Dowbrigade

John
Kerry is finding that his image with the American people, so carefully
crafted during the Democratic National Convention and laboriously propagated
ever since, is being distorted by the Shifty Swifty’s smear campaign.
The latest poll figures, both internal and public, show an erosion of
support among swing voters and vets, two key support groups for Kerry.

Serves him right. He was the one who decided to base his
campaign on Vietnam, and he should have expected something like this.
It seems that early on, George Bush made a public declaration that he
had no intention of challenging Kerry’s war record – AND KERRY BELIEVED
HIM! He let his guard down! As Kerry of all people should know, one NEVER
lets one’s guard down in a fight with a Yale man. Quite frankly, we are
beginning to wonder if the the man is up to the task. Still, there is
plenty of time left for creative politics.  In chess, the player
who makes the first move wins a little over half the time.  The
player who makes the last move ALWAYS wins.

Kerry Blames Bush from the
New York Times

Sonya
Thomas, of Alexandria, Va., eats lobster on her way to winning the
World Lobster Eating Championship, Saturday, Aug. 21, 2004, in Kennebunk,
Maine. Thomas ate 9.76 pounds, the equivalent of 38 lobsters, in 12
minutes. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

At the conclusion of our current four-week commitment
to a dozen teenaged Japanese small-town business undergraduates. we
are looking forward to spending a few days with the Dowbrigade Mom,
loyal reader and insightful commenter, up in Downeast Maine. While
there, we will inevitably have a number of close encounters with the
red crustaceans. Although fresh lobsters are available all up and down
the
Eastern seaboard,
they somehow seem more succulent in Maine. This is probably an illusory
effect created by the persistent marketing campaign run by the
Maine
Tourism Board to associate the state with delicious critters, but knowing
that makes them no less delicious.

However, lobsters were not always held in such high
esteem.  From the Colonial period until the early 20th century, people
in Boston thought the King of Crustaceans was considered fit only
for pig food and fertilizer. In fact, local legend holds that during
the
1700’s
there were prison riots at the Colonial-era prison on an Island in
Boston Harbor because the prisoners rebelled against a steady diet
of – Lobster.
They probably  scrimped on the drawn butter.

from AP

Of
course, everybody has seen this painting, if only in their nightmares.
But it’s in the news because it’s been stolen from a museum in Oslo,
along with another work by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.

So the Dowbrigade would like to collaborate with a sort
of Fine Arts Global Amber Alert. This case goes to the point of the old
adage that some art is invaluable in both senses of the word.
That is, they are so famous that they literally have no value to a thief
in that
they cannot be sold or shown to anyone without immediate risk of apprehension.

In any case, should you see this painting at auction,
or in some obscure gallery in South Boston, or on the wall of some local
college dorm, please contact this publication – we want an exclusive!

OSLO (Reuters) – Armed robbers stole a version of "The
Scream" and another masterpiece by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch
Sunday in a bold daytime raid on an Oslo museum packed with terrified
tourists.

Two masked robbers ran into the Munch Museum, threatened staff with a gun and
forced people to lie down before taking "The Scream," an icon of existentialist
angst showing a waif-like figure against a blood-red sky, and "Madonna."

from Reuters

Taking
nothing away from the incredible gymnasts, the medal bedecked amphibians
and the Cuban boxers, the most
incredible performance in these Olympic games so far is the campaign
of the Iraqi soccer team. After qualifying first in their group,
they beat Australia today 1-0 in the quarterfinals and now will face Paraguay
for a place in the final.

It is absolutely unprecedented and almost miraculous
that this ad hoc, war-torn nation could even field a team on this level,
let alone end up among the top four teams in the world. It is somewhat
akin to the Red Sox single A farm team, the Lowell Spinners beating the
New
York
Yankees
major league
team
4
games in a row.

A year ago, Iraq’s soccer federation
had been disbanded, the team had no facilities and no money and the nation
had been suspended by the International Olympic Committee, a suspension
lifted only early this year to allow them to prepare for Athens. Iraq’s
only previous Olympic medal was a weightlifting bronze at the 1960 Rome
Games.

Of course, President Bush immediately tried to take credit
for the Iraqi victory, we guess on the theory that all Iraqi teams are
now part of the American farm system. Why, if not for his heroic decision
to invade Iraq they would still be suspended by the IOC and running around
muddy fields in army boots! However….

