This story just appeared on the news; it’s much too soon to know what’s going on. I’ll follow it.

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It seems to be over, with no gunshots having been fired. Ezra Klein was giving a lecture at the time; everyone was evacuated to the basement of the building.

Oh Giunchigliani really. Go back to Italy or get with the program. You live in Las Vegas, not Parma, man. When your local university has a football program this successful, you spend hundreds of millions on a new stadium. Get it?

Of the panel’s 11 members, only Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani addressed whether there was a need for the stadium. Nearly everyone else in the room — from UNLV President Neal Smatresk to the stadium board chairman Don Snyder — appeared to be poised to build some type of venue… Stadium board member Cedric Crear, a Board of Regents appointee, even went as far to say that a new stadium would “revolutionize our football program. This city wants a winning, big-time football team. I don’t want to be shy about saying that.”

Don’t be shy, Cedric. Say it loud and say it proud.

Even though some Strip casino companies such as MGM Resorts International said the previous stadium proposal of $900 million was too much, Snyder told the Review-Journal after the two-hour meeting that there is no price ceiling.

“Why not?” Snyder said when asked if the new stadium proposal could match the price of the old one.

… “The temptation is to cut out the bells and whistles. When you start cutting costs, there’s a tendency to look like all the other stadiums across the country. Then you get mediocrity and I don’t think mediocrity is acceptable in Las Vegas,” [another booster] said.

The last thing I’d associate with the Las Vegas public education system is mediocrity. The Las Vegas public education system is way, way, below mediocre.

The parents argued that the restrictions limit their freedom to educate their children according to their beliefs and asked the court to fine the government $6,780 per child for every day that the limitations are in place …

The haredim of Belgium don’t just want to keep their children ignorant; they want to get rich off of suing the Belgian government for the state’s efforts to educate their children.

It’s a novel, ballsy approach. For every subtraction problem my child comprehends, $6,780 from the government in penalties! Did she learn that the earth revolves around the sun today? That’ll be six thousand seven hundred and eighty big ones.

We’ll see how the Antwerp district court rules on the injunction. Maybe it’ll up their asking price. Each day a haredi child learns something, ten thousand from the government.

The Lions’ big center Raiola
Went off to collect his payola.
His manner was blunt
He called everyone cunt
And signed his own name with Crayola.

… Dominic Raiola embodies college and professional football.

Of course Raiola never bothered graduating, leaving as soon as the professional leagues beckoned, but he’s still a legend at Nebraska because… uh… because not graduating… probably not even taking any real classes… is legendary!

With all the academic value he’d derived from his attendance at the University of Nebraska, Raiola hit the Detroit Lions, where his non-stop viciousness has earned him millions.

But UD can’t help thinking there’s something tragic about this seeming winner – a man who’s made it to the big leagues and the big money and big acclaim. Because although football is a spectacular outlet for murderous hostility against the world, games are brief, and vicious plays even briefer. There are practices, to be sure, but these too are fleeting. Football is no match for Raiola’s rage, and he’s always getting in trouble as a result.

Take his latest thing – Screaming at the University of Wisconsin marching band that they’re all fat fucks and cunts and faggots. No one knows why Raiola did this. The band did nothing to provoke him.

But we know. Raiola is exactly the sort of disturbed person universities like Nebraska make legends out of and professional football makes millionaires. For them, he’s a hero, and he’s a skill set. For everyone else, he’s a deeply troubled human being.

Once he gets his head sufficiently concussed, Raiola’s problem will become even more acute. Not that anyone gives a shit as long he gives Americans some really terrific hits to look at.

You wonder sometimes what it really comes down to, the sort of people and customs it creates. You wonder about the actual daily nitty gritty of university life at schools where nothing matters but sports.

I’m not talking about the big public stuff, the big five-part Sports Illustrated feature on T. Boone Pickens’ Oklahoma State University and its multidimensional pigswill. I mean the microculture – the way people talk to each other; the way they dress; the way they interact, one on one.

