The Aft A-Gley Gang
It Burns me up, the way some things get out of hand. A quick search for a document turns into an afternoon sorting through files. A new "organizer" becomes the genus of complete disarray. Or the way a planned outing of restful relaxation morphs into an adrenaline-charged struggle for survival. Happens to all of us. Happened to these folks, too.
The Death of Intelligence
Looks like I was born a few decades too late.
 Over at the University of Maryland they've got a cheerleading squad for their collegiate chess team. That's not the story here, but it's indicative of what the problem is. Turns out that a creeping cult of anti-intellectualism is wrapping its Cheetos-stained fingertips around the necks of our best and brightest. So Maryland U is now offering scholarships to top chess players. And it's working, since the school now routinely whoops the pants off schools like Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. Gimme a pawn to K-4!
The problem is two-fold. One the one hand, colleges around the country want the dollars and prestige that big-name sports can draw to their institutions. That means football and basketball, which favor the child who didn't hang out in the school library during recess. The other factor is the lure of the business degree, which has been putting intense pressure on humanities programs to "prove their validity" in an ugly and viciously competitive job market. The end result? Listen to Michael Newton, a government major at Dartmouth:
- "You can party a lot, ski a lot, and still do well and not be that intellectual. At Dartmouth, it's not that cool to be intellectual. It's much cooler to be outdoorsy. At Yale, my friends say it's cooler to be urban trendy."
This punk isn't planning on learning Latin, you can see that. And Dartmouth isn't an exception. Students at Princeton have drafted an "open letter" calling for an investigation into this phenomenon, and they cite a "work hard, play hard" mentality that leads to "a strict dichotomy between structured, resume-building extracurricular activities and activities that provide a mindless release." This professor sums up the matter succinctly:
- "America is not a deeply intellectual culture," says Anthony Grafton, a history professor at Princeton. "[Intellectualism] is a countercultural value, not one that most people embrace. It's not what life in the suburbs is about, and most of our wonderfully bright students come from a well-off suburb."
So the Mice and Men matter to consider here is that providing a safe and secure, comfortable home with top-notch educational opportunities doesn't tend to produce bright, critical thinkers; rather, it breeds the washing powder morons in a Smirnoff Ice laundromat. Get your crunk on, dude.
One Minor Detail
I'm sure you've seen this by now. Two young geniuses, Jason Bautista, 20, and his 15-year-old half brother, strangled their mother and chopped her into pieces at their Riverside home near Los Angeles. They claim to have been inspired by an episode of the Sopranos.
 In their quest to pull off the perfect murder, they observed that a time-honored syndicate trick is to remove the head and hands from the body of the corpse, so as to confound the forensic identification of the body.
- According to the sheriff, Bautista was killed and dismembered Jan. 14. The sons allegedly tried to dump her body in Oceanside the next day, but were spotted by a security guard and ended up throwing the body in an Orange County ravine. The guard gave police the license number of Jason Bautista's car.
When police arrived at the home of the young criminal masterminds, they discovered Jane Bautista's head and hands. These were, of course, rather significant clues as to the identity of the deceased.
Thy Staph and Rod
This sounds bad. In L.A., doctors and public health officials are concerned with an outbreak of a new type of drug-resistant bacteria staph that infects the skin.
- The infection, which causes nasty-looking boils, deep abscesses and widespread surrounding inflammation, has proved impervious to common antibiotics. Although it appears to be spread primarily by skin-to-skin contact, including sex, its origins and precise mode of transmission remain a mystery. Doctors treating it caution that it could also be contracted at health clubs, steam rooms and other warm, moist environments.
This infection is largely emerging in the L.A. gay community, although at least one woman is known to have contracted it, probably through contact with an infected partner. Unlike other forms of Staphylococcus, this variant does not require broken skin to gain an advantage—mere contact with the flesh of a carrier is enough to "get ya."
You really don't want to contract this one, since treatment can be pricey: "Some doctors use a new antibiotic called Zyvox, although with a single course costing $1,500, they often have trouble persuading insurers to pay for it." The aft a-gley angle here is that some people who catch this are either lancing their own boils or taking an abbreviated drug regimen, which strengthens the virulance of the strain. Time to haul out that "body condom" SNL used in a skit way back.
Chicken Soup for the Lawsuit
You've seen those heartwarming, ever-so-sweet "Chicken Soup" books, right? Chicken Soup for the Elderly Grandmother, and Chicken Soup for the Death Row Inmate? Lots of 'em out there. Turns out that one author, Deborah Blackmore, is now in hot water over the inclusion of an anecdote that may have been inspired by her half-sister, Jane Jibson. The title of the book? Chicken Soup for the Sister's Soul. The funny part here is that Blackmore never identified her sister by name when relating her experiences with Jibson, who was the black sheep of the clan. Jibson's lawyer, however, disagrees.
- "Her dog is well-known. People have read the story and approached her about it," Reisinger said of his client. "She has suffered emotional and mental anguish. Those are all things we will prove at trial."
Jibson's soul requires $1 million to soothe.
10:58:59 AM 
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Tuesday, January 28, 2003
