Vlad’s imaginary friend.
Vlad’s imaginary friend.
It doesn’t get any better than this. (For background on coacha inconsolata, go here and scroll down.)
A somber coach “Boom” rested on the pulpit. [University of Florida football coach Will] Muschamp had a cross to bear that wasn’t his own but instead a player’s. The weight grew heavy.
“[S]orry to inconvenience you guys, but with the situation Monday and the seriousness of it, I felt like it was a little insensitive to have a football press conference. I think it is today, too,” Muschamp said from the crease of his mouth.
His head drooped, his voice lowered.
“But we’ve got to move forward.”
Scandal fatigue with the NCAA began setting in a long time ago. The long wait for penalties in the USC case started it; the Penn State penalties, misconduct in the Miami case, and lack of action on UNC’s academic scandal were other major milestones.
The NFL’s recent history has gotten more people asking even harder questions about what the important scandals are in the sports world. College football has not been immune either. Jameis Winston, Treon Harris, Treyvon Paulk, Dorial Green-Beckham, and Devonte Fields are all part of the same trend, with more scrutiny on how teams handle allegations of assaults, especially violence against women. And less on who might be trying to make a buck here and there.
Go ahead and get rich off of university athletics! That’s a trifle here.
Subject to government approval, EL AL plans to place its “LY” code on select JetBlue-operated flights to/from New York (JFK/Newark), expanding options throughout the United States for EL AL customers.
LY stands for Loathesome You, and refers to female El Al passengers, all of whom, on taking their seats, will be subject to the revulsion of the orthodox Jewish men on board, who will insist on being seated away from female loathesomeness.
Welcome to Jet Blue, ladies! Relax, take a seat, and then watch while the men on the plane treat you like a just-excreted piece of shit.
**********************
You know what to do. Boycott Jet Blue.
The University of Southern California couldn’t ask for a better trustee. John Martin just priced his desperately-needed hepatitis medication at $1,125-per-pill. Last year he gave himself $180 million in compensation. (Read what a columnist at Forbes, of all places, thinks of John’s take-home pay.)
Yes, when it comes to modeling ethical behavior for a university’s students, when it comes to bringing that certain something to the running of a university, Brown University’s famous Steven Cohen (now that the SEC has forced him to close the shop) can’t do better than USC’s very own John Martin.
Just after featuring the rape-positive, bonkers-for-BB-guns school in a long article in the Sunday Magazine, they’re at it again in a whole new article, gnawing at FSU like a dog with a bone… Why can’t they leave FSU alone to live in the way the school has chosen to live?
Does the New York Times fly down to Sicily once a week to try to upset the delicate balance among the mafia, the courts, and the police? No! The newspaper recognizes and respects the right of Sicilians to live in their traditional fashion, under the ethos of omertà, etc. If, in just the same way, the heart of the FSU community has always depended on a complex synergy among football players, coaches, police, lawyers, boosters, and the leadership of the university – a synergy that keeps players on the field and out of jail by ignoring their crimes, plus makes everyone rich off a winning team – what business is that of some newspaper?
Tattle-tale reporters just can’t resist sharing details of the FSU way:
At least 13 football players have been implicated in a string of wild public shootouts with CO2-powered BB and pellet guns, causing thousands of dollars in property damage, endangering bystanders and eliciting a police response. Yet until the most recent case — a previously unreported shootout in June that caused such a commotion that a sheriff’s helicopter was called in to search for suspects — none of the episodes led to charges, even though elsewhere in Florida suspects as young as 12 have been arrested for doing the same things.
It’s like they think they’re better than the folks in Tallahassee or something…
Money from the Boosters has helped pay the salaries of high-ranking athletic officials and the university president, whose performance goals included enhancing “the partnership” between the Boosters and the athletic department.
And… And? … You got a problem with that? Everybody benefits! It’s not like we’re not gonna cut the president in on the deal. He’s the chief fucking academic officer! He, like, keeps the place all intellectual and all. Without that we lose our tax breaks.
… in the French university.
Aggregation in American university sports journalism.
Because there are so many stories, you might as well aggregate them.
…south,” and when your academic ranking is that secure, you can go ahead and cancel classes because of football games.
Editors at TSU’s newspaper are so excited that an upcoming
game will be aired on ESPN2. The only way for Texas State football to get this television exposure is to play on a Tuesday.
that they’re calling for the cancellation of all Wednesday classes. For the tv gods have spoken; they have decreed a Tuesday night game. The university must and will obey the gods.
… a Philip Larkin for our time, is seriously ill. Scathing Online Schoolmarm admires this essay about him by Luke O’Neil, a fan. She thanks her sister for sending it to her.
Here’s an excerpt:
Of course I’ve always known he’ll die someday, as will we all, but the actual prospect of it here writ large has instead driven me into a sort of childish revelry about the romance of the greatest crime of them all. Maybe that’s not surprising, as the allure of the grave is a theme well-trod for we woebegone lot. And more to the point, Morrissey, perhaps more than any other artist of his stature, has been prepping us for his death since the day we first heard him. That dalliance on the border is in fact the very appeal. Morrissey without the circuitous dance with death is just a sad, unloveable loner. Where’s the drama in that?