For that, you need two types of stories that routinely hit the news:

1. the sadistic coach; and

2. the sadistic hazer.

These two highly placed boosters carry the microculture in a way we can see, a way chronicled – since it maims people and generates trials and lawsuits – by the local and national press. Oklahoma State’s macroculture is the five-part series; OSU’s microculture is the secretary of the Interfraternity Council who pulled a loaded gun on pledges when they said they wouldn’t take a bullet for their brothers. He didn’t shoot them, but in his rage he shot out the window of the pick-up in which they were sitting. Because they obviously had no idea how serious the brotherhood of boosters was at OSU.

My post’s headline comes from a voice mail the women’s lacrosse coach at the University of Louisville sent to one of her players. The university’s system of spies had spotted a player wearing a shirt with the name of a competing university on it.

Darby, change your clothes, don’t bother coming to practice today. Do you know that I just got a phone call about you wearing a Michigan State shirt? You obviously have no idea how serious athletics is at the University of Louisville. I do not want to see your face today until after practice, but your butt better be up in my office with a Louisville shirt on your chest when practice ends.

Winston Smith would have no trouble recognizing this message. It is the functional equivalent of mandating burqas for university women.

The University of Louisville – read about its vile, all-enveloping sports culture here (scroll down) – is now enjoying national coverage of this coach and her alleged abuse of the students on her team.

Are you beginning to see how twisted these all-American settings are? Looked at from both macro and micro perspectives, the nation’s sports sluts get sicker by the day.

… is back! It’s hooting like mad in my backyard.

… the full film, on YouTube, of DeLillo/Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis. UD, a DeLillo fanatic, found Cosmopolis so disappointing she could barely finish it. And then this novel, of all DeLillo’s novels, gets filmed…

She avoided the film, especially when bad reviews started coming in. But of course she has been curious about it. And here is an easy way for her to see it.

So she’s been watching it today, between lawn mowing, pumpkin gathering, and car washing.

The curious thing is, she’s also been watching, over and over, the trailer for Gravity; and these two films together have her thinking about their rather strange similarities. Both films feature the cuttingest-edge postmodern American technology along with the new sorts of people this technology spawns. Both films put these new sorts of Americans in conditions of absolute surreal silence.

Outside of this silence, in its background, revolves a very real world. The background in Gravity is Earth, and as I watch the trailer my homing eye is always moving away from the astronaut and instead following Sri Lanka and Florida and Chad… The revolving stage of beloved bluegreen Earth …

Manhattan’s the background in Cosmopolis, and the anarchic city churns and churns behind the deeply tinted, armored, windows of Eric Packer’s stretch limo.

The films share, that is, this perennial dual focus, this inside/outside, silence/noise, technologically mediated environment/natural (or semi-natural/semi-cultural) environment. Both really allow one to think about mediation, about the odd estranged relationship many contemporary Americans are able to have with actuality. DeLillo’s best-known novel – White Noise – is all about this, from its title onward… our white-noisy electronically mediated daily experience…

Yet Cosmopolis is the work of a moralist; indeed, for me, its weakness is precisely its moral hectoring about the psychopathology of great wealth, and in particular the way great wealth immunizes itself from the pain of humanity. I love the theme – but in most of his novels DeLillo approaches the theme subtly, satirically. Here there’s a grim sermonizing that forces the film’s actors simply into one anti-capitalist screed after another.

Gravity’s trailer (good name for a film in itself) suggests that this film uses the dual focus bit in a much more human and (I hate the word, but it fits) poignant way, conveying our new yearning for a life of embeddedness and proximities and raggedy no-tech imperfections in the wake of all that shiny mediation.

It’s like what Stephen Dedalus says in Portrait when he realizes he’s an artist:

He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father’s house, and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul.

It is rather degrading – I mean, being a British woman who discovers that her taxes are going to schools that mandate veiling even for little girls, and that make the girls sit in the back of schoolrooms behind the boys. Etc. Etc.