The Iraqi soccer team is not amused with US President George Bush’s move
of using them in his presidential election campaign advertisements.

Calling Bush a "killer", the players said that he should remove his
forces from their country immediately.

"Iraq as a team does not want Bush to use us for the presidential campaign," the
Daily News quoted Iraqi midfielder Ahmed Manajid as saying in an interview with
the Sports Illustrated. "He can find another way to advertise himself," he
added.

from Web
India 123

report on Iraq 1 – Australia 0

In addition to inventing Democracy, competitive sports
and the gay bathhouse, the ancient Greeks had a nifty way of settling
political disputes short of all-out war.

Each side, or tribe, or city in the dispute would send out a champion,
usually the leader or the baddest dude in the group, who in those days
were often the same guy. These two guys would emerge onto the battle
plain, or in front of
the
city
under siege, and engage in a little down-and-dirty
one-on-one hand-to-hand combat. Winner takes all.

There is some evidence this tradition of representative combat predated
the Greeks, at least if we consider the Bible a historic source. The
legendary
combat between David of Israel and Goliath of Philistine reputedly took
place about 300 years before the first official Olympics.

This eminently
sensible solution avoided widespread bloodshed, general mayhem
and collateral
damage, and
allowed
one city
to establish
its preeminence
over another without reducing both to smoking piles of rubble. Although
this heroic combat lacked the visceral appeal of raping and pillaging,
as the tradition evolved into what we know as sports today the ancient
Greeks partly compensated for
this loss by introducing ritualized drunken orgies, which continue,
in a flashy commercial fashion, into the modern day.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could settle our political differences today
with some form of ritualized combat? Avoid spending hundreds of millions
of dollars and distracting hard-working Americans from their jobs and outside
obsessions, not to mention quality TV time?

Considering the two healthy, athletic Alpha Males we currently have
jousting for the office, the Dowbrigade would like to propose a sort
of Presidential Decathlon, consisting of ten events chosen to test the
mettle of the aspirants to the laurel wreath representing the "World’s
Most Powerful Man" title in the very skills they will need to be successful
in this challenging post.

We arrived at this "ten event" formula only after careful consideration
of historical precedent and the principles of fair play. A mano-a-mano,
duel-to-the-death of the old school, although an attractive idea on the
face of it, and steeped in tradition and history, would be not only illegal
under current statutes, but not really guaranteed to produce a winner
with the best skill set for governing a modern super-power.

Certain entire areas of competition were rejected because they gave
too much advantage to one or the other of the current candidates. For
example, we threw out any sport included in the X-games as being too
heavily favoring John Kerry, accomplished wind-surfer, motorcyclist,
hang glider and hacky-sack expert.  At the same time and by the
same token we eliminated all sports involving weapons as favoring the
Texas roots of the incumbent, as well as introducing the risk of decathlon
degeneration into the aforementioned duel-to-the-death.

Although both men have some experience at "America’s Pastime", baseball
and other team sports were rejected on the grounds that it would be unfair
to ask the President to field a team including Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft
and Tom Ridge (although we bet ‘Leeza knows how to break up a double
play). So all 10 events are one on one, Kerry vs. Bush.  Without
further ado, here they are:

First Event – The Handshake Marathon: Handshaking is the preeminent
political movement, and a successful President must be capable of repeating
it
endlessly, and with feeling.  We would suggest that the candidates
each be required to shake the hands of an entire mid-sized city, including
babies and pets.

Second Event – Scramble Drill: In this event the candidates will simulate
an essential Presidential survival skill – getting out of the Oval Office
fast in the event of a terrorist strike. The candidates will have to
pretend to be working (second nature to these guys, and not worthy of
a dedicated event) in a mockup of the Oval Office when an alarm will
go off. How quickly can they navigate the maze of underground tunnels
and crazed security personnel and reach the White House helipad?

Third Event – Arm twisting: A new twist on a hoary political tradition
– the arms to be twisted will be robotic prosthetics, capable of measuring
pressure, torque and duration and reading out an objective evaluation
of the candidates skill in this essential ability.

Fourth Event – TelePrompTer reading: A front-line skill without which
a President would be reduced to speaking extemporaneously, and we all
know
where that leads.  As an additional hurdle, while trying to accurately
read some meaningless gibberish, the candidate will be required to ignore
a variety of distractions such as foreign correspondents in suspicious
turbans, nubile interns in thongs and energetic bloggers trying to ask
questions.

