Almost the exact same story as Adam Lanza, including knowing your son has mental problems and blasting and stockpiling away with him anyway.

It started with Coach Pitino himself, who said that in the aftermath of charges that his University of Louisville assistant basketball coach hired prostitutes over a number of years for some of his players (festivities took place in the athletes’ dorm), he felt

… heart broken… My heart is just taken out of my body and broken.

It continues with this remarkable essay, which argues that Pitino himself a few years ago had sex on a restaurant table (some reports say it happened on the restaurant floor, or in its bathroom) because of 9/11 (RICK PITINO AND THE SHADOWS THAT NEVER LEAVE):

[Pitino’s] descent into a dark place [so maybe it was the bathroom] happened no more than two years after 9-11. The idea that tragedy and loss [a close relative of Pitino’s died] did not have anything to do with a flawed man’s attempt to fill those voids with something adventurous (and highly inappropriate) seems unconvincing.

Plus even the Pope, man…

In keeping with the Golden Rule Pope Francis invoked when he spoke to Congress, none of us would ever want the past — something 12 years ago — to be held against us.

The whole essay’s really weird because few people so far have anything to say at all about whether Pitino knew his lads were double teaming (or so the exposé claims) in the dorm … It’s as if the writer – given Pitino’s own sex scandal background – assumes we’re going to go there and we’re going to assume Pitino must have known all about the McNasty…

I mean, he might have. Who knows? We’ll find out. But that’s not what most people are thinking about right now. Right now we’re thinking about whether the claims are true, what exactly happened… It’s early days. Yet here you’ve got this guy anticipating a general belief that the slimy Pitino (as the essay goes on to note, he’s paid an outrageous fortune, is a really unpleasant human being, is a hypocrite – all those motivational books about how you can be as great as he is – and is an inveterate breaker of rules, athletic and otherwise) must have known about the sex. So right there I’m not sure the writer is accomplishing his Coacha Inconsolata (put the term in my search engine if at this late date you need a definition) goals by going out of his way to remind us that Pitino’s a shit.

After a long detailed recounting of Pitino’s grubby past, the essay ends in this way:

[We need to] recognize the fragility of life behind (and beyond) the public persona of someone who has won multiple championships and earned a boatload of money.

You know, there’s one thing Scathing Online Schoolmarm will say for Donald Trump. Donald Trump doesn’t say I’m a shitty person because of 9/11. He doesn’t say under all my greed and cruelty I’m fragile and you have to be nice to me. Nor does he have admirers who say these things for him.

[T]his scandal, if the allegations are true, reveals a sordid underbelly to college recruiting which is not altogether shocking yet may nevertheless be altogether damning for the university IF (a) parents become leery of sending their kids to Louisville…

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And remember Cam Newton’s dad! Another model for the big-time university sports family.

This advice, culled from one of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino’s many motivational books, seems to have been taken to heart by Katina Powell:

Powell kept five journals with details of her escort escapades, sexual encounters, murdered relatives and activities at the University of Louisville. Most of the U of L services she provided took place in the men’s dormitory where basketball players reside. Her main contact and the man who paid for her services–the school’s former director of basketball operations and former graduate assistant, Andre McGee–kept Powell and her girls busy from 2010 to 2014. She has hundreds of text exchanges with him to set up her services as well as pictures of her girls with players and recruits.

She seems to have recorded everything.

One other note of interest as we begin to, uh, bone up on this story, is the fact that the journalist who first reported the story, Pat Forde, co-wrote a book with Rick Pitino and is (was?) apparently his buddy. Hm.

LATEST SEX SCANDAL THE TOUGHEST YET FOR LOUISVILLE

I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me, as Lady Bracknell says… Is attendance at games, as this University of Virginia student editorialist argues, really a reflection of any kind, poor or rich, on a university? You could argue that the school in question here, UVa, should be proud of its low football turn-out, suggestive as it is of things like independent mindedness and studiousness. Perhaps some UVa students don’t like thinking of themselves as subjects in a long-running experiment on how to stimulate your rats into finding boring bone-crushing sports events interesting.

[UVa needs to be] building new stadium video boards … enhancing sound systems….

Buy a state of the art Adzillatron to shriek car dealership ads at them! Trap them in a stadium for hours, unable to turn off, or even turn down, incessant messages!

But UD says: Nothing will work without liquor. Only schools willing to soak students in booze are going to get anywhere with the national nightmare of tanking game attendance. Once your students are really shitfaced, they’ll do anything.

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Now with university players, it’s different. If you want to motivate them, try Coach Kermit Blount’s approach: starvation.

Larry Levine, the murdered English professor at Umpqua Community College, seems to have lived his life precisely as he wished, pursuing poetry, fishing, travel, and solitude.

Teaching was a side gig of sorts. Levine had only been at Umpqua Community College a few years. He spent more time earning his living as a fly fishing guide on the North Umpqua. He also went fly fishing in Patagonia…

But she figured that whenever it did take off, the leading edge of the scandal was likely to be the University of Louisville. (Put Louisville in my search engine.) The only real competition for Louisville would be the University of Miami, but, post-Nevin Shapiro, UM is lying low.

What other American university features a trustee who tried to resign but was forced to stay on the board by the governor of the state?

[Steve] Wilson, who is co-founder and CEO of 21c Museum Hotels LLC, said he has been unhappy with the effectiveness of the U of L board and had offered his resignation to Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, who declined to accept it.

Bet Steve wishes he’d risked… what? what can a governor do to you? … and gotten out while the getting was good…

Go ahead and read this first article of many. The details are titillating, the taxpayer money impressive, and I promise the accounts will get even better after they interview the players. The school people call the U of Smell is at it again.

