Back to school

Everyone is going back to high school.

First, a 22 year old Mexican national was caught squatting in the boiler room at an Apple Valley high school. Francisco Javier Serrano had been hiding out in the bowels of the school at night and posing as a student by day until caught by school officials. He's left the states voluntarily to return to his mother's village outside Mexico City, but not before playing darling to the cameras for almost a year while living in a posh apartment on Lake Street funded by disgraced local developer Sabri Basim, whose serving time in federal prison.

Now we have an even stranger story. A blond, cherubic boy starts hanging out at Stillwater High, calling himself Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, the Fifth Duke of Cleveland, speaking in a fake British accent, and claiming to be from Paddington, London, and Fife.

But like any Baby Face Nelson, our wayward Duke was hiding something dark behind his cheery puka beads and Aeropostale clothes. His story intrigued students on the school paper who did some investigating--and found out that Prince Caspian is really Joshua Adam Gardner, a boring 24 (22? 23?) year old. The only title that follows his name is "sex offender", having been convicted of sexual assault as an eighteen year old.

Going by his online monker "Earl of Scooby," Josh apparently is a fan of sites like facethejury, facebattle, and kissmeordissme, where he employs phrases like "bloody hell" and "mah mates" to further his British aspirations. He's bisexual, and his profile delivers some deep kernels of wisdom...

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the Arrivals Gate at Heathrow Airport.

A colleague at work thinks I could pass myself off as a high school student, but I know he's only kidding. There's a high school just down the street, and we've talked about hanging out in the lunchroom on our break, rapping with kids, you know, just getting away from it all, like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School.