This season's HOT look

The first really cold storm of the winter hit Los Angeles yesterday, with temperatures plummiting to a positively Baltic 16 celsius. Personally, I haven't yet lived here long enough to really notice such temperatures as being cold, but I can gauge the transition from autumn to winter by the appearance of ugg boots. Ugg boots, in case they haven't reached the UK, are bulky sheepskin calf/knee length boots that look like a cross between bedroom slippers and a slaughtered elk, and on the campus of A Well-Known West Coast University they seem to be commonly worn with a short skirt. Quite why one would wish to cool one's legs and simultaneously worry about frostbitten toes has so far eluded me, but then I'm not an undergraduate. For some reason, ugg boots seem to raise the ire of polemicists, but personally I don't give a toss. There's something rather 80s about the look, and as I always say there's no such thing as an indecent outfit, only indecent legs. People without decent legs are banned from A Well-Known West Coast University, or at least they're actively discouraged, so that's not really a problem here. Also, most of the detractors seem to be Australian, so their views on sartorial elegance can be safely ignored

My 'Dynamic Climatology' class sporting their winter drawers. The dark-haired one works on equatorial Rossby wave rectification, and the blonde is interested in mesoscale land-surface forcing

Of course, this is a very cosmopolitan campus, so not every female undergraduate wears ugg boots in the winter. The Japanese students, for example, go more for knee-length stockings. It must be due to that 'schoolgirl' obsession that they all seem to have. I wonder if there's anyone left in Japan who enjoys just good old fashioned shag, without the need for utensils or a bit of latent peadophilia? I doubt it.

The only nation that rivals the Japanese for kinky strangeness are the Germans, which raises the vexed sociological question of a possible link between coming second in World War Two and sexual perversion. More importantly, would you rather spend a weekend in a Vegas hotel room with a German or Japanese depraved twenty-one-year-old? I throw these matters open for debate.

Some full-grown women in Japan trying to attract a couple of peadophiles. In their defense, at least they don't shit on each other for pleasure, unlike some WW2 antagonists I could mention...

Instant arsehole - just add uniform!

This week, I am mostly outraged by the inappropriate and indiscriminate tactics employed by The University's very own police force. Quite why this Well-Known West Coast University needs its own police force is beyond my comprehension, since this is possibly the most tedious and trouble-free campus that I have seen anywhere in the world. No matter, the fact is that we do, and it's been clear to me in my dealings with them that they have a bit of a chip on their shoulder because, uniforms notwithstanding, they're not proper police. Aaron Spelling would never have written an action series about the exciting and seedy-but-glamorous life of The University's very own thin blue line, daily braving dangers to keep the campus protected from illegal parking and skinny, twenty-year-old socialists. The campus fuzz know this, and it gnaws away at their very tiny and soulless minds, so it's no wonder that they have a warped attitude. Added to which there's nowhere on campus that sells decent donuts.

It seems that this time their malignant nature has taken them too far, and more importantly it's taken them too far in front of fifty or so witnesses with camera phones. A 'full investigation' has been ordered by the acting chancellor, which can be roughly translated as 'a spineless hatchet-job on the student involved, followed by a couple of quiet dismissals and panicked settlement with the student's family'.

Not that I object in principal to rough treatment of undergraduates. There are occasions in campus life when they need a thorough going-over that they won't forget. Occasionally one of them needs to be separated from the herd and made an example of, just to keep the others in check. But that is not the role of the police. It is, and always has been, the strict domain of the Academic Staff. That's what we get payed for. What's next, SWAT Teams proctoring exams? That's my job, and I don't need any fairy body-armour and and a wussy fucking baton to do it.

Heroically protecting us from the scourge of mendacious disabled parking permits

For those who really thrive on this sort of thing, you can watch an undergraduate student having the shit kicked out of him here