Although in the case of this fraternity – a medical one – they don’t bankrupt, overmedicate, pointlessly medicate, or kill each other.  They do that to us.

Surely you didn’t expect UD to be optimistic about a recent uptick in legal and other efforts to keep the lads from killing each other.  The lawyer quoted in my headline notes the problem:  No adults in the room.  

Uh, yeah.  We like being violent, and we love watching and imagining violence.  Tens of millions of Americans elected a president who physically stalked his opponent during their debate, and whose face goes red as a baboon butt when he shrieks Lock her up to shrieking crowds.  Violent Video Games R Us.  Violent Rap Lyrics R Us.  If a NASCAR monster doesn’t go flying off into the stands lacerating a family we feel cheated.  

We’re pretty fucking protective of the football players designated to be competitively violent for us on a regular basis.  They are our heroes.  We overfeed them and give them special drugs to make them scary to look at and capable of immense leverage against weaker people; we dress them up like monsters and moan with bliss as they fracture and concuss.   Every single day of their lives we cover them with be violent kisses and shower them with be violent fame and fortune, and when they’re violent off the field (why wouldn’t they be violent off the field?) we cover it up.  The police, the university administration, the media, the sports leagues, the rest of us: We cover it up, and at the end of each year we give the most violent of them trophies.  “The NFL looks for players who are aggressive — and, by definition, that means they have to be OK with harming themselves and others.” 

You can write all the high-minded articles you like about how we all agree that violence against women by the most violent heroes among us is shocking and wrong; you can talk about penalties and solutions.  

It often seems that only video evidence forces the NFL and its teams to take a victim of domestic violence seriously. Even when action is taken, the league hopes the public’s memory will fade. “[The NFL] wait it out, because fans have a very short attention span,” says [one observer]. “There is no financial reason for them to not continue the status quo.”

Instead, if change is to come, fans are going to have to take action. “So painful as it’s going to be, we’re going to have to boycott teams who fail to meet basic standards of human decency,” [says another]. “So as a society we have to certainly send the message that hiring and retaining players who are perpetrators of violence will result in harm to their bottom line.”

Uh, who’s “we”?  Have you noticed many women, who might be expected to care most about the pummeling of their sex, in football and hockey stands?  In sports organizations?  For successful college and professional teams, failing to meet the basic standards of human decency is job one; failing to hire and retain perpetrators of violence is the quickest way to get yourself fired as recruitment coach.  

We don’t even care that our biggest heroes go nuts (who wouldn’t?), ending up in jail or gaga or dead or killed after years of getting bashed to bits as fucking freak shows for the rest of us.  Really, mes petites: I wouldn’t hold your breath on the whole violence-against-women bit.

… but at least Kansas has a shitty football team whose games no one attends.  And that’s bankrupting the school.

My savior, ’tis of thee,

Sweet school of Liberty,

Of thee I sing;

Land of hypocrisy!

Land for a perv like me!

Where I’ll pretend I’m Jesus-y.

Let freedom ring!

But get a load of the Greek system.

The sainted Urban Meyer resigns.

************

UD thanks Wendy.

… Louisville, expecting to find – I don’t know, another standard-issue striving southern school – I was stunned by its special quality of debasement, by the absence of even lip-service in the direction of intellect and integrity. τον αθλητισμό και τον αυτο-εμπλουτισμό (Sport and Self-Enrichment) seemed its motto, as administrators stole whatever money they could get their hands on while hiring psychos to coach the guys. Louisville indeed was basically a Greek university (steal everything) with teams.

UL’s in one of its mopping up phases at the moment, trying to figure out how not to be stupid and corrupt while at the same time trying to recover some funds from … well, from lots of people, starting with its last president, who set up quite the clever scheme to reward himself and cronies with all the money that should have been going to the coach… I mean… to the students? … professors? … But the last sicko coach, whose … non-standard… recruitment and retention methods led to his firing, is suing the school for tens of millions of dollars; and of course the prez is doing absolutely everything he possibly can to harass the school and make it give up its lawsuit against him.

