We’re gradually implementing new features here at Break Out The Oreos, some of them visible to you and some of them not. We’ve beefed up our site-mapping and search engine compatibility, which is why a Google search for “Break Out The Oreos” actually leads you to where it is supposed to. The same applies to yours truly. These and other changes have resulting in higher visbility for our humble blog, which has recently had several weeks with three hundred or more hits. Last month our blog was visited seven hundred times.

Now, while the whole “150 views on a good day” strategy is nice and all, it’s still a far cry from the type of site traffic that other, more prominent and better established blogs receive (Sex and the Ivy gets over 2,000 hits a day, but then again, none of us here at Break Out The Oreos have quite the kind of social life that Ms. Chen does). This is all the more reason for you, our loving and loyal readership, to help get the word out–tell your friends about us! Visit more often!

Devon outlines the big changes coming to BOTO, after the jump.

There will be a wealth of new content appearing here going into the new semester–Devon and Nicole have ironed out most of the kinks of this whole “blog” thing are stepping up their game. With the editors moving back to Morningside Heights for the new semester and capable of working together in person, the readership can expect more frequent publishing over a broader range of topics.

Perhaps most interesting among these new topics will be more “on the street” activity–we’ll bring you our first-person reports of events and happenings as the editors scamper about New York and the Ivy League, including interviews and photographs exclusive to Break Out The Oreos. Upcoming stories will include our visits to the Ivies during football season, the antics of CUMB, the 2008 Presidential Election, and the final months of both Shea and Yankee Stadiums.

Reader feedback is a big part of our intended expansion, and as such we’ve opened a poll widget on the right that will allow you to tell us about your experience on our blog. This will allow us to improve our content and make the BOTO cleverer, sharper, and more insightful.

You’ve already heard from contributing writers Matt Rothstein and Ben Theodore–you’ll be hearing from a lot more over the next few months, including a slew of Ivy League students in what will become a frequently running segment. We’ll also be publishing photos and other visual art from guest artists. If you have your own tips or photos or such to submit for our perusal, you can either use our contact form or send us an email at our submissions line.

Nicole couldn’t help but notice that news about politics and the Ivy League have resurfaced on our humble blog, and she felt it necessary to point out that her future alma mater has its fair share of bizarre minutia.  While we here at BOTO usually sing rigorous, albeit quirky, praises of Columbia - think rugby-clad musicians spouting witticisms and bellowing the school fight song in football fields across the Ivy League - we have also been taught to question the status quo to the point of near paranoia.  Couple this insatiable curiosity with the perspective of a more objective voice (that of a Haverford College student) and you have a partnership ready to tackle the hairy underbelly of world domination.  With this in mind, we present the following riddle:  what do Barack Obama, Frank Lautenberg, David Paterson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hans Blix, Pat Buchanan, Alan Greenspan, and Mikhail Saakashvili have in common?

Find out after the jump:

These politicians are players in Ben and Nicole’s Columbia alumni-driven conspiracy theory.  Think about it:  as Ben noted on browsing Wikipedia’s list of noteworthy former Columbia attendees, one could recount the entirety of American history and only mention Columbia alums.  It seems that the individuals listed in the riddle have collectively turned their attention to the future of politics and formed a coalition of actors in, or orchestrators of, the current state of society.

• As Chairman of the Fed for twenty years, Alan Greenspan had arguably more control over the state of the U.S. economy than any other individual on earth.  Since 2001, he has actually been criticized for policies that led to a housing bubble and the current subprime crisis.  And let’s not even begin to discuss how much of an impact the writings of Milton Friedman (PhD in 1946) have had on our leaders in the last few decades.
• Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), quite possibly our next President, has utilized his youthful idealism and command of rhetoric to assemble a massive army of devoted, political foot soldiers.  With more influence than perhaps our current President (so much for Yale conspiracy theories - we’ll save Skull & Bones for another time), Obama is in prime position to extend Columbia’s influence across American policies both foreign and domestic.  If only we could get him to acknowledge that he attended the school…
• Columbia has also achieved a near-stranglehold on the New York State Governor’s Mansion.  After George Pataki (class of 1970 from Columbia Law School) served for eight years, New York’s mob-rule/democracy chose to elect Eliot Spitzer (alumnus of Princeton and Harvard).  The powerful assembly of the New York City Ivy League school, however, had other plans.  After having carefully planted David Paterson ‘77 as Spitzer’s Lieutenant, a prostitution scandal took down the Governor, and Paterson rose to the highest office in the state.
• With just one of the nine robes on the Supreme Court filled by a former student at Columbia, a less keen observer might think that the school’s reach stops with only two branches of government.  However, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was rated the 20th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes Magazine in 2007.  Perhaps more importantly, her Senate confirmation hearings set a precedent that nominees were not obligated to answer questions on certain issues if they chose not to.  This ultimately led to the confirmations of Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts.  Plus, she has her own famous Family Guy joke.
• But why stop on our shores?  Columbia’s powers also extend across the world. Whether it’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, or UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, it seems that former Columbians have made their mark on the modern diplomatic identity of the United States.
• This focus is no more fitting this week given the media attention paid to Georgia ($10 if you could find it on a map before two weeks ago; $20 if you work in the White House and could find it on a map).  With virtually all of the Western world siding with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in his accusation of unprovoked Russian aggression, it’s important to point out that Saakashvili is himself a recipient of an LLM from Columbia Law in 1994. EDITOR’S NOTE (8/16): Mr. Saakashvili is also apparently a discerning aficionado of certain Morningside Heights cafés.

