Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Since I can’t work at my office anymore, I’ve been trekking up to my alma mater to do some work in the relative calm of the Tufts Library (Having a 2 year-old around is not conducive to getting legal briefs written.  Besides they have most of the case law books I need to reference and high-speed internet for alumns.)

Wow do undergrads look young when you’ve been graduated for a dozen years.  Mostly I try to tune out any chatter these children engage in around me, but a story I heard today kept my interest.  Now mind you, this is a third or tenth-hand version of the story.

Supposedly some of the DU frat brothers were down at BC for a Cinco de Mayo bash.  Late into the night, the party went mobile and headed down onto the Esplanade, music, beer, and all.  In their drunken brilliance, they decided that semi-shanty-town that the local homeless vets have on out there on one of the islands was a good place to run a conga-line through.  People got woken up, some fingers and toes got stepped on, insults were hurled (as was at least one girl’s dinner), and things were looking to turn really ugly really fast.

Here’s where it gets weird.  According to the kids, one of the homeless guys stood up on a park bench and ordered the rest of the vets to ’stand down.’  And they did…quickly and efficiently.  He helped the drunken frat party gather itself up and head back toward campus, apparently telling them to “stay the hell off my island.”

Is this “The Colonel” that Neve heard about a while back?  Is this guy really carving a little empire out of public parkland?  I don’t even begin to know how to feel about this.