…one of my puffball mushrooms.
Hand-picked fresh for you
just seconds ago.
Click on the image for a
fuller sense of its human
brainishness.
Rooted collybia plus a leaf perfectly
bifurcated between brown and green.
Click on the image for more detail.
Just taken from UD‘s woods.
American university sports events get more and more violent, so much so that it wasn’t much of a story when, last year at this time, Syracuse University was host to multiple fights and one stabbing at their “Orange Madness” opening basketball event of the season. Police swarmed the building and everyone was ushered out before the event was scheduled to end because security couldn’t control all the fights.
Big deal. The life of the mind.
But yeah sure, as the chancellor said up there in my headline, we promise to do better next year.
So here we are and “how could this happen?” asks the local paper. How could it happen that Syracuse University, in designing this “family friendly” event to prevent last year’s violence, hired Ace Hood? Ace Hood…
After a night rocking to songs about fucking bitch pussies and shooting the fuck out of everyone with your arsenal, Syracuse will be ready for the football and basketball season!
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UPDATE: Now that we’ve gotten a glimpse into the culture of the Syracuse athletics department and many of its fans (why not hire Ace Hood?), it’s time to cancel his act because a few malcontents object to his brilliant subversive lyrics.
Wonder how much his cancellation fee is. Yet another excellent use of university funds.
Everyone’s wondering who his replacement will be.
How about something for the girls? Rihanna!
Many “students” are little more than cogs in the great NCAA money machine. Sure, they receive their scholarships, and some are serious about their studies, but how much time can they put it on classwork when they are expected to practice, travel across time zones and play at a quasi professional level in order to keep those scholarships?
And what happens to them when they get hurt? Or more often, flunk out? The answers often aren’t pretty.
College sports and the big-time dollars they produce have effects on the core educational mission. When Nike founder Phil Knight builds his alma mater, the University of Oregon, a $68-million “football performance facility,” it is money not spent on a new science or performing arts building. D-III athletes don’t “inadvertently” sell their autographs, like Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel, to memorabilia collectors, nor do our alumni have reason to take the NCAA to court for compensation for use of their likenesses in sanctioned video games.
Attendance is tanking at lots of Division I football games, and UD wonders whether some part of that isn’t simply disgust, scandal fatigue. Americans expect the professional leagues to be disgusting, but there’s a vestigial sense that universities should be better. Amid all the theorizing about why people aren’t going to university football games, there’s maybe this, as the authors of the opinion piece suggest: Our tolerance for the Div I Big Lie is finally starting to weaken.
Yes well there was ol’ UD yesterday afternoon walking in the rain to her class at 1776 G St (finally an address UD can remember). Right hand, umbrella; left hand an Urban Outfitters bag in which lay the MacBook Air GW just gave her and fifteen blue books (midterm). As she passed the World Bank, the loudest, most armored-car-strewn security operation she’d ever seen – and you see them all the time in Foggy Bottom – came blaring out of the Bank and onto the street. A staggeringly enormous black vehicle led the parade, flanked by nervous guys on triple-wide scooters and then sidewalks full of men whispering into phones. Pretty much all of us stopped to gawk. Even the veterans among us found this display noteworthy.
It was Malala. When the Taliban’s itching to put another bullet in your brain, this is how you go home after you give a speech.
Empty expensive stadiums and sadistic highly compensated coaches and teams on a permanent crime spree are all well and good; but now Moody’s is warning about Division I schools becoming credit risks, so say goodbye – maybe – to all that fun.
In laying out risk factors to Division I programs, Moody’s cited the increasing use of public subsidies to fund sports, exposure to litigation over head injuries, and the possible movement away from the NCAA amateurism model. Moody’s views future costs as uncertain.
I love that possible movement away…
The amateur tv networks that have taken over amateur Division I sports at our universities will have to bail out these schools when no one will lend any more money to them… At which point tv will call all the shots – not just most of the shots, which they do now. That means they will demand butts in all seats. Viewers hate to see empty stadiums. But how will we do that, the universities will ask their tv guys. Not our problem, the tv guys will say. Meanwhile, each year attendance is effing hemorrhaging .
The university goes to robotics and it goes to engineering and it says to the professors there solve this for us. And they do solve it, they make animatronic students but it’s not cheap, so the university’s athletic division continues to lose zillions every year meaning that they’ve been able to please the tv overlords but they’re still in very bad shape credit-wise…
… you will recall, threatened to sue Harper’s Magazine over an article about the university’s notorious budget problems. Cooler heads – i.e., students – prevailed, and the suit (Joshua Reinharz darkly suggested that “that the article’s author, Christopher R. Beha, was motivated to write an article casting Brandeis’ finances in a negative light because his aunt Ann Beha’s architectural firm was rejected by the University in its bid for a 2004 building project.”) never happened.
But universities continue to make this sort of mistake, with Canada’s York the latest example. Again a university has taken umbrage at a magazine article – in this case, an article which called the campus “a hunting ground for sexual predators.”
That’s strong language, to be sure, but I suspect “literary license” covers it, and, in any case, a lawsuit costs a lot of money and will ultimately be a high-profile way of keeping the issue of campus safety in the news.
They’ve even placed him in an “undisclosed off-campus” location!
… titled The Last Days of the GOP.
