If you are a college student, and your campus is shut down due to a blizzard, what, pray tell, do you do with yourself?  You get likkered up and engage in wacky antics, that’s what.

One of my students came in on crutches this morning.  I asked what had happened, and the following story was sheepishly related:

Over the weekend there was an epic “around the world” party in the dorms (though our campus is technically dry — wink, wink). Everyone consumed enough antifreeze to go out and play in the snow. Many snow penii and obscene statues were constructed. There was a great deal of sledding, using cafeteria trays.

Eventually, as happens at most college parties, pantslessness occured.

Mr. P decided to up his game, and climbed up onto the portico roof of Residence Hall Ranchero Panthero — the better to drop trou, turn around and utter a Rebel yell while slapping his butt cheeks to draw admiring catcalls from his buddies. As he looked up, he realized that the portico roof was directly under the bay window of Ranchero Panthero’s very staid and easily-outraged house mother — who had phone in hand to summon Campus Security.

He uttered an “Oh, shit!” and trid to simultaneously hoist his britches, spin around and duck out of sight — but having consumed his weight in Malibu, his coordination was not what it needed to be to successfully pull off the maneuver.

(You know where this is going, don’t you?)

He fell off the roof and landed in a snow drift, pants still around his ankles — one of which was now broken. Then he had to lie there in the snow (a few friends got him a  blanket, thank God)while an ambulance was called to haul him away to the local hospital. His RA had to notify his parents, who were Not Amused At All to be summoned to school to deal with an injured son who now has a disciplinary action pending for under-aged drinking in the dorms.

Apparently, we will be getting yet another foot of snow in the next two days.

I am about ready to build a giant wicker man and start immolating people in sacrifice to pagan gods.

G-veg has always been an advocate of, “Don’t ask the question if you a) don’t really want the answer and b) aren’t reasonably sure it’s an answer you will be pleased with.

I tend to agree.

Roberta X puts this harsh lesson into practice.

I’m totally going to do this the next time I get mailers from political reps, parties, etc.

At the very least, the boneheads will have to pay for the postage; I doubt they’ll actually take the message to heart – unless this is a craze which catches on. *hint, hint*

I love the smell of snow-thrower exhaust in the morning…smells like snowmageddon.

Here in SE Pennsylvania, we have about two feet of snow. The kids are ecstatic — though Miss Biscuit is not sure about the fluffy white stuff that is up to her chest. Shark has tunneled through the back yard, Cranky Tundra Dog at his heels, and Bear has created many snow goons.

French Onion Soup is simmering, bread is rising, tea is brewing…life is good at La Maison de Cranke!

in honor of our being buried in snow, have a look at some abandoned Antarctic huts!

I have a soft spot in my heart for our Bio department for a number of reasons.

The first is that I am actually teaching in the Sciences building this year, thanks to a classroom scheduling SNAFU. The benefits of teaching in Igor Hall are numerous. The building borders on the faculty parking lot, which means you can scoot in and scoot out relatively unmolested if you just want to teach and avoid other campus entanglements.  Yet another perk  (heh) of the local is that the best on-campus coffee purveyor is in the basement of Igor Hall, and they have a selection that would make my coffee-loving friend Claudio have ecstatic fits.

The far-flung corner of the third floor hosts a spectacular menagerie of mice, gerbils, hamsters, rats, turtles, crabs, pigeons, lizards, spiders, assorted giant bugs and fish. There is something calming about walking past a large tank of Oscars, large as dinner plates, dreamily drifting in perpetual gasping surprise at what passes by. The hairless guinea pig has an endless array of amusing sweaters inflicted on him by the textiles department. Periodically, a student — in a fit of not-to-be-denied puckishness — will open a couple of cages and the Bio Chair will lock down the building and enlist everyone in it to help track down escapees. (Watching seniors chase down a pissed-off King Pigeon, scramble for mice or shriek like girls over a loose tarantula is endlessly entertaining.)

They also gave a greenhouse. Full of brightly colored flowers, meat-eating plants, and of course, peas! It’s humid and smells of flowers and peat moss and earth, and often the only audible sound is the rustling of leaves and the slow drip of water. It’s a small corner of spring, and when you have the winter WHARRGARBLS, a walk through the greenhouse is just the thing.

