From Fark.com: “Woman runs off road, hits tree, falls down 30-foot embankment, gets hit by train and survives. Man in black robe with scythe reported muttering at the scene, ‘I really thought I had her with the train’.” Heh.

According to Drudge, Rupert Murdoch is pulling out the lawyers in a feeble attempt to protect Fox’a cash cow, American Idol. Apparently, ABC plans on airing an unflattering special on how the show is a complete scam–right in the middle of May sweeps!

Imagine it. You’re in a mental hospital and because you’re freaking out, the orderlies strap you down and a doctor sticks you with a sedative. Except, you react to that sedative and suddenly, your life is in mortal danger. Your muscles lock, blood pressure vascillates wildly and you start sweating and dehydrating. You’re dying. So you freak out. So they give you more of that darn sedative.

And then, you die.

Charlie Weis’s mug is on the front page of ESPN.com.

“Think of [the final exam] like a tapas bar.” –Prof. Kaveny

“Did she say topless bar?” –Brian, Nick and Dmytro, pretty much simultaneously

Indiana is the only state in the union where both the Rule in Shelley’s Case and the Rule of Destructibility of Contingent Remainders are still good law.

I just bought a new computer.

Well, okay, I take that back. I just bought an old computer — very old, in fact. My newest “baby” is a Power Macintosh G3 Blue & White, the Mac desktop that was introduced in January 1999 and discontinued just as I was starting college, in September 1999.

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LOL!

CORRECTION TO POST BELOW: I now have it on good authority that this issue is not settled yet; the university’s final decision is still pending. Stay tuned; check my homepage for the latest.

P.S. Welcome, CNNSI readers! For further background on this incident, please see my earlier post on the topic.

The Backer reports, here and on his blog, that the students who took the infamous “Shocker” photo of Monk Malloy have been barred from graduation:

The sad outcome of this whole situation has a few N.D. students sitting out their graduation Ceremony for taking the photo. Why? What does this accomplish? A few students play a stupid prank their senior year, and the results may add more attention than needed. …

I think we can all agree that not allowing them to participate in their graduation is a little harsh. … [I]s this such an act of deception, that two people will have to miss a day they’ve been looking forward to their whole lives? Or is it just a couple of foolish kids who didn’t think before they jumped? I feel bad for the kids, and I believe they’re receiving a punishment that doesn’t fit the crime.

Amen. Andrew adds: “If the university wants to find some token (or religious) punishment for them because of the gesture’s offensiveness, fine. But…holding them out of graduation? That’s just lame and makes Notre Dame’s administration look really petty.”

The whole thing makes me feel sufficiently hostile toward Malloy and the administration that I’m now sorely tempted to post the photo on my blog, for the first time, in protest. The main thing holding me back, really, is Lisa’s copyright lesson; since the person who owns the intellectual property rights to that photo has asked me not to publish it, I guess I’d better not publish it.

But, I have no sympathy for Malloy anymore. He was the victim of a stupid, childish prank, and instead of taking it like a man, he has responded with the administrative equivalent of a temper tantrum. This sort of overzealous response does not make me feel like part of a welcoming Notre Dame community or family. Instead of Christian forgiveness, the message here seems to be one of pure authoritarianism: if you mess with the administration, they’ll make an example of you.

The Backer is wrong about one thing: we can’t “all agree” that the punishment was unduly harsh. By no means is there universal agreement on this. Becky, for one, thinks Monk is being quite lenient, and that he could have justifiably expelled the kids. My dad, based on his earlier comments, evidently feels the same way. But as I wrote in an e-mail to him over the weekend:

I suppose perhaps I’m letting the perps off easy because I strongly suspect that the photo was a spur-of-the-moment idea (they’re taking pictures with Monk, and somebody thinks, hey, snicker snicker, let’s do this), and also that they never intended it to get on the Web — they probably just figured they’d show it to a few friends, an “inside joke,” and they stupidly never thought about how quickly and inevitably the chain of emails and IMs would spread, until someone inevitably posted it publicly. In other words, I am inclined to see their actions more as a stupid, thoughtless (literally) on-the-spot prank that went much, much further than anyone intended… and as such I tend to think that preventing them from participating in the final rite of passage of their Notre Dame careers is too harsh, because they were mostly guilty of stupidity, rather than maliciousness. If I suspected that the photo was premeditated by more than a few minutes, and/or if I believed that they intended all along to have it spread far and wide and into the public domain, then I would feel differently.

Becky asks what would be a fair punishment. Well, aside from making them say 10 Hail Marys and 5 Our Fathers or whatever :), I can think of several viable options. Graduation is still several weeks away, so why not require them — on pain of nonparticipation in the ceremony — to perform a certain number of hours of community service, and/or write a 10-page reflection paper on why what they did was wrong? A required letter of apology to Monk would also be perfectly fair, and to whatever extent the university wants to make that letter public, that would also be fine. But for heaven’s sake, give the kids the opportunity to atone for what they did before banning them from such a memorable and important rite of passage in their lives!

I realize that Notre Dame is a religious institution with unusually strict standards of behavior, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the hard-line response to this prank, especially given that the prank’s target was a priest (and a president). But if the university really cares about fostering a sense of community among its students — which it purportedly does — individuals who make stupid mistakes like this should not be thrown to the wolves with no opportunity to avoid a life-changing sanction that can never be undone. You only get one chance to graduate from your undergrad college, and if these kids are truly repentant and are willing to pay the price in other ways for what they did, they shouldn’t be denied that chance.

