I took a rare trip to Redstone that did not involve a substituting gig so that I could take care of some of the stuff I don’t have time to when I am in school all day. However, I got a bit of a late start and by the time I got up here and through Walmart (to return those clothes we bought in Delosa in lieu of having luggage), it was too late to go to either of the ideal coffeehouses. So it was Hastings or Starbucks. I opted for Hastings.

And wouldn’t you know it, I ordered the coffee and fired up the computer only to find out that the Internet was down. I couldn’t get an IP address. I convinced them to reboot the router, which turned out to be a mistake because they inexplicably put their business operations and “Free WiFi” on the same router. So their entire system was down during the reboot and nobody could buy anything. Oops.

Anyhow, rebooting the router didn’t work. So I decided to put my nice new Android phone to the test and see if I could tether (connect computer to phone to Internet). This involved two OSes that I am not remarkably familiar with, Linux and Android. But I got it to work! Booyah! Linux has actually made significant strides in making it easier to install third party software. And Android has turned out to work quite well.

I do have to watch my usage, since I’m on a 4GB limit. At least for now. I called Verizon to ask about something else and the girl on the other end very helpfully pointed out that I was only put on the limit by mistake. She submitted a request to get me back to unlimited. We’ll see if it happens.

I only got up to .5GB last month. I only had it part of the month, but I spent the whole time downloading apps and other stuff that would use an abnormal amount of bandwidth. So I feel pretty confident about staying within the limits.

Unfortunately, I can’t check past usage because of a glitch on Verizon’s site. Another glitch on the site is why I had to call. And yet another glitch is why I was put on 4GB in the first place. Verizon’s website needs work.

It’s hard not to get a chuckle from this:

The cheap signs smashed into lawns and along the corners of busy intersections are hard to miss. “We Buy Junk Cars!” ‘’Cash for Your House!” ‘’Computer Repair.” The eyesores have vexed Hollywood Mayor Peter Bober for the past few years as he wastes valuable resources plucking up the signs only to watch them pop up in even greater numbers.

While stopped at a red light a few months ago, Bober studied the unsightly signs and came to a realization that would help him fight their proliferation: The criminals had left their calling cards in the form of business phone numbers.

“These people want us to call them, so let’s call them so much their head spins,” said Bober, who bought a $300 software program in March that makes robocalls to the businesses. The volume of calls has reached as high as 20 calls each to 90 businesses in a day.

Not sure if it’s legal, but I like it if it is. I’ve had that thought before. It’s not like we don’t know who is putting up the signs. The companies in question can say “Hey, that must have been done by some overenthusiastic boy we hired, sorry or whatever” or something, but this gives a particular incentive for them to take it down. There’s little more obnoxious than repeated calls. And unlike tickets, you don’t end up losing money due to court costs (if the businesses are smart, they collect the fines and then go to court and demand a separate hearing on each ticket).

There was an article in the Redstone newspaper a while back about the city coming down on people who aren’t taking care of their property. Most notably it was about enforcing a little-known rule that if the registration on your car isn’t current, you can be ticketed whether you are driving it or not. They’re starting to write these tickets now. The goal is not revenue-generation (for once!) but rather as a means of getting people to either fix or dispose of old cars that are considered a blight on the city.

More locally, there is the case of Kevin Erickson. The first time I met Kevin, it was because he called the police on me. We’d just moved in and he wanted the police to look into who these people were hanging out at the house next door to his aging mother’s. I haven’t seen much of him since his mother died.

Erickson has been in the Callie paper recently. He is an entrepreneur of sorts with a couple of businesses, selling off old stuff. Not the old stuff that we approve of like antiques and whatnot, but rather old cars and tractor equipment. There is a push to shut him down because the old tractors and such are considered, at least by some, to be unsightly. It doesn’t help that one of Erickson’s lots are seen by everyone who passes through Callie.

Now, in one sense, I am more sympathetic to Redstone than Callie, and in another sense I am more sympathetic to Callie. I have some sympathy for Redstone because it does have a pretty serious image problem. As a sort of junky place. And things like cars on cinder blocks for years on-end aren’t helping. And, to their credit, they’re also starting to offer people free disposal service. Whatever it takes, just so long as you get rid of your junk! Callie, in my view, has less to complain about. It doesn’t have a huge image problem. In fact, Erickson’s lots are really the only place in the entire town that is any sort of problem. On the other hand, unlike with Redstone, the lots do stick out like a sore thumb.

Ultimately, I sort of give Redstone a pass. But generally speaking, I look at some of these things as the things that make Arapaho what it is. And not entirely in the negative way. The fact that some people around here are only vaguely aware of what an HOA is just makes my heart sing a little. And when I am driving in the middle of nowhere, a broken down car in the middle of a field is actually more interesting than it is unsightly. The mountains out here are beautiful. We have trees and rivers. But I consider some of the broken down sheds to be a part of the landscape. There are some things about Arapaho that I consider unsightly, but these are not among them.

