One night, in the winter of 2013, crowds of Michigan State University students ripped trees out of the landscape, burned them in the streets, and jumped over the flames. Here’s the Nazi-book-burning-fun image. Close to sixty similar bonfires went up all over East Lansing in response to MSU having beaten Ohio State — another perennially torching and rioting school — in a football game.

You want links? You want links to decades of torching-the-town and scorching-the-earth and torturing-police-horses Penn State, Ohio State, and Michigan State? Sorry. Too fucking depressing. Look them up yourself.

It’s a long tradition: After football games, or after the firing of child-rapist-enabling coaches, or in celebration of holidays, hundreds of drunken shits gather at America’s football factories and attempt to incinerate their neighborhoods.

As if places like East Lansing weren’t bleak enough. Let’s establish a university where we admit hundreds of people who, as one, yank out of the ground all of the saplings planted in an effort to bring some life to our cold terrain.

A university! Maybe East Lansing harbors some gangs we might expect to do something like kill trees and set the town on fire. These are university students. Michigan State University is a university.

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But, as all of America’s media is madly noting today, MSU has a specific culture. (I’ve just linked you to today’s Michigan State University Google News page. Scroll down. Endlessly.) It’s the same culture Penn State and Ohio State and plenty of other NCAA-favorites (the NCAA’s getting excoriated everywhere too – like – hey – turns out it’s corrupt) exhibit, and it’s a deep culture – the work of decades of abjection in the face of athletics.

At this point, schools like these are basically distilleries. Rape and pillage are what you get when you’re a big ol’ distillery packed with twenty year olds.

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So the depraved people at MSU let a depraved doctor systematically rape hundreds of children. Same thing with a coach-rapist at Penn State. The president of MSU and the athletic director just resigned. And now we’re breathlessly told that this is just the beginning of the massive numbers of sports-related crimes about to be exposed at MSU.

Funny thing: It played out almost exactly the same way at Penn State! And Auburn! I could go on!

The trouble at Michigan State appears to go beyond Dr. Nassar, who was a university employee for decades and the physician to two women’s varsity teams. An ESPN investigation Friday described a pattern in which sexual assault complaints involving prominent athletes, including more than a dozen on the football team and a few in the celebrated men’s basketball program, were handled by the athletic department rather than through regular university channels.

Michigan State insufficiently complied with federal officials monitoring the university under Title IX, the gender-equity law, the report found.

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MSU … will not face criminal charges for [its] part in Nassar’s actions, though [it is] facing multiple civil law suits from over 100 victims of his abuse.

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It’s a culture, see? You don’t dump the prez, bring in a deer-in-the-headlights replacement, and create a new culture.

It is, as they say, what it is. The sadistic, greedy, amoral coaches who, once finally fired, dedicate the rest of their lives to suing the school for four hundred million dollars. The deities on the money teams who sack quarterbacks and women. The brain-damaged ex-football-hero trustees. The student body seething with alcoholic bullies. When they tire of watching pledges die from booze forced down their gullets, they head out to the town saplings.

The school’s too busy dealing with five ongoing high-profile athletic and academic and fraternity scandals to notice the creepy little team doctor or the elderly has-been coach off raping children somewhere. And all the decent people on the faculty, in the administration, and in the student body keep their heads down and do their work and pretend their school’s not a saloon.

Syphilis-ridden 18th Century Mummy Dug Up in
Swiss Church is Relative of Boris Johnson

Pharmacy professor Richard Morrisett will remain at [the University of Texas], despite pleading guilty to a felony charge after strangling his girlfriend until “she saw stars”…

… dismounts.

Interesting to discover that the education and welfare of England’s children has been in such good, uh, hands.

Whee.

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“We combine rural, urban and suburban lifestyles,” County Executive Ike Leggett said after the finalists were announced Thursday.

What Leggett doesn’t say is that you can get all three lifestyles in the same house. Chez UD sits eight miles from a city, so I guess that makes it suburban. But the immediate world around UD‘s house has itself been urbanizing for years, and in fact it feels quite city-like almost the moment you step outside the barriers (dead end streets everywhere) and trees (GP is an arboretum) her town has created between it and urbanism.

