Er, the Ravens are winning… Which is TOO exciting for UD, given that she greeted existence itself in Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland… In fact, UD‘s Baltimore roots are impeccable: Her mother’s family – the Kirsons and the Wassermans – were all Baltimoreans. Her grandfather, Charlie Wasserman, was an engineer for Baltimore Gas and Electric (“He had a lot of patents for smokestack thingies,” says UD‘s sister as UD types.). Her father graduated from Johns Hopkins, as did her uncle. Her aunt was a teacher in Baltimore public schools. Her mother was an x-ray technician at Hopkins. UD lived in Baltimore until she was eight years old, at which point the family moved to England, where her father had a post-doc in immunology. Then they moved back to Baltimore for a year, and then her father got a job at the National Institutes of Health, so the family moved up (class and moneywise) to ‘thesda.
UD and her sister are laughing madly at the commercials. Mr UD sits stonily.
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Interception Baltimore!
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Touchdown Baltimore!!
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An ad with a guy driving a truck out of the nose cone of a passenger aircraft.
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Lots of fights on the field. The announcers seem to be preparing us for an on-field riot.
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Baltimore intercepts again. They’re dominating the game for sure.
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A song my mother used to love to sing.
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Wow. Another Baltimore touchdown. 21 to 3.
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Oh. My. God. Baltimore just took the ball all the way.
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Wow. Half the power in the Superdome has gone out. Used up all the electricity on Beyonce.
Weird. Survivalists all over the country must be preparing their weaponry.
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No one here understands any of the Bud Light commercials.
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Baltimore’s in the lead, but SF is close to a TD. The tension would be so thick you could cut it with a knife if I really cared.
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Four seconds to go. I think we won.
News from Russia.
An applicant recently filed a trade mark application for Пушкин (Pushkin) to provide catering services… The Patent Office declined the registration, arguing that the word Пушкин is the name of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and registration of his name as a trade mark would not be in the public interest.
… is the chancellor of Southampton Solent University… In England, yes, of course… Are you thinking an American university could cook up a chancellor with a name like that? And until recently Lord West of Spithead’s University, “which currently sits 117th out of 120 in the university league tables,” featured among its business faculty a “senior lecturer in entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity” who seems to have directed all that innovating entrepreneurial energy to the distribution of cocaine. Out of her home.
The governor of the state of Tennessee has said it as directly as possible: The university itself is imperiled unless UT’s football team wins games and fills its stadium.
“If you want to be bottom line about it, it shows why UT-Knoxville has to be good in football,” Haslam said. “You have a whole program that’s set up with a 100,000-seat Neyland Stadium, and it’s a program that supports all the other sports other than basketball and provides scholarships back to the university.”
And – he didn’t need to add since everyone knows it – the school, entirely because of sports, currently carries TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS in debt. Yeah baby you read that right. So there have to be bodies in UT’s big new incredibly expensive stadium; the team has to win…
Only it’s losing, see, so the stadium’s kind of empty and all the coaches that doomed the team and the school have to be paid off in the millions of dollars to go away and WOW! Where can the rest of America sign up? What a great way to run a university!
A recent study by a group of business school professors has intriguing implications for MBA programs throughout Illinois.
Because traditions and lines of bribery tend to be both clear and reliable in fully corrupt countries, it’s far easier to do business in them than in only partially corrupt countries.
The authors of the study see no reason why this principle couldn’t apply to American cities and states; and, a Chicago Tribune columnist points out, “Chicago just last year was deemed the nation’s most corrupt city and Illinois the third-most corrupt state in a well-publicized analysis.”
Rather than force their MBA students to take absurd ethics courses (UD‘s critique of these courses may be enjoyed by clicking on the category Beware the B-School Boys), business schools throughout Illinois might instead exploit their state’s curious advantage by offering modules on the tradition and fine-tuning of graft.
La Kid lived on Georgetown Cupcake during her Foggy Bottom years; it was always UD‘s go-to place for care packages for her and her apartment mates.
Now the immensely cool and popular place is in trouble with the DC government. Hasn’t paid its sales taxes!
A pun on lines (of customers outside) and liens (against it) goes here.
Chico, California, the town, and Chico State University, have a lethally dangerous drinking problem. UD‘s been following (scroll down for background stories) the several recent alcohol poisoning student deaths there, and Chico State’s years of efforts to make them stop. But it’s an old – a very old – story in Chico, the business of drunk and disorderly. The town’s just like that, and the university conforms to the ways of the town.
This article, in Chico State’s newspaper, describes a community meeting in which a preliminary discussion of solutions took place. The idea is to get town and gown to cooperate… But this will inevitably involve asking Chico’s wall to wall bars to cool it on three for the price of one specials, etc. And UD just doesn’t think that’s going to happen.
Meanwhile, Chico State’s boozy rep precedes it:
“The reputation that the school has received, deserved or not, seems to be affecting the type of students that apply,” [one participant] said, citing … surveys… that show a 13 percent increase of incoming freshmen classified as “high-risk drinkers” over the national average.
Year after year, Chico State admits a lot of freshmen already very serious about their drinking, people who know they can drink in comfort, with plenty of company, on that particular campus. I have no idea how you change this fact.
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And at the University of Virginia, where two students had to be put on life support for alcohol poisoning (both have recovered), the head of the Greek organizations there says:
“You hear stories about people dying and thankfully here we’ve never had that situation but it’s possible, so it’s scary and we’re going to take any steps necessary to prevent that from happening…”
… has had major drug issues lately (scroll down for posts about the drug scandal) is bad news indeed. The grandson of T. Boone Pickens, a student at Texas Christian University, has died, reportedly of a heroin/Xanax overdose.
For Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, the question was whether truth was a woman.
For the contemporary German philosopher Wolfram Eilenberger, the question is: Supposing his favorite soccer team is a woman?
In an article, and now in an interview (Zeit Online: “You are serious about your feminization [of soccer] thesis?”), Eilenberger warns of androgynous-looking, collectivist-minded new coaches and players on the team. Bayern Munich is starting to play like a girl!
To those who’ve ridiculed him as “Philodoof,” Eilenberger darkly notes that the feminization of soccer is only a small part of “the end of man” generally – the end of masculinity itself.
— is once again on the receiving end of a spanking delivered by a Jewish newspaper. “Moral bankruptcy… exists at the institution… [Yeshiva] must immediately undertake an independent investigation which examines moral issues at the institution.”
The author reviews some – not all – of the scandals emanating from Yeshiva just over the last few years. He wonders why Yeshiva covers them up, denies them… UD has asked why Yeshiva refuses to respond to angry public letters from alumni, fails to change its incestuous form of governance…
Far from being willing to examine its structural corruption – a corruption which will continue to generate scandals – Yeshiva shows every sign of believing itself to be morally superior.
How long can a large complex organization remain delusional?
UD gives it another five years before it will be put in some form of receivership.