So I’m sure most folks are well aware that Knicks “coach” Isiah Thomas is finally out. Well, technically he hasn’t been fired per se. He’s been reassinged to another “roll” in the organization in which he’s banned from contacting current players. I’d argue in fact that this assignment is in fact worse that being fired, as now he has to go through another public shaming even after he did his best to shame himself season after season while coaching the Knicks. With the assumption that Thomas’ career in the NBA is over, let’s recap some highlights of his glorious career in the Association.
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- He, and his Piston teammates, walked off the floor with 7.9 seconds remaining on the clock at the end of an Eastern Conference finals game against Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in 1991. (They also refused to shake hands with the Bulls after the game!)
- Publicly blamed a rookie Michael Jordan for not giving him the rock enough in the 1985 All-Star Game.
- Lost the Knicks $11.6 million in a sexual harassmant lawsuit in 2006.
- Led the Knicks to four straight 49+ loss seasons. Interestingly enough, the team recorded a season of 33-49 in the 2004-2005 and 2006-2007 seasons, and they locked in a record of 23-59 in the 2005-2006 and 2007-2008 seasons. Do I detect an emerging pattern of awful? AND they did this All with the 2nd highest payroll in the NBA at 88,877,161 in the 2007-2008 season. (Most of that money went to Stephon Marbury.)
- Allegedly blackmailed by that same Stephon Marbury because he felt he wasn’t receiving enough PT.
Vanderbilt’s Rites of Spring festival went down this past weekend, and for the most part it was a great experience as always. To those not aware, Rites of Spring is a 2 day, school year ending binger at which many different artists show up to play. I’ve got some thoughts on the whole experience.
Booze and Lines
One of the hallmarks of the festival is the booze. Students are allowed to bring in six beers with them to the festival, and in years past, this meant you could bring in six beers each time you re-entered. The result of this allowance were large stockpiles of booze in nearby dorms from which students could re-load. They could then re-enter through express festival re-entry lines. However this tradition was destroyed this year. The express re-entry lines were gone, and one could only bring in six beers per day, period. Additionally, the school only had two entrances for “of age” students bringing in beer, and they were each only manned by two people each checking IDs for thousands of students trying to go to shows. This hellish combination of rules resulted in 45-60 minute lines to get in, and because people expected they could ferry more beers in during re-entry, there were large arguments when they learned they couldn’t further stalling the lines. For example, I arrived at the festival at 9 to catch a 9:20 show. After waiting in line, I didn’t get in until 10 and that show was over. Thanks a lot.
Lil John
That’s right, I saw my arch-nemesis Lil John in concert. I guess that meant I had the chance to wing something heavy at him and end his destruction of society right there, but I guess I just pussed out. It’s always amazed me how acts like’ Lil’ John can contradict themselves in just a few seconds. Mr. Smith decided to go on a diatribe between songs praising independent and successful women, and then proceeded directly into some song that consisted of “It ain’t my baby, it don’t look like me” and single “Get Low.” I’m not exactly a die-hard feminist, but these little “inconsistencies” have always been humorous to me.
(For the record, thanks to a certain Duke alumnus, I can’t hear “Get Low” without hearing “To the windoooooow, to Luol!”)
State of the Festival
When I arrived at Vanderbilt in 2003, Rites of Spring was a free, three-day long festival that lasted from Thursday through Saturday, and the biggest obstacle was trying to remember what happened. However now the festival is two days, and they charge students for admission. Aaaand the acts aren’t as good. It would appear that the people planning the events are shelling out more money towards homecoming shows as opposed to rites of spring. Since Vanderbilt invariably loses homecoming despite their best attempts to schedule cupcakes in the past (they handed Navy their first win of their season during homecoming 2003), I’m going to come out and say that spending any money on a homecoming concert is downright foolish.
One of the fringe benefits of working in the construction business is being able to encase things like trinkets, junk, mementos, and Jimmy Hoffa(s) in concrete. I myself have several expired credit cards encased in curbs around the city of Houston. However one New York construction worker who happened also to be a Red Sox fan took this concept to another level when he tried to curse the New Yankee stadium by burying a David Ortiz jersey in a concrete slab in a service corridor. The removal of the jersey required drilling through 2 feet of concrete and 5 hours of work. (And you better believe Turner made sure the workers excavating the jersey had sparkling new Turner hard hats.)