At the same time, I sort of do understand why these things are considered unattractive in suburban Colosse (for example). I’d probably be kind of upset if I just spent $250k on a house (which is a lot, in Colosse) only to have some hucksters next door making the neighborhood look a lot more like that other neighborhood where people spent $150k on their house.

However, the most enduring characteristic of Arapaho, and I would actually say the Mountain West more generally (outside some of the larger cities) is that you simply don’t have to care about such things. It’s the freedom of not caring. I read somewhere that the average car on the road is 11 years old, which once upon a time would have seemed bizarre. But around here, I even see Dodge Colts. Nobody cares. We live in a 2,400 square foot house (not including the basement) that is adjacent to trailers and mobile homes. It’s not ideal, but unlike the hustle and bustle of the suburbs where the “right” neighborhood means everything, it’s actually quite liberating.

The freaking out over Erickson’s lot reminds me of one of the things I was happy to leave behind from Colosse.

I am not what you might think of as a fashionista. I like to tuck in my Hawaiian shirts. The only matching I really care about involves belt-shoes-watch.

Every now and again I will do something conspicuously right. I bought an old cop’s shirt at a thrift store and would sometimes wear it unbuttoned over a white t-shirt and for whatever reason strangers would compliment me on it back in the early aughts.

And, apparently, I am a very good Walmart dresser.

When I suddenly had to replace my missing warddrobe in Genesis, we went to Walmart in order to restock. I bought a black plaid button shirt and some black jeans. Both of Clancy’s sisters complimented me on it even before they realized where I had bought the outfit and put it together.

It came up again at the wedding when their aunt complimented me on my suspenders (suspenders being another thing that I have done right over the years - people apparently like suspenders) and commented “I’ll bet you didn’t get that at Walmart.”

I hadn’t gotten it at Walmart the day before, but with the exception of the shirt, I had indeed gotten all of it at Walmart. The pants were Wrangler slacks, though, and not the typical Puritan/George that one things of as Walmart pants.

The whole weekend was another one of those God Bless Walmart situations. If you’re stranded without your luggage, there’s one place you can go to get things in order in a jiff even in a comparatively rural place like Genesis.

I was at that media/coffee place in Redstone that I have discussed before, when there was a bit of downtime and the woman behind the counter started talking to a customer that she apparently knew.

The baristess apparently greeted with the news that every mother wants to hear from her twenty year old son: My girlfriend is pregnant! And we just eloped! She had a way with words, it turned out, and said “Something gained and something lost. I gained a daughter-in-law and maybe a grandkid, but lost hope in my son’s future.”

She will no doubt love the grandchild, but she’s not particularly fond of the daughter-in-law. She secretly suspected that this was how things were going to turn out.

Anyhow, her lack of enthusiasm did not go over well with her son. She told him that he had just thrown his life away… just as she had twenty years before. Insert stuff about “Not that I don’t love my children…” here, which she quickly added.

Anyhow, the son apparently had designs on being a police officer. He won’t be able to do that now. So what, pray tell, was he going to do? That’s what she asked him. He replied that maybe he would become a security guard.

This next part (like the “something gained and something lost” quote above) is a direct quote, in part because I had to keep myself from laughing out loud:

“A security guard? Son, we live in Redstone. There’s nothing here worth paying someone to protect!”

If that isn’t the perfect encapsulation of Redstone stereotype, I don’t know what is.

Patrick Hruby argues that NCAA basketball players should go on strike. The argument for paying college football players is weak. The argument for basketball is even weaker. If they want to get paid, and they’re really good, they have a multitude of options. Also, Title IX. You can’t may men’s basketball without also paying women’s.

According to a new study, cursing at work can help you make friends and reduce stress.

Matt Yglesias points out that if we had more dense cities, we’d have less dense elsewheres. This would allow for more things like grass-fed cattle ranching. Though true, it still doesn’t explain how you get the rest of the country to agree to more dense living.

Derek Thompson investigates how spending has changed over the years.

Why are city centers growing more quickly when wealth becomes more suburbanized?

A World Without People: pictures of abandoned places.

Due to a labor dispute an entire Arena Football team was fired during a pregame meal. Stranger still? The on-the-spot replacement team went on to win.

I really hope that makeshift publishing becomes a thing. If we’re going to keep paper books around, the inventory problem has to be dealt with.

China has begun construction of a megacity, planned to be four times the population of New York and twice the size of Jersey. A part of me thinks this is just awesome. Except that I fear it will be disasterous.

As folks around here know, I oppose a playoff for college football. The notion that it produces the “fairest” result is far from clear when. More to the point, though, there is no perfect way to determine a champion. March Madness isn’t perfect. Major League Baseball isn’t perfect. The pursuit of perfection, often in the form of allowing more and more teams into the playoff because the 9th team is arguably just as good as the 8th, merely pushes the can down the road.

This post isn’t about playoffs. This post is about what is often behind the push for playoffs. That pursuit of perfection. A fool’s errand, as often as not. The notion that any system is going to produce the perfect result, unsullied by a freak loss here or a bad call there.

