Patching holes is turning into an industry in itself.

This was the smallest Sugar Bowl crowd since 1939 when 44,308 watched TCU beat Carnegie Tech 15-7. Back then, Tulane Stadium only held 49,000. The next year an upper deck was added, expanding capacity to 70,000 and the Sugar Bowl sold out.

If 50,000 people saw this one in person (counting the bands) I’ll eat a fried gator.

Louisville traveled as well as could be expected for a 13-point underdog. More than half the attendees were wearing Cardinal red.

It was the Florida contingent that was embarrassingly small. According to the Orlando Sentinal, Florida sold fewer than 7,000 tickets from its official allotment of 17,500.The Sugar Bowl committee didn’t make up the slack as there were empty seats on the 40-yard line in the Florida section, and an entire upper deck end zone never saw a soul.

Tuberville (background here: scroll down) to lucky University of Cincinnati!

Tommy Tuberville will make $2.2 million next season at the University of Cincinnati… UC will pay up to $931,000 to buy out Tuberville’s Texas Tech contract.

China is famous for its copy-cat architecture: you can find replicas of everything from the Eiffel Tower and the White House to an Austrian village across its vast land. But now they have gone one step further: recreating a building that hasn’t even been finished yet. A building designed by the Iraqi-British architect Dame Zaha Hadid for Beijing has been copied by a developer in Chongqing, south-west China, and now the two projects are racing to be completed first… [The plagiarized project] the other is being built at a much faster rate than [Hadid’s].

Well, UD‘s been on a tear lately about empty university football stadiums even at many of the big frothing at the mouth schools… But she’s been focused for the most part on student and alumni sections, and it’s useful to take a peek upstairs at the amazing, tax subsidized, luxury suites.

So here’s an email (one of hundreds) to the USM athletic director from a Southern Miss fan (earlier posts here – scroll down) pissed because he’s spending – even with the tax break – an awful lot of money to entice people to join him in controlled atmosphere splendor (UD loves “controlled atmosphere.” If you can be a university football snob, this is the way to do it… I mean, I think by definition you can’t, but if you could, boasting about the absence of shitfaced rednecks in your suite would be the way to go.), and because the team’s losing all of its games he can’t even give these things away.

Gentle Hitler meek and mild appears, a statue kneeling in prayer, as you peer through a hole in a wall at the site of the Warsaw ghetto. It’s an art installation.

Art journals dredge up the dead language people dredge up on occasions such as this. The artist’s work “reveal[s] contradictions at the core of today’s society.”

Praying little boy Hitler (We can look forward to praying little boy Pol Pot in the killing fields, praying little boy Stalin in the gulag, and praying little boy Assad in Aleppo.) is a quintessential work of kitsch – so much so that UD intends to feature it in her aesthetics course this semester. It conforms to Milan Kundera’s definition of the form: “the absolute denial of shit.” It’s the functional equivalent of “the Hitler with a song in his heart” in The Producers. Like Franz Liebkind, it wants to remind you that Hitler was essentially an innocent – a flawed human being like every one of us. He knows what he did was wrong, and if he were alive today and in touch with his inner child he’d be on his knees in the middle of the Warsaw ghetto praying for forgiveness.

Praying little boy Hitler conveys the important truth that we’re all potential Hitlers. Paul Berman, reviewing the work of Andre Glucksmann, writes:

The eleventh commandment that Glucksmann wants to append to the biblical ten is this: to know thyself as capable of being a monster – even if that means saying (and here the imp of excess wraps its fingers around Glucksmann’s neck […]), “Hitler, c’est moi.”

Now see, that’s good. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to read the newspaper, note disastrous academic scandals that have exactly the same M.O. as stuff going on at your campus, and alert academic authorities.

John Blanchard was a senior associate athletic director at the now-notorious University of Carolina Chapel Hill, and he has said, in an interview with some of the many people reviewing that sorry school’s decades of academic fraud (a fraud only uncovered by a very determined local newspaper), that he did just this. He said look at POS Auburn – do we really want to be like them?

But although Auburn was discussed, nothing came of it. The head of UNC’s Department of African and Afro-American Studies continued proliferating bogus courses for athletes, exactly the way Auburn’s chair of sociology, Thomas Petee, did.

Actually, UNC went further than Auburn. It hired a sports agent, with ties to current players, to teach a course.

Coates warms to his theme:

“If we are going to allow charitable donations, we should think about what the ultimate purpose of those donations happens to be,” Coates said in an interview. “When one thinks of charity, they don’t think of charity flowing to the head football coach of a big state university.”

Coates also questioned muni financing for stadiums. “Using the borrowing power of the state and tax-exempt interest to build stadiums for sporting events isn’t the real purpose of the university, either,” he said.

The state of Washington, which isn’t totally insane, refused to pay through direct taxation for a University of Washington stadium renovation which will sideline and rip off students, but will be wonderful for corporations.

The university will do the deed anyway, taking advantage of indirect tax subsidies.

And here’s the horseshit from the university about how lucrative the new stadium’s going to be.