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Louisville’s coach, Rick Pitino, has had his own … uh… Here’s UD, back in 2009, posting on Pitino’s… er…

Brian Friel, author of Dancing at Lughnasa, has died.

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His comment about the origin of certain kinds of writing is similar to what Don DeLillo said the other night at the New Yorker festival:

“That assassination [of JFK] was the thing that made me a novelist,” he said. “The power of it… I couldn’t come to terms with it.”

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Add A.R. Ammons:

[Poetry] comes from anxiety. That is to say, either the mind or the body is already rather highly charged and in need of some kind of expression, some way to crystallize and relieve the pressure. And it seems to me that if you’re in that condition and an idea, an insight, an association occurs to you, then that energy is released through the expression of that insight or idea, and after the poem is written, you feel a certain resolution and calmness. Well, I won’t say a “momentary stay against confusion” (Robert Frost’s phrase) but that’s what I mean. I think it comes from that. You know, [Harold] Bloom says somewhere that poetry is anxiety.

Dan Kane, a first-rate and persistent North Carolina journalist, broke and pursued and ultimately owned the University of North Carolina academic fraud story.

Given the loathing of sports factories for outsiders who disrupt the smooth production of football games, Kane “was subject to violent threats from UNC fans and a variety of multimedia smear campaigns.”

He wasn’t the only one, of course – all sorts of people who take academic integrity seriously got hit right in the kisser by everyone from the highest snoots in the administration to the lowest yahoos in the stands. But since everything that Kane and the whistle blowers were saying about the big ol’ UNC cheating machine was true, the school was forced to back up into p.r. mode and stop trying to disembowel all the mean people who were saying mean things about it.

Kane has now won (UD thanks her friend John for sending her the link) the McCulloch Courage in Journalism Award.

UD sees that Kane “grew up on a small dairy farm in Upstate New York” (Les UDs, regular readers know, have a small spread of their own upstate) and is “a graduate of St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y.” UD taught for a couple of semesters at that school way back when (Mr UD had taken his first job, at the University of Rochester), and it’s not impossible that this guy might have been in one of her classes…

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UPDATE: Dan Kane read my post and said he graduated from St. John Fisher in 1983 and “took enough English classes to qualify for a minor but I don’t remember having [Soltan] as a professor.” But I was Margaret Rapp then, so there’s still the teeniest possibility…

… somewhere way below that, there’s Southeast Louisiana University, a public school where the taxes of the good people of that state are funding new football recruit Jonathan Taylor.

Taylor, so determinedly criminal-minded that even the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama dismissed him, has been welcomed with open arms by SLU.

Outside the Lines asked [a school spokesman] what SLU’s admission process is for students with criminal records and/or a pending felony charge, to which he responded, “Southeastern Louisiana has no specific admission policy regarding an individual’s police or court records.”

But actually SLU does. Basically, if you haven’t been convicted… of anything … super-serious (murder?) and if your court proceedings are still ongoing (i.e., if you haven’t been convicted yet), c’mon down y’all!

“While we are aware of past controversies, Jonathan has not been found guilty for the incidents he was accused of that led to his dismissal from his prior institutions,” Southeastern Louisiana said in a statement Wednesday.

So here’s Taylor’s student profile.

Domestic violence charges in Alabama against former Georgia defensive lineman Jonathan Taylor were dropped Tuesday as part of a plea agreement.

The 6-foot-4, 335-pound Taylor, who was dismissed from the Bulldogs’ football team last summer, still faces an aggravated assault charge in Athens-Clarke County from a July 2014 incident in which he reportedly choked and struck his girlfriend. He also faces a misdemeanor case of theft by deception in Athens for a cash-checking scheme that involved other Bulldogs players.

Taylor pleaded guilty in Alabama to a misdemeanor count of criminal mischief stemming from an altercation in March with a different woman. The woman, however, recanted her story.

[The University of] Georgia, which had a string of players suspended or dismissed over the last several years for various incidents, has stayed fairly clean and has not been associated with any major discipline problems since the start of the 2014 season.

UD has said it again and again: online is the salvation of big-time university sports. You can cheat like hell with online courses.

UD has no idea how Southern Methodist University – famous for having so filthy a sports program that in 1987 it got one of the very few death penalties the NCAA has handed down – its entire football season was cancelled that year – got caught. It apparently did what a lot of schools with this sort of program no doubt do – signed a player up for an online course and had someone else take it for him.

Once SMU got caught, it didn’t help that the school is just a longterm rascally ol’ give-a-shit sort of place.

In a conference call with reporters, [an NCAA representative] noted SMU’s history of violating NCAA rules. The school has been called before the NCAA infractions committee 10 times since 1958. The basketball program last ran into trouble in 2011, when it admitted that coaches sent impermissible text messages to recruits. [This] history of violations was taken into consideration when this year’s punishment was issued.

Or, to put it less delicately;

SMU is the NCAA compliance version of Old Faithful. Just a matter of time before it erupts again. The infraction dates: 1958, 1965, 1974, 1976, 1981, 1985, 1987, 2000, 2011 and now 2015. And for all that rule violating, the Mustangs have one football national championship it can claim, from 1935… SMU is historically corrupt.

I think this guy is getting at the fact that corruption is SMU. That’s it. That’s the school.

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This puts SMU’s coach “3-for-3 in putting programs on probation.” If you’re shocked that a death penalty school hired a coach who put his two previous schools’ basketball programs on probation, you’re not reading this blog with care.

A totally random reminder that not many people write lyrics as well as Paul Simon.

Likes games. Knew she would. Know what I mean?

Know what I mean?