… Prague.
A 26-year-old woman reportedly pulled a loaded handgun from her pocket Tuesday when her Front Range Community College instructor confronted her about cheating on a test.
Fort Collins police said student Brittany Schoonover reportedly pulled the gun from her pocket and “racked the slide” — the process of moving a round into the chamber of a semi-automatic handgun manually — when her instructor confronted her outside a classroom, arrest records show.
… The instructor told police he feared for his life and the lives of other students, but he was able to disarm Schoonover and call for help, according to arrest documents. Other specific information about how the instructor disarmed her was not available Wednesday.
Mandatory faculty workshops in how to disarm students threatening you with semi-automatic handguns are on their way. Training will also feature helpful hints, such as: Never walk away from a student until she gives you permission to do so.
[The student] brandished the handgun when her instructor began walking away – to prevent him from leaving.
A song of praise for NFL football.
… The grunting, juddering, anti-flow of the broader game, the rote brutality and steak-headed backwardness of the action at the play-by-play level, the sudden blundering intrusion of all those honking commercials — for achingly sincere domestic macro-pilsners, for strapping trucks and their loud and swaggering drive-train warranties, for extremely emotional insurance companies and also weirdly ironic insurance companies — at every stoppage of play. In the most basic sense this is just what the average NFL game is, but more worrying for the lords of the league, it is also a description of what is an objectively not-great television show — one with the queasy pacing of rush-hour traffic, the jarring violence of a car accident, and the fuddy legalism of traffic court, and that somehow manages to be three hours long.
… In recent years, [these sorts of] games, resembling out-of-body experiences, have become worryingly common. The sudden glut of ultra-shitty games probably isn’t the greatest long-term problem facing the sport, but it’s also the most obvious and inescapable challenge to all the solemn covenant-pageantry of the NFL; it’s hard to civically sanctify the experience of being bored.
… The league’s signature corruptions have unmistakably diminished both the quality of the games and the broader health of the sport; things just can’t go on this way.
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UD thanks Dirk.
UD‘s been telling you for years about the spectacular synergy between online courses and filthy university sports programs. When it comes to anonymous online courses, it’s so easy to fall in love! It’s so easy to fall in love! It’s so easy (so easy) … yeah yeah yeah its so easy (so easy).. yeah yeah yeah…
… comes from this Penn State student-run blog:
Grand Jury Appalled At University Marketing Of ‘Fun, Party Atmosphere’
For that’s the real story. Other news outlets are content to quote high-voltage words and terms from the “scathing” report on the lurid, protracted, public, death of frat pledge Timothy Piazza: fraternities are a cancer; Penn State showed shocking apathy in regard to large groups of sadists on its campus.
The Penn State student journalists correctly focus on the cold calculation schools like Penn State and West Virginia (read this; it tells you all you need to know about the death of Piazza) make – to market their schools as almost nothing other than places to drink and go to football games.
Quoting from Karen Weiss, a WVU sociologist, here.
[T]he party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy.
Of course, we could adopt, for the frats, the same model we adopt for university football. We could say that every year we will sacrifice the mind and body of a certain number of our players for the sake of everyone’s amusement. We could say that every year we will kill a certain number of our frat pledges for the sadistic pleasure of people who’ve chosen to attend our school in order to enjoy sadistic pleasure. Party schools could try being honest, and just saying Football’s a violent sport; some fraternities house gangs of sadists. We think a few student brain injuries and deaths each year represents a small price to pay to keep our enrollment numbers steady.
[Former University of Louisville AD Tom] Jurich has been stung by the backlash that came along with his dismissal, but he owes it to a remarkable tolerance [at UL] for scandal. Rehiring tainted football coach Bobby Petrino in 2014 dented the school’s reputation, as did the multiple issues with [Rick] Pitino’s personal life and basketball program. Fixated on justifying Louisville’s inclusion in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Jurich was willing to take all the hits to the school’s image in exchange for on-field competitiveness.
… But now the school that compensated [Jurich and Pitino] at the very highest levels of their professions wants to blame the employees rather than itself for the current chaotic state of the department. Pitino was the active wrongdoer; we simply gave him more power than a third-world dictator. Jurich amassed too much clout; maybe because we paid him $5.3 million in 2016, more than the entire budget of the English, Math, Biology and History departments.
… Everyone needs a boss, and neither Pitino nor Jurich were adequately bossed in recent years. Former school president James Ramsey was busy arranging stealth sweetheart deals for himself and other university leaders (including Jurich), which helped lead to his ouster. The Board of Trustees was a rubber stamp. Lacking adequate oversight, the whole thing spun out of control.
And so we reach a point where the University of Louisville blames Pitino, and Pitino blames [his underlings] Andre McGee and Jordan Fair, and we’re supposed to believe that this institution led by wealthy and powerful alpha males was brought down by the sorcery of a former director of basketball operations and a first-year assistant coach. Call it trickle-up corruption.
