It's all about the quality squirrels

I've been working on the Berkeley campus for more than three months and have finally strayed beyond the fringes of my office building by taking an official campus tour. First interesting note: the bright-eyed students who lead the tours have to walk backwards the whole time, so they can maintain eye contact and pepper guests with witty bon mots about the Blues. So I learned a lot of useless trivia, which I love, and got to watch three guys dressed in blue and yellow sportswear trying not to trip over their feet for over an hour. Fab-u-lous.
There was a lot of blah-blah Free Speech Movement, blah-blah biggest university library west of the Mississippi, blah-blah Pac-10, blah-blah Go Bears. And then there was the interesting stuff.
Best trivia snippets:
* The highest point on campus is a belltower; bones belonging to the natural history museum are stored in the tower because it maintains a near-constant temperature.
* The campus squirrels have been voted America's friendliest.
* A fountain on campus memorialises a homeless dog named Ludwig who scraped together a living by begging food from students and loved to play in the water. After his death, mourning students did the right thing and named the fountain for him, thereby claiming another honor for the campus--only American uni campus to have a fountain named for a dog. Go Bears!
* And, best of all, Berkeley has produced 20 living Nobel Prize winners, seven of whom still work on campus. Each of these seven has a car park labeled NL, for Nobel Laureate. I have seen them with my own eyesies. Apparently there have been instances when more than seven of the Nobel guys have been on campus for a function and some have gone without carparks.
While the tour did not have the desired effect, I guess, which was to make me feel misty about my association with the university (Go Bears!) it did make me think about my own alma mater and how badly I blew it. I had the grades to get into Berkeley and lived an hour away, but I chose to go study in Salt Lake City, where it snows and coffee is considered a racy stimulant and if you're not Mormon you're not worth much of anybody's time. Strangest choice of my life. And I don't recall any squirrels on that campus. Certainly not chubby, chattery, elfin comics like the ones at Berkeley.