Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Dartmouth's Basketball Team Embarrasses This Alum, But Not as Much as the NLRB Does

The men’s basketball team at Curmie’s undergrad alma mater, Dartmouth College, is an embarrassment.  No, not because they’re terrible, although they are: they have secured last place, alone, in the not-exactly-elite (in basketball terms) Ivy League.  They didn’t win a road game all year.  As of this writing, they’re 337th (of 362) in the NET and 339th on KenPom.  They haven’t had a winning record in 15 years, and currently sport the longest active streak (dating back to 1959) of not participating in the NCAA tournament.  They weren’t very good back when Curmie was a student there; they’re worse now.

But “disappointing” isn’t the same as “embarrassing.”  Not being very good basketball players is one thing; being narcissistic little assholes is something else again.  The reason the Big Green’s hoopsters are in the news, alas, falls into the latter category.  The players voted today (as I write this on March 5) to unionize (!), thanks to a heightened sense of self-importance by some rather mediocre athletes and a remarkably inane decision by the NLRB’s Regional Director, declaring them “employees.”  All 15 players signed the initial petition to join Local 560 of the Service Employees International Union, and 13 of them voted to unionize.

The Regional Director in question is Laura A. Sacks of the Boston office.  (Curmie believes people who do remarkably stupid things in their professional capacities shouldn’t be able to hide behind an important-sounding title.  Walking lawyer jokes like Jake Krupski ought to be similarly disgraced.)  The decision itself is inane on its face, but the rationale is even worse.

Here’s the decision; let’s look at a couple of key points.  First off, there is no argument with the college’s position that financial aid is offered exclusively on the basis of financial need; indeed, four players on the team receive none, whereas one gets a full ride.  Athletes don’t get special housing or other such perks.  Again, no one claims otherwise.  A fall term message to players “encouraged” them not to schedule courses during potential practice times, particularly between 2:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon. 

Conversely, that message told players they should “[F]eel free to register for courses in the following time slots: 8S/8L, 9S/9L, 10, 10A, 11, 12.”  Here’s where Curmie’s experience becomes relevant, because he knows what that means.  About 90% of all the courses I took as an undergrad were in one of those time slots.  Afternoons, certainly after 2:00, were almost always free.  One doubts that much has changed, even given the considerable interim.

Remember, too, that since Dartmouth is on a quarter system, students take only three courses at a time, so there’s less likelihood of scheduling conflicts at all; unless a particular course necessary for a player’s degree plan was offered only in the afternoon and only during basketball season, problems are rare if not altogether absent.  It’s also unclear why the team couldn’t practice in the evening, as there are multiple places on campus with basketball courts, and much of “practice” is film study or time in the weight room.

Also worthy of notice is the fact that NCAA and Ivy League regulations prohibit teams from requiring too much practice time: “In-season, student-athletes may participate in a maximum of four hours of CARA [countable athletically related activity] daily and a maximum of twenty hours of CARA weekly….  When a sport is not in-season, student-athletes may participate in a maximum of six hours of CARA each week.”

Yet, curiously, Sacks and her minions based part of the decision on the bizarre belief that athletes should be treated differently because the demands on their time exceed those required of participants in, for example, music, theatre, or journalism.  In a word, BULLSHIT.  First off, those activities are year-round; there’s no “off season,” and certainly no time cap.  Curmie was required to spend more than four hours a day and more than 20 hours a week not infrequently (especially but not exclusively during tech weeks) when he was in school, and he's certainly expected that kind of commitment from students throughout his career as a director and technical director in college and university settings. 

The other variation on this theme was that Curmie realized early on that if he was going to be an active member of the debate team, he was going to have to spend a lot more than 20 hours a week.  He opted instead for doing research to help the team when he could, administering one of the divisions of the high school invitational tournament hosted by the Forensic Union, and occasionally brainstorming with more active team members.  But those active debaters spent dozens of hours a week working for the team.  Same with the editors (at least) of the college newspaper, the directorate of the radio station… the list goes on and on. 

It’s also frankly nuts to claim that the Ivy League is taking students out of classes willy-nilly.  Virtually all league games are played on Friday night or Saturday.  Wanna guess, Gentle Reader, how many road games Dartmouth will play this year on a Monday through Thursday while classes are in session?  The answer is… wait for it… one.  Yes, one.  Another came between the end of classes and the end of finals.  Yet somehow, we get an official NLRB ruling with nonsense like “if, for example, the team is traveling on a Monday…”  Is Sacks incapable of looking at a schedule?  Furthermore, there was no rebuttal to the coach’s testimony that players sometimes missed road trips, with his blessing, because of class responsibilities.  In the Ivy League, education matters more than sports.  It really does.

So the whole “taking them out of classes” business is nonsense.  Moving on.  OK, get this: Cade Haskins, one of the students who keeps getting quoted, says that although the college makes it clear that “it is understood by both the faculty and coaching staff that class attendance takes precedence over participation in athletics,” he often prioritized basketball.  The fact that he can’t abide by the rules is an argument in his favor?

The precedent for this action is a decision a few years back when the Northwestern football team successfully convinced the NLRB that they were employees, but because they compete in a league that includes state universities (Dartmouth doesn’t), federal law apparently makes it impossible for the NLRB to make a ruling against the university in this instance.  Of course, unlike Dartmouth or indeed any other Ivy League school, Northwestern does give athletic scholarships, so, arguably, players are indeed employees, doing a job in exchange for financial considerations.  Still, it’s ironic that it would be Northwestern, a school far more noted for its academics than its athletics, that would be the target for such a unionization effort.

There are more ironies at play, too.  It would be impossible to name an athletic conference that cares more about the importance of education relative to sports than the Ivy League does, and there are few teams in any sport in the Ivy League more inept than Dartmouth men’s basketball… well, with the possible exception of Dartmouth women’s basketball.  If these folks are “employees,” Curmie would hate to see the amateurs.

