No question that money makes the world go round and that SPORTSWORLD is spinning as never before.  People everywhere “occupying” and struggling to make ends meet.  The U.S. sending its discarded batteries to Mexico to landfills there.   Canada exporting asbestos to the Third World.  The globe spinning madly….will the centre hold?   Still trying to make sense of Albert Pujols new contract for the Anaheim Angels of the American League.  Can’t count that high when the $$$millions reach the stratosphere.   Also, watch the dollar signs on the recent deal that creates the largest sports media conglomerate in Canadian history.   And do watch our for FOX News, which owns the Republican Party, lock stock, and six-gun.  Romney scared of Gingrich.  Perry showing signs of Alzheimers.  Bachmann making sure her daughter will never ask a boy out to the prom.   No wonder Stephen Harper seems normal.

These are the dog daze.  Jut took a shower and my dog Forest lay down and drooled all over my jeans.   He follows me.  Hope you are getting sufficient rest, good food, and reading well.  Avoid TV if you can, and I have just concluded that A&E should be renamed “the murder channel,” and the History Channel might be called “The Hitler Channel”.  Oh well, too grumpy, I guess.  Am in line now for a new hip early in the new year.  Will try to make that gimpy limp a thing of the past, if not to get back to the basketball court.

Ta……

1. There are few, if any, shows geared to any level of the intellect beyond the common denominator. Which is about IQ 52.
2. Most TV is nothing but advertisements with something called a show involved but not really.
3. The quiz shows, however defined, bring out the worst in the Canadian and American character: Greed
4. The news shows are geared to be entertainment; again, sandwiched around ads for varieties of maladies that hit when people hit their 40s.
5. Food ads really suck. Makes me want to blow up McDonalds, Wendy’s etc.
6. Sports shows on Canadian TV are passe–darts, poker, wwe, really keen. Makes one wish to watch live suicide bombers in Afghanistan or Iraq. Nothing happens at all in Canadian sport, oh, sorry, except CFL and NHL. Or, hey, why hot spend some money and do Canadian college/university bball or vball. Would be far better than watching paint dry.
7. News shows are oh, so repetitive. Almost makes one wish for the old Soviet Union, which only had Pravda. We don’t need the profusion of newscasts. Nor do we need the profusion of mediocrity that parades as entertainment or education.
8. Yes, PBS and TVO have a place, an important place, and one asks them, again and again, to make themselves more attractive in their programming. PBS at this juncture? Not bad. As good as can be, as is NPR, given the circumstances.
9. CBC is at times a thorn in conservative government side. Let it become more so. Let the journalists take their rightful place as being critics of power. That is the only reason for the existence of the CBC.
10. Sports? Let us see a TV station that takes on the corporate sports empire. At the moment, sadly, sport and television are in bed together, and there is no prognosis for any form of coitus interruptus in the near future.

All of this, pity………

Obama is a cool cat, who generally does not rise to the occasion in showing choler.  He fits within the rubric of “good negro” that has strong resonance in American history, including people like Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and, until relatively recently, Tiger Woods.   Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima, and Sambo also fit into this category, a putative connection that is of course unfair to Obama, but suggests a major reason why the President is so reasoned and reasonable.  And that is the force of white racism in  America, which, though weaker now than in past decades, still  provides a restrictive set of behaviours available to non-whites.  So Obama does not want to be classed in the company of Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, and, now, Republican contender Herman Cain.

For those of you noticing the Republican elephants prancing around the TV stage every fortnight or so, Cain is the dark one, the pizza impresario made good, the man who gave us the phrase “9-9-9″ to make a point about tax reform.  One of my friends, a professor in Oklahoma whose status as a lesbian makes her immediately an outsider, suggested that the way Cain figured these numbers, and equally important, how he apparently behaved behind closed doors, made it apparent that the numbers should be turned upside down, to make “6-6-6,” the putative mark of the beast in the famous Book of Revelation, that figures so prominently in the evangelical Christian canon.

Trouble is that Herman Cain has been committing several transgressions in his life, against the famous Seventh Commandment, the one that gave Jimmy Carter such a hard time (remember his interview in Playboy)?  Now, even before many of you who see this blog — and yes, the number is obviously larger than the population of North Gower — Cain might be done as a candidate.   As I type, he was scheduled to meet with his wife to discuss his political future.  That just might be nil at this juncture.