Until relatively recently, I was opposed to instant replay of any form in football. The idea being, even the instant replay people aren’t going to get it right sometimes. The typical “incontrovertible evidence” standard means that the replay booth is left to decide between whether it really looked like the ref’s call was wrong, or whether it really, really looked like the ref’s call was wrong. And sometimes they get it wrong entirely. Sometimes a pivotal call is one that can’t be reviewed. Sometimes the call on the ground is so effed up that there is no right way to do it (a fumble is confused for a forward pass, a whistle blows the play dead and the live ball is picked up with an open field for a touchdown… how do you sort that one out?). There is, of course, more fair and less fair, but the delays and such didn’t seem worth it.

My mind changed as (at least at the college level) the reviews got a lot better and, most importantly, faster. Particularly in the first half of the season. There seemed to be some backsliding towards the end of the season. But the first half of the season, as well as last season (which is when my mind was changed), demonstrated that it’s possible to correct the obvious bad ones (of which there are many) without delaying the game. My main point, though, about sometimes just accepting the bad calls as a part of the game rather than a betrayal of the game, stands… in the abstract, at least.

While I was down in Colosse, I watched a Southern Tech basketball game against (who else?) Utica. I don’t watch basketball on all that regular a basis, but it was the worst officiating I believe I have ever seen. Of course, that’s one of the fundamental differences between basketball and football. In football, there are some bad calls (even with instant replay) and they can sometimes have a powerful impact on the game. You can debate it, discuss it, pick it apart. But basketball? It comes down to 100,000 ref calls throughout the game. And there can’t be anything like instant replay. And a whole lot of them are in gray areas and all of them are in realtime. In a lopsided game, there isn’t much the refs can do to affect the outcome, but if it is at all close, the best you can hope for is that the refs screw up equally.

And that’s okay. It, like at least some crummy officiating in football, is built into the game.

To get back to playoffs, when I think of March Madness, whatever problems I have with it from a fairness standpoint, I don’t think anything it does even remotely compares to the arbitrariness of the referees. A reason for me to prefer football, perhaps, though in the end it’s as much about the excitement of the games as it is about a true contest of superiority.

And that’s yet another reason why the LSU-Alabama rematch sucked.

Imagine yourself in a coffeehouse, book store, or some other third place. A man who appears to be in his late-twenties walks up to you and says, “Excuse me sir/ma’am, but do you have a cell phone?” Do you:

(a) Say “buzz off”

(b) Say yes, suspiciously.

(c) Say yes and ask why without suspicion.

(d) Say “go away”

(e) Say yes, grab your cell phone, and hand it to the stranger.

My answer, I must confess, would be (b). I wouldn’t lie or be so rude as to tell them to buzz off, but I guess I am just suspicious of strangers walking up and asking me something like that. It’s not necessarily a rational thing, but once I did loan my cell phone to a stranger when they proceeded to use it for twenty minutes trying to get a hold of somebody. I wasn’t in a hurry, but my plan was not to hang around where I was for twenty minutes. Then being the villain anyway for asking for my phone back before they were quite done.

I was the late-twenties guy (I’m not in my late twenties, but I look like I am) and asked that to a guy at a coffee shop in Redstone. He went with (e), though before he could actually give me the cell phone I told him what I was wanting (”Could you call my cell phone? I can’t find it.”). He called the cell and proceeded to walk around the coffee shop and help me find it.

It’s not unlike back when I was living in Deseret. Shortly before I left Colosse, my car was broken into and a few thousand dollars worth of stuff was taken from my car (it’s a long story as to why I had a few thousand dollars worth of stuff in my car). I called the Colosse PD, who couldn’t have been less interested if they had tried. I had to basically force them to take the serial number of my laptop in the event that it resurfaced at a pawn shop.

Flash forward to Deseret and I left my jacket somewhere. In my jacket was a checkbook. A couple months later, someone wrote a check to a pizza delivery place with said checkbook. I’d already canceled the account that the checkbook was cancelled to (something I had intended to do anyway, since the bank had no branches in Deseret) but the loss of my last checkbook expedited matters. Anyhow, the pizza delivery place sicked the credit collection dogs on me. In order to get out of it, I had to file an affidavit.

I apologized to the detective for taking up his time. But his response couldn’t have been more different from the Colosse PD’s. He got a subpoena for the cameras for the day in question. They didn’t have that, so he interviewed employees there. He gave me updates every two or three days. I didn’t stop him because I was interested in retrieving the jacket if it was at all possible. After about a week, he apologetically said that he had burned all leads.

Of course, we can ask “What else would a detective in small-town Deseret actually do with his time?” No doubt, there is some truth to this. But I became acquainted with the Detective over time because he lead a handful of drug arrests at the apartment complex I was living at. He was not an unimportant guy. Flash forward a little later after my car had been broken into and the culprit arrested, a DA visited me personally to ask if the plea bargain they had worked out was okay with me or if they should pursue it to the maximum extent of the law (I told her the plea bargain was fine).

