Penn State gets hit hard, but is it enough?

Posted on July 23, 2012 by wellsdc

The NCAA dropped the hammer on Penn State today. Through a bit of administrative magic, Joe Paterno’s lifetime win/loss record will no longer show any of his wins since 1998. That is 111 fewer wins, dropping his total at Penn State from 409 to 298, and his place in history, for total wins, from 1st to 12th.

The university (and, to some extent, the taxpayers of Pennsylvania) must pay a $60 million fine, to go towards helping victims of sexual assault, and hopefully Sandusky’s victims. The athletic department will be on probation for five years (whatever that means), and they will have fewer scholarships to go around for the next four years. Also, no bowl games.

Current players may transfer their scholarships to other schools. I hope enough of them do so to cause the school’s athletic department, to paraphrase from Romney, to self-death-penalty.

The Big Ten will announce its own decision on punishment for the school later today.

The obvious question is: Is this enough? I freely admit that I am not a sports fan. I enjoy watching games, but I have never gotten caught up in the sort of fanatical devotion to teams, players, and coaches that characterizes much of sports, both here and around the world. Most athletes and coaches (the vast, vast majority, I’d say) are just folks with an aptitude for a particular game. Most fans are folks who enjoy the entertainment, the camaraderie, and (for lack of a less-pretentious term) the esprit-de-corps of being part of a team’s fandom. Some athletes, fans, and coaches, however, let it go to their heads. And some teams get so good that winning becomes more important than anything in the whole world.

Teamwork and camaraderie, both the kind found between teammates and that between fans, is part of the glue that holds society together. Taken too far, though, it becomes the sort of in-group mentality that starts wars. (I’m not exaggerating.) When winning the game, or protecting the team, becomes more important than enforcing the law, there is a problem. A very, very big problem.

SMU lost its entire football program for a year because players were getting paid. Penn State gets fined and loses some of its scholarships for a massive cover-up of child rape.

SMU might have had a famous, legendary coach in the mid-’80s, when it got the death penalty. I have no idea. But even I, an almost-total non-football fan, have known who Joe Paterno was for some time.

The real punishment for Penn State is that, despite keeping its football program, it loses its legacy. Penn State is no longer the home of the greatest football coach in college football history, even if it took the stroke of an administrative pen to make it so.

I still haven’t answered my own question: Is it enough?

The answer is that I don’t know, and even if I did, it is not for me to say. What happens to the Penn State football program from this day forward has no impact on my life at all. Living in a world where winning football games, and protecting the legacy of a legendary coach, is deemed more important than stopping a known child predator–that has an impact on the lives of every person living in the United States today. How we address that is also not up to me.

The question of whether it is enough can be answered by two groups of people. The first group consists of the victims of Jerry Sandusky, and all victims, past, present, and future, of crimes such as his. They don’t have a direct say, however, in how Penn State’s football program, all other college football programs, and all athletic programs will conduct themselves in the future. Will these schools risk their own glory–and the bottom line–to do what is right? Only time will tell.

The second group, which can affect the future of athletics, is the fans. In particular, the fans who defended, and continue to defend, Joe Paterno even after the facts were known. These are the fans who want to preserve JoePa’s legacy and focus on the good he did, as if winning a lot of football games can make up for, in effect, facilitating child rape. Perhaps that is a loaded analysis, but I have yet to hear a compelling argument for why I should care about anything else Joe Paterno did with his life, ever.

To the fans who supported Joe Paterno and Penn State, what happens next is up to you. College athletic programs exist at their current colossal scale because fans buy tickets to games, watch games on television and pay-per-view, buy merchandise, and build whole lifestyles around college athletics. Is the thrill of watching “your” team win worth the cost of looking the other way when crimes are committed? The choice is yours.

The secret policy meeting at Chik-Fil-A headquarters

Posted on July 21, 2012 by wellsdc

Quite a few people already knew that Chik-Fil-A is run by some pretty hardcore Christian conservatives. Mostly, it has always just meant that if you want a fried chicken sandwich in a hurry, and it happens to be a Sunday, you’ll have to go somewhere else.

It also means that the company gives money to some big-time anti-gay organizations.

Then, of course, the president of the company discussed how proud they are to be anti-gay. Then a shitstorm ensued, and then the company decided to back off of advocacy on the issue.

It sort of begs the question of how the company made its decision to be so overtly anti-gay. Did they decide that fried chicken is a heterosexual food? I suspect it went a bit like the meeting when Kirk Van Houten (Milhouse’s dad) lost his job in The Simpsons:

Kirk: You’re letting me go?

Cracker Co. Foreman: Kirk, crackers are a family food – happy families. Maybe single people eat crackers, we don’t know. Frankly, we don’t want to know. It’s a market we can do without.

