In the annals of the Ivy League there are countless tales of bright men and women who went astray. There was Harvard MBA graduate Jeffrey Skilling, who helped bring the Enron Corporation down to its knees. And then there was former Penn Professor Rafael Robb, who bludgeoned his wife to death in 2006.

So every once in awhile it's refreshing to hear about reversals of fortune that cut the opposite way. Meet one-time drug dealer Andres Idarraga. At the age of twenty Idarraga was given a felony and a 14-year prison sentence.  Ostensibly because jail sucked and there was little to do, Idarraga

began reading books — voraciously.  As he read, he began to dream, not about pimped-up cars and drug money, but about going to college, about doing something that he and his parents could be proud of.

After attaining his GED and receiving an early parole, Idarraga - whose parents emigrated to Rhode Island from Colombia - applied to Brown. He was rejected, so he excelled at another school, reapplied a year later, and got in. Now thirty, Idarraga is currently a 1L at Yale Law.

The question now is where's Idarraga's Lifetime movie deal?

A Brown correspondent writes in with news from the spaciest Ivy:

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; give a stoner a "sticktastic," Hobbit-like, organically ambient tree sculpture and he trips out for weeks. Following the completion of artist Patrick Dougherty's sapling sculpture on Brown University's Front Campus, people young and old have stopped to take in the impressive creation that seems to grow out of the ground itself. For some subclasses of the Brown cultural lexicon, this pull is particularly enveloping.

"They're like bubbles of wood ... It is a special place. It seems to have its own gravity and logic. Smoking there is like communing with plants in nature's womb," said a Brown first-year who wished to be known as "Scuba Steve." His friend quickly added, "It's a portal to an alien world."

Not to misrepresent the Brown community or its fragrant denizens. This was hardly a "sculpture goes up, stoners move in" sort of situation. Most, if not a high majority of the people enjoying the sculpture, are not doing it under the influence of marijuana, opium, or any of the other assorted psychedelics that even seeing this artwork subconsciously demands.

Nevertheless, the sculpture has been a popular destination for students. The very look and feel of the sculpture fits the eco-friendly aesthetic of any college's pot-smoking population. Thousands of locally harvested saplings (i.e "sticks") beget a roughly textured woodland creation. Its not that everyone's on drugs -- its just better when you're high. Wait ... did I say that? Or only think it?

UPDATE 2:51 p.m.: Cornell stoners nod knowingly.