Putting the Claremont Colleges' Alcoholism to The Test

Stagafling and others have given me grief for suggesting that something needs to change with our alcohol(ic) policies.

As I have expounded on this blog, I think parents and the federal taxpayer who subsidizes many of our educations, expect better of us than to drink ourselves into a steady coma. (That's what graduate school is for!)

I'm not so prudish as to think you should never drink, only that you ought to drink responsibly and if you are too childish to handle your responsibilities than you ought to relieve everyone else of the burden of having to take care of you.

And take care of many fellow students we did this past semester.

This past semester the number of ER visits from the Claremont Colleges prompted the administration to take a sober look at our party policies.

If history is our guide, they ought to have looked across the street at our friends, the Sagehens.

I quote from Barrett Seamon's Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You, p. 109,

Before Thanksgiving of the following year, [2004], cozy, cerebral Pomona College had sent nine to the ER -- more than twice its total alcohol hospitalizations the entire previous year and the highest number in eleven years.

Gee, I guess this year's number -- eight or so -- isn't so bad after all!

"An Evening With Mort Sahl" Was Luckily Only 72 Minutes

Mort Sahl had a funny line -- given enough time even monkeys can type Shakespeare -- tonight about l'affaire Petropoulous. He said -- and this is not a direct quote so please bear with me -- that Professor Faggen and he had a conversation that went something like this.

In Sahl's ficitional story, he says Professor Faggen suggested recovering lost Nazi art instead of teaching. "He would find it very rewarding."

Ouch. [Insert nervous laughter]

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P.S. Of course Sahl lost me when he put Hitler and Mussolini on the Far Right. He then put Chavez on the Far Left. I admit to being confused.

I fail to see how Chavez and Mussolini are any different. They both are pretty fat economically totalitarian thugs who speak Romance languages.

I was kind of ticked off when Sahl ducked classifying himself on his own political white board. He mouthed some platitude about how you shouldn't put people in groups.

The irony seemed lost on him that for the last hour or so he had been doing just that!