For those interested, Iain Murray seems to have it covered.

Sara Townsley, a graduate student in biology (among other things–she should start a blog), offers a field guide to the Cornell University campus.

The Gray-Tufted Nostalgic Lamprey. Physically less imposing than their fearsome and often irreversibly tenured colleagues, comprising the bulk of the liberal arts faculty. These herbivorous throwbacks can be identified by their poor hygiene, old Volvos and apparent lack of vertebrae or testicles. As committed Marxists, a century of genocide poses a bothersome snag; thus, they’re prone to historical revisionism and faddish prejudices. These aging, conformist pseudo-radicals still regard themselves as courageous rebels, despite having built a habitat cleansed of all but lock-step sycophants. Found in organic markets, peace protests and pricey restaurants.

It sounds like a similar habitat to Ann Arbor, Madison and Berkeley.

Today is my first Cinco de Mayo since leaving southern California, and clearly the holiday is much less a part of the culture in southern Florida than it is there. It’s not a day that I’ve ever celebrated myself, and given the ongoing disaster that has been Mexican governments, alternating between feudalism and crony socialism, since Independence and up to the present day, I’m often puzzled that the Mexicans celebrate it, though I suppose they’re still better off than they were as a colony, given who the colonialists were. It wasn’t, of course, the day that they won their independence–that happened much earlier–but it was almost certainly the day that they cemented it.

But for Americans, there is one thing to celebrate today–it was a spectacular (which is to say, typical) military disaster for the French.