School burnout and a spider bite

For those among you who, like me, have to go through the grind of grading papers and poorly constructed essays, you know the feeling of being burnt out at this time of the year. Even if you don't have a stack high of essays proposing a hidden 'gay' relationship between Huck Finn and Jim (or George and Lennie), you know the feeling of wanting to say 'fuck it all'. That said, I'm sure that most -- nay, all of you -- are having a better spring than one of my students. I received a letter from his mom, accompanied by a doctor's note, that said that this student will have to withdraw for the remainder of the semester due to a serious medical condition. The condition: it appears that when he visited a family member in the southwest, he was bitten no less than five times by a Brown Recluse Spider.

I must admit I didn't know much about this arachnid so I did a little 'googling' and found this lovely image. I could see why this person doesn't have much interest in style guides or writing ledes, especially if his hand looks like the one in the photo. So, as I tell my students and friends: Always look under the toilet seats you sit upon.

Optimism abounds amidst the apathy

Despite the outdoor conditions which made the Friday night's Gopher Spring Game seem a bit mislabeled, the University of Minnesota mens' football squad took the field at the Metrodome. After reaching the nadir of football ineptitude with a 1-11 mark last year, Brew's Crew went out and landed a top-20 recruiting class. Some of that talent was on display last night as I ventured through the slush -- cripes, it's almost May! -- along with my No. 1 talent assessor, Little Man (aka McLovin). Here are my observations, for what it's worth.

Marcus Sherels, a junior from Rochester, recovered a fumble and returned two kickoffs for 93 yards and had a punt return for 21 yards. Offensively, Adam Webber was relegated to some quick checkdowns and outs. He was listed as 10-of-14 for 65 and a TD. His biggest weapon (Adam Decker) wasn't available because he is currently playing for the middling Gopher baseball team (see notes at the bottom). Also absent from Friday's scrimmage was David Pittman, a Juco transfer that aims to be a major component of the offense, according to Brewster. Pittman tweaked his leg in practice earlier in the week and was unavailable to suit up. The running load this year will fall upon Duane (that's DU-won to you, mister) Bennett and R.J. Buckner. Bennett had 43 yards on 11 carries. He is shifty and made several tacklers miss in the open field. He isn't, however, capable of being a 25 carries/game back due to his slight build (5-9, 195 pounds generously). Buckner had 15 carries and looked to move the pile a little more. Still, he isn't large either (5-11, 205) and fumbled once while being tackled. The Gophers can't afford Bennett to go down with an injury or have Webber carry the ball more than 8-10 times a game. He complained last year of being sore until late the following week after having being asked to shoulder the running load too much.

The defensive backfield that was one of the worst in Division 1A (and AA) will be completely reworked this year. Ryan Collado, aka Orange Cone, saw some action at corner, but I suspect that once summer ball starts he'll find his way to the bench area. Otherwise, it was difficult to gauge too much from the defensive side of the ball Friday. The first- and second-string defensive lines overwhelmed the Gophers starting unit, which is in complete rebuild mode from last year. Brewster is going to have to find some capable bodies up front, especially at tackle, otherwise he's going to go through a handful of quarterbacks due to injury.

Sherels was the bright spot on special teams. He looked good for a walk-on and will probably contribute as a returner. The ugliness was displayed in aces by field goal kicker Joel Monroe, a senior from Robbinsdale Cooper. He was 0-3 on field goal attempts, including ones from 36, 38 and 52 yards. I had to look twice at one of his extra point attempts to see if it actually went through -- apparently it did. This guy WILL cost the Gophers a conference game this year, assuming the team can get that close to another Big 10 team.

Bottom line: Too early to tell, but Brewster is going to put together a semblance of an offensive line, a big back to take the load off Bennett, and some speed outside to accompany Decker. Defensively, they may have up to nine new starters (Willie VanDerSteeg and Deon Hightower the holdovers) if linebacker Steve Davis doesn't stick as a starter.

Notes: Noticeably absent from the show Friday was Decker, a 6-2, 215-pound junior from Cold Spring. He is playing his first love, baseball, for John Anderson and the Gophers. According to the story I heard, Brewster was publicly all for the experiment, but when push came to shove he didn't think Decker was serious and wasn't keen on the idea. He told Decker that he didn't want him missing any football practices. So much for that threat... Decker, in addition to getting his scrotum punched by Jack Ikegwuonu in last season's season-ending loss, had his wallet stolen three times from the Metrodome locker room last year. He may want to leave that at home this year or invest in a better lock.