Oh, but alumni contribute to the college because of the basketball team!  (Seriously, that’s an argument!)  Luckily, Curmie had put down his mug before reading that part, or coffee would’ve come out his nose.  There’s an alumni group, you see, Gentle Reader, that contributed over $300,000 to improve the basketball facilities!  Curmie got a missive from the alumni fund the other day.  That $300k for basketball would amount to about 7/10 of 1% of the unrestricted giving to the college last year (that doesn’t count the tens of millions of dollars designated for other specific uses.) 

It goes without saying that the basketball team at Dartmouth loses a lot more money than it brings in.  Don’t expect to see games televised except on ESPN+, and whereas Curmie’s other American school (his MA is from a British university), the University of Kansas, has sold out 16,300 seat Allen Field House every game for the last 22 years, Dartmouth can’t fill 2100 seat Edward Leede Arena even half full for Senior Night. 

The fact that according to the NLRB decision, “[N]o current members of Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team participate in NIL activities” sort of tells it all.  They’re eligible to do so, but local businesses don’t care enough to pay them as spokesmen.  Why?  Because they aren’t going to attract positive attention.  Curiously enough, the “whiny loser” image isn’t one that advertisers choose to foreground.  They’ll do their own ads or hire actors who know how to read a line. 

But if NIL threatens merely the idea of collegiate sports as we know them (see Curmie’s commentary here, here, and here, for example), the prospect of having to remunerate student-athletes will—nay, should—spell the end of intercollegiate sports altogether.  Many colleges are considering cutbacks to athletic programs as it is.  Curmie wrote last year that another Ivy League school, Brown, “had to cut some varsity sports a couple of years ago: losing money on athletics was one thing; losing that much money was untenable.”  

Whereas part of Curmie says “Good!”, the fact is that cheering on the home team is, or should be, very much a part of student life.  Curmie saw dozens of athletic events—football, baseball, basketball, hockey, lacrosse, ski jumping—as a student and doesn’t want future generations of students to be denied that opportunity. 

But if pampering a cohort of mediocre narcissists will cost even more time and/or money than it already does, the tipping point draws nearer.  There are some outstanding colleges and universities that don’t have athletics teams at all, or who play only in Division III or the NAIA: Brandeis, CalTech, MIT, NYU, and the University of Chicago come to mind.  Brooklyn’s St.Francis College [] recently eliminated all its Division I athletics programs, citing finances.  Indeed, only a handful of athletic departments break even; most lost millions of dollars a year, the shortfall made up by increased tuition and fees borne by other students, a goodly number of whom couldn’t care less about whether the basketball team is any good.

It's also probably worth mentioning that the two players quoted in the Politico article linked above are, predictably, not among the best players [https://dartmouthsports.com/sports/mens-basketball/stats/2023-24] of even the remarkably unsuccessful team on which they play.  They’ve totaled 153 points and 50 rebounds in 26 games (let me save you the math, Gentle Reader: that’s less than 6 PPG and 2 RPG between them); both have more turnovers than assists.  They… erm… have little hope of a career in professional basketball.  Yet they seem to be at the center of the self-glorification.  Figures.

To be fair, there will be appeals after appeals, and it’s unlikely that college officials will have to negotiate for the services of hoopsters in the near future.  That doesn’t make the initial Regional NLRB ruling any less ludicrous.  Ultimately, the argument comes down to this: are athletes are treated significantly differently from participants in other extra-curricular (or co-curricular) activities?  If the answer is no, then there’s no case.  If it’s yes, then the rationale is that because jocks have been coddled in the past, they should be even more coddled in the future.  Color me unimpressed.

Curmie is loath to quote Donald Trump with anything even bordering on approbation, but on this one, he’s got it right.  If these guys want to be considered employees, the correct response is “You’re fired.”  Laura Sacks ought to hear those words as well.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Court Storming and the Absence of Sprezzatura

After the Wake Forest Demon Deacons beat the Duke Blue Devils 83-79 in basketball Saturday afternoon in Winston-Salem, hordes of Deac fans stormed the court. Actually, Gentle Reader, the previous sentence isn’t quite accurate. Video footage shows that several fans who had gathered under one of the baskets ran onto the court and were already at the free throw line before the game even ended.

These incidents are increasingly commonplace, abetted by television coverage of the events, even as the networks pretend to be appalled by the potential for injuries resulting from the practice. Court-storming may be part of the culture of the sport, but there are—or at the very least should be—limits. Curmie has no problem with displays of post-adolescent exuberance, but the safety of players, coaches, and officials must be paramount.

Duke star Kyle Filipowski is helped off the court
after being injured in a court-storming
The inevitable finally happened, and Duke star Kyle Filipowski was not merely jostled, but injured, in the melee, seriously enough that he had to be helped off the court. As the recipient of a degree from the University of Kansas, Curmie is morally and ethically obligated to despise all things related to Duke basketball 😉, but whereas he wants them to lose every game, he doesn’t really want anyone to get hurt.

The exact extent of Filipowski’s injury is still unclear, but it certainly could affect both the Blue Devils’ chances for the rest of the season and post-season, and, importantly, Filipowski’s future. He’s projected as a first-round draft choice, possibly even a lottery pick, in the upcoming NBA draft. He stands to make tens of millions of dollars over the course of his career… assuming he can play. There is such a thing as a career-ending injury, especially when we’re talking about knees, and that’s what this is; if this injury wasn’t severe, that’s only because of what Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms would call “moral luck.”

The video shows that at least three different Wake Forest fans made contact with Filipowski as he was trying to leave the court. Whether or not the bumping was “intentional” and “personal,” as Filipowski alleges, it was at best reckless and at worst criminal. Let’s face it: the man is seven feet tall; it’s not like he couldn’t be seen. The ethics of the situation, of course, would be the same if it had been a bench player, a student manager, a coach, or a referee who was injured. The incident attracts more headlines because it was Kyle Filipowski who needed to be helped off the court, but the rationale for banning court storming would be the same.

At least two other visiting players have been bumped into by opposing fans in court stormings this season. One of them is Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, probably the most famous women’s basketball player in the country—even more so than WNBA stars. She was “blind-sided” and actually knocked to the floor by an Ohio State fan in a court storming in Columbus.