Fifth Event – Grammar showdown: For those unavoidable moments when Presidents
are forced to speak without benefit of a prepared statement, how many
grammatically correct sentences can they formulate within five minutes?  Answers
will be judged by a panel of English teachers and newspaper editors.

Sixth Event – Mud Slinging: In this crowd-pleasing event points will
be awarded not only for the quantity and quality of mud slung, but on the candidates
ability to sling without being sullied by either his own, or his opponents,
mud.

Seventh Event – Poker: This most quintessentially American of games
begged to be included in the Decathlon  The only question was, which
game? Stud poker seemed too old-fashioned, century-before-last, and modern
favorite
Texas Hold ’em favored too strongly one of the candidates.  We would
prefer going with some obscure variation, like Reverse Dentist’s Numbers,
a favorite of the Dowbrigade’s circle of degenerate poker-playing buddies.  This
is a game with rules so wickedly complicated that after over 20 years
of playing, and winning some sizable pots, we still have no actual idea
what they are.

Eight Event – Risk: This quintessential American board game barely
beat out Monopoly on the grounds that American Politics is about more
than just the money, its about taking over the world.

Ninth Event – Back Slapping: Candidates will take turns slapping each
other on their backs until one of them is no longer able to continue.
Use of knives, scissors, box-cutters or any other implement more suitable
to Back Stabbing is prohibited.

Tenth Event – Find the VP: Closely related to the Scramble Drill, this
interesting event tests the ability of the candidate, after evacuating
the Oval Office, to locate his Number Two at the proverbial "Undisclosed
Location".

This kind of political duel would not be unprecedented.  After
all, who can forget that we are in the 200th anniversary of the duel
to the death between Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and
Vice President Aaron Burr, weeding out the field for the 1804 Presidential
elections.

So lets bring back the tradition of Clashes of Champions.  Who
can argue that the world is not a better place since sports have channeled
many of mankind’s aggressive drives to dominate into non-destructive
and socially acceptable avenues? We have come a long way from the Peloponnesian
Wars, when cities would raise vast armies and invade other cities to
raze, ruin and subjugate them. Imagine if New York City raised an army
and launched punitive expeditions up I-95 every time a bunch of Boston
rabble-rousers got drunk and started chanting "Yankees Suck"!

Though the outcome would indubitably be the same, we are probably better
off without all of the messy raping and pillaging which would undoubtedly
result.

And people ask us why we hate paying taxes. A
recent government audit reports that $8.8 BILLION of the money
we have been pouring into this hole in the sand is MISSING! This is
from money
we have allotted to the various Ministries we have set up, which are
looking more and more like licence to steal us blind.

WASHINGTON — At least $8.8 billion in Iraqi funds given
to Iraqi ministries by the former US-led authority there cannot be accounted
for, according
to a draft US audit set for release soon.

The audit by the Coalition Provisional Authority’s inspector general
blasts the authority for "not providing adequate stewardship" of
at least $8.8 billion from the Development Fund for Iraq given to Iraqi
ministries.

The exact methodologies of the thefts was inventive
and varied, forming a veritable encyclopedia of third-world graft, diverted
funding and government fraud. The specific schemes mentioned in
the article involved padded payroll; often thousands of salaries would
be on the books but only a few hundred workers actually existed.

Three Democratic senators — Ron Wyden of Oregon, Tom
Harkin of Iowa, and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota — demanded an explanation
from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over the use of the funds by
the authority.

"
The CPA apparently transferred this staggering sum of money with no written
rules or guidelines for ensuring adequate managerial, financial, or contractual
controls over the funds," the letter from the senators said.

The Pentagon did not respond to questions late yesterday.

Who was it said, a billion here and a billion there,
adds up to real money….

from the Boston Globe

Dennis "Oilcan" Boyd with young fans in Cambridge last
night    photo by Dowbrigade

A
couple of old Red Sox pitchers were in the news in the past 24 hours.
First, baseball eccentric and 1986 world-series pitch Dennis "Oilcan" Boyd appeared
last night in North Cambridge with former New York Giant and Superbowl
winner Steve DeOssie at a charity "Old Time Baseball Game".

