I really want to write something funny today, but you just never know what to expect with a daily blog. When in doubt, consult the news. According to a new study, as many as 1,400 college students die due to alcohol related accident each year, or, as one astute and overly dramatic psychology professor put it, "Half the World Trade Center casualties are happening every year in our colleges." That's right, folks; welcome to the post-Sept. 11 world, where all casualty studies shall be weighed against those lost at the WTC. In reference to the WWII holocaust, for example, instead of saying "over three million Jews were murdered in Nazi-controlled Europe," we are now to put that number in WTC perspective: "Jews, numbering over 1,000 times the people lost in the World Trade Center, were murdered in Nazi-controlled Europe." But I'm getting off track here. Year after year, readers are subjected to a string of alcohol in campus studies that are pretty much carbon copies of each other ("The study does not say whether the problems are increasing or decreasing. A Harvard School of Public Health survey released last month reported that more students are abstaining from alcohol, but levels of binge drinking — having at least four or five drinks at a sitting — are the same as in the early 1990s). Instead, news agencies should just provide free screenings of "Animal House" at the same time each year and follow up each showing with an important looking guy with a clipboard who says, "and so you see, that's where we're at today."
As for me personally, my IBM job is sending me to Nashville this weekend for a three day technology conference. So, if anyone out there has any suggestion as to what I could do during my free time in Nashville, I'm all ears.
Stumble It!