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Rural? Last night, while Les UDs were eating dinner, they heard one of their red foxes (there’s long been a den at the top of the hill behind our house) barking and screaming only a few feet away from them.

“Prepare yourself,” UD said to Mr UD. “I think you’re about to hear the squeals of a dying rabbit.”

And right away, there they were, the lurid last moments of a trapped animal. Les UD‘s looked at one another, mildly shocked and distressed, as the killing went on inches from their own Takeout Taxi meal. UD took the occasion to explain to Mr UD that while they can press three buttons and summon great feasts, the fox must find and kill her meal.

Anyway. Rural enough for you?

Hawaii Governor Didn’t Correct False Missile Alert
Sooner Because he Didn’t Know his Twitter Password

Men responsive to the insistent call of sexual pleasure, beset by shameful desires and the undauntedness of obsessive lusts, beguiled even by the lure of the taboo — over the decades, I have imagined a small coterie of unsettled men possessed by just such inflammatory forces they must negotiate and contend with. I’ve tried to be uncompromising in depicting these men each as he is, each as he behaves, aroused, stimulated, hungry in the grip of carnal fervor and facing the array of psychological and ethical quandaries the exigencies of desire present. I haven’t shunned the hard facts in these fictions of why and how and when tumescent men do what they do, even when these have not been in harmony with the portrayal that a masculine public-relations campaign — if there were such a thing — might prefer. I’ve stepped not just inside the male head but into the reality of those urges whose obstinate pressure by its persistence can menace one’s rationality, urges sometimes so intense they may even be experienced as a form of lunacy. Consequently, none of the more extreme conduct I have been reading about in the newspapers lately has astonished me.

UD‘s godless little town (it has only a thousand people, roughly sixty percent of whom, in 2010, overcame their “fear of coming out” and identified as having no religion) is way in the HQ2 running.

Soon, instead of walking to the GP Post Office and then through Porcupine Woods, UD and her dog will be looping around massive tree-filled corporate domes. Instead of waiting twenty minutes outside the town’s only restaurant for a table, UD will wait fourteen hours while five thousand people try to eat lunch there all at once.

Yes, life around here will certainly change if we’re chosen for the new Amazon headquarters (it will be a ten minute walk from UD‘s house). Some folks say they’ll move the MARC train station out of GP and onto the new Amazon campus, but UD‘s thinking if stations are that movable she should pitch MARC the idea of a dedicated station down the hill from her backyard, so that UD wouldn’t even have to walk down the block to catch the train but could really literally roll out of bed. UD also anticipates regular feelings of rageful impatience, existential futility, and corrosive irony as she waits for late-arriving Amazon purchases with the realization that hugely looming over her is The Thing Itself.

Philly sports fans have a reputation for being passionate…

What a remarkable story is the ransacking of Greek universities! On one side, civilization; on the other barbarism:

Vandals Ransack University Campus in Thessaloniki

The Greek university literally sinks under the weight of its defacement, as in this photograph of the National Technical University of Athens.

Perhaps most remarkable about this story is the fact that no one covers it. Why isn’t there a front-page story about the sordid erasure of thought – in Greece of all places – in the New York Times magazine?

As ever, UD recommends you read Deadspin’s account – including comments!! – of the arrest of one of Temple University’s sports heroes. Nobody covers the wonderful world of football like Deadspin, and their readers’ comments never fail to amuse.

Les UDs are still in the running for the new Amazon headquarters. They live a hop, skip, and a jump from the site.

[A] sewage pipe [recently] spewed waste onto a heavily trafficked concourse — an honest-to-God shitstorm. “I’m like, ‘Literally, it’s raining in Penn Station,’ ” recalls Marigo Mihalos, a booking agent from New Jersey who witnessed the fecal deluge on her way to work.

…The addition of New Jersey Transit trains in the 1990s was both an economic boon to the region — I bought a house in Maplewood, N.J., in 1996 so I could ride the new Midtown Direct to work — and the beginning of Penn Station’s transformation from mere malodorous eyesore to Hieronymus Bosch-grade hellhole.