I said I’d be posting stories about my life at Yale, but I never really followed through. I’ll be heading back to Moscow soon, and I still haven’t told you anything. I’m going to make up for that. For example. Yesterday I had my picture taken with Yale’s biggest celebrity. This is Handsome Dan.
The English bulldog is the symbol of the university’s athletic teams. And not just some abstract bulldog, but one very specific dog. In the photo is Handsome Dan XVI. The first one was chosen in 1889. Here he is:
Actually, Handsome Dan is one of the main reasons I ended up at Yale. When I was advised to apply to my program, the first thing I did, naturally, was go online to see what this Yale place was all about. And that’s how I came across this Wikipedia article. The description saying that, when choosing the next Handsome Dan, preference is given to bulldogs that are "hostile to the color crimson" (the color of Harvard’s teams) absolutely blew me away. A world-famous university. One of the top institutions on the planet. It’s been around for 300 years. Its endowment (the fund it lives off) is $30 billion. And for the past 120 years they’ve been amusing themselves by looking for bulldogs that are "hostile to the color crimson." That one slightly bizarre fact convinced me that Yale was worth applying to, if only to get a closer look at how exactly they go crazy over there. So there you go. And today, by the way, we’ve got an event. Football — American football — Yale vs. Princeton. It’s an important day for Handsome Dan: before the game, the little cuttlefish has to run around the field and fire up the team.
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