As you may already know, there were a series of thefts in the Usen Castle early in the morning of Oct. 3. E-mails went out, threatening fliers went up and after quite a bit of talk, a mandatory hall meeting was convened last Tuesday night between Castle residents and police to discuss the crimes. Yet after all of the commotion, the message of law enforcement was rather boring; the person, they said, who had committed the offenses was most likely a transient individual with no connection to campus who had just been passing through that night. Somehow, I am not satisfied with the "random stranger" explanation of the Castle caper. It seems too easy-almost like taking a laptop out of an unlocked dorm room at 5 a.m. Therefore, I have developed a few other hypotheses as to who the culprit of the Castle burglaries might be. My formula is based upon who might stand to benefit from the thefts-from motives like old-fashioned resale to more, perhaps, unconventional ones.

Due to the swiftness of the robbery, my first thought was that perhaps more than one individual was involved. Perhaps the "thief" was, in fact, a group of marauding, fun-seeking Brandeis students-the sorts that complain constantly about how life here is so lame compared to that at other universities. Though we still have neither on-campus Greek life nor a massive dropout rate, this spate of thefts did give us that sleep-with-one-eye-open metropolitan campus flair that has been lacking.

But maybe that theory is wrong. Perhaps it was the University administrators finally taking heed of the constant complaints about the post-apocalyptic appearance of the interior of the Castle and, daunted by a tight budget, began collecting electronics from Castle residents for resale. There's no easy way to prove this, but if the women's bathroom nearest Cholmondeley's ever has a ceiling again, we can all settle down and write this robbery off as a tax.

Yet perhaps it wasn't the administrators who committed such a terrible eve-of-midterms act. After all, the thefts, while devastating, were not violent-they were either an act of opportunity or irritation, not of outright rage. So who has motivation to be sensibly miffed with our community while not totally on the verge of madness?

If I were law enforcement, I'd be checking out the current whereabouts of one Marty Peretz '59 (the editor of The New Republic who recently made a controversial remark about Muslims). As any reasonable person could assume, the feelings of students at this institution are obviously always acknowledged globally. Doubtlessly, Peretz was immediately aware of the "massive" campus uproar from its very inception. So it's not unthinkable that the computers were stolen in an effort to prevent the further destruction of his life, which has certainly been brought to a screeching halt by the clearly widely heard outcry from campus.

If not, one may consider as well that the thefts might also just be the results of University President Jehuda Reinharz's wish to go out in a blaze of glory after years of having been watched like a hawk by zealous students bent on political correctness and administrative transparency. It must also be submitted that he has mysteriously skipped town as of this week-maybe to Vietnam to lay low for a while until things blow over here in Waltham.

Lastly, my suspicion must fall also upon myself. It is entirely possible that I have a kleptomaniacal alter ego with whom I share no conscious thought, making this article an expression of a guilty conscience. This could begin to shed a little light on the mysterious stockpile of Macbooks in my closet.

I, for one, will be keeping an eye out on this investigation, ruling out no one. While I realize that what they say about the simplest explanations being the most likely ones is logical, I somehow need more excitement in my spree-theft theories than a lone guy and a few unlocked doors. I'll be watching this case, petitioning for a moat and waiting for a lead until the next terrible thing happens in the Castle-though knowing the Castle, that next terrible thing will most likely be of the ceiling collapse persuasion.