Kirk: So that’s it, after twenty years, “So long, good luck?”

Cracker Co. Foreman: I don’t recall saying, “Good luck.”

Yes, I’m sure it was exactly like that.

Humor works best, Mr. Tosh, when it points up

Posted on July 13, 2012 by wellsdc

There’s a reason why famous people get “roasted” once they have had a chance to develop a career. Roasting a venerable celebrity is funny, because the audience knows the person (or their persona) and it’s fun to see someone on high get taken down a few pegs in a jocular, agreed-upon-in-advance manner. If celebrities roasted some newcomer just getting their start, though, they’d just look like assholes.

Daniel Tosh, by all accounts, is quite an asshole.

I wrote a little while back that rape is not funny. I stand by that statement.

I also believe that, in comedy, nothing is definitively off limits, but it’s one person in a million that has the self-awareness and comic chops to pull off a joke about the most damaging, hurtful concepts. Daniel Tosh is with us among the 999,999 people who can’t pull it off.

To review:

– An anonymous woman writes of her experience watching Tosh at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles:

So Tosh then starts making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc. I don’t know why he was so repetitive about it but I felt provoked because I, for one, DON’T find them funny and never have. So I didnt appreciate Daniel Tosh (or anyone!) telling me I should find them funny. So I yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

[snip]

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…” and I, completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening but knowing i needed to get out of there, immediately nudged my friend, who was also completely stunned, and we high-tailed it out of there. It was humiliating, of course, especially as the audience guffawed in response to Tosh, their eyes following us as we made our way out of there. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said about me.

– The proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan.

– Tosh apologizes, sort of, saying he was misquoted but not saying what he actually said.

– Other comedians defend Tosh for a variety of reasons.

– The Laugh Factory’s owner offers an account of what happened substantially at odds with the woman’s story.

– A few people make astute observations, but most people just sort of wail.

Meghan O’Keefe had some interesting observations, and she hit on how it might be possible for someone to successfully joke about rape: she mentions Sarah Silverman, of whom I’m not a particular fan, who has such jokes in some of her routines (click through to O’Keefe’s post, because I don’t want to quote them).

The difference between her jokes and what Tosh said, basically, is about who in the joke has the power. It is also about consent to being the subject of a joke. Sarah Silverman’s jokes, essentially, are about herself. Tosh’s joke was about someone else who, unlike the subject of a roast, had not consented. Sarah Silverman’s jokes portray an absurd scenario, where the audience’s only accessible reactions are shock or laughter. Tosh’s joke, with a simple shift in tone of voice, becomes a threat–to the list of possible reactions, add fear. If you accept no other reason for why rape jokes are not funny, accept that one.

Austin comic Curtis Luciani has an excellent response to the situation, explaining how these power dynamics determine the lines between funny, creepy, threatening, and downright fucking terrifying. Rape is very, very prevalent in our society, both as an actual act of violence and a cultural motif, far more so than most men realize. Luciani’s analogy is brilliant:

I ain’t buying any of that “If I can make jokes about genocide, why can’t I make jokes about rape?” Horseshit, unless you made those genocide jokes during a gig at the Srebrenica Funny Bone. You got away with making a joke about genocide because your odds of having a holocaust survivor’s kid in the audience were pretty fucking low.

Some extra reading for people who might have a hard time grasping the prevalence of rape in society:

Phaedra Starling, Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced, October 8, 2009
Melissa McEwan, Rape Culture 101, October 9, 2009
Melissa McEwan, Rape Culture 101, August 26, 2011

If you’re going to insist on sticking your nose into other people’s relationships that do not concern you, you will have to do it without any Oreos

Posted on June 26, 2012 by wellsdc

Oreos, those eminently awesome chocolate and cream cookies, burst onto the national stage yesterday due to an act of basic human decency. Of course, some people simply cannot let that sort of thing go unpunished. In a fit of diversity and inclusiveness, Oreo posted a rainbow cookie to its Facebook page, garnering hundreds of thousands of “likes” and more than twenty thousand comments. Some comments are supportive, and some are a permanent part of the internet, whose comments will hopefully come back to haunt the authors some day.

Now we know it’s getting real, because Fox Nation’s readers have the story, and they are offended!!!

I was hoping to collect a few choice quotes, but (a) Fox Nation commenters are cowards who don’t use their real names; and (b) I made it through one page and got sick to my stomach, in part because of the unabashed bigotry, but also because of the sheer number of people who think “lol u r stupd” is a good response to someone raising cogent, albeit “librul” points of contention.

Anyway, it only took about two seconds before I came across a racist jab at the president, courtesy of woodsman1st:

After four years of obummer, I believe I want nothing but vanilla cookies with white frosting.

