“This is our biggest rival and our most serious game of the whole season and instead of being able to come together as a school, we will be amidst the joys and heartbreaks of rush,” explains a University of Mississippi student petition demanding the rescheduling of fraternity/sorority recruitment week because it conflicts with a football game.

Shortly after the petition began circulating, senior broadcast journalism major Walter Lyle shared his views on the issue.

Lyle listed ‘things on campus you SHOULD be signing a petition against:

confederate symbolism
sexual harassment
sexual assault
homophobic slurs
racial slurs
domestic violence
drug abuse
literally anything else’

LOL.

If you’re a much older suitor, it’s not a good idea to use your proximity to death as a come-on.

According to [a UCLA sexual misconduct] investigation, [Professor Eric] Gans contended his advances were welcome, but [Pamela] Thomason said the evidence shows the graduate student repeatedly tried to get Gans to cease unwelcome attention.

“The evidence reflects that Gans exerted psychological pressure on (the student) to submit, including references to his own mortality and to how she changed his life,” Thomason said in the report.

I’m going to be dead in a few months anyway so why not fuck me seems to UD one of the less auspicious approaches.

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

Ever wonder exactly what public relations consultants do?

They keep people from giving interviews and saying things like this.

Gans alleges that the whole situation was a setup by the student’s adviser and the department chair — “who are both women, by the way,” he said — believing that some of his colleagues were jealous of the “extremely attractive, sexy girl” he had as a student and of his academic prowess.

… killing people.

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

From the indictment.

Around May 2013, the indictment alleges [hospice owner] Bradley Harris texted [a staff member] to take over one patient’s care [from another staff member]. “I told this chick if she would just give her 1 ml of Ativan and turn her she would die,” the indictment alleges Harris wrote.

Harris sent another text, saying, “[expletive] woman is still alive … I need some boots on the ground.”

Stuart stayed in contact with Harris, while she gave medicine to the patient. The indictment stated he then sent a text about the need to medicate in order to justify continuous care: “We have very strict guidelines that we must be providing skilled nursing interventions at least ever[y] hour to stay in there.”

After the patient died, Stuart texted Harris, and he responded, “Nice work.”

Baylor University football just keeps the hits coming. Year after year.

Comment thread on an article about a sexual assault at Drake University.

A complicated case of he said – she said. Unfortunately, when a man reports sexual assault the claim is rarely taken seriously. (On a side note, the caption on the Drake photo says Magnolia trees. Magnolia trees do not grow this far north. Those are redbuds!)
Like · Reply · Feb 23, 2017 6:53am

Years ago I had two magnolia trees on a residential property in Beaverdale. At least I thought they were magnolia trees!
Like · Reply · 1 · Feb 23, 2017 9:24am

I found an article in the Iowa Gardener Magazine from 2014: “There are a wide variety of magnolias that can be grown in the Upper Midwest. Many of the deciduous magnolias perform well in our climate and range from smaller to larger trees.”
Like · Reply · 1 · Feb 23, 2017 11:06am

… and Blotto God …

If your university worships football, then Johnny Manziel and Richie Incognito and Jameis Winston and so many others in the pantheon shock and appall you again and again as they spit on the divinity you have granted them and leave your school as lost as the nation of North Korea will be, should The Dear Leader ever be called home.

The latest scene of disillusion and devastation is the University of Oklahoma, whose quarterback is a drunk who gets in fights with cops and then, when they try to arrest him, flees. A local scribe puts this football-god violence in the context of all the other such violence in the program and concludes it’s a real shame and something should definitely be done about it.

These are tough days for Sooner football. Not as tough as the final days of the Switzer Era when guns and drugs and woes abounded, and yet, the release of the Joe Mixon video and the revelation that Dede Westbrook was twice arrested for domestic violence before arriving in Norman has stained the program.

Stained? Woe unto thee, scribes and Pharisees! Be careful, when thou liest safe and soft, lest thou forget Baylor.

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

UD thanks two of her readers for the Jameis Winston link.

