By Marissa Warden

Penn StateNot your ordinary bubblegum baseball cards, the trading cards at this State College, Penn., institution are reserved for the elite. Now nerds can trade their favorite author for an evolutionary biologist.

In an effort to remind the public and the student body that they have more to offer the world than football, Penn State designed a set of trading cards with the pictures and statistics of their famous faculty.

If you’re lucky you can be the proud owner of a Catch-22 author Joseph Keller card or covet your friend’s card of evolutionary biologist Masatoshi Nei, who proved mankind originated in Africa.

“I did not grow up in this country, so I know nothing about baseball cards,” Moses Chan, a physics professor featured on one of the trading cards, told the Chronicle of Higher Education. Chan said he has no plans to trade the card highlighting his achievements.

A special campus committee chose 20 noteworthy faculty members to comprise the second edition of trading cards. The 3,000 packs were issued at an invitation-only tailgate party held by Penn State President Graham Spanier.

Macalester might consider creating our own set of trading cards to distract the public from our football failings. It will give us yet another opportunity to boastfully drop the names of our famous alumni like Walter Mondale, Kofi Annan, Dewitt Wallace, Tim O’Brien, and Peter Berg.

Boise State

Who knew a coupon book could cause so much trouble? Drama ensued when officials at the bookstore of this Boise, Idaho, institution learned of the 20 percent discount for O!Zone, a local condom store, in the University’s coupon book.

Jeff Brooks, chief executive of College Coupons, in an attempt to remedy the situation suggested tearing out the controversial coupons so that the books could still be handed out at the bookstore, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Two temp agencies took on the job of tearing out the condom coupons from 15,000 books over the course of three days. The books, sans salacious ads, were then distributed at the bookstore.

But what happened to the torn-out coupons? Fear not, they did not go to waste. Instead, the coupons were sent to the Health and Wellness center where students could redeem them or, if they were frugal, they could just pick up the free condoms already offered by the center.

O!Zone was eager to exploit the controversy, selling t-shirts in Boise State blue and orange with the word “censored” plastered across the store’s logo and offering students a discount upon mention of the coupon.