… over her face at her
birthday dinner this evening.

Everyone’s paying attention, today, to the idiots who are trying to take over the student newspaper; but there’s so much more to be proud of when you’re a Bulldog! Like your beloved Hall of Fame Coach Jim Donnan!

Donnan used his influence with former players who looked up to him, federal regulators said. According to the SEC court filing, he told one player, “Your Daddy is going to take care of you,” and, “if you weren’t my son, I wouldn’t be doing this for you,” the SEC complaint said. That former player, who was not named, ended up investing $800,000.

The University of Georgia. Building a legacy every single day.

La Kid with Matthew Broderick, yesterday.

Both sport glasses so uncool they’re cool.

Some little twerp playing tournament Scrabble had been winning big this year until competitors realized he was stealing blanks, hiding them on his person, and then hauling them out when he needed them.

This story allows UD to share the fact that she has joined an online Scrabble site (it’s mainly Brits) and she’s learning a lot. All she’s done in her life, Scrabblewise, is play a sort of slow game on a board. Her opponents have been a motley crew, and whenever she’s suggested to any of them an hourglass sand timer (three minutes) or other such constraint, she’s been shouted down.

Well! Turns out there’s

Normal (5 minutes per move)

Quick (3 minutes)

Stress (2)

and

Rush (1).

Strongly attracted to the word Normal, and not wanting to make herself a nervous wreck, UD has been sticking to the five-minute thing; but her excellent scores and rating, which are public on the site, have attracted the fast-lane people. They shoot her messages when she logs on:

MARGARET: PLAY A GAME?

Naively, she accepted the first of these invitations. She assumed the player was Normal. The player was Rush. UD stayed in the game because it seemed the decent thing to do, and she even made a good score (though she lost), but she didn’t have any fun, and she didn’t make any interesting words or letter connections. Rushed games turn into Three-Letter Smackdown.

Her Rushed opponent told her (you can chat while playing) that rushed games are in part about keeping people from cheating, and I guess it’s true that if you have five minutes to fart around on your computer while playing, you can check whether something’s a two-letter word, etc. But in most of my Normal games, both of us play quite fast anyway. It’s rare that anyone uses more than three minutes, and typical for people to use around two.

The school UD has for years and years called The Worst University in America is at it again.

The student editorial staff of the University of Georgia’s The Red & Black newspaper walked out Wednesday evening after a non-student was named editorial director with final say on all editorial content.

The Red & Black’s student editor-in-chief, Polina Marinova, along with other top student editors and staff members, walked out after Ed Morales, who had been the paper’s editorial adviser and then became editorial director, was given full editorial control of the newspaper.

“The students have lost control of the paper, and a student newspaper is supposed to be run by students,” Amanda Jones, design editor for The Red & Black, said in a phone interview. “We’re losing power while they are hiring permanent employees that are not students. We are losing control. At this point, every single top staffer walked out.”

In a post on RedandDead, a blog set up by Marinova, she said, “Recently, editors have felt pressure to assign stories they didn’t agree with, take ‘grip and grin’ photos and compromise the design of the paper.”

Morales “had no comment,” and why should he? Why should he talk to the press? Why should he talk to anyone? Have you ever heard of an editorial director, under crisis conditions, who would condescend to talk to anyone about it? No, no, no – grip and grin and bear it, kids! You decided to attend the worst university in America! What did you expect?

Did you expect better than this from a draft memo written by one of the new overseers of the newspaper?

In a draft outlining the “expectations of editorial director at The Red & Black,” a member of The Red & Black’s Board of Directors stated the newspaper needs a balance of good and bad. Under “Bad,” it says, “Content that catches people or organizations doing bad things. I guess this is ‘journalism.’ If in question, have more GOOD than BAD.”

You see the capital letters? You didn’t expect capital letters? You accepted Georgia’s offer of admission! I told you not to.

Scroll down for more of the draft memo. Note the combination of haughty condescension and borderline IQ.

******************

You know what your core problem is? The thing that’s going to keep the place a post-tailgate shithole?

Your president. Michael Adams makes Glenn Poshard look like Simone Weil.

*****************

UD thanks David.

*****************

The more of the draft memo you read, the more obvious the institutional dementia of the University of Georgia becomes. The place has really gone mad.

Yes, it’s “notoriously disgraceful,” as his dean put it, that a professor at the Merchant Marine Academy made a tasteless joke about the Aurora shooter to his students – especially since he’d been sent an email informing him that one of the students in that class was the son of a man who’d been killed in the incident. The school plans to fire the guy, though this seems to me to be going a bit far.

Also disgraceful, by the way, is what the guy was doing as he made the comment. See how the article starts? See what the professors you and I pay for do in their classrooms?

After turning down the lights in his classroom at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, Prof. Gregory F. Sullivan began showing a documentary and prepared to step out for a moment.

