23-year old Russian pretends to be high school honors student.

Artur Samarin came to America four years ago and, for reasons unknown, decided to pretend to be a Pennsylvania high school student by the name of Asher Potts, which he did successfully. Very successfully. According to CBS News:


[Samarin was] a member of the National Honor Society. Samarin was actively involved at the school, working with a student advisory group on a food bank, and he was a member of the school's ROTC and Naval Sea Cadet programs.


Samarin was arrested and charged with, among other things, identity theft, even though he didn't steal anyone's identity. He simply created one.

The real crime here is he decided to go with Asher as a name. That's only acceptable if you want to sing bad pop music or be a reality TV star--not if you want to be a stellar high school student.

CBSNews: The ten best college towns to live in...includes a place in Nebraska?

These sort of list come around every few weeks, always with completely different outcomes. Each media outlet uses different metrics, weighs those metrics in varying proportions, and typically offers some random statistic to completely skew the results toward something entirely randomized.

Which brings us to CBSNews, which decided to create their own "scientific" analysis of the best college towns today. The results (with college in parentheses):

1.)  Princeton, New Jersey  (Princeton University)
2.)  Kearney, Nebraska  (University of Nebraska--Kearney)
3.)  Boulder, Colorado  (University of Colorado--Boulder)
4.)  Bozeman, Montana  (University of Montana)
5.)  Cedar Falls, Iowa  (University of Northern Iowa)
6.)  Cambridge, Massachusetts  (Harvard, MIT, Cambridge College, Lesley University)
7.)  Ann Arbor, Michigan  (University of Michigan)
8.)  Grand Forks, North Dakota  (University of North Dakota)
9.)  Ames, Iowa  (Iowa State University)
10.)  Madison, Wisconsin  (University of Wisconsin)

Don't rub your eyes. You're seeing that correctly. Something called "Kearney, Nebraska" is considered the second best college town in America. Nothing Nebraska-related is ever good news. Even Bruce Springsteen hit a low point in his career in 1982 by naming one of his albums Nebraska. Do you know how Wikipedia describes that album?

"The songs on Nebraska both deal with ordinary, blue collar characters who face a challenge or a turning point in their lives, but also outsiders, criminals and mass murderers, who have little hope for the future - or no future at all, as in the title track, where the main character is sentenced to death in the electric chair."




Mass murderers and the death penalty! Sounds like a real toe-tapper, get down with your bad self kind of album. Even the album is in a bleak black and white. But you know why it's so depressing? Because it's Nebraska, that's why.

And then there was that murky movie a few years ago filmed in black and white as well, called--you guessed it--Nebraska. You know why it was filmed in black and white? Because seeing Nebraska in color is too much of an offense to the eyes of the rest of America.

The movie was nominated for six Academy Awards. You know how many it won? Zero. Do you know why? Because it's...

Oh, but, hey. Let's all move there.