patrickdolan

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16 hours 38 min ago Watching Woody Freak

Was one highlight of my freshman year, a school year that included the Michigan Supreme Court overturning the state anti-pot law, The Dead and Pink Floyd in Hill, John and Yoko (and many more) in Crisler for John Sinclair, the lowering of the drinking age to 18, and yes, Mr. Flood's Party, although I think I spent more time in the Blind Pig and the Del Rio.

I had great teachers, too, and I learned a lot in the classroom. These Kids Today don't quite get how much fun college can be, I don't think.
6 days 5 hours ago It turns out that reading the book inside...

makes you go blind: http://www.asianscientist.com/health-medicine/asia-myopia-short-sightedness-lancet-study-2012/.

Wankers.
2 weeks 1 hour ago Lou Reed said once that

Mitch Ryder's cover of "Rock 'n' Roll" is the best cover of one of his songs ever.



"Then she tuned into that Detroit station..."



Iggy.



Also: Motown.
2 weeks 1 day ago There's a rank order to these things.

Gordon Gee is the biggest scumbag in this story because he's whored out a university to athletics.



Jim Tressel is a liar and a sanctimonious hypocrite, who expanded and enhanced the corruption endemic in college sports.



We fans plunked down our money and kept the machine running. Ohio fans, in particular, denied and continue to deny what was obvious on its face.



Pryor participated in a corrupt enterprise that he didn't build. It's entirely possible that at Michigan (or Stanford or Iowa) he would have developed into someone we could respect, even admire. But the choice he made--to attend tOSU, probably for pay--foreclosed that possibility. I wish him well--that is, I hope he comes to understand what happened and does what he can to make amends. And if he did help his mother with the money, well there are worse crimes.



The people who should burn in hell are the grown-ups. Pryor's got a ways to go before he belongs in that category.
5 weeks 2 days ago "Better"?

I'd say that the Ivy League is more impressed with their degrees than the rest of us. One of the reasons that I went to grad school in the Big Ten instead of the Ivy League was that I looked at the degrees of the people who would be my potential mentors, and thought, "incest." (There were other reasons as well. But that was one. And an analogous train of thought led me to go somewhere other than UM, which was my undergrad school, and had/has first rate people in my field.)
When was the last time UM hired a president that hadn't been a president or at the highest reaches of administration somewhere else? Mary Sue Coleman was president at Iowa before she moved to Ann Arbor. I suspect that if anything filters out UM grads, it's something that happens earlier in the process. Maybe UM PhDs are more interested in being scholars than administrators? (I doubt it, but I think you'll see possible explanations will multiply if you let them.)
14 weeks 5 days ago We live in a world...

In which a musician produces better prose than most journalists.

My only contact with Detroit was as a UM student in the seventies. It's a great city, with great people, that's been hammered by history and politics. Anybody doing anything to get some money into the local economy and to get people's heads up is fine in my book. (Also, I like a couple of the songs.)

I hope I'd have the brains to say the same thing about an MSU or tOSU fan helping out. If you take KR at his word (I do) this about jobs and people.

I'm from Iowa, and I'm hoping Steven Bloom gets a job at the Freep.
17 weeks 5 days ago Indiana

I'm from Indianapolis, and I mostly don't like the place. But Hoosiers, like any people, anywhere, hate liars--part of the reason that they put up with Bob Knight as long as they did was because they believed he didn't pretend to be something that he wasn't. I predict that hiring Tressel won't go down well in the part of the sports community that cares about things beyond winning.

And since we're talking about Indiana, I'll point this out: at least it's not an important job, like coaching the North Central High School basketball team.
20 weeks 1 day ago I realize no harm was intended..

Three facts:



1. On occasion, I work with rape survivors.



2. I find the word "rape" to describe something far less traumatic than real rape painful.



3. I do so because I see the incredible pain and anger the use of the word causes the people I work with.



You can do whatever you want with those facts, except make them go away.



Go Blue.
21 weeks 2 days ago It's actually a process that's taken longer than 5 years.

Thirty's more like it, ever since Proposition 13. It just got much, much worse when the housing bubble burst.



Fortunately for the "no politics" rule, fucking up the California higher education system, once a model for other states and even the world, has required the full attention of all kinds of people over the years.



They'll still be plenty of money for football, of course, never you fear.
21 weeks 2 days ago Not so much a "straw man."

More a response to this: "I know plenty of people who decided between two colleges based off of the success of their football or basketball program."



I talk to students who say they came to Iowa because they're Hawkeyes fans all the time. I think it's nuts, and they tend to be occupying seats that I'm sure Iowa could fill with better qualified students from out of state. But they're in-state kids, and they get a leg up on admissions because of it, as is only right, because they're also taxpayers. I'm guessing it's easier to get into UM if you're from Michigan, right?
Theme provided by Roopletheme; sidebars adapted from Chris Murphy.