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S A MEANS FOR its faculty to better identify with its incoming freshman class, Beloit College has provided its teachers with a Mindset List for that year, and has done so every year since 1998. This list will help professors "connect" with their students by realizing and understanding how they grew up and what they grew up with, historically, culturally, technologically, etc.

They release this list to the public at the end of every August, so that the rest of us can feel like old fogeys. The incoming class of 2010 was born in 1988, the year I (would have) graduated college!

To give you an idea, the big songs of 1988 were "Need You Tonight" and "Never Tell Us Apart" by INXS, "Roll With It" by Steve Winwood, "Wishing Well" by Terence Trent Darby, "Wild, Wild West" by Escape Club", "Father Figure" and "Monkey" by George Michael, "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman, "Man in the Mirror", "Dirty Diana" and "The Way You Make Me Feel" by Michael Jackson, "Red, Red Wine" by UB40, "Kokomo" by the Beach Boys, and, believe or not, "Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns 'r' Roses!

And now, The Beloit College's Mindset List for the Class of 2010!:

DENIS' EPIPHANOUS DISCOVERY OF A JEWISH FIRST-BASEMAN INSPIRES HIM TO CALL OUT MEL!

Thanks to Malibu Kutt for giving me the inside track on this!!

And while we're at it, I present to you...

CANDID CRITIC'S TOP TEN MOVIE TITLE REJECTED BY MEL GIBSON

The Top Ten Movie Titles Rejected by Mel Gibson, as tallied by my good friends at CandicCritic.com

10.) Payback with Interest

9.) The Man Without a Talis

8.) Lethal Latkes

7.) Maverickberg

6.) Mad Max III: Beyond the Bitter Herbs

5.) Braveheart: Buying At Retail

4.) Bird on a Kibbutz

3.) Manishevitz Sunrise

2.) Mad Max II: The Road Moil

1.) Angry Mordechai

DNAN HAJJ HAD BEEN a Middle East-based freelance photographer for Reuters for 10 years. Then he got busted not once, but twice for doctoring Beirut war photos. His defense was that he was trying to clean up random dust and scratch marks off the original image, but after the second photo, of an Isreali F-16 fighter plane, was proven to have the number of flares dropped from said plane increase from one to three, as argued and proven on may websites, including The Shape of Days, Reuters decided to pull all of Hajj's photos from wherever they were being used.

To add insult, it turns out that Mr. Hajj is presently being looked into for staging photos of supposedly greif-stricken victims and for receiving two paychecks--under two different names--for the exact same photos.

Now, to most, this behavior borders on criminal; the one aspect of media that shouldn't be doctored at all is the news. However, for those who have been paying attention, the signs were there all along. Every thing we consume for information, education or edification has been, and is still being, doctored for palatability, or, when it comes to the news, acerbity. For the news, it's Shock & Awe: Criminal Invent; for everyone else, though, it's just business as usual.

T IS AUGUST 1ST and VH1 Classic--not MTV or MTV2 or VH1--is replaying the very first 24 hours of MTV to celebrate its 25th anniversary. Yep, MTV is 25 years old and, at 40, I am old enough to remember when it played nothing but very poorly produced videos of great songs by great or soon-to-be-great musicians.

That's how I know I'm old, when I'm having a conversation with a 29-year old woman who doesn't remember life before cable, and doubts the veracity of my claim that MTV's only programming back then was just videos--no reality or award shows, not even MTV News!--and that for the first few years, never even showed commercials! She didn't know that VH1 stood for Video Hits One!