ICUMI (In case you missed it)

Beer pong shutdown
As you may have heard, the Boulder City Council is considering drafting an ordinance to enforce “the storage and use of ‘beer pong’ tables in front yards,” according to an email from Andrew Shoemaker on the ever-thrilling Boulder Council Hotline. (Was this one of the important lessons you learned from your trip to Portland?)

Well golly gee, councilmembers! You’re gonna ruin all our fun, considering we’re already prohibited from having couches on our porches or letting our llamas graze on city property or rolling boulders on city land. What’s next? Don’t worry if you’re drawing a blank, councilmembers, because we’ve got some ideas for other completely asinine laws you can enforce to sap every ounce of personality out of Boulder:

• No stray hula hoops on porches
• No slacklining in areas where tourists can see
• While you’re at it, outlaw hacky sack and Frisbee too
• No abandoned bikes chained to city property
• No cars other than Subarus or Priuses
• A mandatory 10 p.m. curfew for all CU students (because really, this whole beer pong thing is just another attempt to hide the fact that we live in a college town)

Listen, if beer pong tables were a health hazard, we’d understand. But that just ain’t the case. City Council, we advise you to reconsider whether living in a college town is right for you.

Boulder de-stressed
Well folks, we’re moving up in the world. According to a recent report crunching the numbers on a number of factors, Boulder is the second least-stressed city in the U.S. We were beat only by Iowa City, which also won last year. Surprise surprise, Iowa is a winner.

Apparently, we here in Boulder have an average 34.7-hour work week and only a 15-minute average commute to work. We have a less than 1 percent bankruptcy rate, 8 percent divorce rate and we average 7.12 hours of sleep per night.

But, let’s be real. We also have some of the highest housing prices around. Combine this with a shocking lack of affordable housing, and most people who work here don’t actually live here and commute from much farther than 15 minutes away. Public transportation is lacking and bus prices are so high that we are dependent on cars, so much so it takes more than 15 minutes to go less than 3 miles — not to mention factoring Boulderites who love to drive 5 miles under the speed limit. Plus it’s almost impossible to find parking in all those tiny lots, not only in Downtown, but in most shopping centers, trailheads and even at the University.

Oh and if you work in a newsroom, your world is always stressful.
Let’s be honest, a certain type of Boulderite may enjoy a stress-free lifestyle, but it’s not even close to the majority of us. Regardless, now that the news is out, expect even more people to come flooding into Boulder in the near future. Which will completely de-stress us all the more.