It was with mixed memories that the Dowbrigade approached
St. Peter’s Field on Sherman St. in North Cambridge last night, attracted
by the news of the Old Time fundraiser, and especially by the news that
The Can would be taking the mound for the home side. After all, the field
had been the scene of the Cambridge Little League All-Star game during
the famous "no win" season of our younger son’s team, the Cardinals,
who managed to not only stay in last place the entire season but NEVER
WON A GAME. Since league rules mandated that each team send at least
two players to the All-Star game, our son was chosen. Of course, both
Cardinals struck out when they were inserted in the late innings.

Last night, however, St. Pete’s field was hopping.  It
had the air of a neighborhood sporting event and block party, with plenty
of families camped out on the grass in foul territory, some with picnic
baskets and blankets, others gathered around a box of take-out pizza.

In keeping with the "old-time" theme, the players, largely
college and minor league recruits, were wearing uniforms from the 1920’s
and 30’s, and the loudspeakers were pumping out Roaring 20’s jazz tunes.

Behind the screen, where the good views and the serious
fans sat, the crowd was more male, although still typically Cambridge.
Old time Cambridge "good guys", bald and bowling ball shaped, upscale
young fathers with and without kids, and the occasional goofy geek who
stops while pedaling by and stares as if he had never seen a baseball
game before.

There was food and soda, and on a warm summer night kids
who couldn’t care less about baseball ran lose in adjacent areas and
darted under the stands. Near the exit we spotted a trio of young boys
jumping around like they had St. Vitas Dance. Whether they were over-sucrosed
or in need of the facilities we were unable to ascertain.

The game was scoreless until the 4th inning when local
hero SS Zack Farkas hit a home run, making the score 3-0.  But the
scoreboard was not the focus of attention in a laid-back local event
which raised a bunch of money for a worthy cause.

Then this morning we discovered that today’s Boston Globe
featured an extensive
article on another all-time favorite Red Sox eccentric,
1975 World Series pitcher Bill "Spaceman" Lee. Lee was known for his
unique perspective on the game, epitomized in quotes like: "I think about
the
cosmic snowball theory. A few million years from now the sun will burn
out and lose its gravitational pull.
The earth
will
turn into a giant snowball and be hurled through space. When that happens
it won’t matter if I get this guy out."

He now apparently lives in a house he built with his
own hands after retiring from baseball. His spread is located in the
mountains
of Vermont, near the Canadian border, in a wild area called the Northeast
Kingdom.  The natives, notoriously reluctant to accept any outsiders,
have taken a shine to Bill, recounting anecdotes like: "Did you
know Bill got a new haybaler?" says Otten, leading into a favorite
Bill Lee joke, one Lee tells on himself. "We had to explain to him
you don’t bale hay to smoke it."

Lee appears happy lost in the North Country, and is still
a source of quotable quips, like:
"One thing I love about Vermont is you can take all back roads so
you can drink." Lee stays in shape and can still bring the heat,
throwing in the low 80’s in Senior League games, which is coincidentally
about
what we figure the Can was throwing last night in Cambridge. Of course,
we are no expert, despite the time we spent as a South American scout
for a major league team which must go unnamed as a result of a nasty
contract dispute.

Baseball and summer go together like lemon, sugar, water
and ice.

read the Lee
article from the Boston Globe

As
anyone who has dated a gymnast can testify, they are special.
Apart from the benefits of young healthy bodies, they have a flexibility
and physical awareness which make relationships adventures.

We remember
one girl in particular, a rhythmic gymnast at that, who did that
thing where she arched her back and brought her hips around and over
her head! Needless to say, those who have not experienced this
phenomena are often fascinated by it.

Therefore our surprise at the gymnastic bombshell dropped
by the NBC announcer at the women’s team event the other night, who nonchalantly
let drop the sextraordinary news that in 2002 two members of the Rumanian
team had been dropped for filming a naked gymnastics video for some Japanese
filmmakers who paid them $40,000 each, was not so much that this had
taken place as that word of it had leaked out on world-wide television
in the
middle of the Olympic games.

The fact that there is a market for this kind of smut
is obvious and the reason gymnastics will never be eliminated from the
Games, and the fact that these Rumanian babes took the dough for the
show merely answers the question of what these driven, world class athletes
are going to do once they grow breasts, given that they have not had
time to go to school or learn to cook during their privileged/deprived
childhoods.

