Top Grades and No Class Time for Auburn Players

This lengthy report in The New York Times on what may prove to be a scandal at Auburn reminds me of a story.

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The coaches and athletic director were despondent. The big game was approaching and the star player was failing all his classes. If something wasn’t done, and done soon, he wouldn’t be eligible to play. They convinced the dean.

So, the dean approached each of the player’s professors and explained how contributions from alumni depended on how the team did in the big game — and how important this player was to winning. The dean convinced all of the teachers to change the player’s grade.

All but one.

“No,” this professor insisted, “he has to re-take the exam.”

“OK,” said the dean, “if he passes, can he play?”

“Yes,” said the professor.

“Can it be an oral exam?” asked the dean.

“Sure,” said the professor.

“With just one question?”

“Yes,” said the professor, feeling his arm twist.

“Can it be a spelling test?”

“Why not,” said the professor, now just trying to be a team player.

“A one word spelling test?”

“Sure.”

“And if he gets one letter right, he passes, right?”

“OK. OK.”

“And the word will be coffee?”

“Yes, yes, anything.”

They called the player in. Spell coffee they said.

“K-a-u-p-h-y.”

Best line of the night, so far

“Daniel Silva, another one of my favorites, will be there. Doris Kearns Goodwin. Joan Didion (!!!). Alice McDermott. All in one place! Whoa. I still have to pinch myself to realize I’m on the list with the likes of them. Deep down, I still feel like that dreamy girl with the HUGE PERM, sitting outside the bandroom at Del Norte High School, scribbling poems and songs into a spiral-bound notebook while a storm rolled in over the mountains. I truly feel like not a thing has changed. Weird, no?”

— Albuquerque’s very own Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez celebrating her invitation to the National Book Festival in Washington this September.

No, not weird at all.

Oh, let’s do it again

Small Ads from the UK. Some are laugh-out-loud. Please no Coke or milk drinking while taking a look.

[First posted one year ago.]

Worth repeating

“Santorum got excited because he finished a jigsaw puzzle in 6 months and the box said 2 to 4 years.”

Crooks and Liars Stupid Santorum Jokes

Another (from the comments):

Q: What would Rick Santorum say if you asked him if his turn signal is working?
A: Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No.

[First posted here a year ago.]

Rainy season over

Humidity back in the single digits this afternoon in Albuquerque. Temperature in the mid-90s. Nary a cloud.

Total official rainfall last week: 1.68 inches. This year so far: 3.13 inches.

Amount of rain in Washington, D.C., on June 25th: 5.19 inches.

How the internets work

Jon Stewart explains. [video]

So, which is it?

Mumbai or Bombay?

MUMBAI, India, July 12 — A bank worker did not ….

— The New York Times

BOMBAY, India (AP) — Authorities named two suspects ….

— The Washington Post

Bombay officially became Mumbai in 1997. Bom baía originated with the Portuguese and means good bay. The British converted it to Bombay. Mumbai is the name the area long had in the indigenous languages and is thought to refer to the mother goddess, Mumbadevi.

Best line of the day, so far

“Federal judges wield tremendous power in their courtrooms and a few end up developing the habits of bullies.”

— Rocky Mountain News columnist Vincent Carroll commenting on the removal of the judge in the Indian trust lawsuit

Oil

With Daniel Yergin’s The Prize still on NewMexiKen’s mind, I did a little research. These are the countries that produced more than 2 million barrels of oil a day in 2004. Surprised at any? (A barrel is 42 gallons.)

1. Saudi Arabia 10.37 Million
2. Russia 9.27 Million
3. United States 8.69 Million
4. Iran 4.09 Million
5. Mexico 3.83 Million
6. China 3.62 Million
7. Norway 3.18 Million
8. Canada 3.14 Million
9. Venezuela 2.86 Million
10. United Arab Emirates 2.76 Million
11. Kuwait 2.51 Million
12. Nigeria 2.51 Million
13. United Kingdom 2.08 Million
14. Iraq 2.03 Million

Don’t worry, be happy

LONDON (AFP) - The tiny South Pacific Ocean archipelago of Vanuatu is the happiest country on Earth, according to a study published measuring people’s wellbeing and their impact on the environment.

Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominica and Panama complete the top five in the Happy Planet Index, compiled by the British think-tank New Economics Foundation (NEF).

The index combines life satisfaction, life expectancy and environmental footprint — the amount of land required to sustain the population and absorb its energy consumption.

Zimbabwe came bottom of the 178 countries ranked, below second-worst performer Swaziland, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ukraine.

The Group of Eight industrial powers meet in Saint Petersburg this weekend but have not much to smile about, according to the index.

Italy came out best in 66th place, ahead of Germany (81), Japan (95), Britain (108), Canada (111), France (129), the United States (150) and Russia, in lowly 172nd place.
…

Selected others: 17. Philippines; 23. Indonesia; 31. China; 32. Thailand; 44. Malaysia; 62. India; 64. Iceland; 70. Netherlands; 87. Spain; 88. Hong Kong; 89. Saudi Arabia; 99. Denmark; 112. Pakistan; 115. Norway; 119. Sweden; 123. Finland; 139. Australia; 154. UAE; 156. South Africa; 159. Kuwait; 166. Qatar.

— Via Yahoo! News

‘We do this with livestock all the time’

Rep. Steve King (R-Idiot) shows us how to build a fence. (Click the image to see the video.)

It’s the birthday

… of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Patrick Stewart is 66.

… of Bob Falfa. That’s Harrison Ford. He’s 64. And yes, Ford, who at one time had been in seven of the ten top grossing films of all times, has an Oscar nomination — for best actor in Witness.

… of Roger McGuinn, an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Byrds.

As Roger McGuinn once said of the Byrds, “It was Dylan meets the Beatles.” The Byrds combined the upbeat, melodic pop of the Beatles with the message-oriented lyrics of Bob Dylan into a wholly original amalgam that would be branded folk-rock. If only for their harmony-rich versions of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” drenched in the 12-string jangle of McGuinn’s Rickenbacker guitar, the Byrds would have earned their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Yet the group continually broke ground during the Sixties, creating revelatory syntheses of sound that were given such hyphenated names as space-rock (”5D [Fifth Dimension]“), psychedelic-rock (”Eight Miles High”) and country-rock (their Sweethearts of the Rodeo album). At a time when rock and roll was exploding in all fronts, the Byrds led the way with an insatiable curiosity about the forms and directions pop music could take. In so doing, they became peers and equals of their mentors, Dylan and the Beatles.

… of Pedro de Pacas. Richard ‘Cheech’ Marin is 60.

So, dear, how was your day in court?

Before proceeding further, the Court notes that this case involves two extremely likable lawyers, who have together delivered some of the most amateurish pleadings ever to cross the hallowed causeway into Galveston, an effort which leads the Court to surmise but one plausible explanation. Both attorneys have obviously entered into a secret pact–complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words–to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the Court would be so charmed by their child-like efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed. Whatever actually occurred, the Court is now faced with the daunting task of deciphering their submissions. With Big Chief tablet readied, thick black pencil in hand, and a devil-may-care laugh in the face of death, life on the razor’s edge sense of exhilaration, the Court begins.

— From an actual proceeding in U.S. District Court via Lawyers, Guns and Money who got it from Unfogged.

The Prize

NewMexiKen has finished Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer prize-winning history of the oil industry, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.

I recommend it.

The Prize (1992) is a lengthy (788 pages), detailed account of oil from the discovery in Pennsylvania in 1859 through the first Gulf War in 1991. It is a history of corporate, national and international politics and machinations — the Standard Oil Trust, and its dissolution, international concessions and agreements, the discovery of “elephants” (big oil fields), the role of oil in the cause and fighting of World War II, the rise of the oil-producing nations and OPEC.