Whipped Cream Difficulties

Joe Ely’s classic song “Fighting For My Life” contains the lyric:

I don’t mean to crash the cymbals, I don’t mean to beat the drum

I don’t want to waste your time, I’d rather save you some.

TMQ’s favorite Batman film is “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm“. You can now skip the first 335 words of this week’s column. And if that’s all you were looking for, you can skip everything after the jump, too.

Easterbrook has decided to retire “two perennial items”. We are not sad to see “Christmas Creep” go, as that was never amusing. We are saddened by the end of “Cheerleader of the Week”, but are reassured by Easterbrook’s promise that “the cheerleaders will continue to be discussed and shown, as circumstances merit”.

Speaking of circumstances meriting, Karissa is kind of cute.

This is AFC preview week for TMQ. As we’ve mentioned in the past, we don’t go item by item through the preview, but encourage you to read it for yourselves. We do comment on specific things within the preview that grab our attention.

For example, TMQ’s suggestion that the Buffalo Bills “may have paid too much” for Mario Williams, but this may be a good thing “because his signing added a sense of excitement to the season”. Excitement? Buffalo? Uh-huh.

“…last year when Ohio State vacated its 2010 victories owing to the Jim Tressel scandal, that made Penn State the winner of the 2010 Buckeyes-Nittany Lions contest, previously viewed as a 38-14 Ohio State win.” Actually, that was not our understanding of how the NCAA sanctions work; we understood that Ohio State had the win taken away, but Penn State was not given credit for it in the overall records.

“But when very expensive high-tech equipment fails to function properly in low-stress peacetime conditions, why is it that the contractors who built the stuff never have to pay a refund?” At this point, Gregg, we don’t have any evidence that the Porter collision happened due to an equipment malfunction. We were previously unfamiliar with “The Naval Diplomat”, but his take on the Porter incident strikes us as remarkably sane. In any case, do you think we could wait for the final report from the Navy before assigning blame?

For decades the establishment media have said that rising greenhouse emissions are a super-mega-ultra emergency. If last week’s numbers had shown a carbon emissions rise, the likely response would have been Page 1 stories crying doomsday. Instead when the problem diminished, silence.

TMQ applauds recent NCAA rule changes:

1. extending “‘defenseless player’ protection to the head and neck of an edge defender being hit by a crackback block”
2. “any player whose helmet comes off during a play must leave the field for one down” (this rule has also been adopted by the National Federation of High Schools).

We are not sure how the new “defenseless player” rule will work in practice, but we agree with Easterbrook that the helmet rule is A Good Thing.

Speaking of good things, TMQ’s Houston Texas summarized: “So many Houston starters departed in free agency over the winter that it’s hard to guess how the Moo Cows will look in 2012.” TMQ devotes one fairly short paragraph to the Texans.

(We will not be betting money with Lawrence on the Texas this year. At least, not more than $5.)

“Jacksonville management would rather have a punter than Florida’s most exciting football player of the decade. Jacksonville fans, get the message?” “Jax entered training camp with a league-high $25 million in unused salary cap space. Jacksonville fans, get the message?” “Jacksonville wants good publicity in return for doing just shy of nothing. Jags fans, get the message?” We’ll come back to this later.

Why is college so expensive? TMQ summarizes two schools (ha!) of thought. School one is represented by Naomi Schaefer Riley and her book, The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Pay For. We had not previously heard of this book, and are glad TMQ brought it to our attention. Easterbrook summarizes Riley’s argument as “private colleges are more about grandee status for an indolent professoriate than about education: the undergraduates are seen as limitless reserves of money with the wool safely pulled over their eyes.”

School two is represented by Robert Archibald and David Feldman, and their book Why Does College Cost So Much?. The Archibald/Feldman argument, as summarized by TMQ is simply: unlike physical goods, the cost of services (especially services provided by highly educated people) has been rising over time. People expect benefits, such as pensions and health care; those cost money, putting an upward pressure on prices.

TMQ goes on, in this same item, to take a few kicks at Jill Tiefenthaler, the new president of Colorado College. “She has two senior personnel co-teaching a small seminar. No wonder college costs so much!” Well, the article TMQ links provides what I see as a pretty compelling rationale for Dr. Tiefenthaler and Dr. Kevin Rask (her co-teacher, and also her husband) to be teaching the class:

Tiefenthaler, who became the college’s president in July after serving as provost at Wake Forest University, is well-versed is the economic challenges facing higher education and institutions like Colorado College. But she wanted to teach the class as her own introduction to Colorado’s unique block schedule, in which students take one class at a time for three and a half weeks — a total of four classes per semester.

As far as TMQ’s complaints about Dr. Tiefenthaler’s inauguration ceremony (“With the student-debt situation the way it is, for the president of Colorado College or of any college to lavish money on a lengthy event devoted to her personal glorification shows detachment from the struggles of middle-class families to afford private colleges.”) here’s the schedule of events. It strikes us that almost all of these events are designed to better the campus (the community service project), show off the work of students, or benefit the students (the barbecue and the ball). Nothing on that list strikes us as being devoted to Dr. Tiefenthaler’s “personal glorification”.

(We like a little pomp and circumstance with our higher education. As many of our loyal readers know, we graduated from a small private college in mid-May. There was a lot of pomp and circumstance around that, including a set of ceremonies on the Friday before: a mass for the graduating students, followed by a walk through campus (and we will tell you: when we came out the front doors of the main building and the bagpiper was playing, we got a little teary-eyed) followed by a champagne reception. Our university does not do anything second class, and we do not begrudge one damn penny they spent on these events.)

“What is it about Raiders’ DNA that makes them allergic to rules?” It isn’t the DNA, Gregg, it is Oakland. Walter Sobchak could have substituted “Oakland” for “”Nam” in his most famous quote and it would still fit.

Plot holes in “The Dark Knight Rises”. Who’d thunk it? (We apologize for giving this item short shrift, but we have not seen TDKR, nor do we really have much interest in seeing it. To be honest, pretty much all superhero movies bore us to tears, though we did like the first “Iron Man” and “The Dark Knight” much more than we expected to.)

Creep.

Readers write: OSU can get tax-free returns on that $483 million from last week, and being unfair to sharks.

Tune in next week: we hope the Cowboys will get more space than the Texans did this week.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2012 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Movies, Neuroscience, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.