But first, according to an internal personnel document, he paused to make a parting joke: “If someone with orange hair appears in the corner of the room,” he is said to have remarked to his students, “run for the exit.”

That’s right, kiddies. They’re showing movies. We’re paying for them to turn off the lights, turn on a machine, and leave.

***************************

Outside the classroom, Sullivan writes about Japan.

It is especially in the state interventionist measures that Oka finally came to endorse in order to forestall orthogenetically-driven degeneration that the technocratic proclivities of his statist orientation become most apparent.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls this writing style Translation from the German.

Lively radio interview with a News and Observer reporter about the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill academic fraud (scroll down).

As with Thomas Petee at Auburn and Leo Wilton at SUNY Binghamton, it’s crucial to have either the chair of a department (like Chapel Hill’s Julius Nyang’oro, about whom the reporter is talking up there in my headline) or a very high-ranking faculty member running the independent studies that athletes find so attractive.

The wisdom of commenters. This one even knows how to use a semi-colon. UD bows down.

***********************

Speaking of writing, Scathing Online Schoolmarm is relieved to see wordplay starting up on the last name Peppers. It’s taken far too long. Philadelphia Inquirer:

PEEPING AT PEPPERS’ TRANSCRIPT

Alliteration is the obvious first move, though SOS also looks forward to some pun-seepage.

Pepper is of course part of a famous alliterative Mother Goose thingie:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers;
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

*********************************

Chapel’s campus posted pickled Peppers’ transcript;
A peek at pickled Peppers’ GPA took place.
It shows how Chapel Hill kept up its pecker
And won the big athletic college race.

… to its most basic moving parts.

****************

Transcript:

Two academic men in suits chat. Looks like Harvard Yard in the background.

So the for-profits mop up $32 billion in taxpayer money a year, even though a majority of students quickly drop out!

And for presiding over these empires of failure, the average for-profit CEO is paid over $7 million!

— 7 million? Seriously?

Seriously.

— Does it come with balloons and a 4-foot check?

No, I imagine it’s a discreet transfer of wealth.

****************

UD thanks Dirk.

… La Kid and her friend Julia
visited with a couple of cast
members after seeing
The Best Man.

… quite gets you there.

The wins get taken away, so where are you? One after another cheater university gets its wins taken away, so what does that make all the effort to play and win the games?

As with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which will almost certainly vacate yet more victories once its slow-moving academic scandal picks up steam, it makes the effort either a sick pathetic joke, or it makes it performance art.

UD thinks it’s more healthy to think of it as performance art, à la Dada. Our football program is shit and then we die. Let’s do the rhumba around a Paterno statue and then blow it up. Let’s turn our victory banners into burqas and wrap them around our labrador retrievers.

Far better to adopt the absurd, says UD, than wallow in the bathos all the boys are in at the moment. The boys need to evolve. They need to see the possibilities.

Take this guy, with his anguished questions, his incredulity, his Blanche Dubois Ah see the world ah wanna see thing:

We tend to believe what we want, and since my sister graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and loved the school so much that she still lives nearby, I didn’t want to believe this school — her school — could be so shameful.

Impeccable reasoning, wouldn’t think of criticizing this way of understanding the world, but it takes him to this grim panicky place:

[This might be] the ugliest academic scandal in NCAA history.

UD would ask him to calm down and recall what the great landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll once said:

There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight.

Go toward the ugliness; bring to it the same pep and pageantry you used to bring to game day, and you will find that laughter and fellowship will not be far behind.

The hope amongst the Carolina blue is that this thing is isolated and no matter what, it doesn’t involve the mens basketball program. My gut tells me the men who have led this program, the great Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge and Roy Williams would never take part in anything like this, that they are men of honor and the basketball program will remain clean forever. It is my personal belief that, that is true and whatever ends up coming out when everything is out in the open, it will remain true.

You see that he says the North Carolina Chapel Hill basketball program, not football. Football is obviously utterly dirty… Yet it being in the nature of fandom to cling to one’s magic blanket even as it tatters before your eyes, the writer professes his faith in the spotlessness of at least basketball. At least that, for God’s sake. You wouldn’t take that away.

***********************

Meanwhile – the infinite bounty of sport! – the professional organization that represents literature professors may soon be headed by someone who teaches at an unaccredited university.

No university wants a first paragraph like this in its newspaper.

Yale Trustee Fareed Zakaria ’86 was suspended by Time Magazine and CNN today after plagiarizing parts of his Aug. 20 Time column on gun control.

He’s a Yale graduate. A Yale trustee. An important voice on behalf of the very controversial Yale Singapore campus. He’s out there. And although he’s one of the most privileged people on earth, he wouldn’t break enough of a sweat to do his own writing. The image that comes to mind is Marie Antoinette.

… locking down the campus.

***************

Two dead.