I was at a tire place this morning. In the waiting room was a woman talking on the phone. She talked about all of the gossip going on around her (maybe the local) LDS church. She was actually quite witty and I cracked a smile at some of the things she said. This got a Look Of Death from her for listening in to her conversation.

Of course, I would rather not have been listening in to her conversation. I would rather have been watching TV on my phone, but I couldn’t hear it because she was talking. So instead I just got caught up on blog-reading. The only alternative was for me to go outside, where it was -5 degrees. It’s because of that I don’t blame her for not going outside to talk, which is what I would have done if I’d needed to have a phone conversation while waiting for winter tires to be put on my car. This, despite the fact that it is a pet peeve when people talk on the phone in places that are difficult to leave. I feel that way when I am driving and a passenger is talking on the cell phone. It not only means I have to listen to half of their conversation, but also that I can’t be listening to something that I would rather be listening to.

So I don’t blame her for talking inside, even in the waiting room. Except that (a) it did not seem to be a necessary conversation, and (b) when you have a conversation in such a place, your expectation of privacy is nill.

I was reminded to look into something relatively trivial today: Whether a former apartment complex I used to live in (Midlerth) was located in a particular district in town. I discovered, to my chagrin, that it’s not. I say “to my chagrin” because, with a city as sprawling as Colosse is, it’s helpful to be able to say I lived in Cameron Grove rather than trying to find the two nearest streets of note and saying “around there.” On the upshot, being able to say that I lived right by Cameron Grove is almost as good.

Anyway, Cameron Grove is actually more known as a business district. It includes the corporate headquarters of a global software company that you have probably never heard of but is actually one of the largest in the world. It was founded by a Southern Tech alumnus and benefactor. There is actually a sweet story about one of the nicer water fountains on campus that was placed there because he proposed to his wife at that particular spot on campus decades ago. They divorced three years ago.

Another generous benefactor of Southern Tech died not too long ago. This is important to Sotech, but not because he was universally beloved. In fact, a lot of people don’t care for how he made his fortune. He was also known for being a rather personally difficult, reckless, and an alcoholic. He had a DUI conviction and died in an automobile accident with a passenger (and without a seatbelt). Unmarried and childless, he left his entire state to his do-good foundation. Southern Tech, his alma mater, is expected to see a lot of that. So, god bless the bastard. (It’s actually kind of funny: Most well-known Southern Tech alumni are… somewhat disreputable individuals. The guy from the previous paragraph is an exception.)

EDK writes on Forbes about the changes we’re going to need to make for a better environment and to deal with Peak Oil.

The car culture we’ve cultivated since Eisenhower’s highway project won’t survive when gas prices get too high, and even the electric car requires power generation, which requires coal.

It’s not likely that solar and wind can power the vehicles of the future unless those vehicles drive a lot less. Alternative modes of transportation, such as rail, are a key ingredient.

Redesigning our cities to be more dense, walkable, and green will be another key. And the political forces arrayed against solar quite literally pale in comparison compared to the thicket of political resistance to improving zoning laws, increasing dense urban development, and putting an end to the suburban model of city planning.

I have to confess that I do have a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction to proclamations that the solution to a pressing problem (or more than one) are to redesign a society in a way that we would prefer society be redesigned even without the pressing problem(s). There seems to be an astonishing correlation between those who believe (a) suburbs are culturally dreadful places and (b) they will just have to change their ways because of such-and-such problem.

In a previous piece, I asked what if suburbanism and increased oil prices are not incompatible? Because they might not be. Granted, our current car culture is environmentally wasteful and may indeed be unsustainable. But this treats the question as an either-or. We can still be reliant primarily on automobiles and still consume a lot less resources than we presently do.

The issue with the car culture is not entirely one of a lack of density and public transportation. People can choose to live closer to their jobs, for instance, and still drive. Decisions within the car culture are presently being made with comparatively inexpensive gas in mind. As gas prices go up, people may start making different decisions. Those decisions may be something other than holing up in a condo or row-house less than half the size of their current abode.

The last three places we’ve lived have all been chosen specifically to be near my wife’s work. Walking distance, really. But she drives. And if gas were $20 a gallon? She’d still drive. Walking takes too long and biking isn’t an option for much of the year due to ice (at her previous jobs, ice wasn’t an issue but personal safety was). And $20 a gallon doesn’t add up all that quickly when you’re refilling your tank once every couple of months.

My commutes have, historically, been much longer. If gas had been $20 a gallon, that would have factored pretty heavily into my decision to work. I might have been more eagle-eyed towards finding work near me, but more density wouldn’t have been all that favorable to me seeing as how I worked and lived in different towns. For three straight jobs, I did this.

A lot of long (and therefore gas-eating) commutes are not the subject of the typical suburb-to-city (which is to say, sprawling-to-dense) situations. And when you can live within a few miles of your work, you can afford some pretty expensive gas. And, if we run out of gas, electrically powered cars fueled by other fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, or whatever.

