Answered! – Irrelevant information that you need to know

Say Wha?

“That’s funny. I just played three songs about mice.”

-KPSU DJ Tage Savage on the synchronicity between his radio show’s song topic choices and the Vanguard’s attempt to rid our office of vermin.

In case you were wondering…

The Girls Next Door star, Playboy model and Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend (she’s one of three), Holly Madison is actually a former PSU student. According to TV.com, as well as various other Web sources, the oft naked “star” studied theater and psychology, proving that being a Portland State student can actually get you somewhere in life…or at least into Hugh Hefner’s bed.

What the hell is that?

You pass it all the time, but you probably don’t know what it is. That odd structure on the south side of the Smith Building–the one that looks like a hobbit hole or maybe like some piece of discarded art–is actually an irregularly used old-world style pizza oven.

The oven, a graduate thesis project by PSU student Heidi Moore, is made from cob and takes three people to run. After sitting unused for some time, it was fired up for the first time last spring by the student-run vegetarian cafe Food for Thought. They sold the pizza through their Smith Memorial Student Union basement location once a week for 10 weeks.

And, if you weren’t sure, cob is a type of natural building material that is made primarily of mud, water, clay and other sustainable products. That’s right, it’s sustainable.

Do you have any interesting bits of PSU trivia you’d like to share? Any questions about strange PSU (or Portland) landmarks we can answer? Send them to [email protected] and we may answer them in future editions of “Answered!”