Heh:

After taking a week off from school to evaluate prospective colleges, high school senior Angela Ross said Monday that, though all the campuses she visited had their strong points, she enjoyed getting drunk at Arizona State University the most.

“The students there seemed very serious about [the drinking game] flip cup, which is more than I can say for the people at UCLA,” said Ross, adding that she witnessed ASU students engaging in such innovative games as keg ball, find the keg, and dark doubles. “The thing I like most about the university is that if there isn’t a drinking game that interests you, the supportive environment allows you to create your own.”

Though Ross was accepted at Stanford, it ranks near the bottom of her list, since fewer than two-thirds of the undergraduates she polled there had ever gone to a movie totally plastered.

God bless The Onion.

We figured sand dunes and sunset over Lake Michigan would be a nice change of scenery while studying for ConCrimPro. :) Those are Becky's and my shadows in the foreground. 'Tis very pretty and peaceful. Thanks for the suggestion, Burkeman and PenguinSix!

It almost looks more like a pastel painting than a real scene, doesn’t it?

UPDATE: By popular demand, here’s a full-size version of the photo. It’s only 1600×1200, though, and the quality is a little dodgy — sorry, I’m using my backup (3-megapixel) camera because my primary (5-megapixel) one is still in the shop.

UPDATE 2: Upon close inspection of the 1600×1200 version, I noticed that the photo is just slightly crooked. I fixed that in iPhoto, so here’s a 1571×1162 version that isn’t crooked.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has been placed under the protection of the U.S. Secret Service, reportedly because of a threat against him, the Secret Service said Thursday.

Visit CNN for the latest.

How to become a registered sex offender in Newington, Connecticut:

Davis was a junior at Newington High School when he met the 15-year-old, a freshman, in study hall. They started out as friends and eventually fell in love, he said.

“We would sit out in my truck at her apartment complex and just talk. Thinking we were deeply, madly in love, we talked about getting married, buying a house,” he said.

But when the girl started slacking off at school and mouthing off, her father blamed Davis and wanted to get rid of him, Davis said.

“As far as he was concerned, I was the root of all his problems,” Davis said. …

Sex offender laws were designed to protect people from predators - pedophiles, rapists and the like. But Davis doesn’t fall into that category. At 18, he was convicted of having sex with his 15-year-old former girlfriend, who told investigators she was a willing partner.

If the age gap between Davis and the girl had been less than two years, he wouldn’t have been arrested under the state’s second-degree sexual assault statute, known as the “Romeo and Juliet” law.

But because the girl was younger than 16 - the age of consent in Connecticut - and he was more than two years older than she was, he was charged with a sex crime.

Now he’s 22, and on the sex-offender registry. So whenever he moves to a new neighborhood, his neighbors get notified that a “sex offender” just moved in. Not to mention, he’s got a felony conviction on his record, which makes it hard to find a job — thus arguably increasing the odds that he’ll turn to a life of actual crime, as opposed to the invented “crime” of being a sexually active teenager. In fact:

The two dozen conditions of probation for sex offenders can restrict where a sex offender works and lives, and with whom he or she socializes. Conditions are tailored to each offender, but many are ordered to attend sex offender treatment and most are required to be pictured on the state sex offender registry.

This sort of thing makes me angry.

When I was a senior at Newington High School, I had a crush on a sophomore girl who was two years and about a month-and-a-half younger than me. Nothing happened between us, but if it had, would I have been a sex criminal?

At least Connecticut has the two-year age difference requirement. California doesn’t have even that, so technically, if it’s your 18th birthday today, and you have sex with someone whose 18th birthday is tomorrow, you’re a sex offender. Re-damn-diculous. (Why do I know this? Because during the early stages of Becky’s and my relationship, in California, I was 18 and she was 17.)

I’m not sure what the answer is. Statutory rape laws are always inevitably going to involve arbitrary numerical cutoffs, and there are always going to be cases where the application of the law seems inappropriate. Yet that doesn’t mean statutory rape laws should be eliminated entirely; obviously, a 35-year-old having sex with a 14-year-old should be a crime, even if the 14-year-old technically “consented.” So what should be done? A bill that’s currently before the state legislature would be a good start:

Under the proposed bill, it would not be a crime for teenagers who are within four years of each other to have sex. Anyone who has sex with a person younger than 13 or who forces someone to have sex could still be prosecuted.

Sounds sensible. But beyond that, I’d say a helluva lot more prosecutorial discretion is needed here. The fact that a father has a grudge against his daughter’s high-school boyfriend, with whom she had completely consensual sex, is not a good reason to subject the boyfriend to a lifetime of stigmatization, just because they were two years apart in high school. That’s completely absurd.

I just wanted to make sure he got the message and ensure compliance, unless he is planning on being the only naked groomsman. ;-)