Wotta shocker.
… and the little missus done got that right. Back in 2017, when the state’s newspaper gushed about LSU’s basketball coach boy wonder, Will Wade‘s wife hit it right on the head: Like virtually all of LSU’s storied basketball and football coaches from the word go, young Wade was dirty as the day is long. And as he now departs the school in the time-honored way of its sports leaders — driven out by years of every conceivable violation — we can only comb through our many LSU is the scummiest school in America except maybe for Baylor posts and ponder, as we like to do, America’s poorest, most corrupt, most violent state and its long dedication to three million dollar a year filthy rotten coaches.
Let’s narrate this from the POV of a Bama boy – Bama itself definitely competitive in the southern jock school corruption sweepstakes, of course:
There’s squat going on today, but — dear reader — your Gump Day comes in strong with a bit of schadenfreude, as the sweatiest man this side of Al Golden, at the dirtiest program this side of SMU, finally had the NCAA hammer drop on them.
Or, at least the first part.
To the absolute surprise of no one, a man under investigation by the FBI, at a school under investigation for widespread sexual assault and Title IX violations, and two programs with a history of dirty dealing, have all finally received their Notice of Allegations.
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Oh yeah. Forgot SMU. Lawdie! [flicks hankie o’er lightly sweated brow] Hard to keep up, ain’t it? … But let me add, and I mean this in the nicest way, that we don’t need no big-city Yankee scolds telln us how to educate our youth at our fine universities! Take all the pleasure you want in our anguish, Mr Fancy Pants; we’ll be back bigger and better than ever ‘fore you can say Dave Bliss!
[The British government sought] to find a way to make sure that Chelsea could continue to function, roughly as normal, once Abramovich’s other assets were frozen. The players, the staff and the fans — especially the fans — must not suffer, the government said. A few hours earlier, Russian artillery had shelled a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. But the government was clear: The sanctity of the Premier League could not be sullied...
His arrival marked the start of what will come, in time, to be thought of as soccer’s oligarch age. It was Abramovich, as noted last week, whose arrival kick-started the inflationary spiral that has fractured European soccer beyond repair, with only a handful of clubs hoarding all of the wealth of the game, ruthlessly stripping its natural resources for their benefit...
Soccer’s age of the oligarch is over. This time, there can be no excuse for failing to understand what the game has become. On that, we have clarity.
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This was four years ago, laddies.
Claims of Roman [Abramovich’s] pivotal strategic role in potentially ending the [Ukraine] war felt so fantastical that they might as well have cast him as some peacemaking chameleon, a very Zelig of international diplomacy. He was there at Westphalia in 1648, where he played some of his best treatying, and at Versailles in 1919, where he had an absolute shitter. And yet, many accepted and repeated the claims – performing ever more unpaid service in the reputation laundromat. Abramovich had bought himself yet another day of grace to add to the thousands and thousands of days of grace he has enjoyed in the UK since buying Chelsea [soccer club] in 2003…
Tomorrow Chelsea will host Newcastle, who are now owned by a group led by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia – but remember, those guys are the good autocrats, because they buy our weapons. And use them in a war in Yemen that has thus far gone on for seven years, killing or starving hundreds of thousands, the vast majority believed to be children under five. But of course, the sovereign wealth fund isn’t the same as the Riyadh government. They just have a good relationship with it, same as Roman Abramovich just has a good relationship with Putin. “Which owner knows the guy who’s killed more babies?” is a question you won’t be seeing on any banners at Chelsea-Newcastle.
Marina Hyde, The Guardian
A beautiful sentence, by David Frum, about the right-wing attack on America/worship of Putin.
UD certainly expects college football players to fuck themselves up during spring break. This usually involves alcohol, and certainly does not feature hyper-clean-cut West Pointers. Nah.
And yet there they are, stretched out on the palm-edged front yard of their rental house, having fentanyled themselves almost to death. Policemen administer Narcan to their fine ripped torsos, while other attractive young people stand around being upset and useless.
In this post about UNC’s plagiarizing vice chancellor FOR RESEARCH, UD expressed amazement that “ninnies” at Chapel Hill let the guy get off with a slap on the wrist.
But then, thought she, he’s a honcho, he brings in the bucks, it’s the southland, he sports expensive suits, he’s in good with the boys’ club, blahbiddyblahblah…
How could UD have known about Mimi Chapman, who speaks for UNC’s faculty? Thirty minutes after someone high up in the administration – someone who knows how to read – read this letter from her, The Kay M. & Van L. Weatherspoon Eminent Distinguished Professor of Genetics packed up his y chromosomes and went home.
Let’s take a peek!
… Over the last few days, faculty members from all over the University have contacted me about the current situation with our Vice Chancellor for Research, concerned that Vice Chancellor Magnuson has not stepped down from his position. As a faculty, we believe that this situation has the potential to taint our own scholarship and gives the impression that some members of our community are “untouchable” while for others such a situation would be a career-ender. Every hour, I have been hoping that an announcement would come so that I would not have to make this statement. But that has not happened and here we are.