Imagine if she’d been seriously injured. She wouldn’t have broken the NCAA scoring record for the women’s game, and she wouldn’t be closing in on the real record, held by Lynette Woodard. (The NCAA wasn’t the organization in charge of the women’s game when Woodard played, and they’re being predictably petty, narcissistic, and anal retentive about recognizing Woodard.)

Oops. Once again, Curmie indulged in a little inaccuracy. What he referred to above as “the inevitable finally happen[ing]” had long since happened, as ESPN’s William Weinbaum reports:
In a 2004 court storm, Tucson H.S. star Joe Kay suffered a stroke & was partially paralyzed. “It’s way too long that we've been putting up with this,” Kay told ESPN Sat. after Duke’s Kyle Filipowski got hurt. “I’m completely in favor of banning court storms & field storms.” Now 38, Kay said, “The police should arrest people for going places they are not allowed to go… enforce the rules as they do at other places. It's exactly the same thing.” “Hopefully people will now come to their senses.”
The only thing that’s changed is that Filipowski is known by virtually all college basketball fans across the country, whereas Kay may have been a local celebrity, but folks like me in East Texas weren’t saying “OMG, Joe Kay got hurt in a court storm!” Now, maybe, something will happen… but not unless the powers-that-be actually want it to, and that, despite the copious tut-tutting from the NCAA, conferences, universities, and the media, doesn’t seem to be the case. Indeed, statements of concern and promises of future action from the likes of ACC commissioner Jim Phillips seem very much to be what Curmie’s mom would call “balloon juice.”

Among those who have engaged in court storming this season, both in games in which their team beat Kentucky, were LSU women’s star Angel Reese and South Carolina President emeritus Harris Pastides, who even took to social media to boast about his participation. The problem isn’t going to go away, even in the wake of an injury to a star player, unless there are real, enforceable, guidelines designed both to allow celebrations and to protect the visiting team. And by “enforceable,” I mean sanctions that will be felt, not petty fines of a few thousand dollars to multimillion-dollar programs.

Jay Bilas, probably ESPN’s best analyst (and a former star big man for Duke himself), is outspoken about this issue:
It’s got to stop but it’s not going to. There’s no appetite in college basketball to stop it. The SEC has a rule against it but the institutions are happy to pay the fine because they like the visual. And the truth is, we in the media like the visual too. We put it at the end of every highlight. Years ago, when people used to run out on the field or on the floor, we wouldn’t show it. That was our policy. We don’t have that kind of policies with court stormings. We like it. It’s not stopping and it’s a shame.
Duke coach Jon Scheyer said after the game that when he played, “at least it was 10 seconds and then you could storm the court. Now, it’s the buzzer doesn’t even go off and they’re running on the floor.”

Ten seconds isn’t enough, but 30 probably is. It wouldn’t be difficult to institute a rule that no fans are allowed onto the court, ever, until 30 seconds after the final buzzer. The mechanism already exists in the 30-second clock; let it serve another purpose. The home university can forbid court storming altogether, but they must enforce the ban for 30 seconds. If fans want to celebrate on the court and the home team doesn’t object, so be it, but not until the officials and the opposing team are out of harm’s way.

And if fans are on the court before the game clock has expired, that should be a technical foul on the home team in addition to the other penalties. Would it have mattered this weekend? Duke would have had two free throws and the ball with about a second left in the game. Could they have forced overtime or even won in regulation? It’s extremely unlikely, but the chances wouldn’t have been quite zero.

Whatever the exact rules become, violations must be punished severely. At present, neither the NCAA nor the ACC (in which Wake Forest and Duke play) have any specific sanctions at all in place for court storming. The home university must be responsible for enforcing the rules; failure to do so should be punishable by a significant fine even for the first offense. Curmie suggests $500,000 for the first offense, with half paid to the NCAA or the conference and the other half to the opposing school. Subsequent offenses within a 36-month period would involve stiffer fines, loss of scholarships, and perhaps a prohibition against post-season play.

Any individual violating the rules should be subject to arrest for criminal trespass, and students (after appropriate due process, of course) could be placed on probation, suspended, or even expelled. Anyone who causes physical harm to an official or any representative of the opposing school should face both criminal and civil liability.

Media outlets must agree not to replay footage of court storming, and must cut away from live coverage as quickly as possible (the way they do when some idiot runs onto the field at a baseball game). The cameras should keep rolling, however, with the video available to police and, should there be an injury, to the victim’s legal team.

Chances of this happening: I’m not quite as pessimistic as Jay Bilas, but my nom de plume is Curmie, not Polyanna.

A longer-term solution can be found in the Renaissance concept of sprezzatura, a term used by Baldesar Castiglione in Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) to describe a studied nonchalance, making the difficult appear easy. It expresses a level of confidence, something approaching but not quite reaching arrogance (that difficult task was accomplished, after all). In the basketball world, sprezzatura is Michael Jordan or Stephen Curry swishing a guarded come-from-behind buzzer-beater and offering only a wry smile and a shrug in celebration.

Fans of the truly elite programs (Duke is one, Wake Forest is not), like their players, live in a culture of sprezzatura. They don’t storm the court after a big win, because they expected to win even, if they were the underdog. It was once a cliché that high school coaches in all sports would tell their teams to “act like you’ve been there before.” The fans of the top programs have been there before, too. Wake Forest fans have not… well, not since the days of Tim Duncan, at least, and he graduated before today’s undergrads were born.

Celebrating a win by the home team is great, but it doesn’t have to happen on the court, and it certainly doesn’t involve taunting or assaulting the other team. You haven’t really arrived until you acknowledge that fact and act accordingly.

This essay is a slightly revised and edited version of one which first appeared as a guest column on Ethics Alarms.

Thursday, February 8, 2024

Just What You Needed: More on Taylor Swift

Curmie has two partially-written posts, one of them soon to pass its sell-by date and the other getting closer and closer.  He’s promised Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms a guess post on plagiarism, which would also be published here.  He’s got a book review due (ahem) imminently and hasn’t finished reading yet.  But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.  So… let’s talk about Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Curmie assumes that you, Gentle Reader, know the basics of the brouhaha.  A few notes on Curmie’s position in all this:

Curmie has no interest in whatever romance may or not have developed between the two thirty-something stars of their respective industries.  He hopes they’re happy.  That’s it.

