From The Dartmouth's annual "Hey, spring break just happened, think we can squeeze 500 words out of it?" newsstory, "Spring Breaks Run the Gamut":

For some students life at Dartmouth is raucous enough and already resembles the revelry that students at other schools seek during their spring breaks.

"It's like a perpetual spring break at Dartmouth," Scott McKnight '11 said.

We always suspected Dartmouth was the odd Ivy out. A proposal: Instead of those latently classist "State Night" parties Ivy Leaguers like to throw (you know, party like a state school kid, drink beer through funnels, pretend you care about sports?) let's switch to "Dartmouth Night." It'll be less classist but way more elitist, if the rank-counting hairsplitters on our comment boards have anything to say about it.

More on the Beer Bong of the Ivy League, after the jump.

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...and we're back from spring break, a little sad to have missed the big news on Eliot Spitzer (P'81, HLS'84), if only so I could use that "Princeton in the Nation's Cervix" headline I've been sitting on for months. Since Spitzer's scandal and resignation have been very small stories, completely overlooked by the media, and we'll thus never have cause to revisit it, here's Eliot and Silda's 02138 cover now. The subheadline reads "See What Happens When Harvard Meets Harvard."

Other cute items worth noting:

• Whining about JuicyCampus is officially so over now that old people are writing about it and the gay Yale porn therein. How long until the ironic "we heart JC" backlash begins?
• Columbia's most well-known transman got some press, too.
• Remember when some random guy on a laptop took down the Harvard Grad School website for three days? Turns out he also stole about 10,000 people's personal data, including about 6600 SSNs. Harvard's response: "sorry for the inconvenience."
• If Jesus went to Cornell and wore a pocket protector, he'd be the newest Beauty & the Geek Ivy Leaguer, Jim.
• If Gawker : NYT :: Bwog : the Spec, then Nick Denton used to write our Ragtimes. Just call us "starmaker."
• Tony Blair is going to teach at Yale, which prompts us to wonder: Has Skull & Bones ever inducted a faculty member?

Whew. Keep the tips coming, people. We'll be here all week.

Jacob is going on spring break (the laws of college applying not only to current students, but also to our super-sophomore graduate editor) so we decided we'd all go. These pasty white pages could use a tan.

Send us a postcard from your travels. Better yet, send us videos, drinking games, and names! Tips, titillation, and musings on the tonic powers of tequila are, as always, welcome. We'll resume a regular posting schedule next week, and if there isn't at least one video of some politician's kid smoking hash on a Mexican beach by then, well, shucks. At least you'll have an even tan.

Gosh, these exams sure are hard! Feels like time for a break, no? We'll be back to the usual next week, but for now it's time to recharge batteries, do laundry, bathe, all that good stuff.

But first, a plea: What happens on spring break absolutely must not stay on spring break. We want stories, photos, video, anything. You can find us at the usual. If it means we turn into College Humor for a week, so be it.

Off with you now! May your back tan evenly, may your carefully-compiled reading list go neglected, may your funnel never run dry.

[Ed.: This was written over break; we're just posting it now.]

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 20 -- Come here. New Orleans, where half of us has been on vacation for five days, is a fantastic town, and it's hurting. We haven't had an unspectacular bite of food since our low, low JetBlue fare arrived; hotels are practically giving away rooms, and the locals couldn't be happier to see tourists. There's no lines, all the bars and museums are open, and one thing Hurricane Katrina didn't wash away is the city's open policy on open containers.

It's January, so you should be planning your spring break soon. Make it a New Orleans year, and whether you're doing the responsible tourist thing (walking tours of the Garden District; jazz at Preservation Hall) or the indulgent (bingeing on Abita and po' boys; attempting to talk to Cajuns), the result is still the same. You're pumping travel dollars back into the local economy, so as you puke hurricanes and muffulettas into a Bourbon Street gutter, know that you're engaging in what Tim Zagat calls "patriotic tourism."

(Photos by bobsummers.com, our nature photographer and author dad, after the jump.)

*UPDATE 6:10 p.m.:  Just a note of apology to people who thought this post was a joke. It's not. We want people to visit the place, but we see the tone got a little muddled because of the photos (now after the jump). Thanks, and sorry for the confusion.

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