UD wonders why the British stand for it.

… Cloverfield.

Under the leadership of free spending Evan Dobelle, Westfield State University has taken on the feel of a horror film. Every day brings new financial and legal disaster. Most recently, the state of Massachusetts, displeased with Dobelle’s apparent misuse of public money, has frozen much of the school’s funding.

All of this because – with full knowledge of his scandalous behavior at his previous employer, the University of Hawaii – Westfield went ahead and hired this man.

Dream on.

Here’s what they’re saying along G Street Northwest, Foggy Bottom — bits of conversation UD heard just now as she walked to her class on James Joyce.

She has a big butt, yes. She’s always had a big butt. But she’s in good shape – almost as good as I’m in. She’s a pretty girl. But the butt yeah.

Two GW students, male and female. Female is the speaker. Both students are in summery gym clothes and are in extremely good shape.

“No, that wouldn’t be true of everyone who’s covered. That’s not how coverage works.”

Well-dressed DC bureaucrat outside World Bank building to another well-dressed DC bureaucrat.

“It was a real lesson for me. A real lesson, man.”

Worker in front of a delivery truck to another worker.

“You like hip-hop?”

Directed to UD by a guy selling cds.

… you have to ask yourself: How does OSU top that?

Well, ask no more:

A 22-year-old Oklahoma State University student faces two felony charges for allegedly using a loaded gun during fraternity hazing.

Owen Hossack, a now former Alpha Gamma Rho member, faces two counts of pointing a firearm at an individual with the intent to harm, KFOR reports.

Hossack is accused of holding a loaded gun to a pledge’s head on Aug. 16 in an extended cab pickup truck and asking the student if he would take a bullet for his frat brothers. When the pledge said no, Hossack allegedly became angry and yelled before placing the gun up to another pledge and asking the same question, according to an affidavit. Shortly after the second pledge’s response, a flash of light was seen and the passenger window exploded.

No one was hit by the bullet.

OOOOOOOOOOklahoma!! Where the guns come sweepin’ down the plains!

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Here’s some real tasty details I bet even Aunt Eller couldna whipped up.

During an interview with OSU police Sept. 11, Hossack said he fired the weapon at the window, which he believed to be open, to frighten the pledges.

Hossack, who was secretary of the Interfraternity Council in 2013…

Number One: Nuthin wrong with firin a gun out a open window. Everybody on the street oughta be armed to defend themselves.

Number Two: They voted me fuckin secretary of the whole Interfraternity Council.

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UPDATE: Says here the shooter had passed anti-hazing training. Hm. Was the course explicit about not putting guns in people’s faces and threatening to shoot them? Sounds as though we need a little tweaking.

Listen to your AD, kiddies! He knows what’s best. What your school needs is a vast new expensive football stadium. Everything will be much better then.

Pay no attention to your university’s most recent football game! That tells you nothing. Nothing, do you hear me? Not a goddamn thing! Don’t quote from the article about it, UD! Don’t do it!

How does it feel to play a game in front of a half-empty stadium?

Heartbreaking.

CSU has won both of its home games at Hughes Stadium this season, but fans haven’t shown up to watch. The Rams are averaging 16,832 fans at home, ranking second-to-last in the Mountain West.

While area flooding had an affect [Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Make that effect] on Colorado State University distributing 14,146 tickets to the game against Cal Poly on Sept. 14 — the schools’ least attended home opener since 1968 — Saturday’s match-up with UTEP wasn’t much better.

It was 57 degrees, sunny and Ag Day — annually one of the most popular games of the season. But only 19,517 fans showed up to watch the Rams win their fifth consecutive home game. All five games played in front of less than 20,000 fans.

It fuckin breaks their fuckin hearts, man! Please give all you can to the new stadium fund!

Yet another article worrying about students not going to football and basketball games even as universities build more and bigger stadiums, etc.

UD has suggested armed intervention.