You remember that school thing Break Out The Oreos used to write about? That vaguely snooty grouping of Northeastern educational institutions? What was that that called again?

Oh, right. The Ivy League.

Summer’s nearly at an end, dear readership, and while Devon is truly excited to be departing this small piece of Hell masquerading as paradise for more urban pastures, only one group of Ivy Leaguers is ecstatic to the point of public, gleeful idiocy. Yes, friends, the incoming freshmen are almost here, and they’re already proving to be a promising group for us bloggers.

Evidently, one particularly outspoken Princeton ‘12-er named Stephany Xu–also known by her Facebook alias as Stephany Her RoyalHighness–is lighting it up on the interwebs over at the Princeton 2012 Facebook group with what can only be called an expansive address upon her high standards and positively endless potential. Many thanks to IvyGate for breaking the first great story of the new hunting season.

Here’s one of our favorites:

This is the death of dynasty. The authorities may make the rules, they may think they have control, but we cannot forget we are Princeton. We are her blood and her bile. And we are the generation they have never seen before.

We are the anti-Christs to save the world from the mercy of God, the self-pity that festers within the masses. Religion is the opiate of the masses, so drug them until they are nothing but slaves at your will. You have deserved this. You are Hitler the fourth, Alexander the Great the Second, Napoleon the Fifth, here to destroy the world we know.

We are history because we are the winners.

We just hope that the Princeton administration starts listening to her sooner rather than later so that we can write about Princeton’s departments being restructured into schools of apocalypse, genocide, dictatorship/warlordship, and tantric sex. It would be a revolutionary new vision for the ol’ orange and black–after all, “Dei sub numine viget“ kind of sucks when compared to “We are Princeton. We are her blood and her bile.” Latin is so not hardcore these days.

We’ll lay off a full, jump-capable post for now in the interest of originality and avoiding excessive schadenfreude. We’re sure we’ll all be hearing from Stephany again real soon.

When this half of Break Out The Oreos was a child he often attempted to pout or whine his way into getting what he wanted–that new toy, one more cookie than was the limit, another hour of sleep, you know the drill. And the response he almost always received, fine parents that his mother and father were, was that whining doesn’t make people want to give you what you want.

We say “almost always” because, being the precociously astute seven-year-old that Devon often imagines himself to have been, he inevitably found an exception to the rule: while whining doesn’t make people want to give you want you want, whining at really inconvenient moments for other people will very frequently make them give you at least some form of what you want just to have you shut up. Devon used this strategy to a particularly effective extent whenever his mother went into crunch mode with less than twenty-four hours before a deadline.

Now it appears that those two great whiners of the Democratic party–Bill and Hillary Clinton–have capitalized upon the Democratic party’s most inconvenient moment: with an uncomfortably nasty race between Obama and McCain heading into the stretch, the Clintons have been making just enough noise at just the right time to get Hillary a symbolic nomination at the Democratic National Convention to smooth out what the New York Times is calling “a lingering rift with Clinton supporters.”

Devon ponders the “rift” and gets his indignation on, after the jump.

If you’re confused about this, don’t fret, because you’re not wrong–Hillary did lose a fair and democratic process known as the Democratic presidential primary. Which, in some senses, means that the Democratic National Committee is committing voter fraud with this alternative–albeit symbolic–nomination, because the other side of the coin to Clinton losing is, you know, the fact that OBAMA ALREADY WON THE NOMINATION! ARE YOU FUCKING JOKING WITH THIS?!!

