Odds and ends, 8/20/07

From the front page of the Cincinnati Enquirer Web site. I will quote it and let it go. If true, it speaks for itself:

A man in his late 20s walking across a railroad crossing was struck and thrown 50 feet by a Norfolk Southern train this morning. A witness said the man was text-messaging on his cell phone at the crossing just before the accident.

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My alma mater ranked Number 9 on the Princeton Review list of party schools released today. The list, in order, is

1. West Virginia University
2. University of Mississippi
3. University of Texas, Austin
4. University of Florida
5. University of Georgia
6. Penn State University
7. University of New Hampshire
8. Indiana University, Bloomington
9. Ohio University, Athens
10. University of California, Santa Barbara

On the other hand, here are the Top 10 “Stone Cold Sober” schools:
1. Brigham Young University
2. Wheaton College (Ill.)
3. Thomas Aquinas College (Calif.)
4. College of the Ozarks (Mo.)
5. Grove City College (Pa.)
6. U.S. Coast Guard Academy
7. U.S. Air Force Academy
8. U.S. Naval Academy
9. City University of New York, Queens
10. Webb Institute (N.Y.)

Source: The Associated Press

Ohio U was a pretty good party school back in the 1970s. I saw a lot of kids waste their early 20s on alcohol, pot and other stuff. I was a stone cold sober kid at a Top 10 party school. Somehow I survived.

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Union Carbide Corp. agreed Monday to donate 58 acres of South Charleston property and several research and development laboratories to West Virginia University.

The new WVU Charleston Research Campus, located at the company’s Technology Park, will focus on energy and chemical technology. Union Carbide is a subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Co.

The university will initially relocate its Charleston extension and extended learning offices to the new site, said WVU President David C. Hardesty Jr., who retires from that post on Sept. 1. The university will later develop programs to benefit residents of the Charleston area.

The AP story goes on to note that the new research center "gives WVU the chance to develop education and programs in a part of a state where it does not have a large presence."

Forgive the holes in my knowledge of Kanawha County geography, but I think this is awful close to the Marshall branch campus (or whatever technical term Marshall uses) at South Charleston. The political fallout from this should be fun to watch. Why does WVU need a branch campus next door to Marshall's?

Oh, everyone will cooperate for the good of the community and all that, but some of us wonder what's really going on here. And why.