Maybe for now I’m amused with construction related pranks like when a bricklayer spelled out “OU” in Oklahoma State’s Boone Pickens stadium during a renovation project in 2004; however I’m well aware my thoughts may change when I’m the one that has to deal with it.
Say what you will about the comparison of modern American and European societies and who has the more interesting pop-culture scene, but I always at least assumed that we Americans had our European peers topped in the realm of sex scandals. However it would appear that I must relinquish my assumption of dominance after reading news that the head of the Formula 1 Racing governing body, Max Mosley, has recently been caught on film in a Nazi-style dominatrix orgy with five prostitutes in Britain. Additionally, Mosley is the son of the dubious British, Nazi sympathizer Oswald Mosley who led the British Union of Facists during World War II. I’m going to pause here for a second to allow for all of this sink in.
It would appear that Europe decided to attack our volume of scandal and reply with one completly over-the-top incident. All right Europe, you win this round, but we’ll strike again, just wait.
Vanderbilt recently started a campus-wide opt-in emergency notification service called Alert VU. The purpose of the system is to notify people via email, text, etc. of severe weather or other campus emergencies. It would appear today that the system was used for the first time. This morning I woke up hungover and groggy, eased my way to my computer, and found this email waiting for me:
John Bellows,
Warning!A tornado is approaching the Vanderbilt area.Seek shelter immediately!
Thank you,
Alert VU
I knew there were some strong storms heading through today, so this vague email startled me a bit. Shortly after receiving that tidbit, Vanderbilt’s tornado sirens started going off. I scuttled into the next room and turned on the TV to the local news to find however that there are was no tornado warning issued for Nashville, just a tornado watch and a lot of rain. Additionally, one of the weather guys said that Vanderbilt was sounding their campus tornado sirens and, “We don’t know why they’re doing that.”
Thanks Alert VU! Thanks for sending out a tornado warning notice without warning times, storm data, any other information, or an actual tornado warning. Thanks for sounding your tornado siren with no tornado, and thanks for worsening my hangover.
Now I’m off to find painkillers. You can crush Advil up and do lines with it, right?
I’m currently sitting in my risk management class (the one I railed on last week), and today I’m listening to class term paper presentations. These are taking the form of PowerPoint presentations that will take up both this and next week’s class, and I’m being reminded constantly of the errors commonly made in PowerPoint presentations. This post is more for me for when I make presentations in the future as I’ve been known to do some of these things (I won’t say which), but hey, I’ll let you in on my general thoughts on bad form.
- First off, PowerPoint presentations in general should be used as a visual aid with bits of text that support your presentation. They are not designed to be the repository for the written transcript of your speech.
- If you’re presentation uses a comic strip to try to add humor, it’s awful.
- Never spend your presentation staring at the screen.
- No mumbling.
- If you’re still using slide transitions, you’re a moron.
- Uses slides full of text sparingly. If your presentation is all text, it’s awful.
- White background and black text does not work.
- To the peanut gallery: If this is a class presentation, ease off on the questions. Whatever happened to not calling out other students? It’s alright to ask questions, but we all know when your question or comment is just a veiled attempt to publicly embarrass the presenter. And we don’t think you’re being clever. Not cool.
- Try to dress at least marginally presentable.
- Should you modify something about the presenting computer like use or own computer, switch out a peripheral, change screen settings, etc., it is YOUR responsibility to return everything to how it was before you got there.
- It’s OK to change the font from the default one PowerPoint provides, but don’t use anything too elaborate. Cross that line and your presentation moves into the realm of unprofessional and awful.
- PLEASE be mindful of your time. Don’t pull a Dane Cook and run way over your allotment. You both make the entire presentation session run long and hurry the people at the end, and we’ll hate you for it. (Unless of course you’re presenting a cure to global disease, a workable free energy machine, or the solution to poverty. You may take as much time as you wish.)