… [P]lease resolve this situation in the interests of the institution and out of respect to this faculty with all deliberate speed.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Brava! I see no reason to stick quotation marks around untouchable, but with this small correction the letter is perfect. And it seems to have accomplished its goal. It has disrupted the sausage party at the top and reminded the guys that somewhere hidden among the sports programs at UNC is a faculty, and it can be quite ugly when provoked.
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And as for the institution-embarrassing miscreant himself, he opts for the I’m Too Good for this World defense, stunning all of us with his life-saving achievements, which leave so little room for him to notice that he steals from multiple sources in grant applications. It’s a “teachable moment,” he piously informs us, forgetting to add that it’s only a teachable moment for people like him, who plagiarize.
I walk along the Moscow streets you used to walk along with me
And every step I take reminds me of just how we used to be
Well, how can I forget, Vlad?
When there is always someone there to remind me
Always someone there to remind me
As Kherson falls I pass the refugees around me in the night
And I can’t help recalling how it felt to kiss and hold you tight
Well, how can I forget, Vlad?
When there is always someone there to remind me
Some Polish asshole there to remind me
I was born to love you and I will never be free
You’ll always be a part of me
If you should find you miss the sweet and tender love we used to share
Just come back to the places where we used to go like our beloved Red Square
Well, how can I forget, Vlad?
When there is always someone there to remind me
Always someone there to remind me
…. for one of the more disgusting, destructive hoaxes this nation has seen. Background here.
[F]rom 2010 to 2019 gun deaths in [Wyoming] increased by more than 2 1/2 times the national average and gun suicide increased by nearly three times the national average. The rate of gun deaths has increased 54% from 2011 to 2020 in Wyoming, compared to a 33% increase nationwide.
According to the Wyoming Department of Health, suicide rates in Wyoming are consistently higher than U.S. rates. In Wyoming the rate of suicide by gun increased 43% from 2011 to 2020, compared to a 12% increase nationwide.
Nobody blows heads off like the Cowboy State!
SOS has been reading up, this morning, on the just-sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and she found these extremely instructive sentences in a 2018 NYT article, so pay attention.
Unlike Mr. Deripaska, Lord Barker had a largely spotless reputation. His only minor brushes with scandal came in 2006, when he left his wife to live with a male interior decorator, and in 2012, while serving as energy minister, when he made the tabloids for using a microwave at Parliament to warm a cushion for his pet dachshund, Otto.
LOLOL. Do you see what the two extremely clever writers who produced these two sentences did? Do you see why the ghost of Lady Bracknell shines bright out of these two sentences? I mean, read it out loud, using her upperest of upper class British accents. Go on!
First, their set-up, and it’s vintage Oscar Wilde, as in
The General was essentially a man of peace …
Then … Bada bing bada boom: … except in his domestic life.
So here we begin with another insipid cliche: spotless reputation… Though that sly largely tells you Bracknell waits panting in the wings. Largely, essentially – insert a seemingly innocuous adverb in front of your cliche and let fly.
That short first sentence, in other words, is the set-up. The second, much longer sentence, will launch us into the realm of absurdity… Or not launch, really – launch suggests an instant liftoff, whereas the trick actually involves sort of the opposite of a liftoff… a kind of sly gradual fizzling out is more like it… an operation whereby the sentence, instead of gaining steam and significance (writers are typically instructed to put their most significant material toward the end of their sentences, to work up to it — in part so that the reader is led to want to read further), delightfully self-deflates, leaving us in a terrain so beyond-trivial, so astoundingly non-serious, so insanely petty, so infinitesimally small, as to …
I mean, ask yourself: Why didn’t they write dog? Why did they belabor, bedeck, and bedew the sentence with breed and name? With warm? With pet? Have the writers not read Politics and the English Language?
Of course they have. But I don’t pay a fortune to subscribe to the New York Times in order to march solemnly through a stern-faced rendition of what is in fact a farcical story featuring sleazy twisted self-regarding idiots – I want a sense, as I read, that, along with the obligatory surface rendition of events, the writers grasp the sick world that set the events in motion. The writers correctly pinpointed the dachshund detail as a … sly … opening to that world, and they went with it.
The only thing SOS thinks could have improved this writing would have been if Lord Barker had inadvertently put the dachshund rather than the cushion in the microwave, in the same way Miss Prism inadvertently put the baby rather than the manuscript in the handbag. Alas, real life seldom cooperates to this extent.
Though it is certainly true that we got more than we might have expected in the name Lord Barker. Here life lent the whole thing a very Richard Brinsley Sheridan touch. Nice.
… presumably gearing up to accumulate her next million, when her former employer, the University of Maryland, finally got wind of her alleged two decades worth of theft while she worked for them.
Amusingly, her new job is in the field of ethics… But anyway I guess they read the papers at Hopkins, because her university page there has been Page Not Founded.
If precedent’s anything to go by, she and her lawyers are desperately seeking an AWP (Addiction with Poignancy) for her. Scuzzy unsanitary stuff like meth is out; usually what these people come up with is gambling.