Halloween costumes were highly political this year, as multiple Elis dressed up as Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Other highlights included a Rubik’s cube or two, the Yellow Brick Road, a homeless investment banker and a Mona Lisa complete with picture frame.

Cheap rides to Harvard. Bus tickets to Harvard for The Game are now $15 each way — down from $38 two years ago. The Dean’s Office, YCC, the Council of Masters and the President’s Office have joined forces to subsidizing the tickets. The buses will be air conditioned and will carry 56 passengers each.

An ambulance and gurney outside L-Dub scared Pierson and Saybrook freshmen Saturday night. EMTs placed a white sheet over the gurney, creating the impression that they were covering a dead body — though no one was on the gurney yet. About 20 freshmen gathered in the courtyard around the ambulance, which it turns out was called because a drunk student had passed out. Said one EMT: “These kids gotta learn how to drink.”

If the country were made up entirely of college students, Barack Obama would win by a sizable margin. The college news service UWIRE reports that as of Sunday, 69 college papers had endorsed Obama but only one —the Daily Mississipian, of the University of Mississippi — had endorsed John McCain. See story about the effect of newspaper endorsements, p. 3.

The annual Safety Bulletin, released Friday, provided useful information such as a warning about buying laser pointers (a Yale researcher “was readily able to buy a laser pointer which … was, unknowingly to him, powerful enough to seriously damage a person’s eye”) and what to do if a “sewer odor is detected” in a lab (“try running water in sinks and into floor drains”).

Alpha Phi Omega haunted. The service fraternity held a haunted house in Dwight Hall on Sunday for New Haven children. The chapel included pirates, Vikings and witches. The Yale Children’s Theater, Demos and the FCC all provided entertainment for the children. The event was a success, according to Cecilia Wright ’11, APO’s vice president of membership. “Only about 20 kids [left] in tears,” she quipped.

This day in Yale history

1954 The requirements for draft deferral for graduate students was changed. Student in the sciences and humanities could get a deferral if they were in the upper 1/4 of their class or if they received an 80 or higher on their draft deferment exams. The requirements for medical students remained unchanged — because medicine is one of the “healing arts,” students had to be only in the top 1/2 of their class or receive a 70 or higher on their exams. Law students, however, only had to be in the upper 3/4 of their class.

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