But mainly Pop Store – a rattling down-home establishment somewhere in West Virginia where behind a rotting wooden counter “Pops,” aka Gregory A. Hand, dean of the West Virginia University School of Public Health, “hands” out, if you will, all the soda pop America’s perennially top party school – and the rest of that benighted state – desires.
Eating really bad shit and then washing the shit (and your pain pills) down with Coke is a popular West Virginia tradition, and you gotta hand it to Hand: From his perch in that state’s school of public health he can do a great deal to honor and sustain the tradition.
[WVU] disclosed that Coca-Cola had provided significant funding to Dr. Hand … The company gave him $806,500 for an “energy flux” study in 2011 and $507,000 last year to establish the [Coke-funded] Global Energy Balance Network.
It is unclear how much of the [Coke] money, if any, ended up as personal income for the professors.
“As long as everybody is disclosing their potential conflicts and they’re being managed appropriately, that’s the best that you can do,” Dr. Hand said. “It makes perfect sense that companies would want the best science that they can get.”
Absolutely! Absolutely! With the understanding that definitions of “best” may vary depending on… Well, let’s just say that when a big fat multinational like Coke scours the world and finds the best science in Pop’s lab at West Virginia University…
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UD has a suggestion for Hand’s campaign in West Virginia:
OVERDOSES GO BETTER WITH COKE
Ashamed? Ashamed? ASHAMED???
(Say it out loud like Bracknell saying A HANDBAG???)
What is happening to this country? People at Harvard Business School are ashamed to admit they were like this with great Americans like Lloyd Blankfein, Squido di Tutti Squidi? This country is about to elect as President a proud graduate of Wharton, the BIZnessest biz school in the world, and current students at HBS are ashamed of having worked in an investment bank? What the hell is that? Can it be that the, uh, symbolic value of people Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, and pretty boy Dick Fuld and his merry men is declining?
It’s partly the fault of those goddamn case studies.
“There are several case studies dealing with investment banks wherein students discuss the brutal work environment and incredibly out-of-whack work-life balance,” [said one observer]. “The banks’ efforts — their success or lack thereof — to bring about change have not been discussed, but what is consistently highlighted is the dark side of investment banks.”
What to do?
Big banks are fighting back, promising recruits more hours to sleep, the occasional day off and reasonable deadlines. The effort, prompted by the death of a Bank of America Corp. intern in 2013, is driven in part by fear that the brightest students no longer see investment banking as a sustainable career. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. invited celebrity author Deepak Chopra to talk to its staff a few months ago about wellness, relaxation and the value of vacation.
Deepak! Deepak baby! Teach them how not to die!
They’re bringing Adzillatrons to high school football, not just college. A few stragglers haven’t yet gotten with the program.
[H]ere’s what high school football is not:
A $200,000 Jumbotron scoreboard, one with booming sound and full of advertisements, like the one they are proposing for Manatee High this season.
… [M]aybe people don’t want to be screamed at all the time. Maybe people don’t want to be sold something everywhere they go.
A teeny $200,000 Adzillatron! That’s mere practice for the $13 million Adzillatron you’ll get in college. You think a $200,000 screen is screaming at you? Hahahahaha.
Today’s announcement of the “biggest case of insider trading linked to the fast-growing threat of global cybercrime” is red meat to ol’ UD, who loves her some high-level hypocrisy.
Admittedly, the arrest of a Pat Robertson-trained preacher for his part in “an alliance of U.S.-based stock traders and computer hackers in Ukraine [which] made as much as $100 million in illegal profits over five years after stealing confidential corporate press releases” lacks the panache of Yeshiva University’s Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin – they, uh, handled far more money – but this apparent graduate of Regent University’s online (I assume he did these online) MBA and Divinity degrees certainly does know how to use computers, for school and for work.
He was described in this way a few years ago in some SEC correspondence:
Mr. Korchevsky holds a B.A. degree from Sukhumi University, Sukhumi, Georgia, a M.Div. degree from Regent University and an M.B.A. from Regent University.
You can watch oodles of YouTubes of Korchevsky preaching if you’d like. Helps to know Ukrainian. Just put his name in the search engine.
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Update: A local paper calls it “an incongruous mix of Christianity and criminality.”
Really? How incongruous is the use of religion as a cover for crime? I think the word the reporter is going for is congruous.