Curmie will be rooting for the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, but that’s because for seven years he lived closer to Kansas City than he ever has to another (American) city with a major sports franchise.  He never saw the Chiefs play live, but he did see a few Royals games.  Anyway, the Chiefs are a secondary favorite in our household, behind the New York Jets and the Cleveland Browns, the decades-long favorites of Curmie and Beloved Spouse, respectively.

Curmie will, however, be cheering for Kansas City a little louder than usual this year, although he has nothing against the 49ers, simply to piss off the right-wing idiots (apologies for the redundancy).

Curmie is not a Swiftie by any stretch of the imagination.  He could name a couple of her song titles, but only because they’ve been mentioned as obviously witty comments by friends; he wouldn’t recognize one of her songs if his life depended on it.  Curmie does, however, have a dear friend who, for a couple of years, occupied the office directly across the hall from his in the poorest sound-proofed building you can imagine.  She is far more attuned to popular culture in general than I am, and she is a Swiftie.  Occasionally, if she’d had a bad day, she’d knock on my door and say, “I’m sorry; I just need some Tay-Tay.”  She’d turn on the tunes.  She’d keep the volume low, and with both our doors closed I could tell there was music playing, but not much else.  That’s the closest I’ve ever come to knowingly listening to a Taylor Swift song.

Just because Curmie isn’t a fan, though, doesn’t mean he has anything against her or her fans.  (Let’s face it, sexagenarian men aren’t exactly her target audience.)  She is arguably the biggest pop music phenomenon since the Beatles, or at least since Michael Jackson, and she wears her celebrity extraordinarily well.  She is generous with both her time and her money: visiting terminally ill young fans, giving the bus drivers for her tour literally life-changing bonuses, contributing tens of millions of dollars to food banks in cities she performs in… the list goes on.  It’s estimated that she gave away something in the neighborhood of $100 million last year.

True, she can afford it, but so could a lot of other folks who hoard their wealth like a dragon in a cave or build shrines to themselves.  She appears to be a genuinely good person, which is pretty rare amongst the glitterati.  Everyone who’s actually interacted with her finds her, in the words of Ed Kelce (Travis’s father), a “very sweet, very charming, down-to-earth young woman.”  Travis’s mom and brother, and his coach, Andy Reid, echo those sentiments. The only people who have anything bad to say about her, apparently, are the incel crowd of babbling reactionaries.

Travis Kelce is no slouch at his job, either.  He is arguably the greatest tight end in the history of the game, and if he isn’t at the very top of that list, he’s pretty damned close.  He’s also become a sought-after endorser of everything from credit cards to insurance to vaccinations.  He isn’t exactly in her league in wealth or international fame, but he’s a multimillionaire and a legitimate celebrity, so the couple have the benefit of not being in the same business (and therefore not competing with each other) but also understanding the vicissitudes of notoriety.

Oh, and this is the fourth time in five years Kansas City is making an appearance in the Super Bowl.  They were good before Tayvis (Travlor?) even met; they’re good now.  Still, Vivek Ramaswamy, perhaps the only person in the country to challenge Donald Trump for both narcissism and stupidity, has proclaimed that the Super Bowl will be rigged to favor the Chiefs (against the team representing the city most associated with good ol’ “American values,” San Francisco) to set the stage for a big endorsement of Joe Biden’s re-election bid.  Curmie thinks Vivek, et al., need to check the calibrations on their tin-foil hats. 

The paranoia had already reached epic proportions both before and after the AFC Championship game between the Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens.  Games with the referee assigned to this game, you see, are won by the visiting team more often than games with other referees are… and (OMG!) the Chiefs were the visiting team.  QED, right?  

Well, even apart from noting the small sample size, it’s worth mentioning that the referee, out of all the officials in the game, is probably about the least likely to actually affect the outcome of the game.  Yes, he’ll make (or not make) offensive holding calls on some pass plays, but so does the umpire.  But the most significant calls, especially in the NFL (as opposed to college), are on pass interference, and the referee, who lines up 15 years behind the tight end, is pretty unlikely to be involved in a call 40 yards downfield.

Of course, there was one no-call on a pass play in the endzone that resulted in a Chiefs interception instead of a first-and-goal for the Ravens.  Replay showed that a Chiefs defensive back made contact with the intended receiver prior to the arrival of the ball.  (NFL fans know that the surest way to know it was a bad call is that “rules specialist” Gene Steratore said it was a good one.)  But that replay also showed that there was no conceivable way the pass could have been completed.  Should it have been a penalty?  Yeah, probably, but it was a close call and the zebras will always get one or two of those wrong. 

Naturally, the biggest complainer was Ravens receiver Zay Flowers, who pretty much said he expected the officials to be crooked.  Zay…  Dude...  If you really want to see the person most responsible for the Ravens’ loss, look in the damned mirror.  Taylor Swift didn’t follow up a good play with a much deserved taunting penalty that moved the ball out of the red zone.  The officials didn’t fumble just outside the goal-line for the Chiefs to recover for a touchback.  The NFL brass didn’t prove their childishness by slamming their hand into a bench and getting injured in the process.  Grow up, bro.

Of course, the conspiracy theorists want to have it both ways: if the Chiefs win, it’s for some nefarious purpose; if they lose, it’s because Swift is a “distraction,” and therefore bad not only for the Chiefs, but for football in general.  You know, like how the Marilyn Monroe/Joe DiMaggio relationship destroyed baseball.  (To be fair, the Yankees went “only” 103-51 that year, failing to reach the World Series.)

There is at least a little rationale for the fear that Swift might endorse Biden; she did so last time, after all.  But her support of Biden, like Curmie’s, seems more to be a rejection of the alternative (see here and here, for example) than enthusiasm for an octogenarian who wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer a couple of decades ago.  And I feel confident that such an announcement, should it occur, will take place not at half-time, as some moron suggested, but after a discreet post-Super Bowl interval.  The woman is too smart and too classy to do otherwise.  

