Wheel! Of! Fortune! Comes! To! Princeton!

"Should I buy a vowel?" "Can I have an 'r,' please?" "May I take the flowered vase for $300?"

Princeton students will be pursuing answers to these less-than-scholarly questions this spring when they represent their school on the syndicated game show "Wheel of Fortune" during its "college week" in early May.

"Fortune" producers will bring a mock-up of the set to Princeton during the week of March 27, when 200 Tiger fortune hunters will vie for a chance to make a pilgrimage to the Los Angeles studio. Host Pat Sajak and cult-figure hostess Vanna White will not make a trip to the New Jersey campus, however.

Harv Selby, who is in charge of recruiting on the Ivy League campus, told The Daily Princetonian that the ideal contestant was someone with "game-playing ability, a sense of humor, and a feel for the wheel."

The selected contestants will pay their own flight to the show's Los Angeles studios, but stand to win great prizes--Sajak and White have given away over $250,000 in the last five "college week" shows, Selby told The Princetonian.

The show's producers have chosen four schools for the week: the University of California at Berkeley, Georgia Tech, the University of Hawaii, and Princeton.

Apparently these four were not the first choice schools, however. Nancy Jones, "Fortune" producer, said the game show had designs on Harvard.

"We wanted to come to Harvard very much. We were sort of stonewalled in our efforts," Jones said. Fortune makes a policy of gaining the permission of college officials before beginning the contestant search. Jones said Harvard would not grant this permission. CORNELL

Let It Slush

There's not much to celebrate in Ithaca, N.Y., during the winter. Except slush.

So to compete with Dartmouth's snowbound Winter Carnival, Cornell this month celebrated the late-season delights of the winter in its annual "Slush Festival."

"We're here to celebrate what Ithaca has plenty of--and that's bad weather," event organizer George Preston told The Cornell Daily Sun.

Activities in the day-long tribute to upstate New York weather included a noontime parade of snow plows and Polar Bear Club members who jumped into slush-filled tubs.

Cleverly paraphrasing the Immortal Bard's writings, Big Red actors carried signs that read, "Friends, Romans, lend me your earmuffs."