SWIL meeting
From SWILwiki
SWIL holds a meeting every Saturday that Sharples dining hall is open, at high noon, in Reserved Room 4, which is the one by the cereal. It is run by the SWILpresidents, and generally lasts an hour or so. SWILmeeting gives non-members (and members, too) an opportunity to make announcements about upcoming events and activities, plan SWIL's next item of chaos, and to hang out for an hour or so. Since it is exceedingly difficult to force college students to wake up punctually on a Saturday morning, the presidents have instituted a SWILlottery, open only to those who arrive at SWILmeeting on time.
SWILmeeting is often referred to simply as "Meeting" in conversation between SWILlies, to the confusion of those who remember that Swarthmore is a Quaker college.
The organization of the meeting is in two parts. First there is "SWILbusiness", consisting of official club events and announcements, sentience proofs and dismemberments, which ends with the resolution of the lottery. This is followed by "NonSWILbusiness", where anyone is free to announce anything they like to the gathered SWILfolk in the room, a division that is believed to have originated with Jed Hartman's presidency in 1988.
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SWIL Business
Disorder and the Rabble
The meeting begins with the closing of the doors to room 4 ("Doors!") and a call to disorder (following the same kind of inversion as "non-members" and "members"). The presidents shout, one after the other, "I call..." "This meeting..." "To disorder!" and the attending non-members attempt to respond with an appropriate level of disorder through cheering, catcalls and assorted chaos. Unfortunately at almost all meetings a large number of attendees are too tired or jaded to participate very enthusiastically. Thus, when the presidents record the minutes of the meeting it has become traditional to follow "The meeting was called to disorder" with "The rabble were pathetic" -- this is believed to be the first invented out of several traditional and oft-repeated abusive statements traditionally applied to SWIL non-members by the presidency in minutes. Today only on very rare occasions are individuals who distinguish themselves during the call to disorder explicitly excluded from "The rabble were pathetic" (i.e. "except the girls on the left side of the room"). It is rare indeed for the rabble not to be worthy of being deemed pathetic at all -- the required energy level usually only manifests itself at the year's first official SWILMeeting when we all try to impress the freshmen, or when a large number of alumni are present for SWILReunion.
Attendance List
An attendance list is passed around meeting to be signed during meeting. Having a record of attendance is useful, because it allows us to determine who has come to three consecutive meetings, and is therefore eligible to prove sentience.
In the 80's, the SWIL Presidents took attendance, but in 1988, The Presidents Who Go Ping! reinstated a self-signed attendance list. This attendance list almost inevitably becomes a mass of in-jokes, puns, and sheer nonsense. Most typically non-members sign in as Firstname "Nickname" Lastname, with the challenge to make the Nickname as long, intricate, irrelevant and irreverent as possible.
One may proxy an absent SWILlie on the attendance list, and this is often done if they miss one of their three consecutive meetings. People also often proxy inanimate objects ("Pile of Green Pickles"), with the intent of later proving them sentient. More recently, it has become funny to some to sign in absent non-members at length and repetitively, often with teasing or insulting nicknames.
Announcements
Meeting is used to coordinate official SWIL Events. Normally, only one or two events are being planned at a given time, but even so, if the event is something like the Pterodactyl Hunt, the main body of meeting can take a long time. The presidents or event coordinators announce what's going on, and attempt to solicit help, input, and support from the often distracted rabble.
A number of things are theoretically supposed to be announced at every meaning, and have generated catch phrases which, like insulting the patheticness of the rabble, has almost lost whatever original meaning they had. Sometimes the coordinators of their respective projects are actually working under pressure and need a response, but often, shouting the lines are merely traditional formalities of SWILmeeting.
- "Nominate books, you stupid illiterate people!": The Cordwainer Bird Librarian traditionally requests book nominations from SWIL, which, ideally, will be put on a list and submitted to Budget Committee in exchange for funds to purchase the books. This hasn't happened for rather a long time.
- Near the end of the academic year, this will generally turn into a more serious cry to "Return books, you stupid literate people!"
- "Submit to BEM! Absolute final deadline: two weeks from today!" is the official cry of the co-editors of Bug-Eyed Magazine. The real BEM deadline generally isn't until sometime in the spring.
- There are now standard punning responses to this -- "I will never submit!" or "Dominate BEM!"
Titles and Sentience Proofs
After attending three consecutive SWILmeetings, one is eligible to prove one's sentience and become a full voting non-member of SWIL. If required to miss a meeting, one may send a proxy of one's choosing, whether human or small plastic cup. Doing so is frowned upon unless one has a good reason, and to make the use of a proxy not feel too much like cheating attendees may go out of that way to treat the proxy as a substitute for an individual in every way. (Such as, for instance, ritually crushing the cup representing Chris Segal.)
