A Birmingham AL politician gets it said.

Weeks later, the police can’t find the killers.

I…. dunno. When does Birmingham Alabama become so blood-soaked that, well, it ain’t really what you’d call a great city? The letter to the editor from which I’ve drawn this post’s headline is written by a person who has made sure to live well outside the bloody city limits; so it’s not really his great city. He moved out years ago.

And, as I say, Birmingham doesn’t really strike UD, who has seen multiple videos of police hosing gobs of blood off of its main streets, as a great city. The people who gunned down 24 souls the other night, killing four, only wanted to kill one particular guy standing with the crowd outside a club — this was a standard-issue gang vengeance killing, apparently. So what kind of city produces people who say hell since I’ve got a machine gun I think I’ll kill that guy plus everyone else? Not a great city.

This is far from Birmingham’s first mass shooting. And of course the numbers killed and injured all over Birmingham all the time keep rising. The letter writer seems to think that letting teenagers open carry any old gun without needing a permit or anything is maybe a mite unwise…

“Soon applications to our UAB University and Medical School may be affected.”  Yeah, and just when everyone is bleeding out all over the street. Since Alabama also has a punitive, total ban on abortion, I can imagine potential students and medical staff explaining to UAB that “Welp, after I get out of prison for providing maternal health care, I’ll be gunned down in front of my favorite brunch spot. I think not.”

A brunch restaurant [above Hush, the hookah lounge where the mass shooting happened,] was full of guests eating and drinking [on the morning after the massacre].

They were unaware or unfazed by the fact that hours before, people were cleaning blood off the pavement.

Those walking around the streets still closed off to traffic could see the bullet holes.

They were in planters along the sidewalk.

They were going up a staircase along the street.

They were in the walls of Pickwick Place alongside blood smeared on the walls.

… programming.

Yeah, yeah, the usual suspects are fussing up a storm, but France is adamant that its Olympics athletes will not wear that must-have Iranian fashion statement, the hijab.

Meanwhile, the world’s hardest working organization, CAIR, which must express outrage every day as hundreds of countries and regions all over the world (including, for instance, Egypt) outlaw public-sphere wearing of such things as burqas, hijabs, abayas, chadors, etcetcetc, is drawing itself up yet again this morning in high umbrage over a secular republic’s declaration that people representing that republic and its values to the world may not wear religious stuff while doing said representation.

France is not a theocracy, and women whose fanaticism burns so bright they refuse to take off a headscarf in public fit uneasily into seriously non-theocratic states. These women, like CAIR, are free to spend their lives in worldwide social and judicial combat over escalating and widening public-realm Islamic dress bans; or they can move to more blanketing-friendly places, like Malaysia (uh-oh). Hell, in England they’re erecting statues to the greatness of the hijab! (The monumentalized hijabi in question don’t look too happy, IMHO, but whatever.)

The morning after a sad Zoom session with four of UD‘s old friends, she found this old English folk song in one of her piano music books and really took to it, singing and playing away, and finding its lyrics profound.

Come, let’s be merry, let’s be airy,

‘Tis a folly to be sad.

Come, let’s be merry, let’s be airy,

‘Tis a folly to be sad.

For, since the world’s gone mad, mad, mad,

Why alone should we be wise,

And like dull fools, and like dull fools,

Like dull fools gaze on other men’s joys?

Let not tomorrow bring you sorrow,

While the stream of life flows on,

Let not the morrow bring you sorrow,

While the stream of life flows on;

But when the cheerful day is gone

Still endeavour that the next

Shall be as gay, shall be as gay,

Be as gay and as little perplexed.

If you have leisure, follow pleasure,

Let not an hour of joy pass by.

If you have leisure, follow pleasure,

Let not an hour of joy pass by.

For as the fleeting moments fly,

Time it will your youth decay;

Then try to live, then try to live

Then try to live and enjoy while you may.

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

Lotte Lehmann tells you how to sing it. Frank O’Hara elaborates on it:

Two communities outside Birmingham, Alabama, are
still searching for their dead.” —News Telecast

And tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock in Springfield, Massachusetts,
my oldest aunt will be buried from a convent.
Spring is here and I’m staying here, I’m not going.
Do birds fly? I am thinking my own thoughts, who else’s?

When I die, don’t come, I wouldn’t want a leaf
to turn away from the sun— it loves it there.
There’s nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can’t miss a day of it, because it doesn’t last.

So this is the devil’s desire? Well I was born to dance.
It’s a sacred duty, like being in love with an ape,
and eventually I’ll reach some great conclusion, like assumption,
when at last I meet exhaustion in these flowers, go straight up.

… ‘bama.

The high court judgement also condemned some books found by Ofsted inspectors in the library [of a Muslim school in Birmingham], despite a previous inspection and ruling that the books should be removed.

The judges opined, the books were “derogatory towards women,” nonetheless “clearly some members of staff were in agreement with the teachings of the book – hence why they remained.”

Haroon Rashid, a parent at the meeting said that the … books should have been placed away, out of sight from the inspectors.

This, he believed, was incompetence on behalf of the teachers. Additionally, “inspectors did not understand the context in which the rules [about beating and imprisoning your wives and daughters] were allowed in Islam.”

This is a very nicely written piece about university football, penned by a brave local English professor in Texas. It shows emotional restraint, and clever concision. John Crisp simply cites three adjacent articles in his local paper:

[O]n a single page in my local paper we find: A suicide by a young man who believed he was suffering from sports-related concussions. A quarterback so vital to the success of his team and its profit-making football program that he’s eager to risk his future mental health. And a university president excoriated for making a sound economic and ethical decision.

