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The Daily Tar Heel

6 alternative facts about Duke

UNC and Duke decided to change the color scheme of the victory bell platform, and say no to post game spray-painting.

UNC and Duke decided to change the color scheme of the victory bell platform, and say no to post game spray-painting.

In a recent interview, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway coined the term "alternative facts," which has since gained popularity in both real life and meme culture. Alternative facts do not exist. They are just a bullshit way of telling people that you lied about something you disagree with. Since we disagree on everything about Duke, here are some alternative facts about the second worst university on the earth (we don't want them to be number one at anything).  

1. Duke is commonly referred to as the “Ivy of the Southwest Airlines,” as it is the first and only university to offer a semester abroad on quite possibly the worst airline known to humans. 

The semester takes place entirely aboard a Boeing 737, which only stops briefly to refuel. 

Students are not permitted to exit the aircraft prior to the end of the semester and class may be delayed, cancelled or overbooked without notice or refund. 

Students have compared this program to the movie "Snakes on a Plane," if instead of literal snakes, you were stuck on a plane with entitled non-reptilian humanoid snakes for an entire semester. 

2. The Duke basketball team appeared as themselves in the 1996 movie Space Jam.” 

The grotesque, multicolored, Mucinex-esque team took on Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes in the basketball game of the millennia as Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes battled the Duke basketball team to free themselves from enslavement. 

At the end of the film, Duke players lost to the UNC alum and his cartoon sidekicks and the team was banished from this planet, never to be seen again. 

Now if only they had stayed there.

3. In 2014, it was rumored that a Duke first-year was performing as a porn star in order to pay their tuition. 

Two documentaries were later made chronicling the life of this notorious porn star, later revealed to be named Deuce Bigalow. 

These films, “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigalo" and “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo,” later went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and were lauded by the New York Times as a “harrowing look into the results of the rising costs of college tuition.” 

4. Duke’s lemur center is home to King Julien XIII of the Madagascar movie franchise. 

The 7-foot-tall lemur played basketball at Duke from 1996 to 2000 before being drafted to play for the Golden State Warriors. 

King Julien XIII was so attached to his alma mater that after retiring from the NBA, he constructed an ostentatious, gilded palace modeled after Versailles in the Duke Lemur Center. 

He is widely known as a playboy and throws ragers attended by the likes of Kim Kardashian and Guy Fieri. 

Former guests have likened him to “Hugh Hefner, if he was a talking, 7-foot-tall, yellow-eyed strepsirrhine primate.” 

5. The name of the Duke mascot, the Blue Devil, came to be after Duke founder Daisy Duke was thought to be possessed by a devil that was blue in color. 

Friends and family became worried after Daisy Duke demanded that no one should be allowed to set foot on the university’s grass.

Concern grew when she decided the campus architecture should be modeled to look like an evil YA novel vampire family could reside within the university’s buildings. 

She then started babbling about being possessed by a blue creature with a red hat who practiced alchemy. 

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The combination of her claims and wild behavior led family, friends and a bishop to believe that she was possessed by a blue-colored devil. 

Later, it was discovered that the creature that had taken control of Daisy Duke was not a Blue Devil but in fact Papa Smurf. Nevertheless, the name stuck. 

6. In a 2008 Baghdad press conference, President George Bush was hit in the face with a shoe.

Many believed this shoe was thrown by Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi as a sign of contempt for the former president. 

It was later revealed in a leaked TMZ video that the shoe was not intentionally thrown by al-Zaidi but that the shoe flew off the journalist’s foot after he was tripped by Duke shooting guard and Ted Cruz look-alike, Grayson Allen. 

At the time, Allen was just 13 years old.

@noni_ski

swerve@dailytarheel.com