Mystery Solved!

All over Utah State there are these giant footprints spray-painted on the ground. I stuck my foot in the photo so you could compare the size of the spray painted foot to mine. There are right and left footprints, spread out about 10 feet apart or so. So I asked myself, why are they footprints? The mascot of USU is a bull. Shouldn't we have hoof-prints everywhere, or something like that?

Well, I took it upon myself to solve this Unsolved Mystery. Sorry Robert Stack, but I can handle this one on my own. After a prolonged and agonizing search on the internet (actually, it took two minutes) I found my answer. And here it is: They are the footprints of Paul Bunyan. That's right. Here on my very campus, we have the footprints of Paul Bunyan himself. Or, at least, a statue of him. You see, Paul Bunyan is apparently the mascot of the College of Natural Resources here at Utah State. Some poor sap (pun most definitely intended, and it was actually the forestry students (we have forestry students?)) carved a 12-foot statue of Paul Bunyan out of a giant tree back in 1939. Apparently, every year during College of Natural Resources Week (?) the Engineering students kidnap the statue of Paul and do weird things to it, like hanging him, dressing him in a diaper, or pouring concrete over him. The article that I read stated that the Natural Resources students retaliated by "letting sheep loose in the engineering building" and "filling an engineering classroom with crickets and straw."
A) Where did they get the sheep from?
B) Were the sheep ever returned?
C) This just goes to show you that you should never tick off a Forestry student. They're probably already angry that no one realizes their major exists.


As a side note, I didn't realize colleges have mascots. You can bet I'm going to come up with a great one for the College of Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology. My nominations so far are as follows:

*Atlantis (try dressing THAT up in a diaper!)
*A Kiva (It's an archaeological wonder down near the 4-corners-ish. I toured them for three days my freshman year with my archeology class. It's basically a hole in the ground that has either stairs or a ladder going down into it. We think they used them as libraries. Plus, if the engineering students tried to do anything to it, we could just throw them in it and pull up the ladder.)
*An Anglerfish (This is the fish that lives in the deep sea and has a lure attached to its head. The end of the lure glows, which draws its' prey towards it. I vote this one so far, because a) it's the creepiest, b) most people don't know what it is, and c) those who do know what it is, and have watched Finding Nemo, think that it is totally awesome. Which, it is.)
*The NASW code of ethics. (Boring, but if someone tried to do something to it, you would have thousands of social workers, most of whom are liberal and slightly crazy, fighting behind you.)
*Harry Potter (he could be symbolic of all the people we try to help; he belongs to a foreign culture, which we all enjoy studying about; and he is master of the Elder Wand, so he could take out any engineering or forestry student that was feeling even a little bit mischievous. If you haven't read the last book, I just totally spoiled it for you. Don't re-read the sentence and try to understand it. Just go read the book.)