Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

From a personnel file I was perusing yesterday:

Employee Warning Record
Nature of Violation: Insubordination towards a shift supervisor
Remarks: You were observed giving a shift supervisor an obscene gesture after being asked by the supervisor to perform your job duties in relation to cleaning up the material you left on the floor by the scale
Action to Be Taken: Any future conduct of this type will lead to disiplinary (sic) action up to and including a layoff.

No Animals Were Harmed…
As we walked between Phinney Ridge and Greenlake Friday afternoon, this piece of amateur topiary loomed on the horizon. I’m not sure where I was looking, but I was about to walk right by it when my wife grabbed me and pointed it out.
Just as I reached for my camera and stepped back for a better angle, the property owner pulled up to the curb and hailed me. He regaled us with the years-long struggle to hack this out of the urban wilderness. My wife asked how the idea had occurred to him, and he said he was just looking at the bush and saw it in there, like Michaelangelo visualized exquisite shapes in the chunks of rock before him.
He had had his side done for quite some time, he said, before he convinced his neighbor (the bush is right on the property line) to complete the work on his side.
The result is an African elephant on this side…

…and an Asian/Indian elephant on the neighbor’s side.
We regarded the fauna with newly-minted caution, Hansel-and-Gretel-like, for the rest of the walk, but saw no other such transmogrifications of nature.

It would seem we have not one but two candidates for the Darwin Award in this touching story about passion and parenthood in Alabama. Seems the father was distraught after the Tide (that same Tide that rolled for Mike Price last spring) lost to Arkansas, and was having a tantrum that involved levitation of kitchen utensils and household furnishings. Maybe his son thought this was just the moment when Dad would be distracted from his execrable driving record, and chose just then to press his suit for a new automobile. Dad thought it just might be the time to lower his auto insurance rates AND get even with his maker for dealing dirt to Alabama: he got his pistol, put it to the kid’s head and fired. Kid moved his head just in time to avoid having his brains turned into a less metaphoric Crimson Tide.
I know since I’ve preened about my Ohio State alumni band appearance last month that you can reasonably conclude that I’m a college football fanatic, but I think I’m more in agreement with Jennifer at Synaesthesia about the misallocation of resources it causes, both in terms of money and, more importantly in my mind, in terms of how we regard higher education.
On the surface, it’s an engaging entertainment and, because of the emotion surrounding it, preferable in many instances to professional sports. Universities apprehend this as a way to maintain the interest and, hopefully, financial loyalty of their alumni for years after they have graduated. However, this seems to me a flawed strategy for at least two reasons:

1) except for a handful of programs, the athletic programs cannot cover their entire cost through ticket sales and direct donations, and require a subsidy, which often takes the form of a per-student fee of some sort. and
2) attention and probably most alumni giving is diverted to the athletic department instead of focused on the academic mission and needs of the universities.

I know my own giving to Ohio State consists wholly of contributions to the marching band’s endowment and scholarship fund. That may be excused to some extent because I’ve lived in Seattle for nearly 30 years and have no other enduring connection to OSU, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if I lived near Columbus, I’d be giving money to the athletic department anyway in order to have a better shot at buying tickets instead of to a deserving academic program being victimized by plummetting state funding.
Then, there’s the psychotic effect of being a sports fan generally, as illustrated in the Alabama example. I know that I’ve gone through periods where I’ve identified way too closely with a sports team, taking their victories as false affirmation of my own goodness, taking their losses as evidence of personal failing. Even now, I find myself checking in on college games on Saturday, going through a weird social pathology of rooting against southern schools just because they’re southern, rooting against religious schools because they’re religious, thinking that the outcomes somehow support my secular liberalism. Fueled by alcohol and a difficult life, this psychology is probably what would lead to the actions of that Alabama idiot. I’m saved by the fact that the games come on early in the morning here on the west coast, and I can’t really bring myself to drink to that excess until much later in the evening. And even though my son’s driving record at one time might have brought out the homicidal instincts of a less phlegmatic parent, my life’s pretty good so far.
And, dammit, we’re 5 - 0!