Hoo boy. That’ll be the day. Talk about a jockstravaganza! Let’s see… Whoever the president is, we know he’ll be a jock who couldn’t care less about how corrupt and mercenary the relationship is between the NCAA and sports schools. Or hey maybe we want the vice-president to get involved! There’s Paul Bionic Man Ryan… Joe Weight Lifter Biden… They’re all physical fitness freaks, and they’re all mad sports fans… So forget the executive branch.

Senators and congressmen… yeah, they’re going to want to fuck up the comfy relationship between the NCAA and their home teams… They’re going to want to uncover decades of academic fraud back home and berate the NCAA for overlooking it…

… telling the truth. In a student-athlete variation on the Kinsley Gaffe (“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”), Jones, an Ohio State football player, tweeted:

Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.

Cardale Jones is my hero. He alone speaks the truth through the bullshit of APR scores, and Sociology and Sports Management departments bursting with jockshop courses, and sweet kindly academic counselor ladies who take the boys by the arm and lead them to the courses the ladies will take for them. It’s degrading – to the school, the players, to other students, to everybody. Cardale breaks through the lies and asks an admirably rational question: Why are you making me play school?

It’s why, if you’ve read this blog any length of time, you know that I refer to sports factory personnel as Blanche DuBoises. It’s their job to live in a gaudy gauzy unreality… To lie and lie and lie and even try to believe it all…

When someone firmly based in the reality principle – like Cardale here – comes along, all the Blanches, with a sharp scandalized intake of breath, say Ah declare ah’ve never heard such manner of thing… Lord, lord, lord have mercy…

UD says: Let the Blanches blanch. We know what’s right.

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UD thanks Doug.

… a reader, Chas, tells me his and other comments haven’t been appearing on the site. I have no idea why. I’ve told my webmistress about it. Meanwhile, apologies.

A Tennessee boy with a butt
Has thus far refused to say what
Substance or dose
He somehow osmosed
Has so oddly distended his gut.

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Update: Dave, a reader, writes a limerick in response to the student’s explanation that he can’t have buttchugged because God doesn’t want him to desecrate his body. That way. Putting enough alcohol in it to kill it – however it went up or down – is another matter.

God says you can’t drink with your butt
And it’s not ours to ask “why?” or “what?”
It’s like non-cloven hooves,
Or getting tattoos,
Or leaving your penis uncut.

A former portfolio manager at Steve Cohen’s $14 billion hedge fund told the FBI that he gave his boss tips based on inside information.

Bloomberg Business Week updates us on Brown University trustee Steve Cohen, truly The Most Interesting Man in the World — at least to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

What will Brown do? Although Cohen’s not yet been charged with anything, the SEC and FBI seem awfully interested in exploring possibilities along those lines…

In the case of the also-problematic Steven Rattner, Brown seems quietly to have evicted him from the board after a certain critical mass of fines and bans and suits was reached.

With one thing and another, Brown University’s managers are becoming experienced hands in trustee-management (know when to hold ’em; know when to fold ’em) and, like Yeshiva University (home of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin), could probably start offering seminars.

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Some people seem to think this whole thing is one big joke.

So another course – Naval Weapons Systems – has broached the surface at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. We all know about the AFAM courses under Julius Nyang’oro (scroll down), and despite the administration’s insistence that that’s the end of the story, we’ve all been waiting for the rest of the bogus courses to reveal themselves. This one had no tests, no research paper, and was jammed with athletes.

… oh okay the quarterback has a drinking problem… But cast your eye back over these posts (scroll down)… TCU’s got an elaborate student drug cartel going, with football players prominent in the game.

Four score and seven years ago, I joined my beloved PIKE fraternity…

If you don’t find this oratory profoundly bowel-moving, you are no lover of freedom.

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UD thanks Ani for the link to the video. (Watch the second video on the page for the full monty.)

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Update: Reviews are beginning to chug in. This one notices something UD hadn’t picked up: “At one point, [the lawyer] says that the inaccurate story has spread across the entire ‘United Nations.'”

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Gawker‘s review here.

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UD has noted that the president of the University of Tennessee has held his tongue about this so far. But when the whole world is laughing at your university because it has devolved into very low farce, I think you have to come out and say something.

An investigative reporter badgers a University of Houston professor about how much he charges the university and his research sponsors for work-related expenses.

He’s in the UH physics department but he works for big oil and sees no reason why he shouldn’t live like his real employers — or at least a little like them. For oil executives, renting Land Rovers and flying first class ain’t worth a bucket of spit (they use chauffeurs and private jets); but for physics professors it’s way cool.

The voice of the people. Philosophy of education, American-style. If the University of Georgia students and alumni like to shit all over the campus during football games, “it’s a college campus for crying out loud.” That’s what college campuses are for.

University stories rarely offer international intrigue, but the Jorge Gilbert saga at Evergreen State College has potential.

Jorge, a charming Chilean, ran back to the mother country with tens of thousands of dollars he stole from students in the Evergreen study abroad program he used to administer. He even managed to sell his pricey Olympia condo before the hapless state could grab it.

Jorge’s not in hiding; he’s living an elegant life in a fancy apartment in Santiago and is attached to some university there. So Washington’s trying to hire a collection company to corner and fry his ass.

… Chilean collection agencies typically keep as payment about ¼ of the total debt collected- meaning any collection agency interested in tracking Gilbert … and wringing him of the money he owes Washington stands to make a cool $30,000.

I see Gilbert scaling the Gran Torre Costanera and shouting Nunca me llevan vivo.

… features horrendous University of Hawaii.

… on two triple word squares (she plays online Scrabble).

The word: EXPURGED.

Her score for that move: 230.

Her score for the game: 592.

(She made another seven-letter [STYLINGS] using one triple word square in the move just after EXPURGED. 110 points.)

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Update: Sorry. The link on EXPURGED takes you only to the Scrabble site, not to the page with scores and words. I guess you have to be a member to get to that page.

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More Snapshots from Home:

I discovered, this morning, a big, beautiful spider web hanging from my dogwood tree. After a night of rain, the web is bejeweled, studded with water.

I’m a bad photographer, and I certainly can’t do justice to this delicate sight; but here’s what it looks like.

But just immense; and instead of the black background in the linked picture, imagine a cascade of the sharp coppery leaves of an autumn dogwood as the web’s setting.

UD has covered similar professor meltdowns, but usually they’re about alcohol or drug use. This one, a math professor at Michigan State who paced his classroom, slammed his head into the window, shouted obscenities at his students, shouted about there being no God, and then stripped naked – looks to have been a pretty classic psychotic break.

Students madly dialed 911; they claim police took too long (fifteen minutes) to arrive, but there seems to be some controversy about that. What’s not controversial is that these students were badly traumatized (some feared the professor might have a weapon).

It’s hellishly difficult to identify mad or dangerous or badly addicted people on campus. I’ve only had one student, in years of teaching, who was immediately identifiable as mentally ill by her class behavior and comments (I told someone in administration about it; the student later withdrew to get treatment). Privacy rights; a tolerance for oddness; denial; fear — lots of factors play into our tendency to avoid doing anything about unsettling behavior. And things are often mixed: Amy Bishop’s students report that she taught quite normally only hours before the faculty meeting during which she murdered three of her colleagues.

Given this difficulty, response time is key.

… next catalogue will put all women in burqas.

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Update: And speaking of burqas: This is precisely the outcome UD and many other observers anticipated. And France will now be a model for other countries who will be banning the burqa.