Vlad longs for the good old days, apparently, when men were men and dissenters got sent to the gulag. He says the fall of the Soviet empire was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

The Observer on The Shirt:

After three consecutive years as a sea of green, the Notre Dame student section is set to receive the Midas touch for the upcoming season, thanks to the official golden-hued shirt unveiled Friday.

“Midas touch,” my ass! “Lake Urine” is much more accurate. :)

Anyway, the article goes on:

[T]he general reception of the Shirt among students has been unmistakably negative. Perhaps the most common complaint about the new look has been the color.

“I think the change was a good idea, with the change of coach, but I don’t like the color,” freshman Chris Doughty said. “How would you even describe this color? This doesn’t convey Notre Dame to me.”

Many students expressed distaste for the “golden” hue, arguing that not only does the color fail to represent Notre Dame, but rather it reflects the look of rival universities.

“It’s not gold, it’s yellow,” freshman Cormac Harkin said. “It looks like the [Boston College] ’superfan’ shirt - and we don’t want to copy B.C. in any way, shape or form.” …

Furthermore, yellow is a color also associated with Notre Dame’s infamous Ann Arbor adversary. Sophomore Adam Pabarcus said… “One friend noted how we play Michigan at Michigan, and the yellow shirts aren’t going to be good.”

Other students poked fun at The Shirt’s message, calling it corny and confusing.

“I don’t know what bottle is big enough to light up the universe,” Doughty said.

Heh.

For those of use who are moderately interested in this sort of thing, it turns out that Vincente Fox and his cronies are putting the screws to the one guy who could win the next presidential election in Mexico.

Suspiciously, as soon as Lopez Obrador started doing extremely well in the polls, the courts decided that it was necessary to charge him with a lame crime, thus dashing his chances of being president.

If I may rant, this is one of the things that really angers me about a lot of countries south of the border. These corrupt governments enrich themselves at the expense of the people and instead of investing in the future, they build these ridiculous mansions and such. If these jerks would invest more in the future of their countries, the average Jose wouldn’t be so poor that he has to live under a tin roof.

I’m no policy maker, but it seems to be that the US would do itself a favor to pressure the Mexican government to improve its schools and infrastructure because if people had opportunity there, they wouldn’t risk their lives crossing the border to the US. If the US and Mexico were more equivalent in terms of wealth and such, there’s no way people would flock to San Diego when they could just as easily work in Puerto Villarta or Cabo San Lucas or any number of Mexican cities.

Anyway. Corruption is bad.

And yes, I realize that all illegal immigrants are not from Mexico, but since I started the post talking about Mexico, I wanted to try to keep a sense of parallel structure. Besides, I like Mexico.

And the title is a reference to a South Park episode where Cartman’s hand believes that it’s Jennifer Lopez and starts singing to Ben Affleck about how their love almost makes her forget about tacos. :) Seriously, one of the best SP episodes ever!

I’m sure that most of this site’s readership is aware of the current issues surrounding the filibuster; specifically the efforts of Senate Republicans to outlaw its use on judicial nominees. Like the Iraq war they are taking the laundry list approach and are throwing out argument faster than a fish monger unloads a trawler as to why the filibuster should be eliminated.

I get the politics of all this, but one of the more recent arguments about the filibuster has me scratching my head. On NPR this morning they had a story about Bill Frist’s participation in a simulcast to churches arguing they should support filibuster elimination. (You can listen to the full story online). I want to be clear about one thing, before I go on, I don’t thinking Frist’s participation was wrong, or that the excerpts of his speech played on NPR were extreme (I can’t speak to the whole content of his speech which I’ve not heard), they were political, but this is not unexpected.

However, the gist of the whole thing is that the Democratic filibusters are targeted at “people of faith.” This seems rather a specious argument to me; mostly because it seems that they get upset by anyone that does not overtly promote THEIR faith as being generally against religion — that argument does not seem to follow, at least to me. It is not a matter of being against people of faith, it is a matter of trying to protect people of different faiths.

Basically, I think that the quote by Albert Muller encapsulates the message of the event fairly well:

Religious liberty is on the line here, because the courts also hold, by their constitutional roll, a responsibility to defend our religious liberty. But in far too many cases judges have constrained and violated our religious liberty. And so now are some members of the United States Senate.

Okay, huh? how so, can we have some examples? This is the part I just don’t get. Your religious liberty to do what exactly? To force your religious views on others? That violates their religious liberty, and the courts are right to protect it.

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Does every French foreign-policy decision relate directly to some commercial interest? (You know, like those oil deals with Saddam.) Or is there actually a principled reason to support communist China over democratic Taiwan, aside from France’s desire to sell weapons to the Chinese government?

Just asking.

P.S. So if, heaven forbid, China and Taiwan end up in a war, and we’re on Taiwan’s side, and France is on China’s side… does that mean we get to invade France? :)

Scientists say they are “baffled” by the discovery of 1,000 or so dead toads that appearently exploded at a pond near Hamburg, Germany.

Some say this “exploding toad” syndrome might be caused by a strange fungus, but I think they’re missing the obvious connection: Hamburg was a staging ground for the 9/11 attacks, and now Al Qaeda has set up a terrorist training camp there for its new legion of suicide-bomber toads! :)