Moreover, the effect of any such endorsement is likely to be negligible at best: the same poll that said that 18% of voters would be more likely to vote for a Swift-backed candidate also revealed that 17% would be less likely to do so.  Luckily, both numbers are unadulterated bullshit.  Curmie is likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by Swift because our politics are more or less aligned, not because of the endorsement.  There’s a whole lot of stupid in the American electorate, but not this much.

The terror is real, though, amongst the red cap brigade.  James Carville has a point in arguing that “it’s massively entertaining to watch people this stupid go public.” It would indeed be rather amusing if it weren’t so pathetic. 

Taylor Swift is not responsible for the fact that every idiot producer (again, apologies for redundancy) for Fox or CBS or ESPN or whoever wants to show her reactions to whatever happens on the field; in fact she has repeatedly asked them to stop.  The only good news here is that some little girls get to share some dad-bonding when their heroine is shown on-screen for an average of about 26 seconds per 3 ½ hour game.

In MAGAland, however, this amounts to Swift’s setting herself up as an idol—this from folks who worship at the feet of the world’s most narcissistic grifter (or is it the most grifting narcissist?  Both, I guess).  Among other things, she has been called “ugly” (remind me not to go to that guy’s optometrist). 

She took her private jet to the game in Baltimore, and according to Fox News it “belch[ed] tons of CO2 emissions.”  Of course, if she’d travelled commercial, she’d be held responsible for congestion at the airport.  Moreover, Curmie isn’t so sure about those numbers.  According to a table on the Guardian website (accompanying an article urging readers not to fly because of environmental concerns, so it’s not likely to under-estimate the emissions), Swift’s short flight would generate barely 100 pounds—5% of a single ton—of CO2.  That’s still a lot, but those Fox News numbers are looking rather sketchy.  Imagine that!

Fox Chief Conspiracy Theorist talking head Jesse Waters pushed the idea that she was a Pentagon psy-op asset.  (Well, he didn’t say she was one, only that they’d considered the idea, but he said it in a tone that suggested that his nothingburger of a revelation actually meant something, and the average Fox devotee is too stupid to recognize the dissonance.)  The Pentagon shot that down, and rather cleverly, at that.  When was the last time, Gentle Reader, the Pentagon was the more trustworthy source in a dispute?  Miracles happen!

And, of course, there’s The Donald himself getting all hot and bothered that he wasn’t Time’s Person of the Year, proclaiming himself more popular than she is and with more devoted fans... and declaring a “holy war” on her should she dare to express a political opinion.  Trump proves yet again how mentally unstable he is, and that he is not even close to being an appropriate candidate for the presidency, much less actually winning the election.  But that has been clear for a long time, well before the incompetence of the Hilary Clinton campaign got him elected.  

Swift was even criticized for not mentioning her boyfriend in her acceptance speech for winning the Best Album Grammy.  It pretty much goes without saying that the project in question was completed before she even met Kelce.  Instead—OMG!—she thanked her collaborators on the album!  What is that about?

Curmie’s favorite, though, has to be this post from “Alpha Male” Nick Adams: “By being on the team that won the AFC Championship, Travis Kelce will receive a bonus check of around $70,000. For those wondering why Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce: are things beginning to make sense now?”  Curmie has a reasonable retirement portfolio and a fair bit of home equity.  That said, if you were to pay Curmie the same percentage of his net worth that $70,000 is of Taylor Swift’s, you’d get plenty of change back on a $10 bill.  To be fair, Curmie has seen it argued that Adams is really a leftie troll, similar to the character created by Stephen Colbert a few years back.  If so, he (she? they?) is brilliant.  But a glance over a few days’ worth of his X account suggests that he really is just another nasty moron.

What is this all about?  Is Taylor Swift the target of the broflakes (what a delightful term!—kudos to whoever came up with it) because she’s a successful woman who terrifies weak men? because she is precisely what their pseudo-Messiah pretends to be and isn’t? or just because she’s a decent human being and they avoid those folks like Dracula avoids crucifixes?  A little of all three, one suspects.

Saturday, January 27, 2024

On the "Barbie" Snubs

Let’s get this part out of the way up front.  The only times Curmie has ever cared about awards like the Oscars were when a friend or a friend’s project was nominated.  Also, Curmie has never seen “Barbie,” and has no intention of doing so: he is outside the target audience for reasons of age, gender, temperament, and probably a host of other things, too.  That doesn’t means it’s a bad, or even undeserving, movie.  If, Gentle Reader, you saw it and loved it, Curmie is pleased that you were entertained or enlightened or whatever; if you saw it and were disappointed, Curmie sympathizes.  He’s been there.

Gentle Reader, you are no doubt at least as au courant with popular culture news as Curmie is, so you’ll already know that the anthropomorphized doll movie was a huge box office success.  It collected a passel of Oscar nominations, as well, including for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor/Actress—Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera.  Ah, but the two driving forces of the project, director Greta Gerwig and title actress Margot Robbie were not nominated in those categories (see below for the ”yeah, but…”).

On the one hand, there are certainly ironies at play.  The meme you see here is one of many variations on the theme.  Yes, it would be logical that if a film is nominated, then its director and star would be, too.  It’s certainly worthy of raising an eyebrow that in a film with such feminist undercurrents it would be Ken, not Barbie, who got recognized.

But “Past Lives” also got Best Picture and Screenplay nods without either a directing or leading actor/actress nomination, so it’s not a complete anomaly.  Plus, there’s the simple fact that there are twice as many nominations for Best Picture as there are for the other categories, so some major contributors to nominated films are inevitably left out.

This has not prevented howls of protest from the movie’s fans.  There are the usual, frankly rather tired, allegations of sexism, for example.  How could Ryan Gosling be nominated and Margot Robbie not be?  Well, perhaps the voters (all actors themselves—you can only vote in one category) liked his work better.  Perhaps there were more outstanding performances from female leads in other films than there were from supporting men in other films.  Gosling and Robbie wouldn’t be competing with each other, after all.  Perhaps Gosling just did better work than Robbie.

Perhaps, too, the directors who voted in that category just thought the work of Jonathan Glazer, Yorgos Lanthimos, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, and Justine Triet was better.  All of their films were Best Picture nominees, too, after all.  And those folks aren’t exactly rookies.  Between them, they had one Oscar win and ten other nominations in directing, and that doesn’t count their work as writers or producers, or awards like Golden Globes or BAFTAs, or wins at festivals like Cannes and Banff.

