Category: Thoughts

The Guardian has a great piece on the Duke lacrosse scandal and what it means for college sports. Apparently it’s been circulating at UVA and other sports-heavy colleges around the country. The upshot: hot teams bring recognition and tuition-paying undergrads. They also bring down academic standards and increase corruption, violence, binge drinking.

Great stats: “One survey showed 50 students die each year from alcohol poisoning. American students spend $6bn a year on alcohol, more than on books, snack food and all other drinks combined.” “The fact is that male student athletes, who make up only 3 per cent of the student population, account for 19 per cent of campus sexual assaults. Professor Richard Lapchick of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics of Sport at the University of Central Florida believes that one in seven female students is sexually assaulted at college. Yet few incidents are reported and even fewer lead to prosecution.”

(If the crimes go unreported, how do the reporters know the real numbers? My guess is that the data comes from surveys, or possibly from a disparity between medical-center reports and criminal charges filed…)

Of course, to me, the Duke scandal just confirmed everything I have thought about lacrosse players since junior high school.

U.S. Baby name data was updated on May 12 and there’s been a predictable uptick (I want to say “flood” but it’s not that many) in baby-name news stories. My favorite so far is also one of the most emailed NYT stories, and the headline is: And if it’s a boy, will it be Lleh?, about people naming their daughters Nevaeh: heaven spelled backward.

Equally funny but not baby-related is this list of aptronyms, names which coincidentally describe the jobs people have, starting with, of course, Wayne Schmuck, an unscrupulous used-car dealer.

Looking through Flickr’s interesting pictures I came across an incredible portrait labeled “World Beard and Mustache Championships.”

What, I asked, is this championship?

Only the most insanely awesome mustache (or moustache, if you insist) and beard related event ever.

Obviously, facial hair has replaced real estate as the primary subject of this blog. Hope that’s OK with both my readers.

Some zombies had a social event today and before that several of them dropped by my house.

I took some pictures. There were even anti-zombie protesters, who for some reason were dressed as pirates.

I didn’t see anybody dressed as a ninja, perhaps because of the recent ATF crackdown on ninjas. Or perhaps because ninjas are never seen.

Miguel is a big fan of Billmon’s Whiskey Bar, which I’ve started reading. It’s got some real gems in it, like this one:

… you can also argue that America’s ability to dump $800+ billion into a hole in the desert without suffering a hasty financial and economic collapse… shows how enormously strong, and prosperous, the empire really is.

Oh, sure, the extremists and conspiracy theorists are bizarre, each in their own way. But each one of them has at least a peer or a mirror. For every unhinged Clinton-hater there’s an unhinged Bush-hater, and for every extreme-right-wing blog there’s a site that’s just a little more or just a little less extreme. But I’ve only seen one political blog so far that manages to be absurd without the absurdity being part of the politics: : Stars over Washington, the political astrology blog.

I found it while looking for websites to update Lucien’s site about Valerie Plame. This is a great job.

The Bush administration’s war on science continues with marijuana. I think that marijuana, birth control– especially the “morning after” or “Plan B” variety, and the political opposition to the new HPV vaccines are all of a piece. They all come from the standard puritan fear that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.

Let cancer-stricken people stop vomiting? Not if some of them might also get high! Stop unwanted pregnancies and abortions? Not if it allows people to have sex without feeling guilty! Vaccinate against an STD that also causes cancer? Not if people can have sex without fear of death!

There are several ironies here. The first is the more commonly observed: teaching young people about birth control prevents abortion more effectively than the right’s current plan of telling them just to avoid screwing like teenagers. The second is parallel: if you prevent cervical cancer by using the HPV vaccine, you’ll prevent some of the need for medical marijuana. The third is that, as my father pointed out to me, we don’t even know if abstinence is really effective or not, since it’s never really been implemented in any systematic way (fortunately for those of us who enjoy having been born or having offspring).

I love Slate’s features on obscure economic indicators, and by now I feel like I know a good one when I see it: computer book sales are up.

According to the detailed analysis, I’d better start writing about C# instead of Linux desktops.

Florida-based artist Emily Page sent me a note about how the forthcoming movie Snakes on a Plane has led to an expression meaning, essentially, “Oh well, shit happens.”

It is fortunate that I have learned the expression today, because I now have the exact right expression of sympathy for someone who gets this horrible new eye fungus disease that’s going around.

We don’t teach science in our science classes.

Really. What is the matter with Arkansas?