The University of California at Los Angeles is engaged in a massive coverup. Officials there, citing safety concerns, have declared an end to the Undie Run, in which thousands of students dash across the campus in their skivvies.

A handful of students started the Undie Run in 2002 as a way to release stress during finals, but the celebration -- which took place three times a year -- has grown to as many as 10,000 people, many of them not students. People drank too much, fights broke out, someone got robbed, skin was bared.

No more, say administrators. The next run would have taken place in December. But some traditions die hard. Is UCLA prepared to crack down in order to get students to zip up?

Some things were simply meant to be, and some were meant to be for only a couple years. Such is the case with Adam LaRoche, the ballplayer whom the Pittsburgh Pirates traded last week to the Boston Red Sox.

Pittsburgh is home not only to the Pirates, but to the Roman Catholic La Roche College, and Adam LaRoche's arrival in 2007 as the club's first baseman could only be described as a divine convergence.

"Adam LaRoche's tenure with the Pittsburgh Pirates was in large measure responsible for Sister Candace Introcaso, president of La Roche College, becoming the first ever college president, not to mention the first nun, to be named on a Topps baseball card," we learned from Ken Service, vice president for institutional relations at La Roche (the college, not the first baseman). Service's sources for his claim are unimpeachable: "I have asked my nephew, two neighbors, and a Girl Scout...

Eight months after Queen Elizabeth asked scholars at the London School of Economics how they had failed to predict the financial equivalent of a meteor smashing into the planet, she finally got her answer: Basically, Your Majesty, we were all high on money, and no one wanted the party to end.

More accurately, a three-page letter from a group of eminent British economists said, "The failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.

Thanks for clearing that up. Now, off with your heads!

Technological failure can be a blessing in disguise. Just ask the people on our forum.

If you work for the University of Georgia, and you get arrested or convicted, you're obligated to tell your employer. The independent student newspaper, The Red & Black, reports that people are doing that only about half the time. C'mon now, people: 'Fess up! You'll feel so much better.

When the Leader of the Free World weighed in on Skip Gates's run-in with the unfortunately named Sgt. James Crowley, we knew that the proverbial shark had been jumped. We also knew that we had the perfect excuse to link to our favorite photo of Gates, from an article last August in Martha's Vineyard Magazine.

In the interview, Gates discusses his admiration of Barack Obama and his own daily tricycle rides across Martha's Vineyard, where the Harvard professor has been spending his summers since 1981.

Gates says he has two of the shiny trikes, which leads us to wonder if he might challenge the president to a friendly race next month when the Obamas vacation at the Vineyard. If so, let's hope the police stay clear.

1. For starters, that there even was collegiate paintball.

2. That the triangular obstacles the players hide behind are named for a certain snack chip. (Hint: It's not a Bugle.)

3. That paintball jocks introduce themselves to the camera like NFL players before the match, stating their name and university (even though with only two teams competing it gets pretty repetitive).

Watch and discuss.

The following reports were taken from campus police logs:

U. OF NEW ORLEANS
3:20 p.m., April 14
Suspicious person, Bicentennial Education Center. Unknown male subject (5'9" to 6'0" tall, 205-210 lbs.) wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and a white mask (with only eyes cut out) entered a closed classroom while the class was in session. Subject then pointed an umbrella at the teacher and pushed a button extending the umbrella. The subject then fled the area via unknown route. Status: open.

7:05 p.m., June 25
Trespass -- prowler, Bicentennial Education Center. A black male subject was found by the occupant of the office on his desk top computer. When the subject heard the police coming, he ran in an unknown direction. The subject was identified by his Facebook page that he had been viewing on the computer. Status: open.

10:20 a.m., July 11
Criminal mischief, Fine Arts Building. Instructor...

Does Katie Couric read The Chronicle? A few months back we contrasted colleges' most famous alums with their most infamous ones.

A couple months later, the CBS Evening News anchor did the same thing in her commencement remarks to Princeton's Class of 2009:

"There are a few noteworthy men who were proud to go to Princeton as well ... a list that reads like a who's who of American History," she said. "James Madison, John Foster Dulles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Forbes, James Baker ... and Lyle Menendez, who's currently serving a life sentence at the Mule Creek State Prison in California. Hey, you can't win 'em all!"

Ba-da-boom!

Couric wasn't the only one who wanted to keep the game going. Chron readers have offered up a few other famous/infamous pairings:

U. of Southern California
Famous: Neil Armstrong, astronaut	Infamous: O.J. Simpson, disgraced former NFL...

A simple Web tool lets you know just how much you're paying to have all those people in one room -- as each second ticks by.