Good thing they don't use actual candles in the Copley Square menorah

Years ago, Brandeis Hillel stuffed all the campus mailboxes with channukah gelt and dreidels, causing the annual kvetching of the goyim that they're oppressed by all us dirty Jews.

But this was a special channukah because someone at Hillel had gotten an obscenely great deal on little cheap plastic dreidels. I think it worked out to a penny a piece or so. Why? Because they were made in a factory that didn't know the letters weren't randomly chosen. We think they must have had two dreidels as samples, one from Israel, one from chutz l'aretz. For the uninitiated, there's a difference: Israeli dreidels have the initials for "a great miracle happened here" and diaspora dreidels say "a great miracle happened there." So these dreidels had nun, gimel, shin, peh embossed on them ("a great miracle is neither here nor there"?).

This caused much confusion until we reinvented the timeless college classic: strip dreidel. Nun: nobody takes their clothing off. Gimel: one of the guys takes off his shoes, everyone complains about the smell, he puts them back on. Shin: One of the girls unbuttons her cardigan halfway, decides it's really too cold in the dorms, and puts on a parka. Peh: DRINK!

Hillel: making the Comic Book and Science Fiction club feel better about their social prospects since at least 1990.