The Democrats are attempting to take back the White House and solidify their hold on Congress after almost a decade of what is nearly universally regarded as disastrous Republican leadership, and if Hillary and Bill’s hissy fits fuck this up for us we will be so pissed. How long is it going to be before they understand that Hillary is not entitled to a presidency if the voters don’t want her?

Hillary Clinton has a duty to the Democratic Party take her political ambitions, which were rightly and fairly entertained throughout the primary season, and put them in her back pocket for another few years.

Bill Clinton has a duty to both the Democratic Party and his once-respectable reputation to stop making an ass of himself. He might have already been a douchebag, but at least he was a silently content douchebag until his wife’s presidential bid started getting rocked in the primaries. Now he’s got even liberals longing for the days of “I do not recall…”

…seriously, fuck soccer.

What a crazy time it’s been these past couple of weeks in the world of baseball. Let’s recap:

• Old Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium featured the big names: newly-named Hall-of-Famer Goose Gossage, Reggie Jackson, Tino Martinez, Bucky Dent, Yogi Berra, and more than seventy others. This includes fan favorite Willie Randolph, who after being horribly mistreated by some inferior, other New York team, recieved a hearty welcome back to the Bronx and those who love him for the class act that he is. Never leave again, Willie!
• Manny Ramirez, professional douchebag and Yankee-killer, is dump-traded to the Dodgers in a three-team deal that sends Pittsburgh outfielder Jason Bay to the Red Sox. Devon is ecstatic about this: not only does Ramirez leave the Red Sox, not only does he leave the AL East, not only does he leave the American League, but Ramirez is now on an entirely different coast from where Devon usually makes his home. That’s right, go away, Manny! Never again shall your man-child mug crowd our television screen.
• Ken Griffey, Jr. is sent from his nine-year home in Cincinnati to the White Sox. It’s not every day that you get to see a  600+ homer guy traded, particularly mid-season.
• Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez is traded to the Yankees by Detroit in return for Kyle “Please Don’t Put Him In Without A Ten-Run Lead” Farnsworth. A great move by the Yankees in the wake of Jorge Posada’s season-ending surgery, particularly because everybody in the Bronx hates Farnsworth.
• Xavier Nady, the outfielder traded recently to the Yankees from Pittsburgh, began his career in pinstripes by kicking asses and taking names–he’s hitting .526 since the trade, earning him AL Player of the Week honors and a lot of Devon’s kudos. He’s even a new father! It’s hard not to like him, even if he did spent a fraction of a season as a Met.

Some things never change, though. Curt Schilling is still an attention-grubbing douchebag, particularly now that his irritating career is over.

Devon runs down the baseball scoop in Japan, after the jump:

Japan is a nation obsessed with baseball–intriguing further reading can be found at everybody’s favorite online resource (can we consider it a lifestyle brand?), but for now we’ll just list some of Devon’s favorite baseball-related experiences in Japan:

• Count the caps: So far in its Japanese travels, Break Out The Oreos has counted one Mets cap, two Red Sox caps, one Cardinals cap, one Pirates cap (seriously, Pittsburgh?), and about seventy-five Yankees caps. Say what you like, it’s still a Yankees Universe.
• An unfortunately conflicted young man: One of those two Boston caps was spotted atop the head of a young teenager in the Matsumoto Train Station–closer inspection revealed him wearing a t-shirt reading, “Property of New York Yankees.”
• Hints of a national hero: BOTO has stumbled upon not only one but about a half-dozen examples of young boys wearing the Yankee insignia not only on their hats but also on their shirts On the back of these shirts is the reason–MATSUI. Young men riding their bicycles and playing stickball with dreams of being like their favorite big-leaguer; it could be anywhere in America. How bizzare.
• Missed the memo: Another young man was dressed like his afore-mentioned comrades, except his shirt sported the number 13 rather than the number 55, along with an entirely different name altogether–Rodriguez. Doesn’t he know that nobody is supposed to like A-Rod outside of the greater New York area?
• The faithful: From what BOTO has gleaned from the televised broadcasts, Japanese baseball games are more akin to college football games or anywhere-outside-of-the-US soccer games than their American counterparts. Marching bands, cheerleaders, spirit sections, crowd cheers with bass drum accompaniment, huge banners–all of these are in full force through every inning, every pitch.
• Work ethic: This is meant as a comment upon the Japanese game rather than on the American game, but the players really hustle–they sprint on and off the field between half-innings instead of strolling or jogging back. It’s difficult for one to imagine such a thing happening in the States; then again, BOTO hasn’t been to an American college game lately.

Devon may update from Tokyo in a couple of days. In the meantime, he will continue wandering about Matsumoto in an attempt to get some more writing done.