You do want to know? Okay, read these two pages (scroll down).

And now for an update, from a student writing in CMU’s campus newspaper.

[Virtually no spectators showing up for football games] is not exclusively a CMU problem. It’s the exact same problem that many other trivial Mid-American Conference schools face.

… The reported attendance at the CMU-WMU game was 10,097 people. By hand, I counted 255 people on the east side of the stadium at the end of the first quarter.

UD‘s very fond of a statement from CMU’s 2014 athletic director.

“Does it matter if you have no one at your game, or 15,000, or 110,000?” Heeke asked. “Does that somehow deem [sic] that you shouldn’t play football at this school because you can’t reach 15,000? [Like a lot of schools, CMU fudges like mad to pretend to the NCAA that it meets the minimal attendance standard.] If the school makes the decision to play football, why should it matter? It’s their decision how they want to manage the game and what they think their expectation is and what makes it a viable program.”

Does it matter that CMU paid this guy – Heeke – $300,000 a year when he made that statement? Does it matter that a public university runs an expensive and totally invisible football program? Does it matter that it has no one at its games? No! If the good people of Michigan, if CMU students and their parents, want to fund a bunch of guys (most of whom aren’t real CMU students) throwing a ball around in a huge pricey stadium GO FOR IT. We all know the state of Michigan’s so rich it doesn’t know what to do with its money.

… at the Sea Witch Festival. Costume parade, dog parade, bonfires, the works. She will blog compulsively from there.

… to UD‘s bulls.

Click through the artworks here to see one of our Fangors, for sale next month at the New York Bonhams auction.

…world…

But it wouldn’t be nothing – nothing! – without a woman or a girl to abuse.

There’s Oxford professor in good standing Tariq Ramadan, lying through his teeth as long as he possibly could about his apparent rapes and now ah shit okay I did those two… But they were begging for it… There’s Yale professor in good standing Michael Simons who okay yes I was a bad boy but I’m suing you for a trillion dollars for taking away my named chair…

Behind every great man is a great man; Ramadan has his powerful male supporters; and then there’s Robert “Two Chairs” Alpern.

Ol’ Justice Buzzard
Had only just uttered
A word to his prisoners two;
But then on a dare
The courtroom was bare!
So Buzzard he tore off and flew.

The study goes on to note that despite a schedule mainly devoted to drinking, hazing, parties, football, basketball, and lacrosse, fraternity guys go on to do pretty well in the world.

***********

And I mean duh.

The idea was to fund a team to study carcinogenesis — how cancer starts. But in reality, [Jim] Allison soon discovered, they pretty much had free reign.

All good writers know never to use exclamation marks! I mean, almost never!

But UD has stumbled over a piece in the U Penn newspaper which demands exclamation marks. She will now quote some of the piece and insert the quotation marks its content demands.

In the wake of the admissions bribery scandal! involving former Penn men’s basketball star and coach Jerome Allen, Penn Dean of Admissions Eric Furda is saying that safeguards need to be put in place in both the athletics and admissions departments.

On Oct. 5, Allen, who is currently an assistant coach for the Boston Celtics, pleaded guilty to bribery in connection to the recruitment of a student athlete – now Wharton senior Morris Esformes – to gain him admission to the University. Allen had been implicated in an indictment of businessman Philip Esformes, who had allegedly defrauded the federal government of $1 billion!!! and had used some of that money to bribe Allen and help Morris get into Penn.

… Furda suggested new professional development and training for staffers in both departments to prevent future incidents of bribery!!!!

[So a guy comes at you with tens of thousands of dollars, private luxury jet trips on his dime, and anything else you want, and says in exchange for this I want my kid who can’t play competitive basketball to get a basketball scholarship and thereby admission to your school. Slowly, now. Think it through. Is this RIGHT or WRONG?]

… [Morris] Esformes was accepted to Penn in 2015 as a member of Allen’s final recruiting class before Allen was replaced by current coach Steve Donahue. Esformes never played or appeared !!!!! on the men’s basketball team’s roster.

We’re all sinners, of course; but when you put “Christian” right there in your school’s name, as Texas Christian University does, you invite more than ordinary sinescopic scrutiny. A quick review of this blog’s TCU entries over the last five or so years definitely reveals more sinners than saints, especially among the football lads, who seem undecided whether they want to drug themselves to the heavenly gates or pummel other people to the heavenly gates.

UD was reminded of this curiously … heterodox school by their latest big national news: One of their most valuable football players has two arrests for domestic violence in the last seven months plus an outstanding bench warrant, since he didn’t show up to court for Dom. Viol. #1.

Since he’s a great player, and since TCU’s quarterback is out with injuries, and since TCU is desperate to win a game, they’ll just suspend him for a game or two.

Two? They’ll probably just suspend him for one. It’s the Texas Christian way.

Here are a couple of live ones: Ira Rennert and Michael Simons.

Both are already endowed with insane riches and honors: Business schools are named after Rennert; he lives in the largest private residence in the world (or close to it). Simons is a much-honored, tenured professor of medicine at Yale.

Yet Rennert’s unbridled greed and bullying and rule-breaking mean he spends his life in courtrooms unsuccessfully defending his nefarious practices. When he loses (and he loses most of the time) he turns around and sues his lawyers for failing to defend the indefensible.

Plus there’s his money for West Bank settlements.

Simons has produced important work in cardiology, and as a named chair at Yale he sits at the absolute pinnacle of the academic world. But after admitting to general sexual harassment of women at Yale, plus a more specific thing —

In addition to the sexual harassment, the university committee found that Dr. Simons had exercised “improper leadership and compromised decision-making” with regard to [a] researcher’s husband, also a cardiologist. Dr. Simons, who is married, began making advances to the researcher, Annarita Di Lorenzo, in February 2010, in a letter, and continued his pursuit despite repeated rebuffs. She left Yale in 2011. Her husband, Dr. Frank Giordano, who remains at Yale, said Dr. Simons froze his professional advancement.

— he lost his named chair. He got to keep most of his other goodies, but he did lose the chair.

Except not really. I mean, he lost one chair, but his cronies at the school found another one sitting around, and so Simons was a named chair again! But then people were outraged that Yale was continuing to confer this very high honor on, uh, this chap, so the cronies removed him from the second chair. (“To lose one chair may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”)

So of course Simons is suing Yale to get this, that, or the other chair – some chair, any chair – back. Because, you know, life without a chair!

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

America, my beloved. Lawsuit city. UD madly loves her country, but there’s a lot of … wealth … in it.

… American-style.

Autumn edition.

… The teenage basketball stars are commodities to the hustlers and cons in the hoops underworld — and more disturbingly, sometimes to their own families.

… “So you’ve been pimping out your namesake since he was 14 years old?” [one player’s] lawyer … asked on cross-examination. [The player’s father] did not disagree.

… The N.C.A.A., of course, is not on trial, but it looms as almost a shadow defendant — a multi-billion-dollar enterprise resting on a pool of unpaid, disproportionately African-American labor. The inequities engender cynicism, and N.C.A.A. rules are not followed and not regarded as having any moral authority — not by the players, their families, their youth coaches or by many of the college coaches seeking their services.

Make that literal pimping at the University of Louisville, where teenage basketball stars and their fathers had special campus… housing… just for them.