Across the River Cam

Just in case I decide to run for office sometime, I wanted to be able to claim an elite U background, like Christine "I am a muggle" O'Donnell (Oxford, correspondence course, sometime).

I have now been to Harvard. Of course I didn't learn anything, except where to find the restroom near Anna's, nor did I enter any of the other buildings, but I was there for the "Head of the Charles." It's a pretty place, if not very close to my idea of what a University campus ought to look like.

When we were approaching the Harvard square T-stop, I noticed that the guy in front of me looked like a cross between the real and movie Mark Zuckerbergs. Later I figured out that everybody at Harvard looked like Mark Zuckerberg except maybe for the Asians. OK, I'm sure that wasn't really true, but I did feel slightly freakish. Though there were lots of other tourists there to read the three lies and rub the toe of John Harvard's boot.

I stopped by MIT too. I think I can sort of see what Gell-Mann had in mind when he said that when he learned he had been admitted there but not to the school he wanted he contemplated suicide (but refrained on the grounds that he could always commit suicide later, but that the operations didn't commute). A very cute co-ed (do they still use that word) gave us directions to the endless hall, which she asserted was supposed to be "very MIT." It was pretty long, but I seem to recall entering one end and exiting the other - and you could probably walk pretty far without freezing to death in the winter.

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