In conclusion, there are other candidates, notably Mitt Romney, he of the Mormon faith, a man who brought health care to Massachusetts while an elected state official there, now, though, as a national candidate, railing against anything that smacks of challenging the American market-driven model.  Yes, he should wear flip-flops because that is what he does best, next to charging Gingrich with “unbecoming arrogance” and keeping his hair in a Ken-like mould that makes him perfect for Barbie.  Remember Mitt’s dad?   That’s George, gone now, but if memory serves, a candidate for the Republican nomination several decades ago.  He blew his chances when he goofed on a question on Poland, then suggested that he had been “brainwashed,” a reference that called up an unsavoury practice of Korean War communists and a bench-mark of the fabulous spoof film, “Dr Strangelove,” which made great fun of the whole darn shooting match.

So here we are, the beginning of December, the holiday season.   And, clearly the silly season.  Obama has done many things to outrage supporters who believed that his progressive credentials touted in the 2008 campaign were real.  ”Change You Can Believe In” fell victim to the same kind of congressional Republican counterrevolution that greeted President Bill Clinton in 1994.  No health care that year, none now.  And Obama more a pragmatist than ever–and, be written here and said here–remains a far better president, given the constraints against him, than people give credit.  At this juncture, he seems to have saved capitalism — albeit with a strategy that smacks of a national socialism similar to Franklin Roosevelt’s first new deal.  Obama’s socialism, which infuriates his opposition, is the kind of socialism that real socialists would condemn–”socialism on a stretcher,” the left might say.  Now Obama is giving signs of being a bit tougher on the economic royalists whom FDR flayed so well and to such great end in 1935-6.  Stand by to see whether the Republicans have eaten themselves –from foot in mouth upward–by January.

Now, however, because of something called “the banner” (an in-house newsrag) and some gamey behaviour at football games, all hell broke loose.  Suddenly the group that Clare Leggett worked so hard to make them look halfway-presentable (ie., new outfits) put its collective foot in its mouth.  Too much momentum toward the carnal, we learned through a long article in the Queen’s Journal (while the Whig Standard stood mute, probably waiting for the news to break in  KTW).  Then, everyone and their mother and father, uncle and aunt weighed in, with pro-Bands people ranting against the administration for the term suspension, and anti-Bands people (a significant number) agreeing that the kind of language used in Bands publications and the type of practices practiced by the group in broad daylight went further than good taste dictated.  And, of course, good taste dictates that Queen’s possesses that quality in spades.  Others took the  opportunity to hitch their respective wagons to the issue, seeking to make points of one sort or another.  The loyal Catholic Father Raymond J. desouza, who sits on the football team bench during games and ministers to the spiritual needs of this Presbyterian school’s team, wrote a diatribe against casual sex as a serious social problem, not only at Queen’s, but throughout our land, strong, free, and apparently very horny.  Desouza has the reputation as an indefatigable blogger, and from time to time provides the National Post with the same kind of culturally conservative reassurance as Margaret Somerville and (on occasion) Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail.  Desouza’s critique struck this writer as a version of the impossible counsels for abstinence that now permeate Western Civilization, understandable as an evangelical intiative of huge importance and a sort of answer to the laughable sexuality that swamps everything that we see in our daily life.  (For desouza on the issue, see  http://fatherdesouza.ca/

Why, suddenly, did the Queen’s administration decide the time had come to pull the plug and reassert some control over a group that demonstrated the worst kind of misogyny that one finds in U.S. fraternities?  Obviously there was nothing startlingly new in the Bands’ behaviour, publications, hubris.  I recall my own frat days at Berkeley and some of the things that we were forced to do to become members of good standing among men who were fine in groups of one, two, or five, but became difficult, even unmanageable, when all together with the cultural baggage of a century that included equal parts anti-Semitism, racism, disdain for women, homophobia, go ahead, fill in the blanks.  On one occasion as a pledge I was ordered to go out on a date and, as with all my dozen pledge brothers, see how far I could go with the woman in question.  This is not the place to note specifics on what transpired that evening, save to say that there was a big scoreboard which we had to fill in, all the blanks, which signified our scores and failures.  The women we dated that evening?  Use your imagination.

So here we are, not lost in the fifties tonight, but in the year 2011, and Queen’s Bands are on report, much like the student body as a whole after the Aberdeen Street party fiascoes of bygone years.   Why did this happen?  Not the Bands’ behaviour, obviously, that was well established, historically.  As a norm.  But why the concern, now?  First, perhaps the Penn State sexual abuse case involving an assistant football coach and bringing down a revered head coach, Joe Paterno, and University President had something to do with the Queen’s admin’s concern.   Second, the fact that the new Vice President Academic and Dean of Students (you can look up their names on the campus masthead) had no long-standing Queen’s connection, or any connection, for that matter, before coming here recently, made it easier for them to take a hard line on the issue.  Third, and most important, as with my frat at Berkeley, it’s clearly time for some students to grow up and treat others fairly and with dignity, whether black, female, Muslim, or, heaven forbid, themselves.