When we talk about the things that make our day-to-day cost of living, one of the big ones is real estate. Sprawl, for all of its faults, can help keep real estate prices down. Maybe you can ease housing costs in the dense areas cheaper with ever-more and ever-higher construction, but I still maintain that there is a really strong chance that the price tensions will result in less density as jobs relocate and satellite offices are opened up in places more near where people actually live. And rather than a thousand corner markets opening up, people may instead make monthly trips to Walmart where they can get everything in a single trip.

In conclusion, tough decisions are going to need to be made. A world in which people have to live closer to their work would result in sacrifices. But those sacrifices are not necessarily the ones that urbanites are expecting or hoping for.

I don’t know if it was a league-wide thing or just the team that I followed, but I know it used to be that some major league baseball franchises had a ban on beards. I know that it was true at least of my favorite franchise, because I remember when they did away with it. Maybe it was a league rule and then it was passed to the teams, or whether it was just team-by-team and something that most teams did. I struggle to think of anyone from the 80’s or before who had a beard.

It sounds pretty ridiculous when you think about it. A beard? How offensive is a beard? Aren’t they taking it a little too far? That was kind of my thinking at the time. At east in part because I never like mustache’s and there were a lot of them around.

Flash forward a decade or two, though, and I think that either MLB or the teams had a point. I was watching the World Series. It happened to be on TV when the football game I was watching ended and it was a close game. Not having watched baseball in a while, I was really struck by how… ragged… the players look these days. They used to look like professionals or at least adults. Now they look like college drop-outs on weed. At least some of them look like the sort of person you would avoid while walking through the park. Few of them look like people you would necessarily trust to babysit your kid.

Some of this is, no doubt, a function of age. When you’re young, all old people look like adults. When you become an adult, well some look more adult than others, except you think of it in terms of “respectability” and whatnot, if you differentiate.

How did we get from here to there? I suppose there is an argument to be made that the rules were too strict for too long so that when they were finally allowed to “let loose” they did so in a conspicuous faction. Maybe it was gradual and for some reason nobody said “Look, a goatee is fine, but you do have to cut it every now and again.”

Or maybe it’s just a sign of the times. Things that were once rebel have become rather common - especially among athletes. Back in the day, rebels were often clean cut by today’s standards except for their hair and their clothes (clothes are, of course, the team uniforms and 80’s hair doesn’t work so well under a baseball cap, so they were clean-cut by default). And so athletes are a mirror of society in general. There are also ethnic considerations, though it’s worth pointing out that baseball has been integrated for a long time.

Whatever the case, it makes me feel old in a “get off my lawn” sort of way. Not that it’s the first time, since I look around at what constitutes “business attire” and roll my eyes.

I happened to catch the tail end of the game between UAB and Central Florida last week, wherein the former got their first win of the season upsetting the latter. It was a great game that came down to the final minute of play. Though the network (something called “CSS”) was loathe to show wide-angle shots of the stadium, I would guess that maybe 500 people were there to see it. This was an intraconference game with a big opponent (UCF is likely headed to the Big East soon).

At least they aren’t Eastern Michigan. UAB claimed that there were 8,000 people there, but I doubt it. At least they have the excuse that it was a weeknight game in somewhat crummy weather. EMU has to hit up their sponsor to buy tickets. Tickets cap out at $9 and they still can’t get people to show up.

I am loathe to say that a school should give up its football program because people aren’t showing up, but… geeze.

Meanwhile, an SMU player called his team’s atmosphere a”pee-wee league experience.” SMU, like UCF, may be headed to the Big East. Their attendance isn’t as dreadful as UAB’s, but it would likely stand out in the BE (which itself is no SEC, attendance-wise).

Southern Tech pushes hard to get people to show up, though is not in the position of EMU, UAB, or SMU. Though University of Delosa people look at any empty seats as a sign of abject failure.

It’s all relative, I suppose. But when you’re being beaten out by high school football and college basketball in attendance, you have something to answer for in a way that West Virginia (whose coach complained about fewer than 40k showing up for a game) doesn’t.

Last season, I went to go see most of the Callie Cougars home games, all of which but one they won by 40 points or more (the other they won by 27 or so). They went on to lose in the first round of the playoffs. Since the decision was more-or-less made that we were not going to be staying in Callie very long, I decided to divest my interest in the Cougars. I decided instead that I would see the Redstone Copperheads, being that I work for the district in all. Also, last year I got to see the construction on the “new” stadium and look forward to actually sitting in the stands of it. So I’d just wait for a Friday teaching job and stick around, but that never quite came. So I made a trip up today.

I didn’t do due diligence, however. Otherwise, I would have waited until next week. The Copperheads are playing Alexandria High, the #1 school in the state sitting at 8-0. The chances of winning are not very high (Redstone is 4-4). Meanwhile, the Cougars are playing St Matthew, Redstone’s hoity-toity private school that I vaguely root against. St Matthew, usually a powerhouse because they can pluck the local football talent from Redstone High with football scholarships, is having a down year. Callie is 8-0 and the #1 team in its divisions (St Matthew and Redstone are both from a division above).

So instead of seeing Callie pound the school I don’t like, I’ll be watching Redstone get pounded.

