I wanted to highlight this because of the illustration attached to the article:
What the FRACK is this? I don’t think it is a photograph: is it supposed to be an artist’s conception of the new residence? It looks like someone used a fisheye lens to take a photo of a Thomas Kinkade painting.
We were vaguely hoping TMQ would address the Grambling State situation this week. We know that sounds weird, but we were hoping he might have an original or interesting take on it. Or, failing that, something we could mock.
We also thought maybe he’d have something to say about Bum Phillips. Or Bud Adams. He’s usually pretty good about doing tributes to significant NFL figures who have passed away.
Nope.
So what does TMQ write about this week? After the jump…
ESPN reports that the Grambling State football team returned to practice on Monday. (Previously.)
It also looks like the team may be getting some financial help:
Also:
That’s great, and good on the Cytosport folks. (I’ve never used Muscle Milk, but I know people who do.)
I have to wonder, though: how sustainable is this?
And per SI, “In recent years, Grambling’s football program has run a deficit of between $1.2 and $1.8 million.”
In other news, Grambling State fired the online editor of the school newspaper and suspended the opinions section editor.
David Lankster, the online editor, claims his firing is in retaliation for photos he tweeted of the conditions the football team deals with. (Some of those photos are reproduced in the linked article.) The person who fired Lankster claims he did so over concerns about the use of anonymous sources:
The linked article doesn’t go into more detail on those concerns, and the complaint strikes me as odd. Is there material that Lankster published that was not confirmed by other sources? Is there material that Lankster published that turned out to be false? If either of these was actually the case, you’d think it would be mentioned somewhere.
On the other hand, the opinions editor was suspended “for organizing and participating in a ‘State of Emergency’ student rally calling out the school’s perceived flaws including ‘crumbling buildings and the student-teacher ratio.’” She admits to organizing the rally, but says “it grew into a media spectacle beyond her control or simple goals once football players decided to participate.”
It looks bad, especially in light of the Lankster firing, but I’m on the side of the school when it comes to the suspension. You’re supposed to cover the story, not be the story.
(Hattip on this: Jimbo.)
Bud Adams, owner of the Tennessee Titans, previously known as the Houston Oilers, and the man who fired Bum Philips and traded Earl Campbell for a “sack of doorknobs” (to steal Lawrence‘s phrase), has passed away at 90.
Wow. What timing. I’ll wait until tomorrow and see if there’s anything amusing in the HouChron.
(Required link for any mention of “Ironic”.)
Edited to add: Oh, why wait?
Edited to add 2:
I realize he didn’t die under a doctor’s care, and protocol must be followed, but that’s just oddly phrased to me. I guess they just want to make sure he wasn’t whacked by a disgruntled Oilers fan? Speaking of which…
Adams lived alone and was found in the office at his River Oaks home. He had not been seen since Saturday, Houston police at the home said.
Which is mildly interesting, since the HouChron published a tribute to Bum from “Tennessee Titans owner K.S. ‘Bud’ Adams Jr. and the Titans organization” on Saturday morning. It seems like they were posting tributes to Bum as quickly as they got them and could edit them. Wouldn’t it be even more deeply “ironic” if Bud’s last act in life was writing a tribute to the man he fired?
Not much going on today, so here’s a few links I found interesting.
Robert N. Proctor is a professor of the history of science at Stanford University and the author of “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition.”
“the case for abolition”? We’ve seen how well prohibition worked for alcohol. We see how well it works for marijuana. If you outlaw cigarettes, I promise you: the resulting chaos will make Prohibition and the War on (Some) Drugs look like a Sunday School picnic.
The NFL loser update will return Tuesday. (The Giants play Monday night.)
In the meantime, I wanted to take note of a story that’s been on the FARK sports tab, but is too strange to ignore here.
The Grambling State athletic program, as I like to say, does not have “issues”: they have a lifetime subscription and a complete run of bound volumes. You may recall that the men’s basketball team went 0-28 this past season. You may also recall that the football team lost the first two games of the season, and fired coach Doug Williams.
Things have not gotten better for the football team. They’re now 0-7 and 0-4 in conference. And the players are unhappy. It seems there’s some concern over Williams being fired, and over “poor facility conditions”.
