… at 10:44. Across from UD at a long wooden table sit a father and son on their way to Plymouth. “Going there to take pictures,” says the father. He wears a pilgrim hat; his son wears a three-quarter.
While we wait for our train to DC, Mr UD walks around the busy station. At its center, next to the holiday train display, people gaze at the big schedule and gate sign as if in a saint’s presence. Their awed uptilted faces are lit by the streaming sun.
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Here we go. Business Class, Acela, Washington DC. Pulling away from rickety old Boston – Mr UD and our cabbie went back and forth about all the construction zones and how you have to sit in traffic around them for hours – UD ponders the failure of this city, over many years, to appeal to her. To her it feels wintry, rickety, past it.
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A dream UD had last night:
She is sitting beside Luciano Pavarotti on a comfortable couch. He is in despair. UD puts a consoling arm around him and says:
The line between dignity and farce in opera is a thin one and not all productions manage to cross over into dignity.
But in the world of big-time sports, who listens to them? What do you think this is, an institution of higher learning?
UD has told you about U Mass (gruesome posts aplenty here), so you aren’t surprised that this absurdity has now fired at great expense their new coach, and will soon hire at great expense another new coach. No one comes to the games, so it’s not clear to whom this activity has any relevance.
Oh yeah. U Mass professors. And I guess students.
After the successful extra-point attempt went into the stands, the mostly-empty stadium provided its loudest ovation of the night in support of the fans who tried to keep the ball away from security by throwing it around the seats.
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UPDATE: The situation at this particular university event is drawing a lot of commentary. Read some of it here, and revel again, on this Christmas day, in the blessings of being an American taxpayer.
The Amtrak Quiet Car is the best invention since central heating. Washington to Boston’s a long haul, but you’re sitting in a laptop library with a cafe one car down, and the hours pass calmly, happily.
I’m not saying the lav on a train is a thing of beauty after six hours, and I’m not denying the jostle as passengers leave and arrive. I’m saying who would have thought transport by rail over many hours would evolve into a semi-trance with long water views and private screenings of the international news?
Yet precisely because of the peculiar utopianism of the place, its deliciously infantile and also somehow self-righteous shushing, the Quiet Car makes people bizarre. Here are two cautionary tales – of silence loved not wisely but too well – from UD‘s ride yesterday.
The one outstanding exception to the universal hush of the Quiet Car is of course the conductor. He gets to blast through barking small talk as he takes our tickets. Lady, always print the bar code. Where’s your bar code? Don’t just print the first page lady. Why don’t people know to print the second page? I need to see your bar code was the recurrent theme as our guy blasted through.
On one of his blasts, a woman a few seats in front of UD made the mistake of telling the conductor to shut up. This is the quiet car she told him. She told the conductor.
Are telling me or asking me? You think I don’t know this is the Quiet Car? You keep your mouth shut lady and mind your own business.
UD will admit to being shocked by the conductor’s aggression (his face flushed, his eyes flashed), but the Quiet Car seemed to bring out equal intensities of silence love and noise defense in these people, and the results were ugly.
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Then there was, a little north of Connecticut, UD‘s own series of unfortunate events. She was sitting comfortably, one foot resting on her backpack, when she heard faint but unmistakeable Christmas music. Sound of any kind was bad enough in the Quiet Car; but Christmas music? Was Amtrak asinine enough to pipe carols into the Quiet Car??
Or was it one of her neighbors? She stood up and looked around for the source of the offense but though it felt nearby and weirdly insinuating she couldn’t locate it.
Finally she made a general announcement to the car. Would the person playing Christmas music please turn it off, she said.
Yes, said a disapproving voice. There’s music in this car.
But the music did not stop, and UD once again began beating up beastly Amtrak in her mind…
Until she remembered that Mr UD had, just before they left DC, bought a new little radio – a thin black number – and that UD had packed it in the backpack under her feet.
Frantically, guiltily, humiliatedly, she pulled up the backpack and extracted the radio which it seemed her feet had pressed against and turned on.
It was somehow like that scene in Pnin where Pnin irritatedly returns to the campus library a book he still wants to read. Someone has recalled it. (‘Mrs Fire, permit me to ask something or other. This card which I received yesterday – could you maybe tell me who is the other reader?’
‘Let me check.’
She checked. The other reader proved to be Timofey Pnin; Volume 18 had been requested by him the Friday before. It was also true that this Volume 18 was already charged to this Pnin, who had had it since Christmas and now stood with his hands upon it, like an ancestral picture of a magistrate.
‘It can’t be!’ cried Pnin. ‘I requested on Friday Volume 19, year 1947, not 18, year 1940.’