… “Cemetry Gates” is… indicative of the way we’re supposed to process Morrissey’s eventual death, even if this latest revelation doesn’t prove to be his final bow:
So we go inside and we gravely read the stones, all those people all those lives where are they now? With the loves and hates, and passions just like mine, they were born and then they lived and then they died.
It’s hard not to hear an echo of that line in the singer’s stiff upper-lipped announcement of his ill health. But one can’t help but wonder if death, the province of Keats, and Yeats, and weird lover Wilde, and the endless string of doomed, tragic film and literary stars he’s obsessed over in song, isn’t where Morrissey belongs. No, not Steven Patrick Morrissey the human man, of course, but Morrissey the idea, the one that we actually know, the one that’s important to us. He’s made his dissatisfaction with this mortal coil quite clearly known.
Modiano just won the literature Nobel.
No, I don’t know his work. I’ll do some sniffing around and maybe post something later, though.
******************
As early as 1974, Michel Foucault, discussing Modiano’s screenplay for Louis Malle’s Occupation film Lacombe Lucien, was one of many who saw how all of Modiano’s work implied a reaction to Gaullist-era myths no less than to the wartime Collaboration whose shame virtually required those myths in order to shield itself from scrutiny.
(This passage comes from a book about Modiano whose first chapter – fully available at the above link – usefully reviews critical responses to his work.)
UD has kind of run out of things to say about the University of Kentucky. Its academic ranking has tanked like crazy over the last few years; its run of drunk corrupt practically insane coaches is matched only by its run of criminally violent practically insane players… The school’s best friend is Big Coal; it hates the state’s greatest living writer but it sure do love its bourbon and Adzillatron…
It’s always illuminating to read the local press there. Reporters reflect the local mood, the local ethos. Let’s SOS through a recent representative piece.
The writer headlines the article UK arrest should concern Stoops, and concern is the operative term… Nothing to get alarmed about! Just concerned.
We begin not with the arrest. For that, we’ll have to wait for the third paragraph.
The beginning of the article is about what matters – UK football’s “swift” and “stunning” current winning streak. Lots of excited language about that starts the piece.
Ahem. Now:
Off the field, however, there have been some potholes…
A few bumps in the road is all… Sure, a player was just arrested for rape, but our visibly shaken coacha inconsolata said all that needed to be said about that:
Later in the day, [Coach] Stoops, who was visibly shaken, twice said that he “feels for all parties.”
Then there was the case of the misunderstood players:
[L]ast week, Wildcats freshmen Stanley Williams, Drew Barker, Dorian Baker and Tymere Dubose were charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, after an on-campus incident involving air-soft pellet guns.
It sounds as if the players were just shooting at each other in a playful game, but there was nothing playful about the ensuing campus-wide lockdown.
Playful lads! Boys will be boys. And coach is such a good coach! Why,
Entering this season, he had dismissed five players for violations of team rules.
I mean – haha – you might ask who the fuck recruited this lot. But let’s not go there! Let’s instead be really impressed that our coach “has built up some equity as an enforcer.” Because if there’s one thing an amateur university athletics coach is, it’s an enforcer.
The writer goes on to list several more forms of criminal mischief among yet other players, and then cautions:
Taken as a whole, these incidents show that maybe the Wildcats need some more oversight.
But basically this is the situation:
[T]he Wildcats are finally winning, finally thriving, finally happy…
He might as well be talking about Happy Valley, Pennsylvania! Happy, happy, thriving, winning – this is the reality at UK. Potholes we may have to negotiate here and there, but when all is said and done, these are our best days.
And don’t talk to me about students not going to the games…
Tis the lot of the university basketball or football coach to ever and always be disappointed… Nay, even at times disgusted. He looketh upon th’inconstant student fan and despairs. He looketh upon the arrested student athlete and despairs. He is (in a phrase UD coined) coacha inconsolata, a perpetually grieving figure who stands amid the wreckage of his dreams. What profiteth it that his salary is the highest not only at the university, but in the entire state, if he cannot bend his wayward charges to his will?
Michigan State University’s coaches are among the most inconsolable of them all. Izzo, gazing at the charred ruins of East Lansing, weeps at his wayward ones. MSU’s football coach, for his part, has abandonment issues. “The fans that left, that’s just not right,” he says of the huge numbers of students who walked out before the end of the last game (to say nothing of the students who bought tickets and didn’t show up at all, and the students who didn’t buy tickets).
Indeed the whole university is aflutter. Having spent all its money on stadiums and coaches and Adzillatrons, MSU is staring down the barrel of the end of its raison d’être if the little buggers won’t play along.
Waseda University acknowledged problems with its guidance and screening process…
Miss Stem Cell 2013 was yet another beneficiary of the I’m too busy and important to actually read the dissertations here system – a system that seems particularly popular in Europe and Asia (UD has long noted an adorably old-fashioned tendency on the part of professors in the United States to – er – guide and screen the things their students write). Students know their professors can’t be bothered, so they pick up their dissertations wherever… translate an NIH website into Japanese and off we go…