But the stadium should be cool. It’ll also hopefully give me a chance to get a Redstone Copperheads t-shirt, which they stopped selling at Walmart right about the time I decided to get one (they still carry St Matthew shirts).

Addendum: No shirt. They sold posters, but no shirts. Frustrating. Callie be St Matthew by over 50 points. Redstone lost by 12, though it was actually a close game that came down to the final minutes of the game. A minute and a half to go, Redstone had the ball in the red zone, but couldn’t convert a fourth down. Alexandria’s beefy running back then made an 85-yard run.

It’s been several years since the NCAA decided to start punishing schools that use tribal mascots and imagery. For the most part, it has shaken itself out and almost everybody has selected a new mascot. They became the Red Wolves, RedHawks, Warhawks, and Mustangs. The Illini are still the Illini, but without the imagery, and the Tribe are still the Tribe, but without the feather. The lone hold-out remains the University of North Dakota, and they’re about to pay a steep price:

When UND was accepted for Big Sky membership in November, the conference’s other colleges believed the issue was settled and UND would retire the nickname, Fullerton said in a letter to Kelley. Should UND keep the Fighting Sioux nickname and Indian head logo, the school could face boycotts from other colleges and cancellations of athletic events, he said.

“Boycotts by individual schools or leagues will certainly have a negative effect on all of your programs, including hockey,” Fullerton wrote. “Couple these issues with postseason restrictions, and we are concerned that this state law has the possibility of destroying Division I athletics at the University of North Dakota.”.

The “individual schools” joining the boycott include the nearby University of Minnesota, an important rival for their hockey program (UND’s primary sport is hockey, their football program being overshadowed by North Dakota State). Losing their spot in the Big Sky Conference is itself quite a big deal, as the Big Sky is one of the better FCS-level conferences and includes some pretty big western schools. The mascot has already cost them a spot in the Summit League and Missouri Valley Football Conference, which the other three Dakota schools, as well as Nebraska-Omaha, will be playing in soon. Their hockey program will also be sidelined from playoffs.

The school had already announced an intent to change mascots, but they were overruled by the state legislature. Also important, some very big UND donors have threatened to stop donating money to the program if they make the change. This puts the university in a really rough place. The legislature and boosters are counting on the NCAA flinching, or else gambling with their entire athletics program to hold on to the tribal connection. Is it worth being the Sioux if nobody will play you?

A lot of this points back to the poor way that the NCAA handled this. The NCAA doesn’t have the authority to make any schools do anything, but they nonetheless played a pretty heavy hand. They allowed waivers that let Florida State, Utah, and others get through if they had the support of one or more tribes that they were representing. But otherwise, they set a pretty high bar for any school representing a tribe with more than one faction. North Dakota actually has the support of one Sioux tribe, and in my mind that ought to be enough. Making their continued use of the name contingent on tribal approval strikes me as a good compromise.

In addition to avoiding this trainwreck, it could have been a truly beneficial exchange. Things worked out very well with Florida State, where the school started changing its iconography and imagery to that of the actual Seminole tribe. Likewise, had UND been required to retain the goodwill of the Sioux, they could have asked for the same. Or money, for that matter. Or admittance and scholarships. This could have been a win-win. The origins of UND’s selection of the Sioux are actually known. They were chosen because the school wanted something that was good at killing Bison, which is the mascot of their in-state rival, and they researched it and determined that the Sioux were great bison-hunters. Putting UND’s specific situation aside, schools with generic names like Indians could conceivably have even be asked to emphasize the name of their sponsoring tribe, which for a lesser-known tribe that would like a higher profile, would be a positive. Especially if it came out that they were good hunters.

When I first started substitute teaching up in Redstone, one of the things I was worried about was, well, Redstoners. The term was introduced to me by my trainer with the Census Bureau to express her disdain to the Redstone hand-off person. A Redstoner is a Redstonian that basically doesn’t have their act together at all. The hand-off person, for instance, was pregnant by one of two men while trying to convince a third man that he was actually the father. She thought that the not-father might buy it because “Redstoners can’t count to nine (months).” It’s a slight at a particular kind of Redstonian, but with the assumption that most of them fit that profile.

Callieites, as a general rule, don’t like Redstone. I do. But even so, it’s hard to deny that there is a certain lack of… ambition… or put-togetherness among much of its population. Barely 20% have college degrees despite the fact that they have a college. It has a high drop-out rate and a median home price of $115,000. Callie looks downright cosmopolitan by example. My wife’s coworker’s husband, Jack Alvarez, is a thrice-successful entrepreneur who had intended to start a business upon arriving, but quickly discovered a distinct lack of human capital (a lack of people in Callie, a lack of people with skills in Redstone).

So I wasn’t sure what to expect when I signed on to teach their young. Particularly given how the Catholic school likely siphons off a lot of those from good families (2/3 of the town is Catholic, 3/4 if you include Greek/Serbian/Eastern Orthodox). But the student population really surprised me. There were certainly some that were obviously future Redstoners, but a lot that weren’t. Their personalities really start to form in junior high where you can start seeing their trajectories. Some are destined to be Redstoners. A lot, though, seem to me the exact kind of people that would become future employees of Jack Alvarez. Do all of them lose all of that in high school? That was a depressing thought. Then I wondered what these people would do professionally, and in a “no spit, spurlock” moment it became all too clear what happens to them.