The players are also unhappy about travel policies. Money’s tight, so the team travels by bus.
Grambling was scheduled to play Jackson State tonight. The game is Jackson State’s homecoming game, so it is kind of a big deal for the school (in terms of both spirit and money).
Note the use of the word “was”: the Grambling State players refused to get on the team buses Friday afternoon, and the game has been cancelled.
Yes, you understand that correctly; the football team is in open revolt.
The conference has ruled the game a forfeit, which I guess makes Grambling State 0-8 now. I can’t remember the last time there was a forfeit of this kind in college football; this list at SportsReference.com appears to include games that were retroactively forfeited due to NCAA enforcement actions, and (oddly enough) Wikipedia does not have a “forfeited college football games” entry.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. There’s already some detail coming out about the Williams firing that makes the school look bad. And the school is clearly struggling financially: ESPN has a good backgrounder from Tim Keown.
I have a lot of respect for the Grambling players for standing up and saying “We’re not gonna take it anymore”, and I would hate to see them punished for expressing legitimate concerns. At the same time, though, given the university’s financial troubles and athletic struggles, I have to wonder if maybe the best solution is to shut down the athletic program completely. That certainly seems like a better option than Grambling renting itself out as a cupcake opponent or players spending 15 hours on buses.
(To be fair, ESPN says it is only 160 miles to Jackson State. That’s about the distance between Houston and Austin, or roughly three hours travel time. I wonder if the protest would have been more effective if they’d refused to get on the buses for Indy? Then again, 15 hours each way on a bus gives you a lot of time to think. And plan.)
Edited to add: Totally forgot that I wanted to note this bit from the horribly written TampaBay.com article FARK linked:
“…has won a record 14 mythical national championships”? Say what?
Edited to add 2: By way of the FARK discussion thread, here’s a really good article from SI that goes into more detail on Grambling’s issues, including the whole weight room floor issue and the money problems.
Awww. She’s suffered enough already. Be gentle with her.
Isn’t that a shame?
I wonder: how many of the people who went to prison based on her tests had spouses that left them?
How many of the people who went to prison based on her tests were separated from disabled children of their own, do you suppose?
Dookhan faces charges including eight counts of tampering with evidence, 17 counts of obstruction of justice, one count of perjury and one count of falsely claiming to hold a degree.
Massachusetts law allows a maximum sentence of 10 years for tampering with evidence and 20 years for perjury.
The prosecution is seeking five to seven years. The defense is asking for one year.
Law enforcement agencies across Europe are on alert over the proliferation of gun-making software that is easily found on the Internet and can be used to make a weapon on a consumer-grade 3-D printer…
No wonder that in the European Union, which has much stricter gun-control laws than the United States, officials worry that it is becoming much easier to covertly obtain and carry potentially lethal weapons.
A couple of things that are bothering me:
NYT headline: “Court Rules on ‘Stand Your Ground’ Costs“.
And the lead goes on to refer to “a major ruling on the ‘stand your ground’ debate over personal safety”. Except if you keep reading, it doesn’t appear that this ruling had anything to do with “stand your ground”, but is based on self-defense law in Washington state, as well as legal interpretations of that law going back to the 1930s.
(The court ruled that a defendant who successfully argued that he acted in self-defense was entitled to reimbursement for his legal defense and lost wages.)
And Charles Isherwood reviews a revival of “The Winslow Boy”:
…
I may be misreading Isherwood here, but he seems awfully dismissive of the case that’s at the heart of “The Winslow Boy”, and, by implication, the actual case it was based on. I admit that I have not seen a production of “The Winslow Boy”, or the film version of it: I would very much like to, but have not. (The play has not yet been produced in Austin, and I just haven’t gotten around to watching the movie. Maybe one night at movie night…)
But some years ago I read Alexander Woollcott’s essay on the real case of George Archer-Shee. Woollcott, as I recall, referred to it as one of the high points of English law, and I have to agree with him. Here is a young boy, accused of theft and expelled from his school without any hearing at all. Here is one of the greatest lawyers in England taking on the government itself. And all of this over a matter of honor. (There’s also some neat tricks here. I like Carson’s use of the “petition of right“. And not mentioned in the Wikipedia entry, but mentioned in Woollcott’s essay: when Carson and the family were trying to secure compensation for Archer-Shee, they got a friendly Member of Parliament to introduce a bill cutting the salary of the First Lord of the Admiralty by 100 pounds a year. That got his attention.)
