I wish I had thought of this back in my Rice University days:

When U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials learned that Rice University senior David Nichol had imported 26 fairly large boxes containing 13,000 plastic colored balls from China, they decided to investigate the contents due to the sheer bizarreness of the order.

“There are a lot of things about importing I didn’t know that I do now – about how you need to fill out certain forms and how you need to pick them up from (the Houston) ship channel,” Nichol said.

“I actually didn’t pick them up from the Port of Houston,” he said. “They were taken to (U.S.) Customs and Border Protection to be tested to make sure they were certified balls and not something else. I’m sure it was kind of sketchy to have 13,000 plastic balls shipped to Texas.”

Nichol’s excuse was pretty straightforward: He wanted to create a ball pit in his dorm room at Rice.

(h/t Sheila, via Texas Monthly)

I can’t tell which dorm this is, so it must be one of the new ones. Now I feel old. This totally would’ve worked at Lovett, had anyone dared. The closest thing I can remember from Lovett in the ’90s was the tower of Mountain Dew cans, which simply required superglue and a crapload of Mountain Dew cans (and, I guess, a lot of stomachaches from drinking all that Dew). There were also the two guys who never cleaned their room, to the point that you couldn’t see the floor at all by March or April. That’s not something you want to jump and roll around in, though (I hope). Continue reading →