On Weekends We Used to Sit in the Dorm and Play Monopoly All Night. *All Night!*

Some reporters have mastered the sly deployment of the throwaway sentence. It's a nice piece of the craft, a skill. But others raise it into another dimension, to the level of art.

For your reading pleasure I give you Don Lattin of the San Francisco Chronicle doing a follow-up story concerning the San Francisco State photo-journalism student who was charged with burglary after photographing other students breaking into a car.

That's background enough. 'T is time to quote:

According to Vega and his journalism school instructors, on the night of the car burglary the freshman was working on a freelance assignment to chronicle life in and around a freshman dorm for the online college paper, the Golden Gate Xpress.

At Friday's press conference, Vega projected some of those photographs onto a large screen.

Most are normal scenes of campus life -- a student strumming his guitar in the stairwell, another vomiting in a toilet after a night of binge drinking, and a female student lying on the floor and receiving oral sex from a fellow freshman.

Someone is waving at me from the wings. Time for the ironic juxtaposition.

Nothing to do, Nellie Darling,
Oh, there's nothing to do, you say,
Let's take a trip
On the Memory Ship,
And sail back to the good old days.
Sail to the old village schoolhouse,
Anchor outside the school door,
Look in and see,
There's you and there's me,
A couple of kids once more.

School days, school days,
Dear old golden rule days.
'Readin' and 'ritin' and 'rithmetic,
Taught to the tune of a hick'ry stick.
You were my queen in calico,
I was your bashful barefoot beau,
And you wrote on my slate,'I love you, Joe,
'When we were a couple of kids.

School days, school days,
Dear old golden rule days.
'Readin' and 'ritin' and 'rithmetic,
Taught to the tune of a hick'ry stick.
I was your queen in calico,
You were my bashful barefoot beau,
And I wrote on your slate,'I love you, Joe,
'When we were a couple of kids.'

And you wonder why I jumped at the chance to be a journalist.