Well, UD did her own small turtle-reclamation bit this morning while walking her dog along Rokeby Avenue. A turtle was simply standing there in the middle of the street. While trying to decide whether to pick it up, UD watched as through pure dumb luck it survived two cars passing over it.
One of her neighbors came by. Let her do it!
“How do you feel about picking up turtles?”
“I’m fine with it.”
UD gestured downward. Her neighbor scooped it. “They say,” she said, “you’re supposed to take them to the direction they were walking in.” She even knew shit like that!
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Update: Well, it’s Nature Day for ol’ UD. She just watched a rare bald cardinal thoroughly soaking itself in her Black Eyed Susan Vine Buddha Birdbath. Looked like this.
From Punch and Judy to Waiting for Godot to Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, when the same thing happens over and over again, it often becomes hilarious. For instance, as she read through this article about multiple settled sexual harassment and gender discrimination suits, UD found herself laughing out loud.
[Virginia Commonwealth University] settled that complaint in July 2012 for $125,000 …
[The University of Minnesota] settled [that complaint] in April 2014 for $175,000 …
In 1995, [the University of Minnesota women’s volleyball coach] received a $300,000 settlement from the university after she filed a discrimination complaint about the school.
On and on it went, accompanied by equally hilarious efforts (see “he’s pining for the fiords”) by administrators to explain it away (“University of Minnesota spokesman Evan Lapiska said the school has received only the two complaints about [ex-Athletic Director Norwood] Teague. Asked about [a third complaint], Lapiska said it was filed against the U, not Teague.”).
Nothing to see here! Nothing to see! We don’t hire known harassers and then pay people in order to hush up their subsequent harassments just because we need a good coach/fund raiser to sustain the one hundred million dollar football franchise that runs our school! This is an intellectual institution, damn you, and these occasional glitches have nothing to do with the culture of the place…
“I view this as the action of one man who was overserved and a series of bad events happened,” University President Eric Kaler said at Friday’s news conference. “It doesn’t reflect the culture and the values of the university.”
Overserved?
[The University of Minnesota places] athletics and its financial interests ahead of everything else, including the mission of the institution and the safety of its employees from inappropriate contact.
Teague “resigned” Friday after revelations that he had groped and sent sexually graphic texts to athletic department employees.
Almost immediately afterward, Kaler began the process of attempting to distance the university from Teague — …largely because there are financial benefits to doing so.
… This is about abuse of power, in a system that has completely forgotten the mission of a public university — to educate students, not to generate revenue and contributions for athletic facilities.
At least Auburn and Clemson and Alabama are honest about being nothing but football teams. UD‘s contempt is reserved for Penn State, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Minnesota.
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UD thanks Carl.
You don’t want to be rude and exclude anyone… But on the other hand…
The Florida State University football team took two separate team pictures Sunday: one with starting running back Dalvin Cook, who’s facing assault charges… and one without.
Cook stands accused of punching a woman at a bar last month…
[T]wo versions of the team photos were taken because Florida State University coach Jimbo Fisher didn’t know how it would work out with Cook’s legal case.
You would think the financial mess the state is in would be enough to fill the time of any lawmaker but that’s apparently not the case. Amid today’s budget wrangling, Sen. Tom Whatley of Auburn proposed a resolution urging Auburn University to claim nine football national championships…
Hyuk. Yeah, y’all guessed it. This was written by a girl. Hyuk.
Another woman the University of Minnesota’s AD harassed (go here and here for background) tells all. The University of Minnesota’s very very powerful AD. So powerful that this woman told no one about his obscene and persistent come-ons – she was a journalist covering the teams and feared reporting him would damage her career.
Like the University of North Carolina, Minnesota is a once-reputable school now hopelessly associated in the public mind with academic fraud, vast expensive semi-empty stadiums, vast expensive coach buyouts and associated litigation, and, as with this latest story, totally out of control and vastly overcompensated athletic directors. (Note that Joel Maturi, Teague’s predecessor, was fired and then immediately given a vastly overcompensated pseudo-job in the president’s office. The student newspaper commented: “From buyouts of the likes of former Gopher football coach Tim Brewster to ongoing lawsuits involving personnel, the University has lost sight of what matters most: providing an affordable, quality education in service to the state of Minnesota.”)
… that classic mode of American letters, the apologia for the depraved university football program.
Local Minnesota booster/journalist Chip Scoggins shows you how it’s done for that state’s benighted school. Let us do a close reading.