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

The tweets are coming in.

Positive for Oklahoma fans is at least Baker Mayfield wasn’t charged with punching any women.

All in good time my little pretty; all in good time.

Since Mr. Trump took office in January, immigration authorities have engaged in several high-profile actions against immigrants. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that the president wanted to “take the shackles off” of agents who had, under President Barack Obama, been under orders to focus only on serious criminals.

Kim “Knock Them Right in the Face” Mulkey.

Baylor University’s women’s basketball coach makes her contribution to the school’s effort to get past its rapes scandal.

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

Sing it:

I’m gonna wash those rapes right out of my hair!
I’m gonna wash those rapes right out of my hair!
And send them on their way.

If a mom don’t understand you,
If you play on separate teams,
Waste no time, make a change,
Ride that gal right off your range
Rub her out of the roll call
And knock her right in the face!

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

(UD thanks Rick.)

In February.

Taken from the front steps
of UD‘s Garrett Park house.

Now ah say ah say son you got yourself one helluva problem down at Baylor with some of these here big money boys trying to make all the regents resign just cuz they ground the school all the way down to shit and cost it so far a cool $223 million (and it’s early days!) with all them rapes on their watch.

The ongoing scandal has already claimed Baylor’s president, athletic director and head football coach. But the booster group says the purge hasn’t gone far enough and the regents haven’t assigned much blame to themselves. The boosters argue that a small group of board insiders controls the university and occasionally meddles in day-to-day business.

Damn right! Dumbest thing Auburn University ever did was get rid of trustee-for-life (I mean, spozed to be) Bobby Lowder, who for 29 years ran pretty much the entire school, all in the sacred name of football, and didn’t give a flying fuck about so-called ‘scandals’…

So now you get ol’ Bobby on the phone (after the bank thing and finally getting thrown off the BOT I think he’s available) and you have him talk to Baylor’s trustees and tell them how to keep their asses planted firmly on the board for at least 29 years, and how to keep running the show.

They are a special elite among American universities – schools so indifferent to education and so sports-obsessed and so lame that the only news we hear out of them is big talk about – or investigative reports about – their stupid and/or corrupt athletic programs. The University of Louisville is the trend-setter here, but consider that perennial UD favorite, the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Although sports at UNLV is hemorrhaging money (Scold, scold, scold, say the regents, except they’re the group that cheered the school on and made it possible for it to lose all that money), its loser coach is peeing his pants over the prospect of a new immense $1.9 billion football stadium to accommodate all the people who don’t go to his team’s games.

UNLV would share the stadium with the soon-to-be-relocated Oakland Raiders, see, and excellent local characters like Sheldon Adelson will put up most of the money, see?… Are you getting as excited as I am? This vast structure will have the world’s largest Adzillatron spanning its entire length, so none of the twelve thousand people in attendance (and what amazing optics those numbers in that huge space will be for UNLV) will miss one millisecond of constant shrieking gargantuan commercials. The markings on the field will of course say RAIDERS rather than Rebels, and in general UNLV’s status in all of this will be that of a poor overlooked orphan cousin but it will have to put up I dunno around $200 million. BUT what’s $200 million when you already have a five million dollar budget deficit? Just add it to the fucking deficit! Big deal!

Oooh, but speaking of deal – Sheldon’s feelings got hurt in some way and he has pulled all of his money out. BUT Goldman Sachs will pick up the slack!

BUT Goldman Sachs has pulled out of the deal too!

I mean, it looks as though sharing a hot sweaty bed with casino gambling was too much even for the obscene NFL… But poor UNLV! It has no problem with the lower depths, but it might lose that big new stadium anyway…

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

Yeah and now that the deal’s falling through you got all these local naysayers…

It is high time lawmakers, now meeting in regular session, reconsider the state’s commitment of room tax money to this harebrained, half-baked scheme to enrich billionaires.

Instead of sticking tourists with a 0.88 percent hike in the room tax, lawmakers should let them keep that money to spend on food, drink and gambling, which net nearly 10 times as much in tax revenue.

