“It just never came up,” he said.

CHAPEL HILL, NC–Gazing down on Chapel Hill’s campus, the sun casting shadows and light over the bricks, Quasimodo swings from the architecture of the Morehead Bell Tower, his deformed back unable to prevent his gleeful movement.

“This will be the semester,” he thought to himself, “I’m going to finally win her heart!”

Running his hands across the name, Governor John Motley Morehead, inscribed into the large bells to which he has dedicated his life to ringing, he could feel the new opportunities to find love with Esmeralda Boswell, sophomore Chemistry major, blossoming.

“She is a gypsy, I am a hunchback. We are misfits, outcasts, but cast out together!” Quasimodo emoted, beginning to launch into song.

Boswell, an active member of the Romani Coalition of Students and cocek dance group, has, according to sources close to her, remained ignorant of Quasimodo’s existence.

Claude Frollo, who oversees the bell tower’s operations on behalf of the university, said that no one should have heard of Quasimodo.

“He is a simple ugly monster!” screamed Frollo. “Not a man, not even human! He must stay up in his place, never to be seen.

“He shall continue ringing the bell each hour and sometimes playing a song that people might half recognize on random occasions,” he added.

Quasimodo, who has attempted before to win Esmeralda’s heart, still has begun the semester with joy, thinking that this may finally be the year in which it is possible.

“I can love! Love! Love!” he yelled, his arms pulling as the bells rung out across campus.

It has become a tradition for seniors to climb the bell tower at the end of each semester to console Quasimodo after another year of not convincing Esmeralda to love him.

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Taliban spokesman Aman Hasan announced a plan to ban the Globe Theatre’s traveling band of Shakespeare performers throughout the land of Pakistan.

“A man should play Caliban,” Hasan slammed, citing the recent rise of understudy Rita Balaban to replace Pierson Gran in the group’s version of The Tempest. “Some say we can, but there’s no need to cram a ma’am in that jam,” he added, munching on Raisin Bran.

The Globe’s tour began last month, out of a van in San Fran, after which they swam to Japan, then rode a lamb through Bhutan and a sedan through Sudan. They even took gold at a festival in Cannes.

However, their next stop, the northeastern city of Mardan in Pakistan recently fell to the Taliban, which can pose a problem as the new regime ran a scan and decided to can any female performers playing a man.

“I’m also not a fan of her Econ 101 final exam,” said Hasan of Balaban, a UNC art history graduate who studied Cezanne.

CHAPEL HILL, NC—As temperatures dropped into the single digits last week, students and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill experienced weather more commonly associated with prestigious universities in the Northeast.

“It was so chilly last week, I had to wear four layers,” said Junior Sally Handler, a New Jersey native. “Now I can wear my Carolina sweatshirt at home without feeling like I settled.”

Professors had a similar take on the situation.

“It’s hard to respect yourself as an academic when your students wear shorts to class,” explained Wendy Daniels, an associate professor in the history department. “All those red noses and scarves were a real ego boost.”

Peter Tugwell, a freshman Morehead-Cain scholar, said that last Thursday was the first time he had not regretted his decision to come to Carolina.

“I always imagined myself braving the cold of Harvard Yard to learn from the world’s greatest minds,” Tugwell elucidated. “Last week, I got at least part of that experience.”

When asked about the cold, Chacellor Fold said it reminded her of her tenure at Dartmouth.

“I almost forgot about the paper classes,” she added.

CHAPEL HILL, NC—This Sunday, UNC professor Dr. Aaron Bozkurt dropped his class, HIST 235: Medieval Mysteries, describing the course as “lame as hell” and “not a good use of his time.”

The class, which investigates European history at the beginning of the Middle Ages, meets at 9 a.m. three days a week.

“When I wrote the blurb for Medieval Mysteries, I used a lot of adjectives and sexual innuendo to make Christian Monasticism sound exciting,” said Dr. Bozkurt. “But as soon as I walked into that classroom, I knew I had fooled myself.”

Dr. Bozkurt has worked in UNC’s History Department for 17 years, but says he has not experienced a class “so weak” since his first year teaching at Carolina. He says he took an intense disliking to the students in Medieval Mysteries on its first day, mentioning a number of fidgety freshmen and three students from Fayetteville.

“I swear one of those kids still had braces on his teeth,” Dr. Bozkurt said. “If you think I’m going to get up at 7 a.m. just to walk into that mess, you’ve got another thing coming.

“If I could get away with completely checking out every time class met, maybe I wouldn’t drop the course,” he added. “But in a seminar so small, [the students] would know I’m not into it and it would just end up being awkward.”

Since dropping his class, Dr. Bozkurt has been bragging to friends and colleague about his new free time, most recently to UNC Psychology professor Dr. Jennifer Li.

“When I asked Dr. Bozkurt why he was late to class, he told me he had ‘dropped that shit’ and waved a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich in my face,” said Dr. Li. “He said he was planning to hang out until his next class at 2:00 p.m. and then asked if I wanted to go with him to see the Google Earth Display in Davis Library.”

