So, the new town? Well, it’s a college town that got its name from a woman called Ann. It features kitschy restaurants and a cute nickname (”Naptown”).

Here’s a look at one of its historic districts:

All right, I’m exaggerating a bit. Her name was actually Anne.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.