No matter how you pronounce it, the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland has disrupted the plans of hundreds of thousands of travelers, many of them scholars and students.

* A group of Dickinson College students who were in Iceland to learn about thermal energy planned to take a ferry back to Britain's University of East Anglia on Tuesday after the volcanic ash doubled the length of their planned five-day research trip.

* Fern Johnson, a professor of English at Clark University, is marooned in Dubrovnik, Croatia, where she attended a conference last week on multilingualism in Europe. She was supposed to fly out last Friday; now she's crossing her fingers that she'll depart this Friday.

With the end of the academic year looming, Ms. Johnson writes in an e-mail message that she is worried about the impact of her absence on students. But she says that she has suffered only minor...

The University of Nevada at Reno Wolf Pack was playing the Triple-A Reno Aces baseball team last week when Wolfie Jr., the university's mascot, moonwalked over the edge of the dugout roof.

His dancing partner, a red blob named Archie, hammed it up for the crowd after seeing that Wolfie Jr. was uninjured.

The Web site OnlineUniversities.com this week features "10 Famous Bands Who Started in College," listing such rock luminaries as R.E.M., Radiohead, Pink Floyd, and Coldplay (all of whose members probably would have had a much harder time getting together if they'd been taking distance-ed classes).

The list set us to thinking about other bands whose members met on college campuses — the Talking Heads at the Rhode Island School of Design, Vampire Weekend at Columbia University, Public Enemy at Adelphi University, and Devo at Kent State, to name just a few — and wondering about the ones we should know of but don't.

What famous (or semi-famous) band met at your college? Let us know in the comments below.

(Image: Public Enemy via Flickr) 

Two young men slipped out of George Mason University's Office of Alcohol, Drugs, and Health Education last week with a basketful of dental dams, sexual lubricants, and a few hundred condoms, the student Web site Connect2Mason.com reports.

The men said they had permission to take the entire supply of paraphernalia, so the receptionist on duty told them to first check with the clinic's assistant director, Danielle Lapierre. The two walked to the back then returned to the front, falsely claiming that they had spoken with Ms. Lapierre.

"When I came back, the entire basket was gone," Ms. Lapierre said. "But there was this one lonely little lube [bottle] left."

An unidentified student stole 700 condoms last fall as well--"Come on, 700?" she said. "Nobody needs that many."

Although the condoms are free, taking so many at once amounts to a crime, so Ms. Lapierre notified the campus police ...

They've shushed us, fined us, and scolded us for copyright transgressions, but what thinking person doesn't admire librarians? The Web site BuzzFeed honors these heroes and heroines of the stacks with a collection of passive-aggressive library signs.

Via Metafilter

(Image: Bowman Library, via Flickr)

We asked for your college videos, and you delivered.

Today's first entry is a musical from the University of Delaware. About three seconds into the singing we said, "Nice try, guys, but Yale already did that." And then we got the backstory.

Avi Amon, the Delaware admissions counselor behind "Delaware: The Musical" (embedded below), tells us that his video is the second of a planned four-part production. Part 1, "Reading Season," appeared in November, nearly two months before "That's Why I Chose Yale" danced across the Web.

So Yale ripped off Delaware? Wrong again, Mr. Amon informs us.

When he saw Yale's video he says he thought, "Well, shoot!" He was already at work on part 2, but decided to proceed as planned rather than discarding months of effort. He contacted the creator of the Yale video, Andrew Johnson, who he says told him he had had the same reaction upon seeing Delaware's first ...

A prankster redecorated the reception area of the University Relations office at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville so that when the elevator doors opened, visitors and staffers thought they were one floor above, in the housing office (or, in this case, the "hosing" office). Confusion and comedy ensue.

We especially appreciate the receptionist (behind a nameplate reading "April Fulsdey"), who keeps the prank going by responding to the victims' befuddlement with questions, not answers.

The College of William and Mary goes with the griffin as its new athletics symbol. The team nickname remains "the Tribe."

The head of sports law at England's Staffordshire University is fuming at Air Canada for leaving him asleep on a plane last month. The professor, Kris Lines, says he awoke in a hangar 90 minutes after the flight landed at Vancouver International Airport.

"The last thing I remember was taking off from Calgary," Mr. Lines, who was en route from London, told Canada's National Post. "I knew I was safely on board and there was no further destinations and it was all good. ... Somebody would wake me up at the end."

That the "somebody" would be a plane mechanic in an otherwise empty aircraft came as a shock to Mr. Lines.

"If I'd been a vulnerable passenger, a young girl or elderly, it could have been a lot worse," he said. "The other implication is that if I was a terrorist, then I've got an hour-and-a-half after the plane's landed, all by myself, in a secure area on a plane."

After...

American college students rallied last week to advocate marijuana as a safer alternative to alcohol on their campuses. In France, a new government report proposes a different solution to the problem of binge drinking among students: campus wine tastings in university canteens.

Allowing students to taste wine in moderate quantities will "show them that it is a pleasure, good for their health and part of their national heritage," Jean-Robert Pitte, a former director of the Sorbonne, tells Decanter magazine in an interview reported on its Web site. 

Alain Rigauld, president of a prominent anti-alcohol group in France, dismisses the report as little more than wine-industry marketing.

Decanter promises a detailed description of the report, commissioned by the French minister for higher education, in its May issue. —Don Troop