There is not, indeed cannot be, any great conspiracy to “erase women’s work” or some such nonsense.  Robbie didn’t get nominated because some other woman did.  Gerwig didn’t get nominated, but another woman did.  Yes, there will be those who claim that somehow all those voters secretly got together and decided that precisely one woman should get the nod.  Curmie sees <checks notes> zero evidence of that.  If, Gentle Reader, you think the “Barbie” women were better than one or more actresses or directors who did get nominated, that’s fine.  Curmie thinks something similar in virtually every category virtually every year.  But that’s a matter of taste, not backroom machinations.

It's also worth noting that the meme isn’t quite accurate.  No, Gerwig didn’t get nominated by name, but that’s because the award is for Best Adapted Screenplay, not Best Adapter, although exactly what she is alleged to have “adapted” is beyond Curmie’s ken.  (Get it?  Ken?  OK, moving on.)  Robbie, as one of the film’s producers, also has a nomination to call her own. 

Importantly, virtually any recognition for a film like “Barbie” is significant.  It may be that the movie wears its feminism a little ostentatiously, but the adjective Curmie’s friends who liked the movie have employed the most is “fun.”  The film may not be Curmie’s mug of lapsang souchong, but Curmie will take “fun” over “self-consciously earnest” ten times out of ten.  No, Curmie hasn’t stopped being an intellectual elitist, but he does believe that Hollywood is generally a lot better at entertainment than at intellectual stimulation.

In Curmie’s experience, most Oscar nominees are rather boring exercises in pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness.  Of the last several Oscar winners that Curmie has seen—he hasn’t bothered with some of them—there are more truly terrible films than excellent ones.  That’s just Curmie’s opinion, of course, and you should consider yourself under no obligation to agree.  But hopefully, Gentle Reader, you’ll grant that “fun” is not an adjective applied to most Oscar winners.  If “Barbie” changes that, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. 

Curmie would also bet that individual accolades are less important to Gerwig and Robbie than the success—in all the different definitions of that term—of the overall project… or at least they’ll say it is.  And so we move on to one of the most oft-referenced statements by a nominee ever, by Ryan Gosling :

I am extremely honored to be nominated by my colleagues alongside such remarkable artists in a year of so many great films. And I never thought I’d being saying this, but I’m also incredibly honored and proud that it’s for portraying a plastic doll named Ken.

But there is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally-celebrated film.

No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius.

To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.

Against all odds with nothing but a couple of soulless, scantily clad, and thankfully crotchless dolls, they made us laugh, they broke our hearts, they pushed the culture and they made history. Their work should be recognized along with the other very deserving nominees.

Having said that, I am so happy for America Ferrera and the other incredible artists who contributed their talents to making this such a groundbreaking film.

It is a gracious statement, expressing both appreciation for his own recognition and disappointment that his colleagues on the production were not similarly honored (well, they were, sort of, but we know what he means).  True, it has a little of the aroma of a press release, but there’s a legitimate possibility, even a probability, that it’s largely heartfelt, whether he actually wrote the thing himself or not.  People do tend to be loyal to friends and colleagues.

You can be forgiven your skepticism, Gentle Reader.  But please do not countenance descriptions of Gosling’s comments as “the baby goose’s insufferable blubbering,” “virtue signaling,” or “whining,” which apparently is what a fair number of people whose demographic profiles (but not politics) match Curmie’s seem to be suggesting to anyone who will listen.  Doing so would serve as evidence of precisely the attitude the film apparently seeks to lampoon.  Paranoid, mendacious, and bitchy is not an attractive combination.  There are more than a few walking exemplars of fragile masculinity to whom the truth of the foregoing sentence would seemingly be a revelation.

To sum up: 1). Curmie neither knows not cares whether Gerwig and Robbie “deserved” to be nominated as director and leading actress.  2). An ironic coincidence is not the same as evidence of a conspiracy.  3). A lot of old white guys need more bran in their diet.  

In other words, no, nothing new here.

 

Thursday, January 18, 2024

In Memoriam: Peter Schickele

 

Curmie won’t get an obituary in the NYT,
but he hopes he’ll at least get an
equivalent photo to this one.

One of the first things Curmie read this morning on his Facebook feed was the news that Peter Schickele had died at the age of 88.  To be honest, it never occurred to me that he was still with us; I hadn’t heard anything about him in years, and I’d always assumed that he was at least a dozen years older than he actually was.

He had, of course, stayed on my mind.  Beloved Spouse and I often refer not infrequently to the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, and I’ve more than occasionally wished I could have worked there—their theatre program didn’t have the reputation of their music program, but the school clearly appreciated the arts.  😉

More to the point, Schickele was instrumental in forming my attitude towards life in general in ways I hadn’t really thought about until this morning.  He was, of course, a gifted musician—he wrote over a hundred pieces of serious music: for symphonies, for Broadway, for Hollywood—but, like Victor Borge and Spike Jones (both of whom were more beloved of Curmie’s parents than of Curmie), he gained fame more for his wit and cheerful irreverence than for his composing or playing.

Still, the musicianship was there.  Schickele’s “discovery” of P.D.Q. Bach, the “last and by far the least” of Johann Sebastian Bach’s manifold offspring, clicked in Curmie’s mind in a particularly impactful way.  In a memorial tribute in the New York Times, Margalit Fox writes, “Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.”  That’s about right, both denotatively and tonally.

The “Concerto for Horn and Hardart” in particular struck a chord early on with Curmie, one of whose clearest memories of childhood was eating at a Horn and Hardart automat during a class trip to New York City sometime in the mid-’60s.  You have to be good to write the serious part of that piece; you have to be more than a little off-center to write (and perform) the rest, complete with such “musical instruments” as glass sliding doors with sandwiches behind them.  It meant something different to Curmie at first hearing, but now it is an emphatic reminder that Art can be… well… fun.