Of course, your indefatigable correspondent immediately
lit out on the digital trail of this mysterious naked gymnastics video.  Thanks
to industry resource Fleshbot
we discovered plenty of free
pics of the women on the sites selling the complete video, including
one that has a free
19 second mpeg sample (5 mg).

It is hard to justify the Romanian decision to kick
them off the team.  As the media have repeatedly reminded us, the
original Olympics were an all-nude affair. The Japanese filmmakers were
obviously just Olympic purists hoping to resuscitate some of the original
traditions of the Games.

Courses on various aspects of homeland security are
springing up at college campuses all around the United States, and some
institutions have devoted entire departments to the study of homeland
security.

Students at institutions including the University of
Richmond and Rice University can take classes with titles such as "Rhetorics
of Terror/ism, Homeland (In)Security, and the State" and "Jihad
and the End of the World." Meanwhile, Syracuse University has established
a department called the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism,
and Ohio State University now includes the International and Homeland Security
program.

Other colleges and universities have established certificate
programs in homeland security. The federal government’s Department
of Homeland Security, which employs roughly 180,000 people and is the
presumed destination for many students in these programs, funds both
academic programs in homeland security as well as individual scholarships.
Observers expect to see undergraduate and even graduate degree programs
introduced in areas related to homeland security.

from Wired News

A
man wearing a ballet suit stands on the three-meter springboard before
diving in. Olympics Games organizers ordered beefed-up
security at all venues after an embarrassing breach involving a Canadian
man who leapt into the pool during a synchronized diving event.(AFP/File/Marco
Longari)

from AFP

We were actually watching the Men’s Synchronized Diving
event when this professional exhibitionist did his thing.  The scandal-phobic
camera crews assiduously avoided showing us this joker, but the announcer,
in a snooty British accent, mentioned that there was "something of a
commotion" as a spectator described as "a streaker in a tutu" had penetrated
the pool area and actually performed a dive before being led off by police.

So what was the Dowbrigade doing watching Synchronized
Diving at 3 in the afternoon on a weekday? Well, for one, we have a week’s
break between semesters, and as usual after the super-intensive lawyers’
program in the summer, we spend several days in a quiet, darkened room
letting our brain cool down.

Besides, we had read about this new sport, synchronized
diving, and wanted to check it out to ascertain if it met the Dowbrigade
criteria to be considered a real sport. We must admit it was gripping
drama. Going into the last round of dives, it was a Superpower Showdown
between the USA,
Russia and China. Hometown favorite  Greece was a surprising fourth,
hoping to sneak in for a medal.

On their last dive, one of the Russians "broke form"
and "assumed an illegal position" so they got a big fat zero and dropped
to last place. Their dive looked perfect to the Dowbrigade, which just shows
how little we know. Then one of the Chinese guys whacked the board
again on his way down, flipping and spinning into the water, with his
foot
fortunately, not his head, and that wiped them out. And finally, one
of the American dudes just spazzed out, went too far away from the board,
perhaps thinking of the Chinese diver, while the other one rolled too
fast and made too big a splash, and just like that, the Greek Olympic
Team won its first Gold Medal in about 2000 years. A supreme moment
in the athletic history of one of the most storied athletic nations
of all time. But it still shouldn’t be an Olympic event.

Which is not to say we didn’t enjoy it.  Watching
each pair of divers attempting to absolutely mirror the motion, timing
and posture of their partner was visually captivating and introduced
a whole other dimension to the already spectacular display of young near
naked bodies involved in the whole diving field.

The nubile young bodies factor has definitely been an
element in the popularity of the Olympics, from the original games, which
were in large part a celebration of naked young bodies and often ended
in bacchanalian drunken orgies, up to the modern day.  How else to explain
the almost universal fascination with "women’s" gymnastics, where  men
and women, young and old, gay and straight, stare transfixed at each
quivering firm gluteus maximus. But it’s not a real sport.

Now, the Dowbrigade is a big fan of competition in all
walks of life. We keep a running mental tab of our "All Time Greatest
Savings" at the supermarket, by store, total amount and percentage. We
count our snail style junk mail and celebrate on days our total is tops
in the office. We give our Business students virtual portfolios worth
$1 million and give a prize to the magnate with the greatest net worth
on the last day of the semester.

