is hurrrrrr.

Actor Jason Segel – best-known for his portrayal of Marshall Eriksen in the hit television show How I Met Your Mother - has been spotted in and around Harvard Square since Wednesday evening.

Segel was allegedly seen imbibing alone at Grendel’s on February 1.

Today, this shot of the actor was taken in the Yard:

(Photo credit: Casey Thomson '13.)

Segel is in town to accept his honor as the Hasty Pudding Man of the Year on February 3.

And the countdown to fangirl it up starts…NOW.

Admit it, you won’t be doing that much reading this Reading Period. Or ever, actually. So why not check out the Mayfair tomorrow, Sunday May 1st, around our beloved (and increasingly dangerous) Square?

Events include “six stages of live entertainment, a charity Hair-Cut-A-Thon, Chalk on the Walk; a Dance Stage; Roaming Railroad Train Rides; A Harvard Student Activities Festival, Hot Air Balloon Rides with donations to charity, three Beer Gardens; and over one hundred thousand happy people!”

We don’t know about Boston/Harvard being happy in general, but the Fair does seem like an exciting event.

One of the hair salons participating in the Cut-A-Thon, which takes place right in front of the T stop, is Plan B Hair Salon. The cut and color boutique, whose name bears no relation to the contraceptive method, is located on 99 Mt. Auburn Street, next to Verizon Wireless. Cuts are $25 (compared to the usual price upward from $50) and 100% of the proceeds go to the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital.

“I started this 3 years ago and have generated over $4000 for the center,” said Richard Fogarty, the salon owner. I’m a fan of the place and they recently teamed up with The Voice for a very exciting project, so the (not so) peripheral point of this post is product placement.

So there you have it, the weather will be gorgeous tomorrow, and you can feel both festive and charitable just by stepping out into the square!

P.S. Please leave Lamont at some point. You’ve probably started to smell. And someone was apparently jerking off in the 3rd floor Reading Room on Thursday night. Not okay.

That’s right – tomorrow, from 10:30 am to 5:00 pm, Otto Pizza is giving out a free slice of pizza to anyone who signs up for their email list. And the best part? Otto offers really unique, delicious (and maybe a little weird) pizza toppings, such as butternut squash, ricotta cheese, and cranberries, or mashed potatoes, bacon, and scallions. For those of you who’ve been too busy staring at your phones to notice any changes in the Square recently, Otto is located in Finagle A Bagel’s old post.

Looks like Noch’s just might have some competition.

yum.

This morning, from 10 to 11:30 AM, Mt. Auburn Street in front of the Harvard Hillel was packed with absurdist anti-protesters responding to the demonstration of the Westboro Baptist Church across the street. The sixty-odd anti-protesters bore signs designed to highlight the absurdity of the three WBC protesters’ hateful claims by totally thrashing them in a nonsense contest. Some of the best signs of the morning included “GOD HATES MUGGLES,” “PRAISE CHEESUS,” “TEAM EDWARD,” “I HAVE TO PEE,” and “I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING FEELING LIKE P. DIDDY.” There were also people holding up giant rainbow signs, a couple of supportive Quakers from the neighborhood, two WHRB members in rabbit suits and a moose man who was blocking everybody’s view with his magnificent antlers.

Take THAT, Westboro Baptist Church!

Absurdist responses to the hatred of the WBC have precedents in several major cities, most notably in San Francisco, where church members canceled a demonstration in front of Twitter’s local headquarters but the anti-protesters carried on with their randomness anyway.

While many suggest that acknowledging the WBC’s protests is just giving them more of the attention they want, Hillel members insist that this anti-protest is actually a part of a much larger movement toward peaceable activism. In a message to attendees of the Facebook event, Harvard junior Chelsea Link wrote,

“…remember that, really, this event isn’t about the Westboro Baptist Church. They are not worth our attention. But their message of hatred and intolerance is all too common in our country today. We are using them as a foil to the world we want to create – a means to achieve real change in our own communities. This is a movement of acceptance, of support, of engaged pluralism, and of radical love.”

FINAL COUNT: WBC – 6 members. Harvard Supporters – ~300 members.

With reading period and finals week rapidly approaching, it’s easy to get lost in the stress of the end of the semester. But here at the Voice, we want to remind everyone that the holiday season is also approaching. It’s the first of December, the beginning of the most wonderful time of the year.

It's not Santa's sleigh, but it brings the cheer

This morning, Cambridge City workers were spotted decking the halls and adorning the Square’s lampposts with greenery and red and gold ribbons. A few strings of lights have already made their way onto the streets and more are undoubtedly to come.

DECORATIONS ROCK

Let’s get festive Harvard! Don’t  get so lost in the finals season that you forget the holiday season. The weather’s getting cold, but it’s time to feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

What a well dressed lamppost

A new restaurant that puts the ish back in delicious.

CLOVER, a weirdly conceptual vegetarian restaurant, opened around the corner from Au Bon Pain on Holyoke Street two weeks ago. Unlike its pseudofrench neighbor, Clover takes a decidedly casual approach to food production, the effects of which are visible even to uninterested passers-by who glance through their full-length windows at the line cooks frying seitan in brightly colored aprons. Inside, customers convene over sloppy organics on lopsided faux-wood stools that gleam with the reflection of the bare white ceiling. The famously messy mission statement on the north wall is overshadowed only by the pride employees take in how quickly the place runs out of breakfast ingredients every morning.

Clover’s organic and local-grown aspirations, combined with its chain status (there are food trucks at MIT, South Station, and Kendall) and half-assed industrialist avant-garde décor, beg the question: how much concept is too much concept? No pomo, but the whole aw-look-how-honest-and-incompetent-we-are gag feels like a bit of a construct, which is what makes this place a haven for the ironically inclined.

That, and the fact that, despite its suspiciously hip aura, Clover offers some of the best, healthiest and fairest-priced food in the square. Entrees are tasty and filling at $5 each, while snacks and breakfast food are available for $4 and under at the same quality and surprising degree of tastiness. Drinks are a bit pricey at $2-$3, but worth it if you’re trying the weekly tea specialties (catnip mint?!) or delicious OJ. Highlights include the Soy BLT, beet salad, hand-cut fries and friendly staff. Though the employees will deny it, we econ concentrators here at the Voice suspect that prices will creep upwards as discerning Cambridgites sniff out this new eatery, so snag a fair-trade sandwich before the hipsters make it uncool.

On Thursday evening (September 23), Tao Lin, author, poet, and notorious blogger, gave a reading from his new novel Richard Yates. Does the book have anything to do with Richard Yates? No. Does Tao Lin care? Absolutely not. In the Q&A session Lin revealed numerous other potential titles, one of which was FREEDOM (with 19 exclamation points). Lin’s most recent novella Shoplifting from American Apparel received high praise and he has also authored a number of poetry collections as well as the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee.

Many in the audience, if unaware of Lin’s personae, likely found the reading rather unconventional–which by many standards it was. However, Lin’s soft-spoken, monotone style has a certain, indelible appeal. He read hilarious fragments from the book without cracking a smile, the principal characters names are Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning, and one of his tattoos simply reads “Fuck America.” Lin gave a signing at the end, and drew something in my personal copy of Richard Yates that only Lin could possibly explain. Overall, it was a fun event and an exciting stray from the conventional reading/Q&A norm.