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

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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.

The Dan Markel case gets more farcical by the minute.

… Marine Le Pen’s refusal to meet with a Muslim leader because he insists she wear a veil to the meeting is magnifique.

“You can pass on my respects to the grand mufti, but I will not cover myself up,” she said.

Absolutely. Lots of women are compelled to veil themselves; they need to see high-profile women around the world refusing to. It might help.

It’s a little late to start worrying about that.

“Misplaced cultural sensitivity,” says someone else, and ain’t it the truth. The Hurstville Boys’ Campus of Georges River College, in Sydney, has decided it’s fine for some male students to refuse to shake women’s hands, Australia itself having no code of politeness, no cultural ethos, no sense of equity that might be offended by this.

But at least those involved in the decision and decisions like it are willing to defend themselves!

Georges River College principal Joanne Jarvis did not return calls or emails… Liberal MP for Oatley, Mark Coure, was at the Hurstville Boys’ Campus awards [graduation] ceremony [where boys refused to shake hands with women] in ­December but declined to comment. State Education Minister Rob Stokes also declined to comment… Opposition education spokesman Jihad Dib, a former school principal who is a Muslim, also declined to ­comment…

And UD is oh so familiar with this variant of the there are only a couple of thousand burqas on the street so who cares move:

Lydia Shelley, a lawyer and Muslim community advocate, dismissed concerns over the school’s handshaking protocol, saying “if you seriously want to address the issue of gender inequality … you could focus on Australia’s national shame of violence against women”. By comparison, she said, the handshake issue “pales in significance”.

No but if you really really seriously want to address the issue of gender inequality you should focus on global gun violence… Let’s go cosmic, shall we? That way no one will focus on the utterly trivial, so trivial you can’t even see it with a microscope, business of officially training teenage boys to be assholes.

Keep your eye on DEA/FBI raids of pill mills. One clinic operator currently on trial for everything from “violations of the RICO organized crime statute to illegal drug distribution to kickbacks to wire and mail fraud to money laundering” decided it was too dangerous to pocket the money he got for talking up his corporate drug supplier’s big drug – because a doc now in jail in Michigan for the same shit this guy’s on trial for pocketed his pharma money and look what happened to him.

So here’s what this guy decided to do, in order not to attract attention from the government.

[One] batch of emails [discussed in the trial] concerned [Xiulu] Ruan’s handling of the fees he collected for speaking for Insys. … Ruan … changed his procedure for handling the money after the Michigan case flared up… Rather than receiving the money, he’d begun routing the fees to various educational institutions, directly or through a charitable foundation, with recipients including the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of South Alabama.

Good man! Good man! And there’s every reason why your university can also be the beneficiary of alleged drug dealers trying to hide their money from government investigators. Just set up a lunch with the most prominent pusher in your town and suggest your campus as a routing location.

Who knows if he learned, as an undergrad and grad student at NIU, how to jack up the price of

his newly approved steroid — a cheap, generic offering sold in many countries around the world as deflazacort — [to] $89,000 a year after landing an approval to market it for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. According to a number of patient advocates, they’ve been buying the drug from overseas for about $1,000 a year.

NIU is so proud of him that they’ve given him the Medallion for Entrepreneurship and said a bunch of shit about what a great philanthropic warm-hearted person he is too.

Next year’s recipient: Martin Shkreli.

… after a warm bright February day. Strange it was, this warmth and sunlight, and UD walked like a demon all over town, as did everyone else. From Avenue to Central Park to Avenue, you could barely walk for the crowd. Though I don’t like crowds, I didn’t mind this, because it was life and beauty (the Metropolitan Museum was Grand Central Station), the overflow of happiness in a suddenly mild and sunlit world.

Three Soltans on a bench in Central Park.

Joanna Soltan walks into the Met and
immediately encounters a fellow artist.

UD spends this weekend in New York City. Assuming there’s a strong enough internet connection on the train this morning, she’ll be posting a bunch of stuff that’s been sitting around waiting to be posted. Ne quittez pas.