City Council was all abuzz Tuesday, after Mareesa Nicosia's excellent article on that silliest of hipster holidays, 4/20.

First, a little background: In some municipalities, police use "420" as code-speak for weed and related violatoins. Therefore, some teenagers — probably baked out of theirs minds and floating in a cloud of hot-pocket-induced diabetic shock — came up with the idea of contriving "420" into a date. Thus, "4/20" is born.

Now, you don't see child molesters suddenly switching to the European way of writing out dates in order to gather and celebrate their deviant ways on 28/8. Nor is there a sudden proliferation of drag racing on 9/31. But these pot-smoking hippies have always shown a certain proclivity towards flagrant violations of the law.

With that being said, I wanted to note that there were several members of the public who took the mic at City Council to decry the activities at Skidmore on Monday afternoon. A reverend worried that it set a terrible example, and called Skidmore's administration scofflaws. Public Safety Candidate Richard Wirth used the opportunity to take a political hit on Commissioner Kim, all but alleging that Kim had directed the police to look the other way. (Which Kim, of course, said was not the case.) Chief of Police Ed Moore pointed out that a) there had been no calls to Skidmore yesterday afternoon, and b) officers who regularly patrol that area were working on other assignments yesterday (in particular, a violent domestic incident).

Want the real story?

The lawn around Haupt Pond may have been full of students peacefully smoking weed on Monday, but it's unlikely that any of them possessed more than a violation's worth of the drug. The city's drug unit officers are understandably more concerned with arresting drug dealers, and those involved in more deadly drugs. In fact, little less than a year ago, police busted a large net of dealers up at Skidmore.

Taking the paddy wagon up there on Monday might have resulted in a few arrests, or it might have resulted in a riot, and all for what? A few appearance tickets? It's certainly disingenuous for Campus Safety to -- quite literally -- look the other way, as demonstrated on Tuesday's front page, but I don't think the police are to blame.

Before I sign off, I wanted to relate one of my favorite 420 stories from my time at Skidmore. In the fall of my first year 420 fell on a Tuesday, and it happened to be the first nice day of that spring. As such, the professor teaching my seminar on Environmental Imperialism decided to take the 15 of us outside for the afternoon. The class met from 3:40 to 5:00.

We walked down to a secluded spot by the pond (in those days 420 activities were held on the campus's central green), and we got about the business of rats stowing away in merchant ships, and seeds blowing out of farmer's storage bins. There was noticeably poor attendance that day, but to the college freshman not yet wise to the ways of weed, that was easily attributed to the weather.

Suddenly, at 4:20 p.m., there was a whooping rising over the campus from the general direction of the green. A few students flashed each other with quick glances. Others giggled audibly. The professor just seemed confused.

Then the moment passed and we got back to work.