Oh how the world has changed………

And how some things stay gloriously the same……

Closer to home, why in the world cannot Queen’s students clean up their front yards, Or am I just an old phogey? Fogey? Whatever? Goodness, one might even line up with landlords on this one. Even Daphne Dean, whose whereabouts are clearly marked by spilled white paint on William and other throroughfares in this fare city. But we forgive her, so strong is he on controlling her apt. charges.

Other comments? Many. Perhaps the one closest to home concerns Queen’s and its changing character. Somewhere along the line, Queen’s went big. And lost its soul heart. What importance the undergraduate education experience, save for learning or not learning how to drink. A long history that. God, people, ask the Principal–what in heaven’s name is the academic mission of this place? To bring in enough Chinese and Indian students to balance the books. Does the Principal know, as he should, that he is presiding over the decline and fall of liberal arts? Pity, given that Queen’s reputation has been built on that fulcrum.

Oh yes, the football team. ZZZZ

Comments welcome and yes, more to come…..not any of it pleasing anyone…..

In this winter of discontent, with American voters wondering how to deal with tragedy and with each other, we Canadians merely stoke the wood stove and try to keep warm, and hope that the U.S. economy is able to hold its own in the coming months.  We’ve got the NHL, of course, and a lousy entry in the NBA that’s best described as a dinosaur.  Baseball is not too far off, and the Blue Jays will at least have some pitching.  That, of course, in abundance, carried the SF Giants to victory in the World Series.  Around these parts, lots of rooters for the Leafs and Senators, all of these people grumpy.  If you want to warm up, go see “The King’s Speech,” which is bound to make you feel good about diction, good acting, and good writing.  I’ve stayed warm over the last month with “The Social Network,” also enjoyed greatly, with the ironic point that the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, had very few friends, indeed.  Now that he is worth fifty billion smackers, one suspects that he is more popular.  The film is good, very good in places, and has a fine sense of the weaknesses of the human persona.  As does the HBO production of “Mad Men,” now through its fourth year and still going strong.  Nothing but a soap opera borrowing themes from the late 1950s and 1960s, but sensitive and clear in its brutal portrayal of Madison Avenue and its denizens–especially the men.  All of the male characters are  emotionally challenged in various ways, primarily in terms of identity and relationships.  Ambition is the the complicating catalyst, as all these guys, from Don Draper to Pete, to Sterling Cooper write large, are found lacking in empathy.  Indeed, watching “Mad Men” is a ticket to understanding why a woman’s movement and a civil rights movement broke out in mid-decade.

“Being a man”  also lies at the root of our big games with which we identify, and things haven’t changed all that much in the last half century, if not longer.  Reading the sports pages is an exercise similar to walking my dog, in that the latter sniffs out all the dog piss and feces within at least five hectares.  As with “Mad Men,” no less the real estate market in Kingston, it’s all about winning.  A recent recounting of the scandals that beset the University of Washington football program earlier in the decade (ranging from rape, to assault, to robbery, to cheating, to fraud, etc.–you get the picture) is titled, “Scoreboard, Baby,” which means merely that nothing matters except the final score.  The book is quite a read, it’s paperback, and absolutely disheartening.  But it places in context the sort of transgressions that dominate most U.S. division I football and basketball programs.

Jumping forward to the present, we reflect on Auburn’s national championship, a 22-19 cliffhanger over Oregon last Monday night in the so-called Tostitos Bowl (a force in itself for obesity in North America).  My mouth fell open upon reading a story in the NY Times on Auburn’s rank as #1 in football, and 85th in the small matter of academic completion.  The story is rich….with examples that should make us in Canada feel very good that we lack the kind of money and market that would enable the sort of cheating that goes on down there.  Point here–nota bene, as they say in the margins of good books–is that Auburn at one time a few years ago ranked first (2006)  academically as well as in football.  WAIT!!   The point now clear is that “numerous football players padded their grade-point averages and remained eligible through independent-study-style courses that required little or no work.”

Well, there you are…..in short, several profs in the sociology department, including the head, gave one-on-one courses to players in which the latter merely breathed.  And one supposes that is something.  Auburn was not alone, although the drop from 5 to 85 is remarkable, no less than Florida State’s 17 to 105 and Mississippi’s 18 to 113.  One does not have to be Werner von Braun or even Stephen Harper to smell the rat.  Now, the “loopholes” have been closed, and none of the principals are bragging anymore about their academic marvels.  Indeed, NCAA investigations revealed that one prof at Auburn, Thomas Petee, supervised no less than 252 independent studies students in one year.  Now, fans, I invite you to try that.  I’ve supervised up to seven undergrad independent students in one year and I have felt swamped……get it?

