Because the weather is finally mild.

… we find one of their specialized coaches – he’s solely about conditioning and strengthening the lads – paid the sixth highest such coaching salary in the country. With contract extensions and all, he’s well on his way to half a million dollars a year. (His most recent salary is a “126.25 percent increase from his initial [2010] $160,000 salary with the Seminoles.”)

Now I want you to put aside petty distractions about FSU that are all in the past: the rapes, the thefts, punching women in bars, animal abuse, the conniving local police force, blahblahblah… I want you to think about this hagiographic Showtime special on this great team, this great school, this great community.

Watch the trailer – it features this guy, this strength and conditioning coach. One of FSU’s heroes.

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

So – the nexus? The very crux of what makes a great academic institution?

Well, you’ve got the coach, and you’ve got the Showtime special. Now you need that ineffable combination of elements that makes for scholarly excellence. Let us put these elements together.

Let’s have this coach get stinking drunk in his campus office with the Showtime crew and then pile into his car and crash into a stop sign.

AND let’s let this class operation give him a slap on the wrists and insinuate in its public statement that it was all the evil Showtime crew’s fault for forcing whiskey into the hands of this great good and innocent man.

Now you’ve got it. The life of the mind, Florida State University.

Trump surrogate Mark Burns offers a long list of excuses to cover his long list of lies about himself.

… Member … of the European Parliament, was innocently masturbating in a store, not far from a couple of young people also in said store.

Le vice-président du MoDem a été interpellé mercredi dans un magasin de bricolage [yes, that’s a “do it yourself” store] de Vélizy-Villacoublay (Yvelines). Il a été surpris par un vigile alors qu’il était en train de se masturber devant deux enfants. Robert Rochefort a reconnu les faits et a expliqué aux policiers avoir “besoin de se masturber” quand il était “en situation de stress”.

The police were called, and Member Rochefort explained to them that he’d (as you see if you read French) had to masturbate that very moment in that very place because he was currently in an unspecified stressful situation.

M. Rochefort, whose areas of concern in the Parliament include “Emission Measurement,” has been asked to step down from his high-ranking party position in France.

TACOnic State Parkway.

The founder of Latinos for Trump on Thursday warned that if his candidate loses, America faces an uncertain future in which Mexican food is far too easily available.

“My culture is a dominant culture, and it’s imposing and it’s causing problems,” Marco Gutierrez said in an interview on MSNBC. “If you don’t do something about it, you’re gonna have taco trucks [on] every corner.”

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

With several predominantly Latino neighborhoods, Phoenix is a city used to seeing taco trucks on the corner. In the wake of Gutierrez’s comments, Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego decided to patronize one of them.

The Democrat posted a photo to his personal Twitter account of him ordering three carne asada tacos from his favorite taco truck for lunch Friday. The picture was accompanied by the tweet “about to assert my cultural dominance.” It has garnered hundreds of likes.

[George] Shultz [has signaled] that he [is] discussing issuing a joint endorsement of Hillary Clinton with Henry Kissinger.

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

Trump’s campaign staff should get to work on their tweets asap, since there’s speculation the men might make the announcement on Labor Day.

One source for some great Kissinger tweets would be Christopher Hitchens’ book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Example:

[Americans] can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else.

Don’t say it’s from Hitchens, of course; I don’t think Hitchens would, uh, be supporting Trump.

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

One danger of not citing the author, however, is that no one’s going to believe Trump knows the words egregious and impunity…

Actually, now that I look at the thing, the rather lengthy sentence, and the well-deployed either/or formulation, are also deal breakers… Let’s see…

Kissinger: War criminal! Lawbreaker! Sad!

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

A second set of tweets could feature the advanced age of both men.

Kissinger! Shultz! Sharing a condo in Seizure World! Sad!

George and Henry sittin’ in a tree… IN SEIZURE WORLD. Sad!

There are many variants of these. You might mention Ronald Reagan. I leave it to the imagination of the Trump campaign.

… of Civic Studies in Augsburg, Germany.

A Catholic university said the president of Mexico met the requirements for graduation with a law degree, while acknowledging parts of his 1991 thesis were plagiarised.

Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City issued a statement late on Sunday, saying the thesis submitted by then-student Enrique Pena Nieto – elected president in 2012 – conformed with the standards of the time.

“The thesis introduced original ideas” and used outside ideas with and without citations, the statement said. “The (current) general regulations of our institution are not applicable to former students.”

He recruited a criminal onto his team. Nothing to notice there; virtually all universities take risks on certain players. But when this freshman immediately got to work at WMU, attacking a woman at gunpoint before suiting up for even one game, the feckless Fleck broke out with torrents of bullshit about what he’d done by bringing this man into the WMU community. Let’s listen.