(“… the school insists that there is ample proof of the boy’s guilt”. Again, I haven’t seen the play. But in the real Archer-Shee case, once there actually was a hearing, it came out that there was basically no evidence at all against Archer-Shee: the entire claim that Archer-Shee had stolen the postal order revolved around the testimony of an elderly half-blind distracted postal clerk who couldn’t even identify the boy.)
This, I think, is a good summary of why Woollcott and I find the Archer-Shee case so moving, and why I think Isherwood’s review gets a little under my skin:
(Edited to add: Another part of Isherwood’s review that bugs me: “the fatal five-shilling postal order (let’s just say it’s a cashier’s check for a small sum)”. I really didn’t feel like I needed Isherwood to explain what a “postal order” was to me. I’ve dealt with postal orders and money orders myself, and I’m sure many of the NYT‘s readers have as well. In any case, there should be enough clues from context to allow the average NYT reader to figure out what a “postal order” is, without Isherwood’s condescending explanation.
And five shillings is a “small sum”? According to the British National Archives, five shillings in 1910 money translates to 14.27 pounds in 2005 money. Sadly, the currency converter doesn’t go past 2005, but 14.27 pounds at current exchange rates works out to $23.10. Perhaps that’s a small sum to Isherwood, but I suggest that was a non-trivial sum of money to a 13-year-old boy in 1908.)
I’ve been running way behind on these (life has gotten in the way) and am hoping to fix that soon.
In the meantime, I do have a post up about my experience last night at The Goodnight. The categories on this post might give you a hint as to how things went…
Let us start off with one of TMQ Watch’s patented musical interludes. This one even has a small amount of relevance to this week’s TMQ:
You’ve got to love YouTube comments:
stephen scazzafavo 2 weeks ago
thumbs up for REAL COUNTRY none of this new age shiit
Yeah. About that, Steve.
Anyway, with that diversion out of the way, let’s get into this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
A while back, I suggested the words ‘f–king” and “b-tch”, along with the conjugate “f–king b-tch”, do not belong in a professional email.
To that list, I now suggest that the word “whore” be added.
Also: pay the writer! But that’s not really a “safety” tip…
So, here, have some crap:
The complete “Mama’s Family” is being released on DVD, for those of you who were looking forward to this. And if you were, may God have mercy on your soul.
Burnett considered the “Family” sketches to be “Tennessee Williams on acid.”
Highly local, but mildly interesting to me, and also picked up from the LAT: Mayor Garcetti has more or less fired the head of the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Chief Brian Cummings, who announced his retirement Thursday, never fully recovered from his management team’s admission in March of last year that highly touted 911 response times were inaccurate, making it appear that rescuers arrived faster than they actually did.
Subsequent Times’ investigations documented widespread delays in processing calls for help, routine failures to summon the closest medical rescuers from nearby jurisdictions and large disparities in getting rescuers to life-threatening emergencies in different areas of the city.
I don’t know what to make of this NYT article, so I’ll throw it up for grabs.
The brief summary: In 2010, Sheriff Deborah Trout of Hunterdon County, New Jersey was indicted, along with two of her deputies, on charges that included
What happened next?
The paper of record is not helpful in explaining why the state attorney general’s office took over a county prosecutor. That just doesn’t make sense to me; where is the legal authority for the attorney general to just simply take over a county prosecutor’s office, barring something on the order of massive corruption within the office?
But let’s set that question aside for right now. You can probably guess what happened after that:
And you can probably guess what happened after that: one prosecutor was fired, and two others (including the one who secured the indictments) were “forced to retire”. The news peg for this is that the fired prosecutor has filed a wrongful termination suit, which has led to the release of the grand jury records for the original indictment.
Here are my problems:
So I report, you decide.