- Shouldn’t college presidents be a little smart than this? Should they not know that at a major university with a big-time athletic program, there’s going to be a fair amount of rioting and general civil disobedience? Not former Ohio State University president Karen Holbrook, as evidenced by her recent comments about the school she once presided over. Holbrook stated that there was a culture of rioting at OSU and, “Any excuse to riot and have drunken orgies in the streets, they took it.” Wait, you’re telling me that college students love to drink, riot and have sex? Seriously? Damn, that totally wrecks my world view. I thought every single student at every single college and university in America was in school for one reason: education. I figured all of them were there to go to class, study really hard, learn lots of new things and expand their minds academically. I was under the impression that there was no underage drinking to speak of, no use of illegal drugs, no unlawful behavior and no sexual activity of any kind going on at any of these places. Wake up, Holbrook, you just described every major university in America. If your school has a good football or basketball team and they win big games, the students are looking to riot, period. If your school has quarters or semesters that end, when those quarters and semesters end, students are looking to party. What’s next, you’re going to enlighten us with the news that college students also like to sleep in late, eat cheap food and buy the cheapest used textbooks they can find? Stop acting like OSU was some sort of anomaly and pretending to be so horrified at what went on there. You had to know that’s how it would be before you went there, yet you went and took their millions in salary to do a below average job as the university’s president. To crack them now for their “culture of rioting and drunken orgies” is incredibly hypocritical, because from the looks of it you did little to nothing to discourage or eliminate that culture in your time at OSU.
- I’m about to criticize a guy who can buy me and everything I own about 50,000 times over and another guy who could beat me to a bloody pulp in thirty-five seconds or less, but I think I’ll plow ahead anyhow. The latest round of village idiots participating on ABC’s Dancing with the (D-list) Stars was announced Wednesday, with some predictable inclusions among the contestants. First, you have a publicity hungry, attention-starved rich guy, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. I love Cuban because he’s outspoken, he’s rebellious against the stodgy, conservative nature of being an NBA owner and he seems very much like an anti-corporate type guy even though he’s a billionaire. However, appearing on this show definitely lowers my level of respect and admiration for him, because this is the most absurdly stupid reality show on TV right now outside of American Karaoke. Joining Cuban are the aging jock looking to extend his time in the spotlight (boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.) and someone that no one actually knows and cares about but is trying to become a household name (racecar driver Helio Castroneves). Actually, about 85 percent of the people that participate on this monstrosity are individuals that no one really knows or cares about, but props to ABC for going out and getting some obscure driver of a racecar of some kind (I don’t really know or care enough to make the effort to know what circuit this tool drives on) to come on and make a fool of himself doing the cha-cha and foxtrot. One positive in this show returning for another season as opposed to ABC coming up with a new and possibly interesting show to replace it is that I already know this is one hour of TV I don’t have to waste time watching. With a new show, I might have spent one or two episodes watching and trying to decide if it was good or not, but with Dancing with the (D-list) Stars, I already know I don’t give a crap.
- I feel compelled to back track a bit and revisit the mess that my girl Caitlin Upton finds herself in. The Miss Teen South Carolina winner has been mercilessly mocked this week after a rambling, confusing response she gave during the Miss Teen USA pageant when asked why one-fifth of Americans can’t even locate their own country on a map. She referred to “U.S. Americans” and “the Iraq” in her answer, then admitted she simply got confused and rattled by the question. Now, everyone is lining up to take shots at her like she’s the first person ever to publicly misspeak or not make sense. Hey America, your own president rambles, makes no sense and has little or no knowledge of world geography and the names of foreign countries and leaders, so you really can't be that hard on an 18-year-old girl for doing the same. So she’s not a Rhodes scholar or a polished public speaker, so what? And no, I’m not just saying this because she’s incredibly hot (really, really hot), I’m saying it because not everyone has to be incredibly intelligent and well-spoken. It’s all right if some of us fill other roles in the world besides that one. I’d much rather be around people who are not the smartest but a generally good-hearted than people who are smart, well-educated but are also total a-holes. If the worst thing you can say about someone is that they don’t speak well under pressure and aren’t knowledgeable about global affairs, then I’d say that person is someone I’d be glad to call a friend and a fellow U.S. American.
- I always make a concerted effort to stay about from the obituary/people who’ve died topic, mostly because it’s a melancholy and depressing subject. Still, as a huge rock fan and a fan of rock’s history, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the passing of a true music legend, Hilly Kristal. The name might not be familiar to you, but you probably know Kristal’s most famous accomplishment. He was the founder and owner of one of the most famous clubs in the world, C.B.G.B.’s. C.B.G.B.’s is right up there with the Whiskey in L.A. as the places that any band worth anything has played at. It was located on the south end of Manhattan, opened in 1973 and served as the launching point for the careers of legendary artists such as the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television and Sonic Youth. C.B.G.B.’s was ground zero for the punk movement in the ‘70s and gained worldwide notoriety after starting as little more than a dingy, grungy, skid-row bar. Kristal was the driving force behind it all and a major player on the music scene in New York for many years, or at least he was until he was forced to close down his club last October in a dispute over back rent payments with the building’s owner, the Bowery Residents’ Commission. The final show at C.B.’s featured Patti Smith, the legendary singer/poet who was so much a part of the club’s success in its early days. The club’s name (C.B.G.B.’s & O.M.F.U.G. in full) actually stands for “Country, Bluegrass and Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandisers), which is a mouthful for sure and belies what the club ended up being all about. Kristal ultimately lost his battle to keep the club open and this week, he lost a long battle with lung cancer. He will be missed, just as true rock fans miss his great club and all of the amazing history it represents.
- In one of the least surprising sports stories of the millennium, Cuba will not be sending a boxing team to the upcoming world championships in Chicago. This decision comes on the heels of an incident at the Pan Am Games in Brazil earlier this summer where two members of the Cuban boxing team went missing, ended up holed up at a Brazilian resort and attempted to defect. The tournament in Chicago is one of three qualifiers for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, so the Cubans do have two more chances to qualify is what is traditionally one of their strongest sports. The true surprise here isn’t that Fidel Castro has elected not to send his team to a tournament in the United States; the real shocker is that he ever allows any of his athletes to leave the country, period. Really, any Cuban athlete who has the chance to set foot outside that absolute hellhole of a country is a flight risk. I’m actually surprised that Castro hasn’t tried to find a way to keep all of his athletes from ever leaving Cuba to compete. Y’know, like having them compete via video conferencing, set up a web cam at the gym and have their opponents do the same wherever they are. Personally, if I’m a Cuban athlete, my top priority is becoming the best at whatever sport gives me the best chance to travel outside the country. Then, the second my plane touches down in another country, I’m making a mad dash to the nearest embassy and asking what paperwork I need to fill out in order to defect.
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