They leave.

They go off to college, stay wherever they went, or move some place else where there are jobs. Redstone has lost population (and Alexandria gained it) more census counts than not since it’s peak over half a century ago. Some come back and teach (seems almost every teacher I’ve met went through the Redstone schooling system), but if they keep track of how many of the top half of high school graduates end up staying in Redstone, I’d bet the number to be pretty low. The thought isn’t as depressing as when I was wondering if there was some natural regression, but it’s still kind of sad.

Of course, what’s the alternative? Back when I was working in Mocum, Deseret, I wondered aloud on this blog why so many of the people I knew there were still there working for less than $10/hr when their skills could get them so much more elsewhere. I suppose if I taught in Mocum’s schools I would probably consider the tragedy of those who do leave rather than those that chose not to.

Clancy had some paperwork to catch up on, so I watched the Superbowl at a local bar, The Calfway House. I figured, if nothing else, it would help me meet and get to know some of the locals. If we’re going to stay in Callie, one of the things I am going to need to do is get to know people. A bar is probably not the best place to meet likeminded people, but it’s a place, which is better than watching the game at home on my TV.

One of the first people I met was a woman who seemed to be about my age. It turned out that she, like myself, had once lived in Fort Beck, Deseret. I discovered this when someone at the bar was badmouthing the state. It turned out that she was not really “about my age” at all. In fact, the more she and I talked, the older it became apparent she was. At one point, I wanted to ask “Just how old are you, lady?” Her children were out of the house (and I got the impression that they had been for some time) with one of them giving her two grandchildren. I had been under the impression that she had lived in Fort Beck during her college days, but she later said that she lived there from 1968-71, meaning that either she’s nearing sixty or I misunderstood.

I also met a patient of Clancy’s. I found this out the typical way. Basically, he found out that I moved her recently. There was all manner of good food at the Calfway and I asked him if I needed to leave money in a jar for what I ate. Apparently, feeding people (with, did I mention, good food?) is something of a Calfway tradition, and so he knew that I either didn’t live here or that I had moved here recently. So he asked what brought me to Callie, I told him my wife’s work, he asked what she did, I told him that she was a doctor at Dent Hospital, he asked her name, and lo and behold he is a patient. This has happened three or four times since I have arrived. Every conversation unfolding nearly the same way.

I also got to know another guy somewhat, who was about my age and seemed like an interesting guy. The sort of guy I was hoping to meet; the sort of guy I will be able to converse with easily in the future. As often seems to happen, I never did get the guy’s name. Neither of the other two, either (which drove Clancy crazy when she tried to remember the patient). That’ll have to be the next step. Learning their names.

Every year or few, there is a push in football to emphasize calling a particularly penalty because of injuries occurring from a particular type of hit or penalty. This year, in college football, it’s “helmet-to-helmet contact,” though I think they’ve renamed the penalty to something else. With the ramifications of concussions becoming more clear, the concern is understandable.

Unfortunately, player behavior often follows the rules and we’re starting to see that later in the season. Ball-carriers seem to be intentionally lowering their head more frequently, making them harder to hit without getting them in the head. So on at least a couple of occasions, the announcers have mentioned what seemed obvious to me: without hitting the head, there’s simply no way to tackle to runner. They’re all but guaranteed a few extra yards or an extra 15 (plus an automatic first down) if they make the hit anyway. This is, perhaps, a small price to pay for player safety. And it seems to be effective. But I wonder if the end-result isn’t going to be runners retrained to get those extra few yards or even better draw a huge penalty. That would be a huge backfire.

A while back, Transplanted Lawyer complained about the NFL stepping up penalty-calling for injury-causing tackles:

Instead, it’s wimping out and threatening to penalize — including fining and suspending — players who hit each other hard and risk injuring their opponent. There is an inherent risk of injury in this sport, and all sports. People agree to do it anyway — they compete and dedicate their entire lives to giving themselves even an opportunity to do it, because there is a tremendous audience for it — and it’s fun. I don’t mean to suggest that the NFL should go back to the days of leather helmets, no pads, and adopt an eye-gouging rule. There should be reasonable ways to protect players from unnecessary and avoidable kinds of harm. I like that the players wear well-designed helmets, armor, and that there are particular kinds of maneuvers and stunts that are not permitted. It’s a fine line to draw as to what kinds of methods of forcing your opponent to the ground should be permitted and what should not be. The guys who run the show need to do what is reasonable and appropriate to prevent injuries — but they also need to bear in mind that we’re talking about tackle football. There are going to be injuries and I thought everyone knew that.