Let’s listen, keeping in mind that it took a local news station less than an hour to find the player’s criminal record. WMU says it doesn’t do that… It doesn’t look at players’ criminal records because I dunno who ever heard of criminal behavior among football players? Why waste your time with that? WMU says it’s considering doing that now, going forward and all.

You dig as much as you want, you can say you have something, you don’t have something, you can dig as a head coach as much as you want and it is what it is at this point, and you just have to be able to use it for the future players as you continue to recruit them… There is zero tolerance for anything like that within our culture. Zero… I brought those two gentlemen [there were two WMU football players involved; this guy’s teammate “ordered the victim to take her shirt off, while holding a gun to her forehead, according to the testimony.”] into our culture and if I would have told you I knew what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have obviously done that because that’s not what our culture’s about. I feel like I failed because I couldn’t work in their lives to get them to not make that decision. We do everything we possibly can, every single day, to teach and promote decision making and we will continue to do that.

Ya gotta admit that in years of my recording scummy things scummy coaches say, this drivel (produced by probably the highest paid person at that university) rules. The big lie pompously reiterated (Zero. Zero.). Reiterated use of a voice one can only call the subliterate subjunctive. The obscene hypocrisy.

That’s what you pay your university coach for though, ain’t it? You’re after a guy who doesn’t give a shit about importing dangerous people to university towns if they can play football.

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

UPDATE: I mean, really. Why has Fleck not been fired? Jesus.

Irrationally proud of

my pepper plants.

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

Lemon cake at Black Market Bistro

shared three ways with friends.

Like Catholic, football-obsessed Boston College, Notre Dame of all places is beginning to show signs of spiritual strain. More and more fans confess that the school’s squalid football program – which slimes along its merry way accompanied by a tireless chorus of We’re godly from the school – is so squalid, so hypocritical, that they just can’t do it anymore. Notre Dame is a choir boy gone rancid, and while most of the congregants have decided through an effort of will to grip their hymnals ever tighter and ignore the stinky lad, some have become overwhelmed by the smell. They may still buy tickets to the games, but they’re “finding it hard to care very much.” They’re finding it hard to forget six player arrests in one night, and blahblahblah you know the picture. You know it from forthrightly filthy programs like University of Miami, and you know it from equally but not at all forthrightly filthy Notre Dame.

Notre Dame is Blanche DuBois flouncing around a dump, twirping about her moral purity and her clean bright Southern manse. You just want to look away.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Sunday that his party’s nominee knows that he must inject a little “humanity” into his rhetoric if he hopes to win the presidency…

“…Donald Trump understands that with every position that is taken and as you get closer to the White House, a degree of humanity and decency is part of every decision that needs to be made… [He] wants to do the right thing and wants to take every position that he’s talking about and pepper it with decency, dignity and humanity.”

In every race that must be run
There is an element of fun
You find the fun and snap!
The job’s a game

And every task you undertake
Becomes a piece of cake
A lark! A spree! It’s very clear to see that

A pinch of humanity helps the messaging go down
The messaging go down-wown
The messaging go down
A spoonful of decency helps the messaging go down
In a most delightful way!

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

A cypher running to be prez
Cannot be bothered what he sez
While hurting people cuz he doesn’t care
But now his polls have got so bad
He’s had to add a tad, a crumb, a grain
To flavor his campaign — for…

A speck of humanity helps the messaging go down
The messaging do down-wown
The messaging go down
Just a hint of humanity helps the messaging down
In a most delightful way!

… psychopath to the presidency.

UD will miss Drew Pinsky, the tv pharmawhore who during the course of hawking Wellbutrin announced that women on that antidepressant shouldn’t be surprised to rumble their way through sixty orgasms in a row.

But there’s coming, and there’s going. Pinsky has just been removed from the airways for sharing his terrible anxiety about Hillary Clinton’s rampant brain disease.

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

Yet – to quote Tennyson – though much is taken, much abides. Whenever UD feels herself dropping below her current average (55), she can still visit Pinsky, for a little topping up, at the University of Southern California medical school, which knows an eminent diagnostician when it sees one.

As [Baylor ponders] what to do [about a football player filmed savagely beating his dog], let’s not forget Queso the cat, murdered and mutilated by Baylor baseball players, and Baylor basketball player Patrick Dennehy, shot twice in the head by his teammate Carlton Dotson. And then there are the victims of sexual assault handled so well in house.

Another local reader admires Baylor’s contributions to the Baptist faith.

For a Christian school, Baylor needs to clean up its act! A fancy new stadium doesn’t mean anything when the alumni are willing to ignore athletes who rape women and beat dogs!

Rumors abound that Baylor is finally going to go the honesty route. They are apparently working on an official statement that will go something like this: