Photo: Cliff Lipson / CBS
C'MON DOWN!
Last spring, Joseph O'Brien and a group of Stanford classmates road-tripped to Hollywood in a bid to get on The Price Is Right. A longtime fan of the show, O'Brien, MBA '11, made the cut. Onstage, host Drew Carey gave him a good ribbing saying, "Every Stanford grad who's ever watched the show is counting on you right now. But no pressure." O'Brien won a mattress, bedroom set and pair of Sony e-readers worth $8,354, and a flat-screen TV worth $1,800. "It was really surreal spinning the Big Wheel onstage," he told The Almanac. The episode aired on CBS in June.
Photo: Courtesy Jorge Cham
FROM FUNNY PAGE TO SCREEN
A series of live-action shorts based on Jorge Cham's comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper—about the lives (or lack thereof) of graduate students—were filmed last spring in collaboration with Theater Arts at Caltech. Cartoonist Cham, MS '99, PhD '03, wrote the screenplay and cast real-life counterparts for the strip's characters: geeky engineering student Cecilia, politically active anthropologist Tajel, perpetual student Mike Slackenerny and the nameless protagonist who bears a resemblance to Cham himself. The film will screen on college campuses this fall.
Photo: Nicole Wilder / BravoALOHA, BRAVO
Melissa Rapp, '01, appeared on Bravo's songwriting competition Platinum Hit, which aired this summer. The Honolulu native brought her "chill, happy . . . toes-in-the-sand vibe" to the show, but was unprepared for the machinations of reality television. "I work so hard doing music that I never watch TV," she confessed in an interview with TVGuide.com. Rapp was dismissed by the judges after five episodes. She's recording an island-influenced album due out later this year.
"We accidentally introduced a stray '/'—a slash—on our servers. Suddenly, every page on the Internet was popping up with a big red warning: THIS SITE MAY HARM YOUR COMPUTER. You couldn't access anything on Google. It was as if the Internet was broken."
—Google VP Marissa Mayer, '97, MS '99, recounting her "Favorite Mistake" in Newsweek.