That combination—the clear understanding of the form and the willingness to play with it—is what was, and is, so appealing.  Can Curmie’s scholarly interest in adaptations of Greek tragedy be traced to “Iphigenia in Brooklyn”?  Probably not.  But Schickele’s saucy approach to inherited material certainly planted a seed.  Curmie loves word play, although he’s not quite the punster that some of his friends are.  Peter Schickele was one of the first to inspire that appreciation.  But it’s more than just plays on words.

Over the years, Curmie developed a repertoire of bits that re-occurred in his classes.  The Athenian politician Solon had the voice of a Good Ol’ Boy when warning that make-believe might find its way into “our serious bidness.”  Apollo sounded like Barry White when propositioning Cassandra, but was utterly fabulous when appearing as the deus ex machina in Euripides’ Orestes.  The possibility that a gunpowder-based bomb might have been implanted into a straw dummy when the title character’s body was “rejected by the earth” (launched by an underground catapult) in the Cornwall Death of Pilate became “’splodin’ P-Square.”  Hamlet was caught in the existential crisis of whether to be Goth or Emo.  And so on.

Importantly, the playfulness inherent in these performances was intended (and, one hopes, received) not as an attempt to ridicule the sources, but rather to provide a hermeneutic access to them.  Irreverence for its own sake is always smug and usually boring.  But, as such philosophers as Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have demonstrated, play, or rather a particular kind of play of which these snippets of pedagogical quirkiness are examples, is central not merely to our intellectual life, but to our humanity.  Huizinga even suggests that our species would more rightly be called homo ludens, replacing the Latin word for wisdom (sapiens) with the word for play.

Would Curmie’s lectures have been fundamentally different were it not for Peter Schickele?  Probably not, but it’s possible.  It’s even possible that there would have been no lectures at all, that without having developed a taste for the slightly naughty intellectual irreverence he found first in Schickele and later in the theatre, Curmie would have continued in the pre-law program he began as an undergrad.  He would then have been considerably richer.  And immeasurably poorer.

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Of Bill O'Reilly, Hoising, and Petards

 
A modern day petard,
You didn’t really want to see a photo of Bill O'Reilly, did you?
We begin, Gentle Reader, with a short lesson in vocabulary and etymology in reference to the title of this entry.  Most people know the word “hoist” as either a verb meaning to raise up or as a noun meaning the mechanism by which that raising up is accomplished.  

Its most common usage today, however, may be in the expression “hoist by his own petard,” an expression employed by the title character in Act III of Hamlet.  (A petard is a medieval gunpowder-based bomb.)  In this expression, “hoist” is not a verb per se, but rather the past participle of the verb “hoise,” a verb meaning pretty much the same thing, but which has long since fallen into disuse. 

We do understand the expression correctly, however: to be hoist by one’s own petard is literally to be blown up by one’s own bomb, or figuratively to be undone by one’s own scheme.  Perhaps the best example in mythology (and subsequently in dramatic literature) is Oedipus, who would not have found himself in quite that relationship with his birth parents had he not attempted to avoid the fate foretold by the oracle.

Anyway, the most recent victim of such self-inflicted damage is the insufferable Bill O’Reilly.  Like so many other right-wing talking heads (Beck, Carlson, Ingraham, et al.), O’Reilly started out as a conservative-leaning commentator who not infrequently actually had something to say, but subsequently took a hard turn into Loonyville when it became apparent he could achieve more fame and fortune by doing so.  Even if O’Reilly weren’t a sexual predator, Curmie would have no sympathy for him. 

The source of the heady aroma of schadenfreude that currently fills the air is the news that two of O’Reilly’s books—Killing Jesus: A History and Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency—are among books that have been at least temporarily pulled by Florida’s Escambia County School District lest they run afoul of Ron DeSantis’s purge of books that anyone anywhere might allege “to contain pornography or obscene depictions of sexual conduct.” 

The chances that O’Reilly’s books actually meet any reasonable interpretation of the criteria for removal is remarkably close to zero, but the same could be said for the overwhelming majority of the literally thousands of other  books similarly pulled from the shelves (see below).  O’Reilly’s objection just got more play, both because people recognize his name and because he was an outspoken proponent of DeSantis’s censorial machinations.

Like most such authoritarian regulations, those currently embroiling Floridians appear to have started as a legitimate concern.  There is little doubt that some books inappropriate for young readers found their way into a few school libraries, and some small percentage of librarians and school administrators failed to provide appropriate safeguards.  But “protecting the children” does not include sheltering them from realities like the facts that slavery and segregation are very much a part of this nation’s history, that gay people exist, or that “loving America” is not the ideology-free perspective the right wing proclaims it to be.

More importantly, perhaps, is that O’Reilly is actually right about one thing (insert stopped clock analogy here): the law as written is disastrously, almost certainly unconstitutionally, vague.  As Curmie wrote about a similar exercise in censorship in Utah last spring, “excluding everything you want to exclude while not forbidding what you don’t want to forbid requires language skills surpassing those of the average state legislator,” and censorial reactionaries are even less likely than the average pol to craft such a bill.

That’s why one Utahn (that’s the correct term, apparently) sought to have the Bible removed from schools: “Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide…. You’ll no doubt find that the Bible, under Utah Code Ann. § 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.”  According to the law, the complainant has a point, as no “socially redeeming value” exception is allowed.

The drafters of such legislation have two things in common: 1). they aren’t really interested in protecting children, but rather on ensuring that their weltanschauung is the only one permitted (OK, they wouldn’t use that word; it’s not ‘Merkin, after all), and 2). they’re relying on selective enforcement leading to prior restraint to do their dirty work.

In Florida, Ron DeSantis’s minions over-stepped in a different way.  By holding individual librarians responsible criminally responsible for allowing one of those naughty books to go unsuppressed, and by attaching absurd penalties for those alleged crimes of omission, they’ve prompted precisely the reaction we see now. 

If a single complaint from a parent (sorry, the internal link in Curmie’s piece is now behind a paywall) can get a 25-year-old episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney” about Ruby Bridges pulled from classrooms lest students come to the obvious and irrefutable conclusion that at a particular moment in time “white people hated black people,” then the Trouble right here in River City isn’t pool, but something that rhymes with pool: Fool, in the person of the Governor of Florida.

