Posts Tagged ‘Super Bowl’
Monday, Monday
* In local news! @baylorstudio and @artmilwaukee win $50,000 Joyce Award to create original work of art in blighted neighborhoods.
* The next Kim Stanley Robinson novel! Shaman: A Novel of the Ice Age.
* Is science fiction the future of the novel?
* Student loans: The next housing bubble.
* ‘We Ask That You Do Not Call Us Professor.’
* McSweeney’s: “I’m an English professor in a movie.”
* The University of British Columbia is striking a blow at gender inequity in professors’ pay, promising all tenure-stream female faculty a 2 per cent pay hike by the end of the month – a rare approach expected to cost the school about $2-million this year. I asked on Twitter and nobody answered — is this legal in Canada? I don’t think it would be here.
* Expelled Student Activist Wins $50K Court Judgment Against University President. The president is being held personally liable for his decisions.
An environmental activist expelled from Georgia’s Validosta State University (VSU) has won a $50,000 award in a lawsuit against the university president who kicked him out of school in 2007. In a dramatic rebuke to President Ronald Zaccari, the federal jury that heard the case found Zaccari personally liable for violating Hayden Barnes’ due process rights.
* Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, sat down at the conference table just moments before the faculty meeting began. It was three o’clock on February 12, 2010, and thirteen professors and staff members in the biology department had crowded into a windowless conference room on the third floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. The department chair, a plant biologist named Gopi Podila, distributed a printed agenda. Bishop was sitting next to him, in a spot by the door. Inside her handbag was a gun.
* Scenes from the struggle for academic freedom in New York. Much more here.
* School closings are a popular method of cost-cutting for big-city districts, but critics say the savings are exaggerated. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pushing for up to 100 school closings this year. New York City just announced 26 planned closures.
But studies refute claims of savings. School buildings are difficult to sell. They cost money to maintain, and when vacant can become blights on their communities. Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee closed 23 schools in 2008, claiming she would save $23 million—and instead cost the district $40 million.
* The Super Bowl Is Single Largest Human Trafficking Incident In U.S. Football’s death spiral. The Rarest Play in the NFL.
* Capitalism: rise of the machines.
* Being touched against your will has become a twisted rite of passage for American females. It’s a reminder that you’re never safe anywhere. That your body is not really yours—but instead public property, there to be rubbed against by an old man or pinched and videotaped by a young one.
* It was a startling assertion that seemed an about-face from church doctrine: A Catholic hospital arguing in a Colorado court that twin fetuses that died in its care were not, under state law, human beings.
* Communism! S&P To Face Charges From States, U.S. Over Wrongdoing Before Financial Crisis.
* John McCain: the mask slips.
* Our individual perception of global warming is matching up with reality.
* Occupy Buddhism. Relatedly: growing up a Lama in exile.
* The Institute for Centrifugal Research.
We believe that even the trickiest challenges confronting mankind can be diverted via human centrifugalization. Spinning people around at a sufficiently high G-Force will solve every problem.
* Canada ends the penny. This means the U.S. will start talking seriously about ending the penny in about fifty years or so.
* And the Big Picture blog visits the sky.
Imagine No Concussions
Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.
Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier dare to imagine the end of the NFL. Discussion at MetaFilter.
Lazy Saturday Night
* 100,000 protest austerity in Portugal.
* Adventure Gamer is blogging his way through the classic adventure game canon. He just finished Leisure Suit Larry; next up is Maniac Mansion, and soon after that, Police Quest…
* And only Weird Al can save the Super Bowl now. You heard me.
Some Sunday Links
* Decadence watch: Please be advised we are between five and nine years away from President Tebow.
* The Non Sports Fan’s Guide to Maybe Enjoying the Super Bowl. A List of Things to Say to Sound as if You Understand the Super Bowl, Dummy. Go… Giants? I think I have that right.
* The set list from last night’s fantastic Mountain Goats show in Saxapahaw. And from Vu, an interesting New York Magazine read on Mountain Goats superfandom from 2009.
* The headline reads, “No kidney transplant for dying East Bay dad who is illegal immigrant.”
* Death, Debt and Climate Change.
There were 2900 temperature records set in the United States in January. Exxon Mobil reported yesterday that its quarterly profits had increased to $9.6 billion on revenues of over $70 billion. It’s 60 degrees on February 1 in New York City. These facts are connected. I continue to think that one reason Bloomberg evicted OWS was that he lost patience with waiting for it to get cold enough to drive the Occupiers out.
I have proposed that “debt is death.” It sounds a bit melodramatic. You can in fact map connections between the debt-financed globalized industries, direct violence caused by their expansion, and the indirect but nonetheless deadly violences of climate change.
* Ben Valentine considers statue porn. This and the last two via zunguuzungu’s always essential Sunday Reading.