Tone-wise, the big sustained thing, the ground tone, is a variant of Coacha Inconsolata (put the phrase in my search engine if you’re not yet familiar with it), in which shock, heartbreak, and an indomitable will to be shocked and heartbroken again rule. Have at me! says the bankrupt befouled and humiliated campus…
Oh my men I love them so
They’ll never know
All my life is just despair
But I don’t care
When they take me in their arms
The world is bright – all right!
What’s the difference if I say
I’ll go away
When I know I’ll come back on my knees someday…
Texas Tech is the nation’s sluttiest pain slut, hands down. Penn State assumes the crown if for any reason the current titleholder cannot fulfill her reign. The University of Minnesota is one of the five semi-finalists.
Why, just four days ago, before UM’s Athletic Director, via text, volunteered his muffdiving services to some random woman, Chip was burbling about how the program had finally begun to regain its respectability (church groups were mentioned). Now it’s back to the post-oral-sex-offer, pre-alcohol-rehab-stint status quo, and Chip’s got some familiar heavy lifting to do.
Headline: Teague Scandal Rocks Gophers Athletics Amid Recent Gains
Always give them some shred to hold onto – allude to vaguely defined gains.
Opinion piece summary: The accumulation of disappointment over the years — NCAA violations, misdeeds, awful hires, heartbreaking defeats — has created this perception that the U can’t get out of its own way.
A couple of points here. Note how the random expected fact of lost games gets included in this list of self-inflicted misfortunes. All teams lose games, but at masochistic schools it’s always one heartbreaking loss after another, and what’s a girl to do?
Note further: The “U can’t get out of its own way.” What does this particular formulation mean? It means that the stupid stubborn fact of a university, of all things, having to run a football program is once again the stumbling block. Where the hell does a university get off running a football program? You want to run a football program, be like Alabama and Clemson and get rid of the university!
The Gophers athletic department suffered another black eye that brought the kind of negative, unwanted attention that has become all too familiar.
No one felt surprised. That’s the sad part.
Again, always keep it more in sorrow than in anger. Sad. Sad.
Oh, we’re all shocked by the lewd details, the fact that a person in Norwood Teague’s position would act like such a Neanderthal. But not shocked that something like this happened to the Gophers, another deep dive into a pile of dung.
… Within hours of Teague’s resignation as athletic director, three people sent me text messages. A former university employee, a die-hard fan and a booster. All shared a similar theme in their words.
Here we go again.
It’s fair to guess that employees inside the department shared that same deflation of morale, which is too bad because a lot of earnest, hardworking, passionate folks work in the Bierman complex. They deserve better.
Shocked? Really? But as SOS points out above, it’s crucial for schools like Minnesota to keep an ever-refreshed stock of shock alongside heartbreak. A man coming on like that to a woman? What a shockingly lewd Neanderthal! In Minnesota, stuff like this is just so unfunny and shocking…
University President Eric Kaler tried hard to create a clear divide between Teague’s conduct and his school’s image, saying one man’s deplorable actions shouldn’t define an entire operation.
Please. UM doesn’t belong to its president any more than Joe Paterno’s Penn State belonged to whoever that dude was who made the public service announcements.
Instability at key positions in college sports — AD, football and basketball coaches — stunts momentum and forces athletic departments to continually hit the reset button. The Gophers know that too well. They need normalcy for once.
But constant administrative turnover, hugely expensive buyouts and lawsuits, relentlessly criminalized teams, and of course indifferent students who fail to fill up the brand new hugely expensive stadium is normalcy at jockshops like Minnesota. There are no earnest prudes in Bierman; there are only suckers. Everybody else is studying or whatever.
Teague ultimately proved to be a bad hire by Kaler, and the president can’t swing and miss on such an important position again. The Gophers carry a $105 million athletic budget. This is not a mom-and-pop operation.
See SOS‘s point above. You hire some goddamn academic to run a football program and this is the kind of dumbass hiring decision that gets made. Lose the president. Get Jim Tressel on the phone!
Those who cling to the idyllic perception of college athletics probably resent the fact that football and basketball are placed on a pedestal above every other sport, but that’s the reality now.
Sing it sister. But take it a teeny step further and tell the whole truth.
Those who cling to the idyllic perception of college athletics probably resent the fact that football and basketball are placed on a pedestal above every other activity on the UM campus, but that’s the reality now.
See? That was easy. That didn’t hurt.
