’Lex—
Before we go on, and as an homage to all the collective Philosopher Singers out there in the Fray—Thank you for calling. We have a winner.—I’d like to put on the record my favorite bit of basketball doggerel, from a shoe company now sadly departed:
My shoes are great and that’s no jive/ They’re standard equipment on the D Street Five/ When I fly through the air with my famous slam-dunk/ My shoes wear the star and that’s no bunk/ My shoes will be wearing the Converse name/ ‘Til they bronze my feet for the Hall of Fame.(All together now)Converse All-Stars. Limousines for the feet.
Top that, you sweatshop-fattened swoosh-monkeys.
But, I digress.
The Title IX debate too often descends into the Battle of the Celebrity Accountants. (And if you think baseball owners have books that bounce, try America’s universities.) What gets lost in all of it is the simple fact that Title IX is the law, and any attempt to circumvent it is, like, illegal. Now, since we’re back with an administration that believes that the way to deal with laws it doesn’t like is to ignore them—What is that “faithfully execute” part of the oath for, anyway?—you’ll see hundreds of scams now in the hopes of obscuring the fact that colleges are being allowed to break the law with impunity. As a fencer, I hate to see the number of collegiate fencing programs that are going down because of this, and I also hate the notion that the choice is minor men’s sports or women’s sports, but that’s the dominant paradigm right now because there’s nobody willing to use settled law to break it up. Sad.
(And, yes, before I hear from the hotcha gals at the Independent Women’s Forum, college football can indeed be played with 53 players, and the TV networks will still pay big money for it, as long as those 53 players play for brand-names like Miami and Oklahoma. Punditology aside: With all its foundation money, and the lockstep views of its members, in what sense is the IWF either independent or a forum? What do they debate in the forum? Who gets to sit next to Sean Hannity?)
My family and I once spent a week at the Trapp Family Lodge—a beautiful place, once you get used to the notion of 80-year old Gretl in lederhosen introducing the umpteenth showing of The Sound of Music, in which she is played by an angelic tot who herself is likely now playing in an alt-rock band in L.A.
“Jumpers from 20 that sing through the strings/ These are a few of my favorite things.”
The final score for the final time …
Pierce
