I went out on Thursday night for dinner and some beers and woke up yesterday feeling like horse manure. I chalked it up to a hangover, even though the amount I drank shouldn’t have warranted the condition I was in. The day went on, and I couldn’t shake it, and at night I started feeling a sore throat coming on. I woke up this morning and the sore throat had intensified and my head was really cloudy – the usual symptoms of the common cold for me.
I hate the incipient stages of a cold. You know it’s coming, but there is nothing you can do, but wait it out. Everybody has their own remedies, but let’s be honest, nothing works but time and rest. I used to swear by zinc, but not so much anymore.
It’s the first time I’ve been sick in Australia which is good. I used to rarely get sick (about one bad cold a year), until I moved to the DC-area where I seemed to get sick much more frequently. Maybe all the acrimony in the air from the two political parties running our country into the ground actually has a physical effect on the city’s inhabitants. (That’s right, I’m not afraid to stick it to the man on this blog.)
Not a great time to get sick either (but is there ever?). Outside of my usual work load, I have two papers to review, and a presentation to prepare. Nothing is due immediately, but if don’t get started now, I’m going to be in a big pinch in a week.
Anyway…
So, we developed a little ant problem in our kitchen. They’re those super tiny ants, about the size of a poppy seed. Before S left (oh yeah, S, left Australia a few days ago, for good, she’s in Bangladesh for a week on a work assignment and then going to India, a less self-absorbed man probably would have mentioned this earlier) she bought some traps for them. I set them up, and they seem to have worked. I haven’t seen a single ant today.
You’ve probably seen the traps I’m referring to. They are those flat disc-shaped thingies. Supposedly, the ants enter the traps and carry the poisonous bait back to the nest where it wipes out the entire colony. I was quite skeptical, but hey, the results are looking pretty good.
[Yes, yes, carry the poison back to the nest.]The morning before I set the traps the printer at work jammed. We had about ten people trying to figure out how to fix it. We tried reading the manual, but it was so unhelpful, we gave up on it (eventually we “fixed” the problem by canceling all the jobs, unplugging it and plugging it back in).
When I got home and went to set the traps, I read the instructions first, and thought that there couldn’t be a bigger example of contrast in instruction-giving than the one between the printer and the ant traps. The ant traps gave me 100-word point-by-point detailed directions, when all they needed to say was “Put the traps where the ants are”. (Step 1: Open this box, and with your dominate hand remove the contents. Step 2: With your eyes, visually process the ants, and with your brain ascertain the general area with the highest level of antlike activity. Step 3: Place the first trap between your thumb and your fore finger…)
And just in case you can’t read, or need further explanation of the traps purpose, they provide you with a four-panel visual description. In the first panel, there is an ant and a trap. Curved arcs are being emitted from the trap indicating that the ant is attracted to the bait. In the second panel, the ant is in the trap taking the bait. In the third panel, the ant is carrying the bait. Presumably, it has just arrived at the nest as there are many other ants in the frame. In the fourth panel, all the ants are upside down. It works!
In other news, another big-time college football program has been caught turning a blind-eye to improper benefits being received by their players. This time it’s Ohio State (their coach Jim Tressel resigned earlier this week), but it could have been any large program. The college football (and basketball) system is a sham, plain and simple. It’s been this way for at least 30 years. Everybody knows it, everybody says it, but still it goes on.
["The Sweater Vest" won't be leading the scarlet and gray any longer.]And why does it go on? Because powerful people make money off it. To quote Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” A lot of people make a lot of money off the current system, because they get highly skilled labor at a ridiculously reduced cost. The players (especially the stars) are the ones doing the bulk of the important work and they get paid almost nothing, literally. (South Park recently had a funny episode on this topic, in which they imply the athletes are “slaves”. The clip below is hilarious.)
The most common defense for the current system is that it’s not perfect and needs some tweaking, but a wide-scale overhaul that involved paying the players just wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t work because [insert bullshit reason 1], [insert bullshit reason 2], and [insert bullshit reason 3]. I completely reject the notion that paying the players wouldn’t work. In fact, I argue that there is already a working model in place, the graduate student model.
For many graduate programs (such as mathematics), the graduate school will give its students a tuition remission and a living stipend. Literally, they pay you to go school. They do this for two reasons: 1) the grad students do work (lecturing, grading, tutoring, etc.), 2) they want to entice the best grad students to come to their program to build prestige (and perhaps a future donor base). These are basically the same reasons why a university recruits star athletes, they do work and they help build prestige, so why would this type of system not work for college athletics?
Now, not all athletes are worth the same amount to the university, and this is the same as with grad students. The “star” students get better packages. Some students have to do a lot of work for a little pay. Some students have to do little work for a lot of pay (relatively speaking, of course). Some students don’t get any pay, and in fact, they actually have to pay the school tuition (these are the “walk-on” grad students).
It’s up to the program managers to decide what’s important and who they want to spend their money on. This is based largely on the budget and the perceived worth of the grad students, just like it could be for athletes. Swimmers and field hockey players wouldn’t get the same packages as the football players, and third string fullbacks wouldn’t get the same packages as starting quarterbacks.
It drives me crazy when people use the there-is-no-way-to-determine-which-athletes-are-worth-what argument to defend the status quo in college sports. There is a way. It’s called the market. Open up the market, and universities will quickly learn what the players are worth to them. Those who manage the market smartly will have successful programs, those who don’t, won’t, just like almost every other business in the US (and college football/basketball is absolutely a business).
Probably, there once was a time when college athletics was a relatively fair and equitable arrangement for the players, but it simply isn’t anymore. It’s completely unfair, in fact, I would say immoral, even, to give a minuscule slice of the pie to the group who deserves the biggest slice, especially, when this group is largely composed of young men who don’t come from any means to begin with. Sure, some players will play professionally and make millions of dollars anyway, but there are about 120 Division I football schools, of which around 60 are in a “power conference”. The NFL has 32 teams. You can do the math on that one. Not everybody who is helping to sellout 80,000 seat stadiums six times a year and move millions of dollars in memorabilia annually is cashing in professionally. Just pay the players already.
Well, I certainly spilled more ink on that subject than I intended to, but so be it. I can’t think of anything else to write about, and I really should do a little paper reading and then try to rest and recover, so I guess that’s it for this entry.
I leave you with my favorite Mudhoney song. It's particularly topical today.
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