* The strange case of Michael Swango, serial killing doctor. Via Neil.
* Then Republican governors saved the economy.
* SNL takes a visit to President Gingrinch’s Moon Utopia.
* And just for the Hunger Games fans: a speculative map of Panem. Via io9.
No Cheerleaders at the Super Bowl?
I didn’t realize any NFL teams went without cheerleaders. Kudos, Steelers and Packers! Of course, with all we’re learning about how dangerous football is, maybe we’d all be better off with just the cheerleaders, and no game.
Then again, maybe not.
‘The Super Bowl Is One of the Biggest Human Trafficking Events in the United States’
As the country’s largest sporting event, the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers will make the Dallas-Fort Worth area a magnet for business of all kinds.
That includes the multimillion dollar, under-age sex industry, said activists and law enforcement officials working to combat what they say is an annual spike in trafficking of under-age girls ahead of the Super Bowl.
Super Monday Night Links
* My good friend Shankar D has returned to the Internet with his beloved annual March Madness blog.
* Democrats win the Super Bowl!
* Debt forgiveness is coming to Haiti.
* Is the U.S. Senate more dysfunctional than 18th century Poland’s Sejm? Paul Krugman reports. (Via Steve Benen.) Meanwhile, Open Left argues that reliably beating the filibuster would require 72 Democrats but only 54 Republicans, due to disparate party loyalty.
* How Republicans will kill the filibuster.
As I’ve said before, it is very near to impossible to build out an ideological model explaining why Republicans who voted for the deficit-financed Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit would vote against the deficit-neutral health-care reform bill. But it’s very easy to build out a model explaining why Republicans would vote for a bill that would help them if it passed and against a bill that would hurt them if it failed. Same goes for Democrats. Good-faith disagreement is not the explanation that best fits the data.This isn’t, importantly, an attack on either party. It’s good to have a competitive electoral system! But if we’re going to give the minority party a reason to want the majority party to fail at governing the country, we can’t also give them the power to make the majority party fail at governing the country. We need a legislative system that works alongside our political system, not one that pretends we have a different, more harmonious political system than we really do.
* While I’m wishing away the Senate, Neil Sinhababu is wishing away the 50 states.
* Terrorists who want to overthrow the United States government must now register with South Carolina’s Secretary of State and declare their intentions—or face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison. Keep it in mind. Via Boing Boing.
* Chris Christie getting positive press in New Jersey for gutting state employee benefits.
* Democrats think the kill-Medicare GOP budget is a political winner for them. That would certainly be a novelty. I’m still amazed Republicans are really going to get away with killing a jobs bill during a period of cataclysmic unemployment. It’s 2010; why can’t the DNC circulate talking points? Can’t wait to spend months and months begging the GOP to do the right thing on health care when we all already know they won’t.
* Parents, please don’t waterboard your children.
* Classic Books That Could Be Turned Into Video Games. Some of these are great: Don Quixote Kong, A Hundred Years of Solitaire, Pacman and the Sea, Super Karamazov Brothers, Pride and Extreme Prejudice…
* And deeply bad news for Gerries: delicious soda totally causes pancreatic cancer. I drank a lifetime’s worth in ten years, and then a second lifetime’s worth in the next ten years, so I have to say I feel a little screwed on this.
Saturday!
* OSU President Gordon Gee wants to reform the rules for the granting of tenure such that excellent teaching counts as a mode of scholarship. That sounds reasonable, but unless it’s aimed at the adjunct faculty problem it’s still mostly a band-aid on the labor crisis in the profession.
* What are the chances of a high school football player eventually going on to win the Super Bowl? Eric Barker has a chart that calculates them at 1 in 64,903. Now, I didn’t play in high school, but I still like my chances.
* And Pharyngula linked to the Kim Stanley Robinson talk I posted yesterday, bringing it a lot of new eyes and inaugurating an already rather lengthy discussion at his site about some of the points Stan makes in the talk. Check it out.
Bruuuuuuuuuuuce
I want you to step back from the guacamole dip, put the chicken fingers down, and turn your television all the way up. And what I want to know is: is there anybody alive out there?
It’s hard to find a YouTube clip of the Springsteen halftime performance that doesn’t disappear immediately due to NFL takedown nastygrams, but here are two that are working as of right now.
Still More
Still more.
* Nobody kills themselves in New Jersey. Stat via the MetaFilter thread on secularity and the social good.
* Springsteen says Wal-Mart deal a mistake. Also: How to come to terms with Bruce playing the Super Bowl.
* The child stars of Slumdog Millionaire still live in ‘grinding poverty.’ That is absurd.
* And Fox and Warner Bros. have agreed there’s enough Watchmen money for everyone.
Giants Win!
Giants win! Pundits to use a Patriots-Giants metaphor in their Super Tuesday analysis in 5…4…3…
UPDATE: Whoops.