The bit at the end about the alpha males is interesting… Is there even one woman at UL? As Fanny Dashwood would put it —
Ever since they hired one of the ickiest coaches this great country has to offer, UA’s football team has been hitting all of its marks (er, girlfriends) one after another, making a real name for itself in a crowded national domestic abuse field.
Scottie Young Jr… . Orlando Bradford… And as UA can attest, you don’t get there without a certain kind of coach, and teammates who watch it happen and don’t give a shit!
Newly released records from the Tucson Police Department reveal statements from witnesses and victims, stating a former University of Arizona Wildcats football player’s roommates and teammates were aware of, but did not report, violent incidents.
… Witness statements claim Bradford’s roommates, Arizona Wildcats football players, saw the abuse and heard threats of violence but never reported the behavior.
One of the witnesses recounted a February 2016 incident which alleged[ly] happened in Bradford’s vehicle. The witness said Bradford, one of the victims, a female witness and a UA football player were in the vehicle.
The witness told the TPD the victim said something to Bradford, which angered him.
“Bradford exited the vehicle, opened the door and slid the seat forward,” according to the report. “He grabbed the victim by the hair, pulled her from the vehicle and threw her on the ground.”
The witness also said Bradford, on several occasions, had “gone crazy, verbally yelling and screaming” at one of the victims and “threatened to kill her.”
According to the witness’ reports, Bradford would hit the victim “in front of the guys” and named the four football players who lived in the house.
A witness, who police said was in a relationship with one of Bradford’s roommates, heard that Bradford was, “telling everyone in the locker room what he had done (to the victim) and was joking about it.”
SONG OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE
BASKETBALL RECRUIT
‘Come,’ they told me
Pa rum pum pum pum:
‘Your dorm has whores for free.’
Pa rum pum pum pum.
‘You’ll play at KFC.
Yes! KFC YUM!
It’s facing bankruptcy.‘
Pa rum pum pum pum
Rum pum pum pum
Rum pum pum pum
After bribery
Pa rum pum pum pum
We lived in luxury
Pa rum pum pum pum
They brought their gifts to me
Pa rum pum pum pum
Rick’s boys took care of me
And we all kept mum
We all played dumb
Rum pum pum pum
Feds came to talk to me
Pa rum pum pum pum
‘Bout our conspiracy
Pa rum pum pum pum
UL told Rick to flee
Pa rum pum pum pum
He sued, and they sued he
And everyone’s scum
Shitting their bum
Rum pum pum pum
Yes, I played for you
Pa rum pum pum pum
Feel a bit dumb
… about addiction and death, from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s widow.
[A]fter the fifth person suggested I should start running [to deal with my grief], I lost it. “I don’t want to fucking run,” I said. “I want to jump in the river and kill myself.”
When I finally did decide to run, it was always at night by the Hudson. The darker and rainier it was, the more violent the water, the better. I couldn’t get enough. Something about the extremity of it, the closeness to death, was weirdly comforting. If I wanted to jump, it was there.
What got me out of bed every morning and kept me alive, of course, were my kids. I had no choice: They needed me, and I loved them more than anything in the world. I would hit moments when I felt, I’m done. I’m so done, but then I’d see their faces, and right away it would become, OK. I can do this today. They were keenly aware that I was now their only parent, and Willa, my youngest, obsessed about it, asking, “If you die, how are people going to know how to find us?”
A Potemkin Village is “a pretentiously showy or imposing façade intended to mask or divert attention from an embarrassing or shabby fact or condition.” The three Bloomberg writers who make this comparison – it appears in a long piece summarizing the ongoing national basketball scandal, which they call “the worst since college basketball players were caught shaving points for gamblers in the 1950s” – mean to suggest, I guess, that the glitzy University of Louisville basketball team masked whatever there was of the shabby non-basketball University of Louisville.
It’s quite a statement. Can we have gotten to the point where we’re not a tad astonished by it?
I mean, yes, one remembers the witty president of the University of Oklahoma back in the ‘fifties telling a senator he wanted to “build a university our football team can be proud of.” More recently, the president of Ohio State, “asked whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, … said: ‘No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.'” One has no trouble imagining how the puling little president of the University of Alabama feels about his stature vis-à-vis Nick Saban. And of course we know how the leadership of Penn State felt about that… curious couple, Sandusky and Paterno. Going to jail for them was a small price to pay.
Still…
**************
And does the analogy really work? For after all, as is the way with many big-time athletic programs, there was never a clear separation between the shabby embarrassing academic UL and the rich degenerate basketball UL. The squalor of college sports spreads itself all over the campus – literally, as in the way the University of Georgia campus for a long time looked the morning after big games; and figuratively, as in the establishment of a house of prostitution in a UL dorm for players, recruits, and the fathers of recruits.
It’s not really that you’ve got on the one hand the glitzy sports program and on the other the hidden humiliating university. The whole thing tends toward looking like the Calais Jungle.
Ah, shaddap. This is Arkansas. No one gives a shit.
Lawdy. Finally some amazingly good news. UD has already begun planning her vacation to Alabama this summer. My way of saying THANK YOU.