This blog is overrated.

Those pampered, entitled, adultolescent college students are at it again! According to a new study reported in the Times, “When male students enrolled in four-year universities, levels of drinking, property theft and unstructured socializing with friends increased and surpassed rates for their less-educated male peers.” Oh no, not unstructured socializing! The culprit: not having to “grow up” quickly enough. “College delays entry into adult roles like marriage, parenting and full-time work.”

And of course, the title is “College Students Behaving Badly,” even though the results apply only to men. If the research had shown that only women students commit more criminal acts, one can imagine the ensuing “Co-eds Gone Wild” headlines.

A commenter points out that the Times often publishes stories “glorifying the fun and excitement of being in one’s atmosphere and enjoying times with good company” when it involves chic middle-aged Hamptonites in their newly remodeled kitchens. “But when undergraduates engage in a little bit of fun it’s suddenly socially deviant behavior?” Blog writer Tara Parker-Pope responds hilariously, “A dinner party with friends is structured socializing. That’s very different from the ‘hanging out’ culture of many college frat boys.” Not if you’re a dinner party animal!

When I dropped out of J-school, the extent of their “new media” training was a course that showed students how to use boolean operators like “and ” and “or” to enhance searches. But at least we didn’t have to take a class on Twitter.

(Sorry for the light posting; most bloggers post something before they go out of town.)

An otherwise interesting Times story about tuition-free Berea College in Kentucky contains this pampered-college-student howler: “[U]nlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls.”

At least reporter Tamar Lewin is willing to consider football teams as a pricey amenity. But coed dorms? Are those somehow more expensive than the single-sex kind? And while I’ve heard of at least one college installing a climbing wall in its athletic center, no evidence is presented that “most” schools with large endowments have them, let alone hot tubs.

The Times’ media reporter David Carr gives us an unsparing account of his life as a drug abuser. His life as a domestic abuser? I’d say that two offhand references to his violence against his ex-girlfriend in a sprawling, self-flagellating 9-page essay constitute a fairly sparing account. “I hit her, for one thing.” Oh, well, just for one thing. “If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote that I was a recovered addict who obtained sole custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer?” Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I like the story much better knowing that the domestic batterer ended up with custody.

It’s nothing new to see domestic violence treated with a lack of seriousness in the world of journalism. A couple years ago, firebrand Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg was charged with, and admitted to, hitting his wife. Steinberg’s bitter enemy, the Tribune’s Eric Zorn, proclaimed piously on his blog, “My hope is the hope I’d have for anyone laid so low–that he’s bottomed out, and that this terrible event marks the beginning of his recovery and of a reconciliation with his family.” Domestic abuse is a private issue, a “terrible event” that just kind of happens to a family, and certainly something that one should be polite enough not to discuss. Unless the abuser is using it to put the touches on a bad-boy image to sell a memoir.

Funniest grammar-related witticism I’ve seen in a while, from a comment thread on Megan McArdle’s blog about cyclists:

One day I was riding the bus to work and ahead of us was a bicyclist with a placard on the back of her bike with the vehicle code section saying bicyclists have the right to a full lane.

And of course–do I even need to say it?–she blew through every single stop sign.

It’s one of the very few instances I’ve ever seen where someone was simultaneously flaunting and flouting the law.

If only the cyclist had also had a bright light attached to her bike — then she’d have both a flare and a flair for annoying drivers.

This is what happens when academic non-scientists attempt to write about “geeks.” Here Scott McLemee describes the thesis of the new book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, written by an anthropologist:

[T]he whole process of creating and distributing free software is itself, to borrow a programming term, recursive.

Per the OED, recursivity involves “a repeated procedure such that the required result at each step except the last is given in terms of the result(s) of the next step, until … a terminus is reached with an outright evaluation of the result.”

Something like that dynamic – the combination of forward motion, regressive processing, and cumulative feedback – is found in geekdom’s approach to collaboration and evaluation.

What’s recursive about a development process that involves a “combination of forward motion, regressive processing, and cumulative feedback”? Why isn’t it just iterative? The book is described as “an effort to analyze the source code, so to speak, of geekdom itself”; it’s enough to make you wish that “geekdom” were proprietary.

(Back from out of town; sorry about the light posting.)

Another rant from a disgruntled waiter, this time with a book deal in the works. What is it about food service jobs that provokes such vociferous tirades on hipster blogs, all the sanctimonious posturing about how the way one treats waitresses is an infallible guide to one’s character, how customers who send food back deserve to get their entree with a healthy side of saliva? Sure, waitstaff are overworked and underpaid, but that hardly makes them unique, especially in an era where worker protections are being eroded across the board, and somehow I have yet to be warned that I’d better tip hotel cleaning staff or they’ll spit in my bed. All I can think is that a lot of upper-middle-class hipsters worked some kind of food service job at some point in their college careers and see their fellow servers as more worthy of consideration than those far less cool minimum-wage workers.

Thoughts on the economics professor who sat in an office full of rotting food watching porn and e-mailing a friend about his strategies to seduce a “totally dumb” student whose “little girl set of mannerisms” appealed to him (”find out her weaknesses, flatter her, and then dig out more info to use to my advantage later”) and about his thing for the “teen girls who work at the thrift and dollar stores he frequents”):

1. Ick.
2. I’m surprised this violates university policy if there’s no evidence or complaint that he actually carried out any sexual harassment.
3. ICK.

Consumerist usually does an excellent job as an unapologetic advocate for consumers’ interests in increasingly tough economic times; for instance, the Gawker Media blog has a whole series on the stealth-inflation-causing “grocery shrink ray” even though it’s more or less an invitation for “lazy fat Americans DESERVE to pay the same amount for smaller packages” moralizing. But this list of “Easy Ways To Save Money At The Supermarket” is something of a disappointment. With tips like “Make a list and stick to it,” “[U]se a basket, not a cart. Empty space cries to be filled” and — seriously — “Eat a meal before shopping,” the implication is that trips to the grocery store are expensive because stupefied, stomach-led shoppers mindlessly load up their carts with impulse buys. Some of the advice is completely inaccurate, like the suggestion that the perimeter of the store is “where the healthier, cheaper items hide.” Healthier, probably, but fresh fruits and vegetables are hardly cheaper than processed food. Let me know when one of these lists is written by someone who actually cooks.

The rugged adventurers at Outside magazine have named their “Best Towns in America,” and topping the predictably outdoorsy choices like Ithaca, New York and Crested Butte, Colorado, is, inexplicably, Washington, D.C. “The magazine said one of the things it was looking for is towns that have turned things around.”