EVANSTON – A SafeRide driver was recently arrested for delivering alcohol to a minor. According to court documents, the minor in question placed a call to SafeRide at 9:30 PM, and a driver was dispatched approximately 50 minutes later with spirits in hand. According to university officials, such wait times are not uncommon for students using school resources to get wasted.

“SafeRide drivers may take hours to accomplish minutes’ worth of tasks,” Northwestern spokesman Al Cubbage explained, “but when you’re stranded on Noyes in dire need of a drink, SafeRide will always be there for you.”

Cubbage then made further headlines with the announcement of SafeRide Lite, a new fleet of cars dedicated to reliably delivering alcohol to patient students. Representatives of The Flipside were invited for ride-alongs to see the new drivers in action. I had only been in the car for about a minute when the driver received his first order.

“Got a female student for you at Simpson and Maple,” the radio operator issued. “She called an hour ago, but then I started playing Solitaire.”

“Vodka or rum?” the driver asked as he rifled through a fully-stocked cooler in the backseat. He seemed shocked to hear that she only wanted a ride back home.

“I’m a very ‘scenic’ driver,” the driver spoke as we leisurely ambled towards his destination. “I like to show riders the best Evanston has to offer while they’re puking in my car. If I fall slightly behind schedule, I think it’s a small price to pay.”

The street corner came into view.

“Aw, shit, she’s already been mugged.”

In other news, a Shepard Hall CA has been arrested for selling Adderall to his residents, but only to those who agreed to attend a “super-fun” fireside on body image awareness.

EVANSTON – Jack Weller, a Community Service Officer working the Wednesday-evening night shift in the Foster-Walker lobby, was honored by the Evanston Police Department Tuesday for unprecedented heroics. Weller is now the first CSO in over a decade to actually thwart an ongoing crime, a task that the celebrated hero attributed to “I have no idea how that actually worked.”

According to reports filed with the EPD, John Weller was unobtrusively reading at the front desk when he heard shouts from just beyond the doorway. Eyewitness accounts indicate that Weller lifted a single eyebrow in the direction of the disturbance, and then returned to his novel. When the shouts reemerged after another minute, Weller slowly raised himself from his chair, groaning as he went to investigate and maybe have a cigarette.

Outside, Weller discovered Mark Carver, an Evanston Township High School student, allegedly attempting to steal the purse of a Northwestern undergraduate who wished to remain anonymous. Moving quickly, Weller foiled the attack by placing his hand on Carver’s shoulder and giving him a stern look until EPD forces arrived via Segway to take the offender away very slowly.

“I was so scared at first!” the victim later gushed to The Flipside. “That man is a true hero! I really don’t know what I would have done if Jim Weller hadn’t come along!”

The Plex lobby remains filled with tributes to the grandfather-of-three, with residents promising to make a better effort to get to know the man who keeps them sort of safe at night.

“James Weller is such an awesome guy,” Plex resident Alexandra Meyer commented. “Whenever he signs my boyfriend in for the night, his fatherly glow really reassures me that this completely voluntary honor system is keeping me safe!”

WASHINGTON—In response to the false hijacking alarm triggered by a cup of spilled coffee last week, the FAA issued a statement Monday mandating that pilots use sippy cups on all domestic and international flights.

“Drinking out of big-boy cups is a privilege, not a right,” commented FAA Administrator, Randy Babbitt. “When our pilots show they have grown up, they can have that privilege back.” Babbitt also announced today that the FAA would be issuing Mickey Mouse and Big Bird cups to airlines with the hope of getting a cup in every pilot’s hand by the end of the week.

Although the move has had widespread support on Capitol Hill, the move has unsurprisingly been met with stiff resistance by pilots and pilot advocacy groups. The National Union of Airline Pilots (NUAP) threatened to challenge the new regulation, stating, “If our pilots want to drink Juicy Juice while on the job, they should be able to do it like the grown-ups that they are.”

Babbitt also let slip that the FAA was planning to implement a new time-out policy next year for “naughty passengers, such as those made infamous on September 11th.”

EVANSTON – In an unprecedented move on Monday, the president of SafeRide announced that the organization was considering a name change after one of its vehicles T-boned a minivan, killing two of its own passengers and the driver of the other car.

“Safety obviously isn’t part of our image anymore,” said Michael Grossman, the president of the organization.

While numerous apologies and public statements have been made since the accident, this is the first that denotes any change in policy.
“We want to show the public that we acknowledge what happened and that we’re taking steps towards a solution. The last thing we want is for someone to mistake us for a company that can actually offer safe travel,” Grossman said later in the conference.

SafeRide will be moving forward with a series of publicity efforts emphasizing its new, yet-to-be decided name and slogan, “We’ll get you there intact…probably.” The campaign includes posters depicting a man sheepishly shrugging his shoulders with a smile, commercials showing scenes of unfocused drivers and passengers laughing, and “viral-type” advertising like large, distracting road paintings.

Included in this effort is a contest to rename the organization, where the public can help SafeRide choose between three new names for SafeRide cars: AdrenalinePumper, DeathTaunter, and WhoNeedsSeatbeltsMobile. The names are currently being tested in focus groups.

EVANSTON—When freshman Conrad Stevens went to his first lab in Tech on Wednesday, he ended up stumbling upon a colony of students living in the halls.

“I’d just passed L22 for the fifth goddamn time,” Stevens recounts, “when I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I could have sworn I heard whispers.”

Upon investigation, Stevens realized he had found a small village lining the halls of the A wing basement. “They were all wearing long-sleeved shirts, pants, socks, closed-toed shoes, and safety… fuck, I forgot my goggles!” Stevens recalls.

These so-called “Lost Boys” are, in fact, an entire freshman lab session from last year who, through a typo, were scheduled to meet in “A2.” Senior Benjamin Wells remarked, “any freshman that doesn’t know A2 isn’t a real room deserves to be lost in Tech for a year, living off scraps of food and deionized water. When I was a freshman I spent a whole week living in the Tribune Center because I didn’t realize it was different from McCormick Hall.” When reached for a followup, Stevens raised a thought-provoking question, “Who the fuck put the L Wing between B and G?!”

Stevens is planning to give a talk to University maintenance entitled “This Is Why You Clean the Fucking Basement,” though there is doubt whether maintenance workers will put aside their fears of encountering a minotaur in the Tech labyrinth.