitan.

Do Chicagoans actually believe that to survive here one must overcome the combined rigors of the Kalahari, Antarctica, and Omaha, or are they pretending to believe it to impress the tourists? Who knows?

Adopting this cultural tendency along with Chicagoans’ penchant for slogans, Chicago students have created such extravagant epithets and boasts about the University as the following, which have found their way onto T-shirts:

Hell does freeze over

Where God drinks coffee

Absolut Nobel

Where the end of the world began

The level of Hell Dante forgot

It's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?