April 1998, age nine: I reach into a bureau plastered with doctor's office stickers and pull out a Ninja Turtle-laden B.U.M. equipment sweatshirt. I giggle to myself quietly as I pull it over my head '- making the intellect's leap from B.U.M. to ass '- and realize, as my pervasive mushroom cut erupts out of the top, that I have it on backwards.

Paris may be the city of love for some, but a few sprawling fields in rural Bretagne did it for me. After a blissful semester in Grenoble, conjugating irregular French verbs until I was as blue in the face as the French cheese, I sought any means to stay in France just a bit longer. I became a WWOOFer.

It is very troubling that your newspaper published a story regurgitating the false claims made by Wendy Kaminer about the ACLU without even affording our organization an opportunity to respond or to correct the record. Ms. Kaminer's accusations about both the American Civil Liberties Union Board and its John Adams Project, as reported by The Daily Free Press, are completely inaccurate.

Mayoral candidate and City Councilor-At-Large Michael Flaherty met with The Daily Free Press yesterday and began the discussion by answering the question: 'How are you different from Mayor Thomas Menino?'

We here at The Daily Free Press are big fans of both wordplay and the 2009 Boston mayoral election. Finding ourselves unable to choose which we liked more, we decided to combine them into some headlines we could use during our mayoral series. Hope Yoon like it.

So Im a COM major & Im really angry about the dumb grammar lessons'?that we need too take. Its like, BU is really expensive and it's workload is heavy enough as it is-why are we burdened by extra busy-work that we learned in highschool?

Boston University, like all colleges and universities, goes to great lengths to bolster its competitive edge. Among its swaggering dormitories, annual lobster nights in the dining halls and ever-greener environmental initiatives also roam some very high profile professors.

Businessman and mayoral candidate Kevin McCrea sat with The Daily Free Press Monday with his sports coat off and his sleeves rolled up.

I sleep with my mouth open. It's a congestion thing. You probably understand if you have moderately bad allergies or chronic sinus problems, or if you've had a cold. So even if you're only an occasional offender, I'm assuming you get it.

One of my friends can't pick up a girl if his life depended on it. For the sake of this column, let's give him the alias Harold. Harold is a pleasant, interesting, good-looking and witty young man. But for some reason, he hasn't been doing too well with ladies lately.

The Daily Free Press met with City Councilor-At-Large and mayoral candidate Sam Yoon last week for a candid interview. Yoon, both casual and well-spoken, voiced his lofty goals to upend Mayor Thomas Menino's current reign. And while he talked an eloquent talk, he tended to lack the concrete solutions that would enable him to walk the walk.

My uncle remembers his time in Allston fondly, incidentally so does his wife who married him despite the weekends she spent visiting him there. Neither of them recalls any great hardship or desperation, then again they moved on to the circus of Manhattan real estate.