This jeremiad could and perhaps should go on, but sharp readers get the point.  Corruption is widespread south of the 49th parallel, and seeping here as well.  Waterloo’s football program was cancelled this year because of drug violations, and just yesterday, Laurier’s football team faced a wholesale drug testing.  The jury is interested and we shall see.

Tomorrow night, Queen’s basketball plays No. 1 Carleton, and quite clearly, none of the participants on either squad has a reason to be hopped up on steroids.  But the message now, quite clearly, is–if that guy across the line of scrimmage form you is drooling,  you better drool too.  It’s cold here, in Kingston, and yet, we still have a handle (I think) on athletic decency and fair play.  Hope that I am right.  See you at the game tomorrow and the Ottawa contest on Saturday.

Let’s start in Tucson, Arizona, where citizens reel this morning from yesterday’s shootings in Tucson.  We can rail all we want–and most of us are railing at the moment–at the easy availability of handguns, the  power of the NRA, the lack of civility in  American politics, rhetoric off the Richter Scale on FOX News and other screaming media, the Tea Party extremists who have yet to realize that words not only injure, but do much more.   Recent events–and the multiple multiple shootings since the Virginia Tech massacre  in April 2007 make this clear–and undercut “Sticks and stones can break my bones,” the old nursery rhyme goes, “but words will never hurt me.”  Think again, and rethink the kind of discourse that passes for politics today in the U.S.   Words hurt, and they even kill.   And in the long run guns and bullets know no politics — available too all, sadly, as the most virulent form of direct democracy, to anyone who wants to use them.

So now we wait for the fallout–as one observer put it, the beginning of the end of a particular era of politics, or the end of a new beginning.  If the latter, protect us all.  We hope that the awful event will usher in a new civility.

Closer to home, a gorgeous Kingston morning to balance the sadness from the American Southwest.  Stepped out with the dog this morning, watching flurries coming down in clear skies, wondering how can that happen.  Then realizing that clear skies are not necessarily clear of the wispy clouds that can produce a bit of Martha Stewart fluff.  That’s 1/4 inch or less–just like the frosting on a good cake, she says.   Learned how to do that in prison I am told.

And the sidewalks, clear for the most part, the city’s task now, it seems, as most of us do not shovel more than we have to shovel.  So far, under the new mayor, things have gone smoothly, though at times the sidewalk snowplow seems to take out adjacent grass and garden strips.  And the other thing, there is a marvelous metaphor for the sidewalk plow–and that is the zamboni that one sees at the wonderful ice rink at Market Square–for at times, in cleaning sidewalks, the plows leave a residue of glare ice.  I recommend metallic add-ons to shoes called YAK TRAX — they are very good at preventing tumbles, especially when a dog with a hyperactive nose is leading the way.  Only two bits of detritus last night, a full McDonald’s bag dumped on William between Barrie and Clergy–everything out–and a Tim Horton’s paper coffee cup.  Not at all a bad Sunday morning coming down, as Kris Kristofferson used to sing.

Say, do we have the right (duty?) to pick these things up (and Clergy is perhaps the main thoroughfare for fast food detritus from Princess St establishments) and deliver them back to their places of origin?  I remember the children’s story of “The Wizard of Wartville”–a wizard able to make every bit of crap tossed on the ground–from cigarette butts to burger wrappers, etc.) jump back up and stick to the perpetrator’s face….would that we could do the same……and make the crud stick to the originator’s place of business as well.   Am I being too harsh here?  I think not….

Missed–former Queen’s quarterback Bob Wright, who passed last month at the early age of  fifty years.    Funerals are never happy occasions, and this one was more difficult than usual.  Bob will be remembered for his quiet courage, humility, and ability to get the most from his teammates.  He took the Gaels to a Vanier Cup appearance in 1983.  The reception was an epiphany of sorts, the realization for many that the iceman can come sooner, as well as later.   Then, too, goodbye to perhaps the greatest philanthropist in recent Kingston history–Larry Grant Gibson, who battled cancer so well and so long before leaving us a few weeks ago.  His name, and his purpose, are stamped on so much that is good in Kingston.

That’s it for tonight, a Sunday, supposedly a day of rest.  Tomorrow is Monday, and Auburn and Oregon will battle for the NCAA football championship.   Both schools have blemishes, and Auburn’s is really awful.  More on this for those of you who return, tomorrow.  Good night, and good luck.