I’ll instablog it, assuming
the wifi connection in our hotel
room cooperates. It’s been ornery.
La Kid holding a puppy.
… the deep structure, if you will, of a situation. Example: Jockschool Louisiana State University is jacking up game ticket and parking prices because the program loses millions every year, and will lose more with every year, into the foreseeable future.
A few comments on the article:
Jesus H. Christ, ALLEVA. [Alleva is the athletic director.] You pay 4.6 million a year to ONE guy [- Les Miles, football coach -] and your ENTIRE DEPARTMENT is in the whole half of his salary? So whats your grand idea? Make the thousands of fans pay more instead of cutting elsewhere? … Ask [Les Miles] to take a pay cut to keep LSU football alive without going into the fans’ pockets. Asking 1 man to sacrifce or 100,000 men? You wanna bet on what the answer will be? Pathetic.
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[I]t’s bad enough you make loyal fans pay a kick back for the RIGHT to buy a ticket …. now you charge for parking that has been free for years … I could take my family to eat at Ruth’s Chris [Steakhouse] for less then what a coke and hot dog cost … Les Miles makes more then probably the rest of his coaches combined and the man can’t tell time … he recruits thugs and benches kids because he has his favorites… costing us national championships …
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the real issue is where is all the tv money, merchandising money, ticket money, bowl game money, etc etc ???? would love to see a breakdown of expenditures to see where the WASTE really is going.
[Time] to grab hold of the third rail of Arkansas politics — athletic spending at the [University of Arkansas]. It’s a good time to do it. When the Hog football team is winning, no one dare utter a word about the sloppy, secretive and sometimes shady practices in the athletic kingdom… A big chunk of its money is laundered through the secretive Razorback Foundation… The money wouldn’t exist but for the university and its athletic department. But it is often spent in ways out of reach of public inspection. And sometimes, the numbers don’t match up.
By the way: The Razorback Foundation rarely responds at all to questions about its business…
… University Bloomington. Odd hour and day for a sighting, a lockdown. Five, six, on a Sunday morning.
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Students fighting; one had a knife and used it. Non-lethally.
Les UDs arrived at the beach in time to see the end of the boardwalk costume parade (the dog parade is tomorrow). As always, UD found inexplicably moving a foreground of goblins, a background of ocean. All on an astoundingly sunny and clear October day.
This is our sitting room, complete with a telescope we’re a little afraid to use. None of us knows quite what to do with it. But we are going to give it a whirl as soon as it gets dark. The night sky should be full of stars.
… is interviewed in The Daily Californian.
Background here.
Squirrels are always gnawing at UD‘s terracotta pots (she’s heard two theories: they like the salty taste, and they’re whittling down their long teeth)… In Iowa, a squirrel has been eating a math professor’s bicycle.
… for the dog parade
at Rehoboth Beach.
(UD‘s friend Tamara
took this photo two
years ago.)
Of course she will
blog from there.
American university football: The most perverted product of Western culture since The Story of O.
… med students, Evan Dobelle has decided to go down swinging.
… a clear October afternoon, and at one point a full sun was overhead and leaves were swirling down. I put down my rake and lay on the lawn to feel the sun and see the leaves swirling, and everything really was clear: the bright sky, each sharp leaf with red, green, and a bit of rot on its surface landing neatly on the lawn. You rake the leaves down to the street, and every few hours a green truck comes and carts them away, and this too is clear – a nice clear system of gathering and disposal.
Hyperclarified days are rare. This one made me think of Conrad Aiken’s poem, The Room.
Through that window — all else being extinct
Except itself and me — I saw the struggle
Of darkness against darkness. Within the room
It turned and turned, dived downward. Then I saw
How order might — if chaos wished — become:
And saw the darkness crush upon itself,
Contracting powerfully; it was as if
It killed itself: slowly: and with much pain.
Pain. The scene was pain, and nothing but pain.
What else, when chaos draws all forces inward
To shape a single leaf? . . .
For the leaf came,
Alone and shining in the empty room;
After a while the twig shot downward from it;
And from the twig a bough; and then the trunk,
Massive and coarse; and last the one black root.
The black root cracked the walls. Boughs burst the window:
The great tree took possession.
Tree of trees!
Remember (when time comes) how chaos died
To shape the shining leaf. Then turn, have courage,
Wrap arms and roots together, be convulsed
With grief, and bring back chaos out of shape.
I will be watching then as I watch now.
I will praise darkness now, but then the leaf.
**************
The mind, as it turns forward in time, struggles darkly with darkness. I was thinking, all afternoon, about the deaths of people I loved, or loved and hated, or whatever. But anyway diving downward into that chaos which is my own hopeless reckoning with darkness. Not “convulsed with grief” – not courageous enough for that, but certainly wrapping arms and roots together and watching my thoughts.
Watching through the mind’s window whose insistence on seeing it through, seeing through it, makes “all else… extinct.” The effort of drawing up out of chaos, says Aiken, is painful, but there it is, the completed multifarious leaf, shining its edges against the lawn. Ultimately there are cracked walls and burst windows – a painful, earth-altering awakening. Generative, enlightening, painful.
The one black root… the black root: This underlies the clarifying and there’s no denying it. Chaos resumes after the epiphanies; but “remember… how chaos died / To shape the shining leaf.” The one thing and then the other; darkness, light. As you enter into chaos again – the chaos of every vague and grieving life – remember the natural pattern at play, the contraction and expansion. Let the chaos be, live with it, and eventually once again the light will break. Praise both: the darkness and the leaf.
Just this month, there was an incident at Jendouba University in northwest Tunisia, near Algeria. Groups of Salafists – most from outside the university – blockaded it to protest the punishment of some Salafist students who violated the law, and they managed to stop all classes. Exams could not be held, and the students risked losing the entire year as a result. There was no intervention from the police. So, we are in a critical period. The Salafists believe they are above the law and operate in impunity.
As college football stadiums around America get emptier by the minute, we need writers like Dave Bratcher to remind us why we so love those Saturdays in the fall.
As we made our way into the stadium, a few things struck me. These things are applicable to life and need to be mentioned. Across the United States, Saturdays in the fall remind us of what true equality looks like, teach us why keeping score is important, and loyalty is not to be taken lightly.
When fans show up to cheer on their respective teams, discussions about race, religion, wealth, or family lineage do not factor into the discussion. The things which sometimes divide us, even on Sunday morning, are completely irrelevant on Saturday. Nobody cares what color, what church, how much money, or who their parents are. The identifying factors and circumstances of our lives are completely forgotten about when the teams take the field. This is to be praised.
Guess ol’ Dave missed the $100,000 per box luxury seating! Look up, Dave! See the rich people up there, divided behind glass enclosures from the yahoos? Only the rich people in the stadium get to drink alcohol, Dave! These things are applicable to life and need to be mentioned.
… just took one hell of a plunge.
“I hope that [by] using this soft, constructive approach, we can help them and North Asia and the world to be a better place for mankind,” [the conferring university’s president said].
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Sets an interesting precedent.
“The Indian Institute of Technology has awarded an honorary doctorate in criminology to Dawood Ibrahim. ‘I hope that by using this soft, constructive approach, we can help the D-Company and organized crime around the world to be a better activity for mankind,’ IIT’s president said.”