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Former Blue Devil Jon Scheyer quietly made his NBA Development League debut last night with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, a franchise affiliated with the Houston Rockets and located in Hidalgo, Texas.
Ben Brostoff, a columnist for The Chronicle's opinion section, recently got the chance to attend MIT's Sloan Sports Conference, a one-day event focused on the increasing role of analytics (stats) in sports. At the forum, Brostoff rubbed shoulders with sports luminaries like writer Bill Simmons, Dallas Mavericks GM Mark Cuban and legendary 3-point assassin Steve Kerr, among others. Brostoff wrote this exclusively for The Chronicle Sports Blog.
The term "political apathy" was thrown around quite a bit last week as a mix of faculty and students piled on as Dukies uninterested on politics. The Chronicle's print edition ran a number of good commentaries, including an insightful guest column by professor Gunther Peck. In order to make my bias clear, I must admit I did not vote. My explanation for inaction is relatively simple: I believe most politicians have at best an elementary understanding of America's debt woes, and consequently don't deserve my time.
I receive dozens of e-mails every week more or less written in this format: "I feel very upset about _________. It amazes me students on this campus are capable of ______. This is a reflection of deeper cultural issues like __________." Most are well written and fairly insightful. Many run in the paper, and deservedly so.
In an age where comedy has become an increasingly nuanced mockery of real life, Adam Sandler and the folks at Happy Madison remain committed to good old-fashioned slapstick humor. While the Louis CKs and Tina Feys of the world craft smart and tasteful shows about the pitfalls of middle age, Sandler serves up a double dose of poop- and Jew jokes in a $79 million blockbuster about coming to terms with an annoying twin. And that is part of the appeal of Jack and Jill: it seeks to please us without any measure of subtlety or wit.
I would like to recommend a more effective course of action for the Occupy Duke protestors: Refuse from this point forward to pay tuition, receive financial aid, attend classes, stay in on-campus housing or partake in any activity that implicitly supports Duke as a private university. Namely, to preserve the sanctity of their message, they should leave campus and never return until Duke ceases to receive aid from corporations or the 1 percent.
The residue of a significant cultural and social event almost always includes some cinematic response: in the past five years alone, we’ve seen takes on September 11th and the War in Iraq in the forms of United 93 and The Hurt Locker, respectively. As far as the most recent housing crisis goes, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, Too Big to Fail and now Margin Call have all stepped in with reenactment and commentary.
Moneyball, as penned by Michael Lewis, is about the ability of statistics to contradict what the naked eye interprets, especially as it applies to Major League Baseball. If advanced quantitative analysis actually did improve decision-making processes for the Oakland Athletics, as Lewis claims in the book, then the film Moneyball is more a celebration of this fact than an explanation of it.
I was disappointed to discover today that Duke Dining has forbidden Jimmy John’s from accepting food points before 7 p.m. in an attempt to provide a school-aided crutch for on-campus dining. Nonetheless, I still ordered a Vito sandwich on my own dime and paid with another failing currency.
The first time I saw the music video for West Coast rap group King Fantastic’s “Why? Where? What?” I was pleasantly surprised not as much by a nude and dancing Kristina Rose as by the porn actress’ ability to lip synch.
Tony Reali, the boyish host of ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” is an enthusiastic proponent of what he calls “inside information.” Reali’s chief responsibility on ATH is to award points to the show’s four talking heads based on the worthiness of their arguments about sports. Allusions to a particularly rare piece of info always make him trigger-happy. “Inside information!” he’ll gleefully pronounce at the mention of a behind the scenes conversation, before hammering down on the points button.
I want you to apply for a column because, in short, you know things the rest of this University does not.