Fraudulent Calipari and Memphis fall in NCAA

When is a Final Four appearance not really a Final Four appearance?

I apologize for the riddle, but I wanted to make a point about the 2008 appearance of Memphis University, coached by John Calipari. Calipari, the coach who led Memphis to its first national semifinal since 1985, was such a feel-good story this season that the media nary touched on his previous indiscretions.

Let's retrace Calipari's coaching movements for a second, shall we. A lot of us can remember when Calipari first burst upon the national scene when then-Temple coach John Chaney burst into Calipari's press conference after a Temple-U Mass game and proceeded to try to choke him. Chaney felt that Calipari was an unethical cheat and a weasel to boot. (Note that despite Chaney's limitations of coaching at a ghetto school and never having reached the final four in his career, he's considered one of the most respected college coaches of the past generation).

Calipari led his Minuteman team to a Final Four berth in 1996 behind the play of star Marcus Camby. Calipari was named coach of the year for the team's efforts. It wasn't long after this storybook season that the truth about the program came out. Camby was getting paid by boosters as were several of his teammates. Additionally, there was a free hooker service that was made available to team members. Those perks were deemed illegal by the NCAA. UMass summarily dismissed Calipari, who then filtered into the NBA where ethics, money and hookers are par for the course.

In 2000 the carpetbagging coach resumed college coaching and came to the University of Memphis. His winning was immediate. After a pair of Elite Eight appearances in 2006 and '07, his team went all the way to the championship game played last Monday. The week before the final four, during the ubiquitous media swarm, Calipari was holding court and trying to sound like a upstanding member of society. First, he took a back-handed shot at Princeton University and their style of controlled, team basketball. He called his squad's style "Princeton on steroids," and by doing so diminished the efforts of a group of true student athletes and their respected coach Pete Carill. At another point, Calipari was talking about how he insists his team give back to the people who got them to where they are today. "After a big win, I tell my players to pick up the phone and call the people who have been important in their lives." Calipari included parents and friends and about a dozen or so other options. At no point did he ever mention a teacher; and this was coming from someone who coaches at a state university. He might as well have mentioned the AAU coach who gives him free gear, the unsavory booster who hooks him up or the other sleazy characters involved with their program. To be honest, it would have been disingenuous for him to talk about education considering his graduation rate at Memphis is a paltry 36%.

But the bottom line is winning and Calipari has some great recruits ready to take over for the "students" who leave after this semester. His top recruit is a young man who was involved in a drive-by shooting. As long as the winning continues, he keeps flashing his winning smile and shovels his B.S. at the dumb-as-fuck media, he'll continue to keep Memphis among the top programs in college hoops. That is, until the NCAA catches up with him again and sends him to the NBA for another go-around. At that point the NCAA and Memphis will probably pull the NCAA runner-up banner from the gym's rafters and erase its name from the record books. Oh yeah, that was done before with Calipari: the UMass team of 1996, hence the riddle at the start of this blog. Calipari's first trip to the final four never happened!

I have no idea of Kansas' Bill Self is sleazy or only pays lip service to education, but I'm guessing he's not in the same league as Calipari. So, for that reason alone, I was more than happy to see the Tigers go down in flames in OT Monday night.

Superman is now a verb

As an English teacher, I have always been a stickler for proper grammar usage. Every couple years or so, a new word emerges that breaks the rules in terms of parts of speech. We've got a new one now: "Superman" or "Superman-ing".

Before I get to the word and its usage, let me provide some background. The criminal trial that's been, er, engrossing, the public in Minneapolis has been the sexual assault trial of former University of Minnesota cornerback Dominic Jones. The former Gophers' captain was arrested more than a year ago and charged with assaulting a 18-y-o girl who was passed out. I'm not going to say that Jones is outright guilty -- I don't think I know enough of the facts to make that claim -- but I can say this: Jones and his buddies who were there are some of the dumbest a@##%! that I've ever heard of. While the four of them were finishing their, um, handiwork on the lady, one of the buddies in the room filmed the scene on their webphone. After the girl came forward to police and arrests were made, it was mentioned that the incident was caught on one of their phones for posterity. When the owner of the phone was told that the phone's hard drive could be restored and the video could be brought from the recycle bin -- he was apoplectic.