One of the ironies is that football would likely be safer if they did away with the pads and the helmets. The introduction of these safety measures resulted in players changing the way the hits are made. The illusion of invulnerability has caused players to become more and more reckless. Compare football to rugby, that other tackling sport that doesn’t have the pads, and it’s the former where injuries are far more common. Back when I was in junior high, in the offseason we would play a hybrid rugby-football game without pads and injuries never occurred because the hitter had no more protection than the hittee and so the result was that tackles were made with the aim of getting the player down rather than making sure that they don’t get that extra yard or two.

I’ve heard similar things about how seat belt and safer cars make things more dangerous for pedestrians, though I don’t know how true that is. There’s also a pretty strong argument to be made that the illusion of safety that condoms provide created a culture where people were less cautious about their sexual behavior and this is precisely why unwanted pregnancies and illegitimacy rates climbed ferociously as more and more ways to prevent same have become available.

Not sure if any of you have seen this, but for those who don’t want to view the video, what happened is that a quarterback pretended that the ball needed to be moved 5 yards downfield due to a penalty. While everyone was standing around, he made a break for it and scored the game-winning touchdown.

There was also a recent case when a Cal coach was suspended for having his players fake injury:

Because they run a tempo offense, this sort of thing happens to the Southern Tech Packers with regularity. Pack fans have taken some heat because we’ve come to start booing injured players from certain teams, which is a no-no. It doesn’t help that it often happens with one of Sotech’s rivals, the Piermont Riptide.

Some rivalries are made (due to proximity, usually) and some are born. Sotech and Piermont actually have next to nothing in common as universities (Piermont is a small, private school with a mildly religious background while Sotech is a large public school) who had a rivalry born with a long history of playing one another in games with a lot at stake. Also, Sotech used to be in the habit of running up the score on and on a couple of occasions posted victories with more than 90 points on the board, and Piermont has never forgotten (and they consider it further proof that we are a low-class school). Adding to all of this is an immense dislike by Packer fans of Piermont’s coach, Rod Gandi for reasons I won’t get into.

Anyhow, a couple of seasons ago Piermont inexplicably redesigned their uniforms for a game to emulate ours. Presumably to confuse our players. Typical Gandi, we thought. Then, as we were driving down the field to win the game, over and over again they kept getting “injured” and slowing us down as we were trying to catch their defense off-guard with high-tempo, no-huddle play. Same two players. After the game, Piermont fans were bragging about that it’s not against the rules or anything (actually, as the video demonstrates, it is) and we should just suck it up.

Flash forward to the next season and the our team and our fans are going ballistic every time a player gets hurt. The Piermont fans (on the message board) complained and again suggested that it just showed how low-class our fans were. Others even admitted that they had faked injuries before but that the benefit of the doubt should always go to the limping player. Our fans, obviously, disagreed.

The problem with trick plays like this, whether they are against the rules or not, are that they often lead to things like fans getting angry at injured players for the other team (for the record, one Piermont player we booed was out for the season). I don’t like injured players getting booed. And I want to give every seemingly-injured player the benefit of the doubt. But our coaches and players are left to appeal to the refs every time a player doesn’t get up right until the stretcher comes out and it becomes apparent that there might be a real injury here.

As cute as the high middle school play shown above is, it creates a similar problem. In the event that there is any sort of confusion, what should the defensive players do? If they’re wrong in one direction, it’s a touchdown. If they’re wrong in the other direction, it’s a 15-yard penalty (and possible ejection from the game). Ultimately, it’s not just a trick play, it’s a bad-faith play. A few of the articles talking about the play are saying that it’s a play you only get away with once. Maybe. And maybe some kid will get tackled because some defensive lineman thinks that play has started. In this case, the player walked past the defenders, but next time he may just start walking to the sideline with the ball. Maybe he will genuinely be confused. Maybe not. When there’s not a clear indication of what the defense is supposed to be doing, it’s a recipe for potential problems.

Which is a shame. Cause it really is kind of a cool play.

I’m back at the Copper Cafe. I decided that it was finally time to leave the dog at home, in the yard, alone. To make sure she doesn’t go crazy. I figure that going to Redstone at least gives me the ability to get back quickly if she escapes and someone calls the number on the tag.

I’m here less than half an hour and apparently the Christian-Marxist-Greens are holding their meeting and I’m already getting distracted. This is the second time in a row our paths have converged. To no great surprise, at least a couple of them are college professors. One used to live in Colosse and another in Soundview. They’re discussing the merits of democracy. One of them is trying to reconcile Marxism and democracy. Another is arguing that real democracy doesn’t include votes but rather is a state of consciousness and therefore a nation that looks after its own is more democratic than is a country like the United States wherein we vote but the government is unresponsive to our needs due to the corporate interests.

Next door is a really interesting house. Well, kind of a row-house that was converted from a restaurant or cafe of some sort. It has a really neat patio. Until you look in the windows (or notice the absolute lack of signage) it looks to all the world like a the competing cafe it probably once was. On the other side of the Copper Cafe is an actually residence that’s split into what was split into what must be two pretty small abodes.

The Copper Cafe has no air conditioning, which in the current weather is quite pleasant. This was not the case a couple months ago.