“Tiger, I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything?” These are the words of Earl Woods, contextually manipulated (ironically, the audio of the elder Woods comes from a 2004 interview in which Earl was discussing his wife Kultida, also nicknamed Tiger) and spun for commercial purposes by Nike. In the background stands a part defiant, part somber Tiger. The ad is both Nike’s and Tiger’s tacit acknowledgment that this major is different from all other majors. Why it’s different needs no introduction. The “Earl and Tiger” ad is a profoundly disturbing commercial that’s manipulative at best and politically correct at worst. No one is lauding this 30-second Nike plug. In spite of how shameless the masterminds in Oregon may be, it certainly passes the Malcolm Gladwell stickiness test and is one of a huge number of non-golf-related reasons to watch the Masters this weekend. Of course, you forget to remember Tiger’s unseemly past when he’s covering 1,100 yards of green in six strokes, like he did yesterday at Augusta (eagle on eight, birdie on nine). The world of sports is kind of transcendent (for lack of a better word) in this respect: we forget about exactly who we’re watching. Investigative journalism, be it Outside the Lines or Vanity Fair, is relatively powerless to emasculate athletes because it can’t keep them away from their sports. For all the beatings Tiger took courtesy of a rabid, albeit justified, media, he was greeted with raucous applause at his 1:42 p.m. tee-off. And when he started to crawl up the leaderboard—a walloping drive on two, an incredible hook shot on eight, a great swing with a nine-iron on 12 (after an extended standing O)—that applause only continued. Much of this applause no doubt was a function of the squeaky clean Masters audience. Yet, this overwhelmingly positive reaction is still a fair reminder that the Tiger saga will likely pass in a few years time, just like most infidelity-themed scandals predating the 14-time major champion. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that a good number of us are no longer interested in talking about Tiger Woods the adulterer. It’s Tiger Woods the golfer most of us are interested in this weekend. If yesterday was any indication, there will be no shortage of things to discuss. So, for all the miscues Team Tiger made in rebounding from Thanksgiving 2009, it appears that one nearly mistake-free round of 68 can compensate for a litany of mistakes in the eyes of at least the weekend TV browser. Fortunately for Woods, winning over the guy who has a passing interest in golf probably is more important than wooing the guy in the Callaway hat with a framed picture of Phil Mickelson. Even more fortunately for Woods, he has a weekend to work his magic where virtually nothing else sports-related is happening. The Masters, at least from the college-aged male vantage point, is the de-facto event to watch this weekend with the college basketball season over (who won that thing again?) and the NBA playoffs not tipping off until next week. It’s the old grow-closer-by-proximity thesis. For men who like sports, it’s Tiger and a six-pack for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. A romance made in heaven. Ultimately, then, Tiger Woods’ redemption will be due to a lack of things to do on a weekend in April (as well as an otherworldly short game, but that’s another column entirely). America will likely fall for Tiger once more for the same reasons all of us get suckered into rooting for people that might not completely deserve our approval. If they keep appearing on your television screen again and again doing something marginally interesting, the logic goes, they must be all right. If it can work for Gossip Girl, it certainly can work for Tiger. Unlike a teen drama that producers try to ram down your throat, however, Tiger finds his way into dorm rooms because he’s unbelievably good at what he does. Eldrick currently sits two off the lead and is a six-to-one favorite to win the green jacket. For that reason, any New York Daily News report of another mistress or painfully tasteless Nike spot isn’t going to deter our infatuation with Tiger’s pursuit of Jack Nicklaus. Indeed, I’m more prone to be inquisitive and promote discussion about golf. Ben Brostoff is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every Friday.
The question of how everything came to be is one that isn’t written about much in the news because, obviously, there’s a dearth of new news. Perfectly logical people subscribe to both the Book of Genesis and Richard Dawkin’s “The Blind Watchmaker” because both texts have yet to be empirically disproved. In our short lifetimes, we’ve yet to see a headline that legitimately moves forward the discussion about creation.
Synsepalum dulcificum is a powerful drug. Vastly underrated, too.
We are living in a progressively stat-oriented time.
A very clever English scholar some time ago came up with the novel idea of modeling essays on hourglasses. The idea is relatively simple: A good essay should begin broadly, narrow to a thesis and body and eventually open up to wider phenomenon. Education perhaps is not so different.
Safety is a necessary but not sufficient condition for buying a car.
The first several-hour study session for an impending midterm is not as much a walk through memory lane as it is a misguided crawl.
I was pleasantly surprised to wake up Wednesday and discover that I still am woefully inept at predicting the future.