The first reference is to the concussion-wracked suicide, Kosta Karageorge, the second to the concussed but still playing Baylor quarterback, and the third to the University of Alabama Birmingham’s decision to shut down its unaffordable football program.

Only in his last line does Crisp come out with it:

One wonders if football has become important beyond all reason.

Legal duty? Or moral duty?

You take a school like James Madison University, a school no different from tons of others in this country… A school which recently spent tens of millions of dollars spiffing up its football stadium, and hundreds of thousands of dollars bidding on a home playoff game.

JMU is a U. A university. All that money might have been directed to education.

The last game played in JMU’s 25,000-person seating capacity stadium drew how many students? Let’s see:

Only 1,622 students came to Saturday’s game, despite JMU opening residence halls and dining facilities earlier than usual after Thanksgiving. JMU had estimated in its bid [JMU paid $200,000 for the privilege of holding this game] that 6,200 students would attend the game. Because the NCAA doesn’t allow host institutions to offer complimentary playoff tickets, JMU athletics sponsored all of the student tickets to keep them free. Documents provided to The Breeze [the campus newspaper] show that the price for each ticket was set at $10, and JMU budgeted $62,000 for the student tickets.

So let’s see if UD (notoriously weak on math) is getting this right. Correct UD if she’s wrong. In 2011, this school spent sixty-two million dollars increasing the number of seats in its football stadium to 25,000. We are now 2014, and at the last game fewer than 2,000 (non-paying) students showed up (even this figure might be optimistic, since schools typically count tickets picked up rather than human beings present). (Counting all non-student fans, the stadium was half full.) Again, this was a play-off game. Students tickets were free.

Let’s go back to that 1,622 figure. Look what the school estimated they’d get. 6,200. Off by a rather significant figure, no? You’d want to ask – where did the highly compensated athletics department at JMU (“[In 2013,] three of JMU’s top seven salaries were those of coaches.] get that figure? Out of their ass?

Where’s Nate Silver when you need him? But even so, aren’t there one or two statisticians at JMU who might have been consulted? After all, the – let’s call it the tanking pattern – is well-established…

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

Tiens.

Et alors.

Ecoute.

That student up there… that JMU student going on about the duty of all people admitted to James Madison University to attend football games… She’s the cutting edge. She and her school represent the future of university football.

One option of course is to shut the program, as the University of Alabama Birmingham just did. Almost no one else is going to choose that option.

Most everyone else is going where JMU’s headed: After the endless campus newspaper articles and official statements from the coaches and angry articles in the local booster press full of threats, bribes, and recriminations, will indeed come the punishment of those unwilling to assume their duty to take one of the 25,000 seats.

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

Okay, so here we go into numbers again: Figure about ten thousand locals show up at the games. James Madison has close to 20,000 students. So to fill up the stadium something around 15,000 JMU students will have to step up and do their duty.

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of boredom*
Rode the fifteen thousand.

—————————–

* “Football games are fun,
but partying is more fun.
I may go for the first half,
but it gets boring after a while.”

You think sitting at a stupid three-hour football game is boring? Try sitting in a jail cell for a week.

“Some of these cats came from 3,000 miles away to play here, to be a part of this, to be a part of all of this!” UAB tight end Tristan Henderson hollered at [UAB president Ray] Watts during his meeting with the team. “But you say numbers? That’s what you come here to say, numbers?”

University of Alabama Birmingham men don’t understand that the school can’t afford football. In order for them to understand why the school shut down the program, they would have to understand numbers.

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

Professor Mondo found another good quotation (UD didn’t find it because she couldn’t bear to read the whole article):

“Now you’re telling me I’ve got two more years left to play and I’ve got to give up on football and settle for an education?”

“Over the years, the Board of Trustees rejected multiple opportunities for the [University Alabama Birmingham] football program to become more competitive. In 2006, it rejected the hire of Jimbo Fisher for $600,000 a year because they said it was too much money, even though boosters would pay most of it. Now Fisher is coaching the undefeated FSU and is on a 26-game win streak.”

Jimbo! Jimbo, whose recruiting philosophy has made Florida State University the toast of the New York Times! The toast of the nation! Jimbo, Jimbo, Jimbo, we could’ve had you and because of our evil trustees you fell from our embrace!

There we stood with arms akimbo
Ready to embrace our Jimbo
Then the powers that be
Acted scandalously
And cast us inside Loser’s Limbo

An important reminder that the gender apartheid we’re seeing in public events at British universities is nurtured before women get to British universities.

See UD‘s posts on enforced gender segregation at universities here.

… academic vs. athletics spending at American universities.

A newspaper in Alabama has wasted no time in noting that, for instance, “[University of Alabama Birmingham] spent less per student on academics in 2011 than four years earlier, [while its] athletic spending rate per athlete increased 30 percent.”

Hyuk. That’s how y’all stay Alabam’.

And, uh, at least it’s money well spent!

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

Even when not factoring in athletic scholarship costs, a pricey category for schools that can rapidly increase, the athletic spending rate was still higher than academic spending. A big factor was the growth in coaching salaries, which increased on average by 54 percent among the five major conferences, compared to 24 percent for all FBS schools.

The database defines academic spending per student as direct and indirect costs associated to educating students. Examples include expenses for instruction, department research, student services, and a portion of academic, institutional and operations support. It does not include spending related to other university activities.

Dan Fulks answers this question, posed in the first paragraph of a Birmingham News article:

Why did the University of North Alabama board of trustees ignore its students, staff and faculty [who all voted against] by voting 6-3 this week to pursue a move from Division II to Division I?