The legendary Stanford University tree mascot (pictured above) was suspended from duty after UC Berkeley police observed the tree drinking from a flask during a Stanford-Cal basketball.

Erin Lashnits, 23, a fifth-year undergraduate biology student, was given a breath test which showed she had a blood alcohol level of 0.15 percent, nearly twice the legal limit for driving. She was cited for public drunkenness.

This is where we have to stop the story. A 5th year student regularly runs around dressed as a tree making a public fool of themselves is found to be drunk and that is surprising? What would be surprising would be if she wasn’t drunk. It would take more than a few stiff ones to get most people to run around a basketball court shaking and jigging as only a larch could. I’m surprised they didn’t find her smoking a big fat doobie too.

The story gets even more funny. Evidently the tree impersonator plans to apply to become an astronaut and hopes one day to walk on the moon. (More like a space cadet we think.)

“I don’t think these things lie, but I felt fine and I was certainly able to do my job,” she said. (Failing to note no doubt that her job is to dance around as a drunk idiot.)

What’s wrong with a little tree watering you ask? Well it turns out that the imbibing tree violated the terms of the band’s three-year alcohol ban, which Stanford administrators imposed after band members got drunk on a notorious bus ride home from a USC football game in Los Angeles in 2003.

technorati: stanford mascot drunk
photo taken from KCBS (Los Angeles)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 10:59 pm by Insider and is filed under Funny ... to us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.