‘But look – you wrote Volume 18. Anyway, 19 is still being processed. Are you keeping this?’
’18, 19,’ muttered Pnin. ‘There is not great difference! I put the year correctly, that is important! Yes, I still need 18 – and send to me a more effishant card when 19 available.’)
Why is Forbes writer Josh Freedman raising his eyebrows at college football?
There are so many reasons. But the one he has in mind is ye olde charitable deduction:
T. Boone Pickens gave $165 million to a charitable foundation attached to Oklahoma State University for a new football stadium and new housing and dining options for OSU athletes. Whether that is worthy of charity is not even the issue here: Less than one hour later, the foundation invested all of Pickens’ donation money – plus another $37 million in other donations – into a hedge fund run by Pickens.
Ya follow?
After taking Pickens’ money and reinvesting it into Pickens’ hedge fund, the school borrowed money (tax-exempt) to build the stadium. By borrowing at this lower, tax-exempt rate while investing the original donation and keeping the gains of that investment, the school was attempting to earn money simply off of its tax-favored status.
Got that?
Be sure to read Freedman on luxury seats and executive salaries too.
It’s all a little hard to follow, but the main thing you need to know is that it’s your money paying for this – the seats, ol’ Boone’s largesse…
From the New York Times:
… Sports like rowing … are left to suffer.
Last year, the University of Maryland cut seven varsity sports. In 2006, Rutgers chopped six. The week that Temple announced its cuts, Robert Morris, a private university near Pittsburgh, announced that seven varsity teams were on their way out.
Obviously, none of the sports on the block were football or basketball…
What kind of a business case can you make for a sport like rowing, which is not even one conducive to spectators (because the course is 2,000 meters long), much less one that makes no money for the university? Well, a weak one, if any. But that’s the whole point of amateurism, the quality that is supposed to fuel college sports in the first place.
… But is this latest round of cuts the end at Temple? What if the football team doesn’t start generating big bucks, enough to sustain the smaller programs?
You have to wonder if we will wake up one day, glance at the sports offered at the Temples, the Marylands and the Rutgerses of the world and see two words left: Football. Basketball.
Keep the American university a lean mean money-losing machine. Without revenue, more and more courses will go online. Eventually the only non-virtual campus activities will be football games and post-game riots.
… for Christmas. She’ll blog from there.
“[Skip] Holtz and Jim Leavitt are the only coaches in USF history and both were fired,” a sports writer explains, blandly enough.
Hired, fired, big deal. The only two coaches you’ve ever had, both fired. So what. Sunrise, sunset. To everything there is a season. Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.
But when you actually pursue the narrative behind this bland fact, the bland fact of having had two football coaches in your school’s history, and having fired both of them, you begin to grab hold of the de profundis primitivism of so many American university football programs as they pump out losers, bullies, thieves, and litigants, one after another… All welcomed with pomp and excitement and even love…
The second-in-the-series is particularly cherished, by contrast with the scurrilous cur first-in-the-series, the villain we so wanted to love, in whom we invested our deepest hopes.
Trying to compare Holtz and Leavitt is like trying to compare Auntie Em with Cruella de Vil or Flounder from The Little Mermaid to the shark from Jaws. It’s like the difference between Mom’s homecooking and prison food.
Jim Leavitt was fired for punching players.
Skip Holtz prefers hugging them.
Holtz, if you couldn’t tell, is my new favorite college football coach in the state. Why? Because he makes my job easy, that’s why. He’s friendly and fun. He’s accessible and approachable.
USF’s Holtz was Francis to Leavitt’s Benedict. Adenauer to Leavitt’s Hitler. Ford to Leavitt’s Nixon. Our long national nightmare is over. Morning in America. Hugs all around.
But then the head of the university’s board of trustees had his meltdown.
The one-line email was fired off at 3:26 p.m. Saturday, within a minute of the end of USF’s humbling 37-28 loss at Temple, and it was sent to the chief of staff of USF president Judy Genshaft.
“Disgusting and unacceptable,” it read.
Always wondered what the board of trustees of a university does, didn’t you? Goes to football games, gets pissed when the team loses, orders the president to fire the coach. Uh, y-y-yessir! Right away! Only it’s gonna cost a shitload in buyouts… And uh don’t forgot how much the lawsuit from the scurrilous cur cost us…
Throw money at him! Whatever it takes! Lose the fucker!
What if we, uh, get audited? There are laws, you know…
The University of South Florida overpaid three top administrators — and committed $1.7 million too much in severance for former football coach Skip Holtz, according to a state audit released this month.