The ancient Greeks, in addition to inventing competitive
sports, were fanatically competitive in all aspects of their lives.  They
wouldn’t stage a poetry reading, they would hold a poetry contest.  They
wouldn’t stage a drama festival, but rather a grand drama competition.  Rather
than attend a concert, they would prefer a battle of the bands. But
they knew enough to keep these aesthetic competitions out of the Olympics.

On Olympus we are a purist. Competitive sports must
be played according to rules, and must be objectively scored. In a parallel
to our conversion from Cultural Anthropology to Physical Anthropology
many long years ago, if you can’t see it, count it, measure it or weigh
it, it doesn’t exist for the purposes of the discussion. We want goals,
runs, minutes and seconds, meters (yes, we love meters – so much easier
to play with) and kilometers.  No 8.2 for not sticking the landing.
No 9.4 for "artistic impression."No throwing out the highest and lowest scores to reduce subjectivity.

According to the "Dowbrigade Rule" the following Olympic
Sports are Not Really Sports and should be banned from the Olympics:

Synchronized Swimming – The worst case scenario of a performance art
passing itself off as a competitive sport

Synchronized Diving – see above

Dressage – This involves horses.  The name says it all.

Eventing – Another horse event. The only horse events that deserve to be in
the Olympics should be running (no horse races at all any more) and horse high
jumping. If they want to have a race including obstacles, that’s OK, but it
has to be a RACE. We could see bringing back the Chariot Race as well

Gymnastics – Sorry, Nadia

Artistic Gymnastics – Even less of a case can be made for this pseudo-sport.
You might as well make body-building or the bathing suit portion of the
Miss Universe pageant Olympic sports

Rhythmic Gymnastics – C’mon, how many different positions can you force
these thirteen year old sex symbols to assume?

Trampoline – How about pillow fighting?

There were some hard calls there. For example, it could be argued that
Boxing, especially the Olympic variety where the short fights and protective
headgear practically guarantee that each fight will be decided by the
judges, depends on subjective judgment and a complicated point system.  But
the primordial place of simple hand to hand combat in the Pantheon of
Sports, from ancient times to the present, convinced us to include it
with the "real" sports. Plus, the scoring is actually done largely by
computer these days, making it acceptably objective.

So lets get back to basics. How far, how fast, how high. And let the
"fashion" sports find a home in national championships, on cable television,
in traveling extravaganzas like the Ice Capades.  But not in the
Olympics.

When Harvard graduate and budding anthropologist
the Dowbrigade was in desperate need for a "real" job in Peru, way
back in 1981, the want ads were not overflowing with positions for
Cultural Anthropologists, and so we embarked on our long trajectory teaching
the Mother Tongue.

Three years later, by which point we were on the faculty
of the National University of Peru, we realized teaching had become
a
career
and a calling, and that we needed some professional training, not to
mention a Master’s Degree, in the field.  But with limited time
and money, a wife and kid and another one in the oven, we looked around
for a solid but short degree program. On the recommendation of a colleague,
Samson Devera, we found one – the State University of New York flagship
campus in Albany – where a Masters of Science in Education could be
had in one academic year,
plus two summers.

We never regretted that decision, and spent 14 happy
months in an apartment complex near the state capitol.  Albany
seemed agreeably dull, offering few distractions or alternatives to
work. Admittedly, between a full-time job mornings at New York State
Blue Cross Blue Shield preparing
BUP reports (bi-annual user profile) on stone age computers running
the first real spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3, our Master’s program
classes in the afternoons and evenings, and a pregnant wife and 2-year
old at home, we didn’t have much time for partying.  Only now
do we realize what we were missing…..

ALBANY, New York (AP) — The State University of New York at Albany
returned to No. 1 on the list of party schools, while Brigham Young
University kept its
title as top "stone-cold sober" school in an annual survey of American
college life.

The Princeton Review’s report ranked Albany seventh in the use of hard liquor
and marijuana, ninth in beer drinking and first in "students (almost) never
study."

The annual "Best 357 Colleges" survey, conducted since 1992, is based
on responses from more than 110,000 students at campuses around the country.
The review has no affiliation with Princeton University.

It is the ninth time the University at Albany — a state-run school with an undergraduate
enrollment of 12,000 students — has been on the party school list. It was No.
1 in 1998 and No. 14 last year. The University of Colorado at Boulder ranked
No. 1 last year.

As usual, we are the last to learn…

from CNN