What Washington business lobbyists say on-the-record about the House Republicans and about Tea Party activists pales before what they are willing to say if their names aren’t used. One former Republican staffer says of the anti-establishment groups, “They want to go in and fuck shit up. These non-corporate non-establishmentarian guys—that is exactly what they are doing. And the problem with that is obvious. What next? What happens after you fuck shit up?”
If they were just sports programs – and not also universities – there wouldn’t be any problem here. You’ve got a certain sort of conduct – verbally violent… sometimes physically violent… – but that’s the norm, that’s how you motivate the little buggers. That’s how you make them angry motherfuckers like you so they want to kill the opposing team. But there’s this teeny vestigial sense at some American universities that qua university they shouldn’t be seen countenancing this sort of thing – that the ethos of a university…
I mean… not that the university itself will ever interfere with its coaches! Noho. But when coaches get so vile that large numbers of players leave the school rather than endure them… Or – God forbid – when players or coaching assistants go public with their complaints… Well then! Ahem! Yes! We’re a university, not a BDSM club (in all of these cases, including the latest one at in-some-obscure-and-actually-no-longer-discernable-way-Jesuit Georgetown University, there are multiple masochists on the team ready to defend their sadist)… We’ve got standards of behavior here…
Congressional progressive caucus; against the government shutdown. If a crazy person with a gun shoots me, I become an icon of the far left.
Maybe Bernie Sanders, only Senator in the caucus, will engage me in conversation.
“Any chance you’re a Vermonter?”
“No, but I’m an old friend of Peter Galbraith’s.”
“He’s not popular in the State Senate.”
“Tell me about it.”
The nutty right has royally fucked the country; I will stand with the nutty left against it. I will stand in the rain (it’s raining) and scream crazy shit with the crazy ass progressive caucus.
I don’t know what the p.c.’s platform is. I’m sure I’m opposed to most of it. But a student in my mo/pomo seminar told me about the rally, and I’ve been spouting off in class about postmodern political passivity (in my weaker moments I tell myself this blog, this daily attack on corrupt elements of the American university, constitutes…) and… I dunno. Sometimes there’s no unpacking motive. I’m on the train. I’m going.
Maybe they’ll cancel it due to inclement weather. Optimal outcome. I get points for going without having to listen to the crazy ass progressive caucus say dumb shit. Without having to worry about Our Polarized Nation.
UD‘s wearing her uniform (boots, jeans, black turtleneck, scarf). The other day she attended a meeting of GWU’s highest administrative team, and the contrast between their suits and her jeans was stark. Thready old hippie UD. Representing the humanities faculty whether they like it or not.
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Postlude. Wow, it’s wet out there. Chilled damp UD takes her place on the red line train back to Garrett Park. She carries a red sign with white letters that read
END THE SHUTDOWN!
Capitol trees, bushes, and grasses trembled beautifully around UD as she walked from Union Station to the rally. One tree in particular, planted in circular groves on the grounds of various buildings, had a complex birch-like peeling bark (maybe the tree was a river birch?) and a thick coat of reddening green leaves with black berries. Blue jays shrieked and crows called out from lamp tops. Panicled pampas grass was paired with humpy mums – not a good look.
Employees at various federal entities streamed in to a park at the foot of the Capitol. They banged pots and chanted WORK NOT HURT. One of them gave UD the sign. T-shirts were also available, but who was going to put one on over her poncho? The rain flooded down, and the air was cold.
One guy tromped through the crowd trying out various chants. “We’ve got a Norma Rae,” said one attendee to another, and they laughed.
Police and their dogs were everywhere. At one point a bunch of them converged on an oddball wearing sunglasses, but he was just an oddball.
“Are you on furlough?” a reporter asked UD.
“No.”
He walked away.
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Jesse Jackson spoke. He sounded drunk and old. He offered a halting potted American history. We won in 1862… and… uh… in 2012… Now it’s 2014 and we won’t forget… He didn’t even bother coming up with one of his famous rhyming couplets.
… wins the literature Nobel.
“I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.”
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INTERVIEWER
Was the community you grew up in pleased about your career?
MUNRO
It was known there had been stories published here and there, but my writing wasn’t fancy. It didn’t go over well in my hometown. The sex, the bad language, the incomprehensibility . . . The local newspaper printed an editorial about me: A soured introspective view of life . . . And, A warped personality projected on . . . My dad was already dead when they did that. They wouldn’t do it while Dad was alive, because everyone really liked him. He was so liked and respected that everybody muted it a bit. But after he died, it was different.
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There are parts of a story where the story fails… The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn’t fail. That it might is the danger. This may be the beast that’s lurking in the closet in old age—the loss of the feeling that things are worth doing… Of course it wouldn’t matter if you did give up writing. It’s not the giving up of the writing that I fear. It’s the giving up of this excitement or whatever it is that you feel that makes you write.
As in that scene in The Great Gatsby when Wolfsheim explains to Nick –
“He’s an Oggsford man.”
“Oh!”
“He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“It’s one of the most famous colleges in the world.”
– so today another Oggsford man is unmasked as a pretender.
[T]op barrister Dennis O’Riordan … was this week suspended for having claimed to have two first-class degrees and a doctorate from Oxford and a master’s from Harvard…
Unlike Gatsby, O’Riordan really piled it on – two from Oxford, and a Harvard cherry on top. I guess he’s taking into account inflation since 1925…
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UD thanks Jon.
Yeshiva University apparently has not had its fill of sex scandals for the year.