Wonder why Broadway dry cleaner Blue Jay Cleaners has split in half? The newly created empty lot will serve as the location for an American Apparel store. About time: The store was slated to open last June.

Though Kevin Olusola ’10 did not win the “Celebrate and Collaborate with Yo-Yo Ma” musical competition, Ma chose Olusola as a runner-up, remarking, “Inventive beatbox!” in praise of Olusola’s R&B remix of Ma’s “Dona Nobis Pacem.”

Hopefully Yale already cashed his check. John Thain, whose gift paid for the Thain Family Café, is now out of a job. The former chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch was deposed from Bank of America yesterday.

The latest victim of over-enrollment, Alexander Nemerov’s art history lecture, has relocated from Loria to the Art Gallery auditorium.

The Davenport dining hall was closed Thursday for lunch and dinner, much to the chagrin of about 400 hungry gnomes — and 400 Piersonites, who suddenly found their own dining hall mobbed.

Harvard beat Yale in the Democratic Party, argues a new polemic by Noam Scheiber in this week’s New Republic. “The two schools stand on opposite sides of a cultural chasm in the academic world,” he writes. (Scheiber was educated at Tulane and Oxford.)

Meryl Streep DRA ’75 has been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as a stern nun in “Doubt.” But “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” racked up 13 Oscar nominations — roughly one nomination for every 12 minutes of the film.

Wynton Marsalis, the eminent jazz trumpeter, will visit Yale as a Chubb Fellow next month. He will hold a “musical conversation” with Yale history of art professor Robert Farris Thompson on Feb. 5 in the United Church on the Green.

Swing dancers took over the Woolsey Hall Rotunda on Thursday evening. They are hosting a live band and free lessons tonight at 7:30 at the Undercroft of Christ Church on Elm Street.

The Unity Ball is tonight at 9 p.m. in Commons, featuring mash-up DJ The Hood Internet, appetizers and desserts.

This day in Yale history

1981 Move over, Moose. Morse College hung a giant papier-mâché walrus head above the food line, highlighting the fact that the French word for “walrus” is “le morse.” The synonymous Beatles tune became the official theme song of Morse happy hours.

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