Curmie can’t be sure if the recent removal by the same school district that pulled O’Reilly’s books of Webster’s Dictionary for Students, along with over 2800 (!) other books, for potentially violating the state law against “sexual content” was precipitated by an actual concern or as a means of showing just how remarkably stupid the law is.  Curmie fears the suppression was  spawned by the former, but there is no doubt that the latter has been amply demonstrated.

To be fair (sort of), although Curmie doesn’t have immediate access to that particular volume, he suspects that more than a few words involving sexuality may well be spelled and defined therein.  It’s a dictionary! 

Revenons à nos moutons: feeling too much sympathy for hypocrites like Bill O’Reilly, who were all for censorship of other people’s books, may be too big of an ask.  But perhaps, just perhaps, his notoriety might initiate a review, not of books which happen to include a gay character or suggest that slavery may not have been such a good idea, but of a ridiculous, anti-intellectual, ethically unenforceable, and (dare I say it?) un-American law imposed at the behest of one of the country’s foremost proponents of governmental thought control. 

Even Curmudgeons can dream.

Monday, January 15, 2024

NCAA Football, Part 2: Some (Sort of) Solutions

OK, Curmie recently pointed out a handful of the manifold problems with college football as it is currently structured, especially with respect to the bowl system.  There are some issues that are insoluble, either legally (apparently) or structurally.  NIL and the transfer portal aren’t going away, but some tweaks are still possible. 

Next year’s expansion of the playoffs from four to twelve teams is stupid (it potentially adds three games to some teams’ schedules—let’s just forget about all that “student-athlete” rhetoric—but it does solve one problem and mitigate another.  There won’t be an undefeated major conference champion that isn’t given at least the opportunity to win a national title.  If you’re not clearly one of the twelve best teams in the country, STFU if you get ranked 13th. 

Plus, there will be fewer opt-outs if there’s a national title at stake instead of the rather less impressive distinction of being the champion of the Pop-Tarts Bowl.  (Yes, that’s a real bowl game.)

But these don’t begin to solve all the problems.  Let’s take the ones Curmie identified earlier and offer some possible solutions.   

NIL is becoming the principal if not sole driver of collegiate athletics.  We can’t eliminate the system altogether, but we can impose restrictions.  For example: forbid universities from marketing their players, or seeking contributions from the public (“if you want your team to keep winning, send a check”).  To give a little perspective: it is hardly a secret that Curmie is a fan of the Kansas Jayhawks; KU is the only school from which Curmie has a degree that has Division 1 football. 

Jayhawks coach Lance Leipold was heavily rumored to be a contender for the University of Washington job after their coach, Kalen DeBoer, left for Alabama.  Curmie subscribes to an email list about KU athletics.  The most recent missive manages to whine on three separate occasions about the alleged insufficiency of KU’s NIL funds as a cause for concern.  KU, by the way, is about to give Leipold a substantial raise to his meager $5.7 million salary; it appears likely he’ll soon be able to get the large Coke with his Big Mac combo if he wants it.  Collegiate sports have been mostly about money for a long time; we’re moving towards being exclusively about money.

It would be nice to impose a cap on how much a “student athlete” could make, but that’s probably not feasible.  What could certainly be done is to make all NIL contracts include a promise by the athlete to be available to play in every game, including bowl games, except when ruled medically unable to do so or there is some other reasonable excuse (death in the family, that sort of thing).  “I’m an asshole who doesn’t want to risk injury” is not such a legitimate reason.  NIL sponsors should be permitted to claw back every nickel from players who don’t adhere to this rule.

If Curmie were in a management position with an NFL team, he’d make it clear that he’s a lot more interested in players who want their team to win and do what it takes to make that happen rather than in looking out for themselves alone.  Of course, the average NFL exec is a moron who wouldn’t come to that obvious conclusion, but even curmudgeons can dream, right?

That said, players who stand to make millions as professional athletes are indeed risking their future earnings by playing in bowl games.  They will receive insurance policies based on percentage of their anticipated future income, as determined by independent authorities; the cost of these policies will be shared equally by the NCAA and the player’s university.

The transfer portal will not be open until the day after the national championship game.  Schools who contact players from other teams will be ineligible for any post-season games, including conference championships, for one year (three years for a second offense in the three year period).  Players who advertise their availability prior to that start date will be ineligible to play for anyone for one year. 

And then there are all those bowl games that nobody has ever heard of unless your team plays in it.  Here’s Curmie’s proposal: no bowl game that includes a major conference team and attracts neither 25,000 fans to the stadium nor a TV rating of 1 (i.e., 1% of television sets in the country are tuned to the game) will continue next year.  Those numbers will be halved—12,500 fans and a rating of .5—for games between Group of 5 teams. 

Games that meet only one of those criteria will be on probation: if they reach the goals next year, great.  If their numbers improve but are still below the threshold, the bowl remains on probation.  If the numbers don’t improve, they’re gone.  No new bowl game can be played within 25 miles of the venue for five years.  (A different bowl in the same city that meets the requirements would be allowed to continue.)

Using TV ratings on Sports Media Watch and attendance figures from Wikipedia, Curmie would therefore cancel the Boca Raton and Fenway Bowls immediately, and place the Birmingham, Camelia, Cure, Famous Idaho Potato, Famous Toastery, Frisco, Hawaii, Independence, Las Vegas, Mobile, Myrtle Beach, and New Mexico Bowls on probation.

Of the five current “All-Star” games, the East-West Shrine Bowl would be allowed to continue because of its charitable cause; the others would be cancelled unless they, too, adopt a recognized charity recipient of the game’s revenues.  Such a charity must not be exclusive in terms of race, sex/gender, religion, etc. 

Even if all of these ideas were to be adopted, college football will never be the same.  Curmie supposes there’s something to be said for being upfront about the corruption of the process, but that seems rather a small consolation.  “Student athletes,” especially in football, will increasingly be regarded as commodities to be bought and sold, in large part because they’re marketing themselves that way.  But until someone comes up with a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon in the fall, Curmie will probably continue to watch.  Alas.