BY KATIE MAPES
Snack Cart
* * * 1/2
The quality of the snack cart snacks is almost beside the point (and, for what it’s worth, ice cream sandwiches can never be bad, precisely). The point is that the school is giving us free snacks on Wednesday afternoons. Why Wednesdays? Who cares? They’re free!
The cynical may point out that this, like the ice skating rink and free coffee, is a remarkably effective marketing ploy that (a) builds a sense of brand loyalty among students, and (b) distracts them from larger issues, such as last year’s Legal Services Center budget cuts.
But we’re just charmed by the fact that November’s snack is hot cider and donuts. That’s a snack so perfect for the crisp New England fall that we’re fairly certain it featured prominently in Little Women, perhaps in the chapter where they all had a skating party and Amy fell through the ice. (Doesn’t that fill you with a sense of foreboding towards the upcoming skating season?)
Library Paper Cutter
ZERO Stars
We understand that law students are under a lot of stress, particularly those law students prone to spending their time in the library. Thus, we understand that the school would naturally feel the need to keep sharp objects out of their reach to prevent unfortunate homicides and the like. At least, we assume that’s what’s going on, because we fail to think of any other reason why a school with an endowment the size of many small island nations with climates much, much more pleasant than Massachusetts furnishes its library with a paper cutter so dull it’s incapable of cutting more than five or six sheets of paper at a time.
We’ll thus refrain from pointing out that paper cutter murder/suicide incidents are vanishingly rare. That said, the fact that the paper cutter screeches like fingernails on a chalkboard while cutting those single sheets of paper is likely to raise the rates of violent crime to approximately the same level as if the coffee bar was stocked with loaded guns instead of Sweet ‘N Low.