… Lawmakers should note that there is no stadium price tag in the bill they passed, and the stadium backers flatly refused to consider capping public funding at 39 percent of the cost of construction. It was $750 million or no deal. The cost of the stadium when first proposed was a mere $1 billion. It ratcheted up from there. What is to stop the Raiders from building a $1 billion stadium, tapping the taxpayers for three-quarters of the tab and getting the state to make the estimated $900 million in road improvements needed to access the stadium?

Besides, does UNLV really need a new football stadium, when it can’t fill the one it has? One that has adequate traffic access off a major freeway and abundant parking. Why is there a need for a stadium on or near the campus, when 93 percent of students live off campus?

Oh shaddap.

Sometimes it’s fun to read. This is about the current president of Argentina.

His first wife was Ivonne Bordeu, daughter of the racecar driver Juan Manuel Bordeu. They had three sons: Agustina, Jimena and Francisco. He got divorced, and married the model Isabel Menditeguy in 1994. They signed a prenuptial agreement, on Franco’s request. The marriage got in crisis when Macri became the chairman of Boca Juniors. They stayed together anyway, but finally divorced in 2005. He started a romance with María Laura Groba, but never got married with her. He left her in 2010, and started a new relation with businesswoman Juliana Awada. He got married with Awada that same year. He wore a fake moustache and impersonated singer Freddie Mercury during the party. He accidentally swallowed the moustache, and Minister of Health Jorge Lemus performed first aid to save his life.

… in perspective.

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

Sawyer was drunk when he delivered his opening remarks
onstage at Stardome Planetarium. He
stood below a slide show of “The Emptiness of Outer Space”
— stars and planets, scattered like the scantest
motes of dust in unimaginable void — and was about
to make the leap to what percent of us,
our dearly thumping bodies, is a corresponding emptiness . . .
when one foot met a wire that had strayed
outside the curtain, and a wild arc of hand undid
the podium, which canted off its casters sidelong
into the 3-D galaxy props, and you could say whatever
thimble or pustule or hackle of grief was his,
it had toppled the whole damn universe.

……………………………..

Tonight, though, after show time,
he’s just soused enough to wander through the mock-up
stage-set milky ways agog with child-wonder:
all those luminescent islands! all that vacuum!
Look: a planet floats, there’s that much cosmos
all around it. A planet! While we . . . we couldn’t
squint and levitate a half inch, not the guru-most
among us. Well, we could: if the laws of the universe changed.
It’s only the Earth that makes us so heavy.
It’s only our lives that keep our lives
from floating off into the nothing.

The University of Iowa is an avatar here.

How can it be running an almost three million dollar athletics deficit and at the same time have a stupendous winning record?

This was the year the Hawkeye football team went 12-0 in the regular season, won the Big Ten’s West Division and played in the Rose Bowl. So why did the athletics department end the year in the red?

I’ll tell you why. Because fewer and fewer – vanishingly fewer – people want to go to the games. Ticket revenue is drastically down. And this is the effing heartland, where everyone has a sacred obligation to piss themselves with excitement on game day.

The second element of the financial collapse is quite comical, quite in keeping with the florid absurdities of simulacral culture.

But although ticket sales were low, the undefeated season triggered performance bonuses for coaches.

Head football coach Kirk Ferentz, for example, picked up an extra $1 million in 2015 for milestones that included going undefeated, finishing ranked in the top 10, going to a New Year’s Day bowl game, being named coach of the year and having a team graduation rate of at least 70 percent.

UI coaching salaries, bonuses and benefits totaled $20.3 million for fiscal 2016, up from $18.2 million the previous year, reports shows.

The whole beautiful shows churns along, runs itself, rewards itself, with little input or involvement from any actual audience – and certainly little involvement from – uh – university students. The location of Kirk Ferentz’s milestones and rewards, randomly enough, does happen to be a university, but the university isn’t showing up for his big days. It only pays his bills.

You don’t get more simulacral than that.

Congrats Iowa. You’re the wave of the future.