Dad-Snorting edition

• First off, Keith Richards ground up his dad's ashes with a little cocaine and snorted him. Oh, Keith. You cad.

• Oops. A hilarious construction accident.

• Classic Python. Oh, the argument sketch. "Wait a minute! It's a fair cop!"

• Buy KITT. Costs significantly cheaper than the Chicago Cubs.

• Speaking of the Cubs, near the end of this fairly banal piece about new Tribune owner Sam Zell, there's a quote that kind of worries me.

  On the issue of the sale of the Chicago Cubs, Zell confirmed that he may seek to sell Wrigley Field separately. He acknowledged that Wrigley, because of its landmark status, is a tricky, single-use piece of property.

That's scary... a Cubs without WGN TV, Pat & Ron, or Wrigley Field? That's hard to imagine, and even harder to stomach.

• Greenwald goes off on Giuliani's frightening comments about Presidential power. You really think Giuliani won't try to run the place like a king?

• Via reddit, If we taught English the way we teach math.

A few thoughts on college sports, since Florida beat Ohio State for the national basketball championship just as they beat Ohio State for the national football championship. Some pundits are bemoaning that such a repeat performance means that the tournament's unpredictability has been lost. I wouldn't say that, necessarily. After all, the tournament has always at least been a little predictable. No team from a small non-power conference will win the championship. In fact, they'll be treated as giant-killers if they even make the Final Four. Alas, despite all the parity talk of sportswriters the last few years over the rise of the MVC, Big West, and WCC, among others, the dominance of power programs has never been stronger in the two major college sports. George Mason is the increasingly rare exception, not the rule.

Sure, it's great for the sponsors, great for fans of the big schools (Indiana included), great for the broadcasters, and great for the pocketbooks of those universities lucky enough to succeed in the cutthroat environment. The problem is that the losers are the players (essentially two- or three-year mercenaries being exploited before busting loose for the NBA or NFL), who never get the education they deserve, and all the universities who can't find success, particularly smaller Division I schools who have to pump cash into money-losing athletics departments. The NCAA's scholar-athlete tradition may still apply to, say, swimming and diving or wrestling. In football and basketball though, the presence of two dominant professional sports leagues, and the requirement that players go through at least one year of college first, has produced a high-stakes gambling operation whose goal is first and foremost the production of entertainment. The big secret of the "rise of the mid-major" is that they've risen not through any harder work or dedication than big programs, but through the same back-handed tactics that major programs use.

My suggestion is two-fold and ultimately an impossibly tough sell.

1.) NFL and NBA must get rid of college requirements, and create real minor leagues. This hopefully rids the college game of at least some of its crazy atmosphere of Greg Odens and Kevin Durants. That way, no one will plan on coming to college to be one-and-done, and the recruiting of such players will become way less important. They'll be going where the money is anyways.
2.) This one's the tough one: essentially convert all college sports into Division III, and destroy their quasi-independent status on campus. Here's a definition:

"Division III athletics features student-athletes who receive no financial aid related to their athletic ability and athletic departments are staffed and funded like any other department in the university. Division III athletics departments place special importance on the impact of athletics on the participants rather than on the spectators."

We've forgotten that these athletes must be students first, and that education should be the primary goal of a university. People claim that athletics raise a university's profile and raise booster cash. That's crap. So many schools have money-losing athletics programs that it's crazy, and the marketing (of Indiana hats, jerseys, oven mitts, etc.) wouldn't just stop because IU sports would be on a smaller level.

And why do we root for IU teams in the first place? Because they say INDIANA right there on the uniform. Those guys are our guys. One linguistic quirk of talking about sports teams is that us fans will use the plural subject "we" to describe the team. "We need to make the playoffs this year." "We should've signed Alfonso Soriano." "We gotta make those high percentage shots!" We appropriate the team into ourselves. And won't that be a lot easier knowing that the players are actually students like us, and not entertainment mercenaries?

The biggest problem with this plan is that it screws over the group of athletes too unqualified to make it into a university on academic and otherwise credit alone, but not good enough at their sport to play professionally. They won't get a chance to go to school, but maybe another better-qualified student from equally deprived conditions will take their spot? After all, how will we ever get the culture of "PLAY SPORTS TO SUCCEED" to change without, you know, actually changing it?