This guy probably takes immense pride at being able to type out “obummer” correctly. If you don’t think this comment is racist to the core, then I have now identified an argument to which “lol u r stupd” is the best response, except that it might have too many big words for you.

Next (and this is as far as I made it), we have libssukkalot, whose handle doesn’t even merit ridicule:

First time in my life that I’ve ever seen a gay cookie, but then again it has been three and a half years of a lot of firsts too! I’ve never seen this many stupid people in charge of a country, and I’ve also never seen a “Dictator” for president of the United States until Obama!

With no way of knowing how old this person is, or anything else about the person’s background, it is impossible to say exactly how dumb this comment is above a baseline level of dumb.

That’s as far as I got. I don’t get why people think what others do in their own private romantic lives is any concern of theirs. As for the argument that gay people rub their sexuality in people’s faces, maybe you should stop thinking about penises so much whenever you see two dudes holding hands. Just sayin’.

Maybe it’s just that you haven’t had the proper introduction. Here’s a link to some excellent gay porn. Maybe you’ll end up liking it…

…Click the link…….I dare you…..

Justice, Bad Jokes, and More Justice

Posted on June 25, 2012 by wellsdc

[TRIGGER WARNING for rape, sexual harassment]

Kurt Buckman: I can’t go to jail. Look at me, I’ll get raped like crazy.
Nick Hendricks: I’d get raped just as much as you would, Kurt.
Kurt Buckman: No, no—I know you would.

From the movie Horrible Bosses (2011) (source)

Stanley Goodspeed: You enjoying this?
John Mason: Well, it’s certainly more enjoyable than my average day… reading philosophy, avoiding gang rape in the washrooms… though, it’s less of a problem these days. Maybe I’m losing my sex appeal.

From the movie The Rock (1996) (source)

Several good things happened on Friday. As anyone reading this already knows (unless this is the first website you have ever seen, in which case “Welcome!”), a jury in Pennsylvania convicted former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky on 45 of 48 charges for sexual abuse of minors.

In another story that the Sandusky case may have overshadowed, a Philadelphia jury convicted Monsignor William Lynn on Friday of one count of child endangerment. Lynn is the highest-ranking Catholic official to be convicted in relation to a child sex abuse scandal.

Two thoughts on this. First, we are taking a long-overdue stand against abuses of power in areas we, as a culture, usually view as sacred (figuratively or literally): sports, especially football; and religion. Neither of these should give anyone, however talented or revered, license to flaunt not only the law, but some pretty elemental notions of humanity.

Second, within moments of the announcement of the Sandusky verdict, the jokes about prison rape started appearing. Refreshingly, quite a few admonitions to STFU about it also quickly appeared, based on a very simple premise that cannot be stressed enough:

Rape. Is. Not. Funny.

Ever.

If your initial reaction to the above statement begins with “Yeah, but…” please stand up from the computer and hit your head against the nearest door frame. Do it until I tell you to stop.

I call this “refreshing” because an issue that is usually the subject of bad jokes and perverse revenge fantasies is finally getting some serious attention. The issue of prison rape was already in the news, remarkably, because of new guidelines issued by the Justice Department, entitled “National Standards To Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Prison Rape.” It is a common grievance among so-called men’s rights activists (MRA’s), who tend to whine a lot on internet forums but do very little actual activism. To see people, let alone the government, take it seriously is nothing short of dumbfounding. Continue reading →

I’d say the shoe is on the other foot, but they make us take off our shoes

Posted on June 21, 2012 by wellsdc

Some people don’t like to be groped by strangers. Possibly most people. Some people, upon being groped, have the nerve to demand better treatment than that. In today’s world of constant ~~vigilance~~ pants-wetting fear, that cannot stand. One woman in Florida wondered how government agents would like it if we groped them.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The agent she allegedly groped did not like it one bit, and now the woman faces a misdemeanor battery charge.

Considering we are dealing with an agency that pats down cancer survivors after scanning them, and whose agents might threaten to sue you if you dare speak out about your groping, this should not be too surprising.

What makes this story slightly more interesting is that the woman is a former TSA agent herself, and she knew the “victim” of her groping demonstration: Continue reading →

Still creepy, but slightly less so

Posted on June 15, 2012 by wellsdc

Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Kate Upton turned 20 this past Sunday. That makes her 41.6% of the age of Elle Macpherson.

(Yes, I have a calculator, Wikipedia, and a powerful capacity for procrastination, and I am not afraid to use any of them.)

She is no longer a teenager, so everyone’s fascination with her is slightly less creepy. I still think that she mostly looks dazed in her photos.

But it’s still rather creepy.

Bombers and Bake Sales, Postmodern Edition

Posted on June 14, 2012 by wellsdc

I was always sort of a fan of the bumper sticker that addressed perceived funding disparities between defense (i.e. war) and education.

