Hooray for clubs!

We at the UW have a lot to boast about when it comes to our university. For instance, we have one of the best medical schools in the United States, our location suits both outdoorsmen and urbanites alike and every spring our cherry blossoms explode with colors that would drop the jaw of any Crayola exec -- oh yeah, and Husky football rules!

However, while the UW has no (official) outlets for things like hang gliding and tinkering with robotic dinosaurs, other universities do.

For the past two and a half months, "Get a clue about the U" has featured nine of the UW's student organizations, tackling everything from dinghies to paintballs to helping the homeless. Today -- instead of the same old, same old -- "Get a clue" looks at some of the more notable student organizations from around the country.

And where better to start than Harvard?

Founded in 1795, Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals derived its name from an early ritual that required its members to provide a portion of "hasty pudding" each time they met as a club. In the early 1800s, meetings consisted primarily of mock criminal courts, which denounced everybody from Cortez (he was too cruel) to the University's administration (for making students take math courses).

The club's practice of elaborate court hearings has since evolved into Hasty Pudding season, when the club puts on various performances of major shows, from February through March every year. Each show involves scripted actors performing a "no-holds-barred drag burlesque" for a general audience inside the organization's clubhouse. It is quite a spectacle, as the costumes and sets often rival those of professional design.

Hasty Pudding season commences each February with the Woman of the Year Parade. For the event, 14 men in dresses escort a well known actress through the streets of Cambridge, Mass. and onto the clubhouse stage to receive her award -- the Pudding Pot. Club members then roast her in front of a large audience. A week later, the Man of the Year ceremonies kicks off the first show of the season.

This year, Drew Barrymore and Anthony Hopkins were honored, and past winners include Harrison Ford, Lucile Ball, Jodie Foster, Samuel L. Jackson and Tom Cruise.

Also in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab -- though it's not a club, per se -- has been busy perfecting "Troody," its five-year-old chicken-like robotic dinosaur. Powered by batteries and computer, Troody can walk, pivot and swing its tail (break dancing to come later, maybe).

Another MIT organization, the Solar Electric Vehicle Team, is gearing up for the 2001 American Solar Challenge, to take place July 15-25. MIT's team will put its vehicle, "No Name II," up against others from around the world -- including cars from about 40 other U.S. colleges and universities (UC-Berkeley, Ohio State and Texas A&M, to name a few). The teams will race more than 2,300 miles -- from Chicago, Ill. to Claremont, Calif. -- for the right to call themselves the supreme solar power.

Switching from the land to the air, Stanford Flight offers its club members the opportunity to hang glide, skydive and even fly planes (got money?), as the club has been known to frequent the Mission Soaring Center in Milpitas, Calif., as well as fly into the Watsonville Air Show.

Changing gears yet again, Yale offers an odd change of pace -- no, not with its infamous Skull and Bones Society -- but with the lesser known Chicken 'n Porn Club.

What is there to say, really? The club assembles every once in a while to gobble up Popeye's fried chicken, scattering the floor with greasy cardboard boxes while watching pornography. Following a Jan. 2001 article in the New York Times, featuring the club's "X-tracurricular" film StaXXX, members of the P 'n' C, as the club is commonly referred to, have received numerous requests for interviews, from publications and news services such as the New York Post, Fox News Boston, Hustler and The New Yorker.

So there you have it, a few of the nation's most notable, and oddest, student organizations -- and while the UW may not draw the likes of Mel Gibson and Meg Ryan year after year -- like the Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club -- at least we can separate our porn from our fried chicken.