It’s that time of the year again. College basketball phenoms are declaring for the NBA draft, but just like it’s been in recent years, the vast majority of over-hyped players leaving are freshmen. This would be the by-product of the new NBA minimum age of 19. Sure we had our Carmelo Anthonies in the past, but never have we had so many freshmen bail at one time. I’m worried that the NBA minimum age is turning our nation’s colleges and universities into mass developmental and scouting leagues.
Before you immediately say, “Hey Jack, don’t you realize that all college sports are essentially minor leagues for the pros?”; stop, consider why this NBA age rule was started, and compare it to the other big-time college athletic sports. The minimum age in the NBA was set at 19 largely because of the high influx of high-school talent in the early part of this decade. 18 year olds entering the league like LeBron James became the norm instead of the exception like Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady, and Kevin Garnett were when they arrived on the scene. The problem with this mass of young talent was that NBA scouts were stretched too thin, and as a result, instead of just observing high school talent for future consideration, they had to make immediate personnel decisions. Talent mistakes were made, underdeveloped players entered the league, and they were subsequently crushed. Instead of having just colleges to scout, NBA officials had to survey the vast high school landscape. Essentially, their talent pool doubled or tripled in size, and the NBA set a cap on this by essentially requiring that players spend a year in college. But there’s an important distinction, players aren’t required to play in college, they simply have to be 19 when they enter the league. As a result, players have been entering school largely with the intent of playing one year and then skipping to the pros. I mean, say what you will about NCAA Football, at least players there have to maintain academic eligibility throughout their three years.
Another counter-argument here is that the college game is going to be better with all of this NBA caliber talent entering its ranks. While this might be true as evidenced by some of the stellar play of Michael Beasley and other freshmen during the season, I completely disagree with this principle for a number of different reasons:
Firstly, their appearance completely changes how college programs operate. While they may deny it, programs essentially have to completely re-tool offenses and defenses to fit their new Kevin Love, Derrick Rose, or O.J. Mayo, but where are they after these players skip for the pros? Often times, it’s an offense in shambles and a team that struggles to return to where it was only a year ago.
Secondly, and more importantly to me, the minimum age has made a mockery out of higher education. While their certainly are exceptions, for the most part these players enter school with no intent of performing well in classes or academics. They enter only for the purpose of self-promotion and increasing their stock in the NBA draft. And at the end of the day, college isn’t about athletics; it’s about academics. Schools exist to promote the development and distribution of knowledge, not to field a semi-professional or developmental athletic team.
But what’s the solution? Many future players maintain that they’re in dire financial straits and need a NBA contract to help their family, but at the same time I agree that players do need to spend some in a developmental situation before entering the pros. The solution is simply to look over to college baseball. They’ve probably got the best compromise their is in college sports going for them. Baseball players may enter the minors immediately after high school if they wish, but if they go to college, they must stay there for a minimum of three years. That’s it! That’s the solution. Make high school NBA prospects enter the established NBA developmental league with a reasonably priced contract for a year, and if they’re really as good as advertised, scouts can find them there as opposed to high school, or if they enter college, they would have to stay for at least three years and at least maintain the appearance of academic interest by maintaining minimum requirements by the NCAA to be academically eligible to play.
I feel like this one is pretty self-explanatory, but I figure it was a big one that I haven’t touched on yet. I’m sure most folks have already have strong opinions oon this horrific trend, so I’m only going to give a couple thoughts.
- This is one of those trends that will never be cool no matter how long it remains uncool. It’s “un-ironifiable”. (Trademark!) It’s right up there with Creed, Pat Boone, Parachute Pants, jenkem, and fascism. You hear that, multiple-popped-collar wearers who think you’re being cool? You’re not. Stop it.
- I once had a roommate once that sported one of these things for a week or two, and after intense ridicule and numerous threats to stable all of his collared shirts down, he eventually relented and lowered the douche flag. However during that week, he managed to play in an intramural softball game in which he not only sported a pink popped monstrosity, he also demonstrated that he in fact might have been raised as a girl when he tried to through a ball by starting his throw by leading with the same foot as his throwing arm. This is how I immediately see all popped collar wearers.