Apparently one of the bio faculty members, in need of some greenhouse therapy, put on her garden grubbies and went to do some basic maintenance — re-potting, rearranging, watering, pruning and generally sprucing up the greenhouse.  I knew something was up when I saw Dr. Herb bustle past, gray hair flying, covered in dirt. My classroom is right next to the Chair’s office, so I heard her shriek: “I SAID it’s a God Damned cannabis indica!!!”

In her efforts, she discovered some contraband. Tucked in a far corner, lovingly nurtured by the grow lights and damp environment, some enterprising soul had stashed a goodly-sized pot plant in a sturdy, ceramic container. Sucker was damn near four feet tall.

Oh, the drama. Excitement leaped, like a trout, in the trousers of the Bio collective. (Partially, I believe, because no one is entirely sure if the plant was student- or faculty-cultivated.)

When I left, various bio bigwigs were trying the decide if they should stake out the location to out the farmer, destroy the plant and say no more, or continue cultivating it “purely for research purposes.”

I love my job. There’s never a dearth of entertainment.

…and yes, I am ready to kill a couple of students.

• Mr. “I come to class 20 minutes late — if at all — and take a seat at the back of the lecture hall.”  He has to clamber over several people and their things to get to his preferred spot. He is usually overburdened with two extra-large coffees, and his backpack is covered with metal doodads that clink, clank and jangle whenever he moves. It take him a good five minutes to get settled, disrupting the whole class all the while. The kicker? He puts his head down and falls asleep as soon as he does get settled.
• Miss “The directions do not apply to me.” No matter what the paper topic is, she finds a way to disregard assignment parameters and make the paper about some deeply personal issue (usually related to her menstrual cycle or her very colorful sex life) that i9s in no way appropriate for the classroom at all. She will often throw a small snit when she is told that her first draft is unacceptable. “But I put so much of myself into this paper! Does my pain count for anything in this class?” is her battle cry.
• Mr. “Weasel-eyed Blunt-Jones.” Has a deep and meaningful relationship with the chronic. His license plate and screen names all involve “420.”  His extracurricular activities involve being strapped to a bong for at least 23 hours a day. When he is not smoking it, he is trying to score it, scam it or sell it. Goes through a full bottle of Visine per class, and his lids are generally so heavy as to make one wonder how he actually negotiates hallway hazards. Ever see an episode of “South Park?” This guy is Towlie, personified.
• Miss “Technologically overburdened.”  She keeps her iPod in her ears at all times, and has two different cells — one for off-campus friends and activities and one for on-campus friends and activities. She is usually texting constantly on both of them, and will occasionally use carpal tunnel syndrome to try to get out of paper deadlines. She can keep track of three Facebook chat session, two different text convos and her favorite play lists, but can not tell you the salient points of the paper that is worth fully one third of her grade.

Spring break is one month away — seven classes and counting. Let the countdown begin!

Punxsutawney Phil — that nasty, verminous little whistle pig — has seen his shadow, and predicted six more weeks of winter.

I say we load up on BBQ sauce and hickory wood, road trip up there, and have us’n a little hootenanny, with Phil as the “guest of honor.”

“Dr.” Andrew Wakefield (in his case, the MD is almost certainly decorative)  was found “in breach of ethical and professional guidelines.”

His research — based on studies of twelve children — single-handedly influenced thousands of people to forgo vaccinating their children for measles, mumps and rubella.

From the GMC hearing:

“The research has since been discredited by subsequent studies involving millions of children, which found no evidence for the link between the triple jab and autism. It has since been retracted by the Lancet, and ten of the original 13 authors disowned the research. But the claims sparked a massive drop in the number of children given the triple jab for measles, mumps and rubella. Vaccination rates have still not fully recovered to levels before the scare.”

Bonus! Conflict of interest! It turns out that, in addition to the original falsehoods, Wakefield, “received £55,000 to carry out the research on behalf of solicitors acting for parents who believed their children had been harmed by MMR, but could not account for how at least half of this money had been spent and did not declare any conflict of interest to the Lancet, according to the fitness to practice panel.”

In short, jerkwad falsified his data, a lot of hysterical people bought in to it, and a lot of kids have been harmed because of his duplicitous shit.

I’m sure Jenny McCarthy — that bastion of scientific knowledge — will be issuing her own retractions any minute now.

J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, passed on this morning at the age of 91.

Fiercely reclusive — known to aim his shotgun at any fans who strayed too close to his New Hampshire lair –  his official publishing career spanned only 1940 – 1965.

Catcher was his only full-length novel, and it sold somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty-five million copies.