It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.

Now, in honor of the U.S. Army’s 237th anniversary, we have the Cupcake Tank:

It’s the U.S. Army’s 237th anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than with food?

Admittedly, the military and gourmet chow don’t go hand in hand. Hard to imagine partygoers munching on MREs, hardtack and cream chipped beef on toast (known to some as “#$%@ on a shingle”).

So imagine our surprise when the folks at Georgetown Cupcake, the cupcakery featured on the TLC series “DC Cupcakes,” dropped by the Pentagon this morning to show Army brass their latest creation – a one-ton, life-size Army tank made up of 5,000 cupcakes and at least 200 pounds of camouflage fondant. Not only that, but the tank can shoot actual cupcakes from its cannon!

Yes, it fires cupcakes.

Estimates of the total cupcakeage range from 3,000 to 6,500 total cupcakes. It appears that no tax dollars went into creating this delicious monstrosity, so funding for more bombers is probably safe. If purchased by the dozen from the donating business establishment, the cupcake content of this tank alone would have a street value between $7,250 and $15,708.33.

Meanwhile, In New York City:

U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno cuts a cake marking the Army’s 237th anniversary on June 14, 2012 in Times Square in New York City. Odierno was joined by fellow Army troops as he swore in 16 new recruits in a ceremony celebrating the Army’s birthday. ”Cake Boss” reality show Buddy Valastro (R), helped Odierno cut the 500 pound cake in the shape of a tank, which Valastro said took 8 of his staff three days to prepare for the event. Photo: John Moore, Getty Images / 2012 Getty Images (via Houston Chronicle)

I’m not even going to try to guess what that cost.

An Open Letter to People Who Send Anonymous Death Threats

Posted on June 12, 2012 by wellsdc

I don’t care who your target is: you are wasting oxygen, and it is highly likely that your original genetic material would have been better served as the contents of a flushed condom. I am specifically referring to the dipshits currently threatening the guy who got George Zimmerman’s old phone number. I am hardly one of Zimmerman’s fans, so I hope this serves as evidence that I condemn death threats sent to anybody. The following advice applies to anyone who would seek to threaten people in such a way: please stop using biomass immediately. This is not a death threat, because I have no interest in being anywhere near you, nor would you be worth the effort, whoever you are.

To put it in a more graphical form:

Photo credit: I don’t know. I found it here.

Dum Dums: A Mystery Unveiled

Posted on June 5, 2012 by wellsdc

When I was a kid, every Wendy’s Kid’s Meal came with a Dum Dum lollipop. (Maybe they still do. I estimate that I last ate a Kid’s Meal circa 1986.) The Dum Dums weren’t as good as a Frosty, but they were a fixture of my childhood nonetheless.

The only flavor I remember anymore is the “mystery” flavor, complete with question marks on the wrapper. Flavors like lemon or cherry may be reliable candy mainstays, but what was that strange, elusive, ever-so-yummy mystery flavor? It actually never occurred to me to actually ask that question as a child, because I had a Dum Dum in my mouth and it would have been rude.

Now, thanks to Mental Floss, we have an answer to the age-old question of the “mystery” flavor. Actually, we may have already had an answer, since it’s right there on the Wikipedia page. Maybe a Mental Floss writer had a deadline and found an old “mystery” Dum Dum behind the fridge or something. Whatever, because now I know, and that’s what’s important.

First, we learn a little history, like how the Akron Candy Company invented the Dum Dum in 1924, and it gots its name from a sales manager named I.C. Bahr. The Spangler Candy Company bought the brand in 1953 and has manufactured it ever since. They’ve had numerous flavors over the years, but that “mystery” flavor has long enticed young & old alike with its puzzling deliciousness. (Am I overselling this?)

Some Dum Dums have wrappers with question marks where the flavor is normally printed. This was a marketing idea that made the production process run more smoothly and made eating Dum Dums more fun. The Mystery Flavor pop is a mixture of two flavors that come together when the end of one batch of candy meets the beginning of the next batch. Rather than shutting down to clean out the candy equipment between flavors, Spangler turned lemons into lemonade and made pops out of the combination of flavors – the tail end of the old, and the beginning of the new. The candy lines keep running continuously, and the Mystery Flavor pops are a surprise treat every time.

That’s fascinating, but it also helps me realize how much older I’ve gotten since I last truly enjoyed a Dum Dum. Rather than want to grab for the nearest available candy, I keep thinking of the cost-saving measure of making mystery candies rather than losing production time to clean out the machine.

I really hope someone has cleaned out that machine since 1953.

Photo credit: ‘Dumdums’ by Linuxerist [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-2.5, or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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What was Sundered and Undone

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