Following in the indie tradition of bands like MGMT and Milosh, Portland natives Starfucker combine plunky Casio riffs with slow, barely varied backbeats on their new self-titled album.

Imagine it’s 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning. You’re still drunk from last night, you’ve got work and laundry piling up and it’s not even light out. Yet here you are at Barton Hall, chugging coffee and assembling steel trusses, heavy-duty rigging for light fixtures and scaffolds into a stage. You’re making signs that say: ‘Backstage Band Area’ or ‘Bathrooms Here,’ or running errands to Wegmans to buy your guests of honor their organic bottled water of choice. A truck breaks down on its way to Ithaca, so the stage you need to have assembled by 3 p.m. won’t be ready for a few more hours. But the show must go on — will go on, at 6 p.m. Screw how early it is, it’s time to get to work.

You’ve got to have a sense of humor to get by at Cornell. With the fluctuating weather, the sometimes near-impossible courses, the even more ridiculously obscure prelims and the generally serious academic mood, something’s gotta give. Comedy offers no better way to balance the C.U. pressure cooker. Cornell’s Program Board (CUPB) rolls out the laughs by hosting a gamut of comedians to offer their biting wit and spot-on observations. But did you know that there are student on-campus comedy troupes, too? And that a few of said comedians have dipped their toes — even gotten their feet wet — in the waters of stand-up? And, lastly, did you know that these kids are funny? I mean, really, really funny?

You can’t spend a night — or the requisite Collegetown three — of dressing like a sexy police officer, Sarah Palin or an oversized pumpkin and come out smelling like roses. This week, the Daze staff share their wildest moments from All Hallow’s Eve: raw and (mostly) unedited. From disastrous high school pranks to men whose fetishes happen to be your specific Halloween costume, writers divulge their best and worst nights. It may have been a long time since elementary school going door-to-door; but that doesn’t mean the tricked and treated memories are far gone. So when Friday (and Thursday and Saturday) come along and the inevitable good and bad times happen, just be glad you weren’t us.

5:30 p.m.: I’d been sitting with Rockwell, Ethan and Jon for over 20 minutes, so I figure it safe to get to the heart of the subject. “So ... what’s up with the orgies?” Laughter ensues. 6:00 p.m.: Dinner time. The infamous Mathis Jackson swipes us in — Mathis knows every person in Risley by name. We go through the assembly line. “You have to get the stir fry. It’s amazing,” Jon tells me. “No really, you just have to get the stir fry. It’s so good ... seriously get the stir fry.” 6:06 p.m.: I sit down, sans stir fry. “Hey, you should really try Risley’s stir fry,” says Sonny Xu ’12.

It’s not infrequent for Cornellians watching Entourage or The O.C. to sigh longingly and wish that our fair University were located somewhere a bit more star-studded or sun-basked. But these dreamers can take heart in the fact that once, a long, long time ago, Ithaca was the center of the movie universe.

Adam Vana ’09 doesn’t mind if you don’t call him a musician. “I think DJs who insist on that are just insecure,” he says. One of Cornell’s most prolific practitioners of electronic music, Vana prefers to use the word “prosumer,” a concept that fuses the roles of producer and consumer.

You know the person you bumped into at Temple of Zeus today? When your elbow knocked into his or her oh-so-delicious soup and sent it flying over his or her body and spilling onto the stack of pages he or she lovingly clutched to his or her chest? Well, that person may very well have been Cornell’s next Kurt Vonnegut, and those pages you accidentally destroyed may just have been the next great, American novel. (Good job.)

Cornell has nine dance groups who perform it, two classes taught exclusively about it, four radio shows that feature it, vfunding agencies and concert organizers who sponsor it, one official blog devoted to intellectual discourse about it and now, over a 1,000 records containing it, more than 500 original flyers advertising it and about three decades of photographs of its infancy. What is it? It’s Hip Hop, in all its quixotic, nonconformist, ever-evolving, hard-to-define glory.

On October 31, 2006, a gorilla woke up, got dressed and decided to spend his day chasing a banana around campus. Or more accurately, two dudes decided to pull an ingenious prank on Halloween — a guy in a gorilla suit chasing a guy in a banana suit throughout campus — classrooms, up and down lecture halls, skipping through Ho plaza, even meandering through Trillium and Libe Café, picking up some much needed coffee and potassium.