Any non-member of SWIL is entitled to request an official title, which may or may not be granted, though usually the asker's words are twisted on themselves in some bizarre and humorous ways. It's better to think of a title to request than to just ask for a generic title.
The Lottery
The lottery was instated by Abi-wan Kenobi, Ben Kenobi, and Queen Amy'dala, in an attempt to get people to come to meeting on time. Lottery numbers are handed out at the beginning of meeting to all who arrive before noon. (No, the presidents don't get lottery tickets. And the presidents really ought to be there before noon.) An acceptable random number generator is produced by the presidents (often a D20 or graphing calculator) and a winner is chosen randomly. Prizes range from X-men videos to salads to cool squishy things from T. Bumble's.
The Three Salesmen of the Apocalypse added the "mystery bowl" to the lottery, allowing victims lottery winners to choose their prize.
Non-SWIL Business
After all official business is concluded, everyone at meeting has the opportunity to announce events that aren't being run by SWIL, or announce anything else they like to all people still trapped there.
The meeting concludes by being called to order.
Special Events
A couple of time-consuming administrative events are carried out at SWILmeeting, generally at the very end of SWILbusiness, or, if they're long enough, at the end of meeting. These include presidential Nominations and Elections (at the end of the fall), Senior Remembrances (at the end of the spring), and nominating SWIL movies (near the end of each semester). SWIL Reunion meetings, when they happen, are also ridiculously long. It is traditional for the presidents to rule that since SWIL Reunion meetings tend to have three times the number of attendees and take three times as long as an ordinary SWIL meeting, attending a Reunion meeting can count as three consecutive (simultaneous!) meetings for the purpose of sentience proofs.
Historical Silliness
A variety of attempts have been made by SWILpresidents across the ages to spice up SWILmeeting by introducing random silliness, generally in the form of an activity that takes place while SWILmeeting is in session, interfering, or otherwise interacting with the sometimes rather boring events of the meeting. For example:
- Chaos' presidency tried (with moderate success) bringing toothpicks and marshmallows for people to construct into sculptures. Meeting attendees were not significantly quieter, but the sculptures were cool.
- Jim Moskowitz '88 suggests:
- At one meeting we passed a blank piece of paper around and had those present write a fold-a-story (sometimes called an Exquisite Corpse): each person would fold the paper so they couldn't read anything about the story other than the line of text immediately above, and would add one more line onto the bottom. At the end of the meeting we had a dramatic reading of the work, which eventually made it into BEM (as, I believe, "Spaceship to Zone X")
- Another time we mandated that everyone at the meeting had to speak in rhyme (and we pulled it off for almost five minutes)
- Still another time we handed out slips of paper to everyone at the meeting (around 25 people) and explained that everyone had been given a secret word, and that exactly one other person had the same word as they did. Everyone was to try to find their partner without others learning their secret word. The game would last for 48 hours, at which time everyone would hand in a sheet naming their partner and as many other names as they'd found. The game would be scored, 1 point for each other name found, minus one for everyone other than your partner who knew your word, and fifteen points for finding your partner. The team with the highest score would win a prize. The only rules for asking questions were: anyone could ask you a question about your word; you could choose whether to answer it or not; if you chose to answer it you had to answer truthfully, and the other person had to truthfully answer the same question about their word.
- I believe we opened our first meeting with a reading of The Standard Disclaimer (now featured as Disclaimer #2 on my web page, http://kith.org/jimmosk"
- The "Three Salesmen of the Apocalypse" ran an 1000-blank-white-SWILmeeting, in which every time someone spoke, they had to draw a card. The cards had been made at the SWILtable during the previous week, and contained instructions like "You must speak only in a French accent", "You are now Chris", "Draw three more cards", or "Every sentence you utter must be followed by the phrase 'in Jim's pants'". It was ... interesting... and at least a partial success. --Jillian
- Notable fallout from the event included the simultaneous presence of three Chris Segals at meeting, all of whom Hated Us All, the replacement of "In Bed" with "In Jim's Pants" as a SWIL fortune cookie meme, and Arthur revealing to Greg that he had been his secret admirer in the previous semester. One of the cards, labeled "Arthur", would have forced everyone to obey Arthur had he drawn it -- this unlikely but potentially horrifying catastrophe, thankfully, did not occur.
- The general sentiment at the moment is that, if the presidents should want to run a Blank White SWIL Meeting again, they should go through the cards and weed out the ones that are no longer relevant.
SWILnews
The happenings and announcements of SWILmeeting are written up in SWIL News, which is theoretically emailed out to the list weekly.