It’s quite an edifying spectacle, higher-thought-wise — a university spending all its time and money keeping the football games (no one goes to the games — too grossed out) going and the suits and countersuits humming. Prez tried to get the whole thing dismissed (too vague, he said), which didn’t work; then he actually tried to make it so UL had to pay his legal costs which haha also didn’t work but you know it gummed stuff up a little more so maybe Jimbo would die down at one of his many Florida McMansions (financed with UL money) at some point during pre-trial proceedings or whatever…

Jimbo Ramsey-wise, when things were good, they were very good.

Former University of Louisville President James Ramsey resigned under pressure a mere 27 days into the 2016-17 fiscal year, but he was still the nation’s highest-paid public college president that year, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Chronicle, which maintains a database of compensation received by chief executives of public and private colleges, reported this week that Ramsey was paid about $4.3 million that fiscal year — more than any of the other 250 top executives for public colleges and systems included in its review.

Ramsey made millions despite stepping down as U of L’s president on July 27, 2016, less than a month after the fiscal year began on July 1.

Don’t get no better than that, baby! Don’t get no better! Let’s see Jimbo’s successor clean up like that! Let’s just see her try!

Sing it.

Bleeding eye, sucker punch
You know that we love you
We can’t help ourselves
We love you and nobody else

In and out the league
You come and you go
Leaving massive bloodshed behind
We forgive you a thousand times

When you snap a football or make a sack
We come a-running to you
You leave half-dead women behind
There’s nothing we can do

Can’t help ourselves
No, we can’t help ourselves

… Black Market Bistro.

Seen on an early afternoon walk through
Garrett Park, UD‘s hometown.

[W]hile Acosta’s record covering up for a depraved plutocrat makes him a good fit for the Trump administration, it should disqualify him from public service.

The prez of LeMoyne-Owen stole some of her motivational speech to students from another writer, and the school has a right to be appalled and to seek her resignation – especially since she denies she plagiarized.

But the real ground for eviction lies in her source material. Instead of reaching for Frost or Thoreau or even Dave Barry, she went for Mr Shit-Eating Grin himself, Joel Osteen.

This is not Ray Rice 2.0. Maybe we need to say that plainly, because this is another video of another NFL running back being violent with a woman in a hotel. People made that connection immediately… But [Kareem] Hunt is not dragging a woman he beat unconscious across the floor.

… appears in this New York Times essay about Brutalist architecture in Poland.

Poland’s Modernist structures had, in fact, first appeared as a form of change within the Communist system, a vernacular of liberation for the country’s architects, who were finally permitted to move beyond the strictures of Stalin’s Socialist Realism. Amid the general thawing of the Khrushchev era, many of these architects — among the most prominent were Halina Skibniewska and Jerzy Soltan, the latter of whom studied under Le Corbusier — were for the first time permitted to travel to countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The style they adopted was largely a replica of Western Modernism.

… okay, why do I love, found objects?

Why is the tan fringed scarf
I found on my morning
pick-up-trash-in-Garrett-Park walk
— filthy, soaked, trampled in the
street beside the Saturday market —
the scarf I love the most?

Why are the black riding gloves
I picked up on a sidewalk in downtown
Bethesda the ones I wear the most?

Why is this Martha Stewart Everyday
towel, left foul and abandoned on a
bench in our town’s cool new children’s
playground by the hapless Liz, and
lifted by UD only after weeks
of abandonment, my clear favorite?

Why is this log covered in fungus,
found while walking the dog through
our forest, worthy of display?

And why is this 1982 National Geographic,
which I found in our upstate house, discarded
by some guest or other, so cherished by me
that I ordered another one for Mr UD‘s last
birthday (the original remains in the house)?

It contains an article – “The Incredible Potato” –
whose enthusiasm for the spud I found hilarious.
Throughout that stay at the house, I read
excerpts – breathlessly – to anyone who would listen.