I won't go into everything the trial has uncovered thus far -- although I will give a shout-out to my old collegiate newspaper, The Minnesota Daily, for destroying the big dailies in terms of their coverage. Suffice to say it involved vodka shots, pornographic videos and other salacious details. But the video portion is something else.

The court was privy to the 16 second clip, both at actual speed and then slowed to a slide at a time. It showed Jones on top of the woman, whose eyes are clearly shut and is non-responsive. While the video doesn't show Jones inside the woman, it does show him "finishing" his act upon the girl's face. This is where we get to my original dissertation on grammar. Superman, which I previously believed to be a noun describing a guy in red and blue tights who could scale a building in a single bound, has a secondary meaning in the world of porn and hip hop. Jones' actions are an example of "Superman". Apparently some people like to do this and there others in the world (even outside the world of adult films) that appreciate having it done. Perhaps there is some value-add for the skin, I don't know.

As the tape was rolling, there was off-camera dialog that was captured as well. I wasn't sure if it was Jones or one of the other men in the room who said "Brown on brown is how we get down!" implying that the apparently passed-out woman was African-American. I was talking to some friend of mine last night and discussed whether the firestorm over this incident would have been even worse if the supposed victim had been a white girl, from say Edina or Minnetonka. My guess is that it would have been. That's not much solace for the alleged victim and her family, I understand.

On a final note, the defense's big witness Robert McField from Missouri, who was kicked off the Gophers team before this incident and is currently serving time in prison for robbery, was on the stand Friday testifying against Jones. McField's mother and another family member were there in their best Sunday outfits, sitting in the front row of the courtroom, smiling and proudly waving to the younger McField as he described his role in the supposed crime.

A New Hero

I can't say that I'm a big fan of ultimate fighting -- also known as Mixed Martial Arts -- but I never assumed it could be an arena for political ideas. I stand mistaken. Jeff Monson, also knowns as "The Snowman" is a 5-9, 240-pound kickass brawler. He's also a devout anarchist. Here's someone to rally the kids around.

Home Opener

Even if I don't have the same affection for baseball as I did as a child, the beginning of the baseball season always has a positive effect on my spirits. After a winter that never seemed to end, I finally heard the birds singing last week. I don't mind the snow so much but the bitter cold has taken its toll. Monday was the Twins' opener and I had plans to take the family. It's something that we've done for the last couple years but our plans had to change this year when little man (aka McLovin) checked in with a case of strep throat and scarlet fever to boot. My 6-y-o daughter wasn't too upset ("I only go because you want me to go") and my son was overly dramatic ("But daddy, I haven't seen Joey Maurer and Nick Punto for so long..."). Editor's note: A bad father would have followed the now-benched Nick Punto comment with something like, "Well Nicolas, you'd probably have better odds of seeing Nick Punto at the local VFW as opposed to on the field." But I didn't.

So I didn't go with the family. I went with Steff and Thor. Thor, surprisingly wasn't a 6-4 blond-hair, blue-eyed Viking with a large hammer, but a short, wiry guy from Milwaukee. Despite the fact that the opener is the unofficial beginning of spring, the gods kicked us in the groin here in Minneapolis with 6 inches of wet sloppy slush. Sucked. Big Time. It actually made the Metrodome a nice place to watch a game despite the ever-present smell of flatulence.

Growing up in Milwaukee, the home opener was like a holiday. Our version of Mardi Gras. I can't remember off-hand, but I don't think I was able to go to an opener until I was in high school. Before that it was verboten. I remember one time my cousin Jeff and I wanted to go to the upcoming opener and my Uncle Bud told us a story about a recent opener that froze us to the core. He said that he actually saw someone taking a poop on some old man's head. Now, thinking back on this, either Bud pulled this story out of the ether, or he went to some pretty crazy parties during the early 80s. I'm still hoping it was the latter. I can't forget, however, that this was County Stadium 25 years ago and 9-volt battery throwing was a competitive sport.

Anyway, this opener wasn't nearly as much fun as Bud's experience but since the Twins beat the Angels-of-Anaheim-near-the-megapolis-of-L.A., it could have been worse. And Nicolas is feeling better.