With the semester underway, Dr. Bozkurt has no plans to communicate with his former students about his reasons for dropping the class, hoping instead to just avoid eye contact with them if he ever sees them on campus again.

CARRBORO, NC—Carrboro residents are in for a treat this weekend, with conventions celebrating two of the town’s most popular pastimes. Carrboro will play host to the North Carolina Anime Convention—dedicated to the distinctive, influential form of Japanese animation—and also a yet-to-be-titled anomie convention—addressing the feeling of personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals.

Coordinator Max Sears said that the NC Anime Con will be held in the events space of the Carrboro Arts Center, where a kickoff address from Hikaru Sugura, an illustrator of the acclaimed Attack on Titan manga series, will mark the start of the convention at 7 pm Friday evening.

The anomie convention, according to organizers who wished to remain nameless and faceless, will take place in the open compound behind Open Eye Cafe, although they stressed that  it will also occur “everywhere and nowhere,” in the accusing effluvium of streetlights and steam vents, and in the secret heart of each Carrboro resident lost in the gulf of shame between society’s accepted vision of success and the means by which one is told to seek it.

The anime convention, Sears said, will feature a diverse array of events over the course of the weekend, including several expert panels, a cosplay performance, and a roundtable fan fiction reading.  The anomie convention, meanwhile, is slated to include a demonstration of the impossibility of lighting a match in cold rain, when one is most in need of making fire, a kitchen table where each attendee can stare, silent and unmourning, at the quivering surface of a cup of coffee in the days after his or her mother has passed, and a panel that, according to one organizer, will discuss “Why, as if by design, it is in the very moments when one should be most conscious of what is good and beautiful in life when one instead engages in such unseemly deeds, such deeds as… well, in short, as everyone does, perhaps.”

“The marathon Gundam viewing is definitely where it’s at,” said Carrboro resident Marco Buhl, who said he plans to be present for as much of the anime convention as he can manage. “It’s always fun to swap theories on mobile suit development and just share the weird humor of the whole metaverse.”

“Listen, sometime, to the moaning of an educated man who is suffering from a toothache,” said anomie convention organizer Claude Dillinger. “Not his moaning on the first day, when he moans simply out of pain, like some coarse peasant, but, say, on the second or the third day, when they are not straightforward moans, but crafty moans.

“These moans,” he said, still counterfeiting Dostoevsky’s underground man, “express the pleasure of one who is suffering, for they declare the futility of pain, which so humiliates consciousness. But moans will be of no use to him; he knows that he is only straining and irritating himself and others in vain.

“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?” he said.

The anime convention is scheduled to run until Sunday afternoon, when it will conclude with the presentation of awards for best fan costume and best fan fiction. The anomie convention is expected to continue into perpetuity, unbroken and deathless, the phantom companion to progress.

CHAPEL HILL, NC—This Wednesday, sophomore economics major Garret Walling returned to UNC with a newly purchased Nalgene Wide Mouth Water Bottle, as well as a newfound sense of acceptance on campus.

Walling, who has been on the UNC Tramping Club’s listserv since FallFest his freshman year, says he feels more confident than ever after buying his new water bottle.

“I bought the white, sort of opaque Nalgene with the neon orange cap,” said Walling. “It’s the opacity that tells people, ‘The water in here might be dirty, but I don’t mind because I spend a lot of my time in the woods.’”

Though Walling has not hiked or camped outdoors since quitting his Boy Scouts of America troop in 2004, the sophomore says that he plans on making a few changes now that he owns a Nalgene.

“I’ll definitely be buying a pair of hiking boots,” he said. “And as soon as I figure out where people buy jeans that look good when you cuff them, I’ll be buying those, too.”

Despite owning a backpack that is already equipped to transport water bottles in a convenient pouch, Walling also plans to purchase a neon green carabiner with which to clip his Nalgene. This method, Walling says, makes sense to people who understand hiking.

“I had a lot of success bringing my Nalgene to class on FDOC,” said the sophomore, who made sure to loudly plant the bottle on each of his desks throughout the day. “I only spilled water on myself while I was drinking twice, and it hopefully won’t happen again.

“It was like a tidal wave,” Walling added, shuttering. “It won’t happen again.”

According to his former English 105i professor, Dr. Hilary Rosin, Walling wrote his freshman research paper on the social impact of owning a Nalgene at Carolina.

“If I remember correctly, Garret collected the data for his paper from a survey that he distributed in class,” said Rosin. “He asked how likely students would be to call a male, Nalgene-owning student a ‘Good Guy,’ and asked his peers to rank [1-10] how satisfied they felt when their urine looked clear.”

Having put his research to good use, Walling is sure to refer to his water bottle exclusively as “my Nalgene” for the next two months, and then eventually forget the bottle on a couch in the Student Union.