The Huskies estimate that the new suites and premium seating will raise $16 million a year in donations.

Additionally, the athletic department projects that other stadium-related revenue, such as ticket sales, naming rights and concessions‚ will increase by $17 million, or 57 percent, to $47.5 million annually, according to Assistant Athletic Director Carter Henderson. That will more than cover payments on the stadium debt of $15.9 million, the school says.

That’s absolutely gonna happen.

University basketball: The excitement never stops!

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The trend will deepen.

Sporting-event attendance to drop in 2013: “The confluence of high ticket prices, better at-home media viewing and the desire to share athletic experiences with others via social media will result in more tickets being discounted and more seats being empty,” said Andrew Billings, the Ronald Reagan Endowed Chair in Broadcasting in UA’s College of Communication and Information Sciences’ telecommunication and film department.

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The schools that not long ago dropped immense sums on immense stadiums are the most farcical losers.

The State of Minnesota and the University of Minnesota collaborated to bring us a new stadium that the market could not bear. Now it’s empty.

Madeleine Honig and UD met as undergrads at Northwestern University, and have remained friends. One of UD‘s most vivid memories is a particular image of Madeleine – a very young freshman because she’d been admitted a year or two early – marching exuberantly along the campus lakefront on a sunny day. UD was sitting in one of the newish lakefill buildings, watching her, and marveling at her beauty as the wind whipped her black hair. She seemed entirely happy, entirely open to the world.

Madeleine’s father, Arnold Honig, died last year. He was a physicist at Syracuse University, a “physics icon,” “internationally known for his pioneering work in the field of highly polarized nuclear spin systems.”

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il [is reported to have] died after getting into a fit of rage when he was told that a major dam project had sprung a leak. He collapsed during a briefing about a flagship hydro-electric power plant, but managed to order ‘severe punishments’ for those responsible before he died.

… reminds UD to link to this YouTube, full of shots of La Kid (the beaming blond to the right of Diana Ross) at Christmas in Washington.

Another genius scrutinizes attendance at university football games (especially the BCS) and begins to detect a problem.

There’s no there there.

Football’s not – as all of Gump Nation believes – the front porch of the university. It’s a surly back alley, a scholastic Skid Row, a lunar landscape with losers.

Look at these stadiums. Look at this picture of the second half crowd at the Military Bowl. They’re the last human beings on earth, huddled near the field while a glowing UFO prepares to beam them up.

Once everyone’s gone, it’s the players plus the Masturbation Marching Band, tickling its own glockenspiel.

That was just a few months ago; and now Rita Levi Montalcini has died, age 103.

She won a 1986 Nobel for her work in nerve growth factor; a few years later, she started a foundation for the scientific education of African women. Well into her hundreds, she spent part of each day at the lab, and part at the foundation.

An atheist, she said the reason she lived so long was selflessness – she never cared or thought much about herself, but spent her energy on scientific and social problems that engrossed her. Pesky obstacles like a sexist father, fascism, anti-semitism, and a whole lot more sexism, were ignored, or somehow gotten around.

… that even UD, who prides herself on her grasp of our simulacral world, is having a little trouble.

It’s a diploma mill in Wyoming — nothing to see there; hundreds of thousands of diploma mills operate all over the world, and Wyoming is one of the most pro-diploma-mill states in America (God forbid the feds interfere with private enterprise). But even by Wyoming’s give-a-shit standards, the gloriously named Degree in a Day (the website provided in the Star Tribune story no longer functions) represents a problem. Dig:

The website tells visitors that purchasers can receive diplomas “in the traditional university manner printed on traditional paper with traditional fonts in the traditional format,” plus official transcripts, signed letters of verification to for use with an employer and letters of recommendation from the dean and president.

Under a tab called, “About Degree in a Day,” the website says it “offers verifiable and authentic life experience degrees from our own ‘Anonymous Universities.’” It continues, “We will never publish the name or allow it to be associated with this site to anyone other than alumni. We do this to ensure our alumni can feel confident there will not be any negative press online about their degree.”

The website “gives examples of legitimate-appearing university websites that it promises to construct in order to give purchasers ‘further proof their degree is in fact authentic,’” according to the complaint.

So… UD‘s been trying to figure this one out. Here’s what she’s come up with. If she’s right about the business model, it represents an authentic advance in the industry.

As soon as a diploma mill’s name becomes known, it becomes notorious. Coverage of the scam will invariably refer to “the notorious degree mill, LaSalle University,” or whatever. In order to avoid instantly stigmatizing the millions of people who’ve gotten bogus degrees from this or that outfit, Degree in a Day will tailor-make a pretend online university just for you. It will come up with a name (the model assumes one will never run out of plausible-sounding university names, and this seems to UD a reasonable assumption) that will be known only to you and to the few to non-existent employers who ever bother to check your credentials.

One particularly brilliant aspect of this model involves (I assume) the ability at a moment’s notice to change the university from which you graduated. Once you’ve been run out of town because of the exposure of your fake Cambridgetown Institute of Technology degree, you can go back to Degree in a Day and have them construct Oxfordshire Institute of Technology.