According to Florida law, the school is allowed to pay administrators $200,000 from state funds for salary, bonuses and cash-equivalent compensation. That rule was broken in three instances, the audit found…
Auditors … took issue with the $2.5 million over five years that Holtz is being paid after he was fired a year ago. University employees’ severance pay can’t exceed 20 weeks of compensation, according to state law.
However, USF has contended the money is for damages, as spelled out in Holtz’s contract — not severance. The millions are required because Holtz was fired without cause, USF replied.
The Auditor General disagreed and concluded simply that the university should “ensure that future severance payments comply” with Florida law.
Now the University of South Florida pees itself with excitement upon the advent of its third savior. Throttlings, hugs, audits all around.
… at Christmas in Washington last week (she’s the blonde in the upper row).
The guy in front is Pat Monahan.
Click on the image – the setting is the National Building Museum – for a closer view.
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UD thanks Koneti.
I can’t recall the mental trail that got me there, but yesterday, for the first time since the 1970’s, I listened to Steve Goodman’s song, Spoon River.
I saw myself in the living room of the Evanston apartment I shared with two other Northwestern University students.
Goodman was a Chicagoan; he performed in Evanston all the time.
I saw myself sprawled in front of a record player. I must have been doing that thing I’ve done since I was five years old with music I like: Listening to it obsessively, for hours. In the windows of the room there was sunlight and snow.
I certainly learned the piece, since I sang along without hesitation yesterday, every word, every inflection, intact.
All of our lives were entwined to begin with.
The union’s preserved.
I tried to entwine with Goodman’s singing. I’m a good vocal mimic.
I thought of his early death, his leukemia. Cool Hand Leuk, he called himself.
The morning is heavy with one more beginning.
But his most famous songs were about evenings: This train’s got the disappearing railroad blues.
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This, though, this moment of mine at the laptop, 2013, was high noon, the living room windows showing sun and no snow. The semester’s classes were over; grades had been entered.
The holidays meant UD could sit quiet and alone in her house and ponder and feel the flow of her life.
It was Goodman who made her feel this, who pressed upon her the specific depth of the river, and for this she was immensely grateful.
[A poem made up of phrases from a newspaper article.
For the original article, go here.]
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Vaguely Decasyllabic Newspaper Poem
Ancient Herculaneum was chic.
Well-furnished rooms, with views out to the sea.
Mosaic scrolls, monastic libraries.
Unlock the scrolls of Herculaneum!
But the scrolls tend to go to pieces.
The ink is dull black and iridesces.
Some pieces, the eye can make out nothing.
Black lines on a pale grey background,
Black dust of the scroll powdering.
Not all the villa’s scrolls have been unrolled;
The scrolls are tightly wound and creased.
Still… orphan fragments make a text:
hold power… think… with a moderate force
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Fiber; sand; the structure of papyrus…
What further scrolls remain there still?
Early editions of Aeneas…
Those who think [University of Alabama football coach Nick] Saban is overpaid should consider the Seattle Mariners’ recent deal with infielder Robinson Cano for $240 million over 10 years. Does anyone think Cano is three times more valuable than Saban? Hardly.
And Cano is just one measly position. Saban’s coach. Right now he gets (when you throw in everything) something approaching ten million a year from the university. Which is too low when you consider the context.
[We] are nearing the point when top-level college coaching is a more lucrative gig than coaching the pros. That is astounding, in a sense — pro teams play more games, they get higher TV ratings, and they don’t have to support academic advisors or pay for volleyball scholarships.
In another sense, though, this is perfectly reasonable. Pro teams have so many tools they can use to improve. They can sign free agents, acquire draft choices or pour money into scouting. Some pro teams see coaches more as an extension of the front office, charged with implementing the philosophy (and following the advanced stats) preferred by the general manager.
College athletic departments, as currently constructed, don’t have as many tools. They can build new facilities to attract recruits, but that is way more expensive than hiring a coach like Saban (who would demand new facilities anyway). They can pay recruits under the table, but there is some risk involved, and some are reluctant to do it because it is against the rules. Besides, the mechanics of under-the-table payments are complicated. You can’t really write a check from a university account, make it out to a defensive end, and hope nobody finds out.
The whole university… conceit… puts special burdens on football programs, for which coaches should expect hardship pay. And now that, moneywise, there’s no difference between professional and non-professional, we’ve removed barriers to fair compensation. In the case of Saban, then, if we use the Cano standard of comparison, one billion over ten years seems appropriate.
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UD thanks Andre.
… but still sent up.
Brown University’s highest profile trustee sees another one of his employees go to prison. Is Brown’s Steven Cohen next? Will he preside over that university’s decision-making from prison?
