Those Silly Chinese

We've had our share of crazies in America's history, but I never knew how hilariously dysfunctional ancient China used to be. I mean, you've got a guy whose solution for invaders is to build a huge wall, which of course kills more workers during its construction than any invasion force likely would, and in a desperate search for immortality, ingests anything that anyone claims is the elixir of life, including mercury pills, which ironically probably did him in. I love it!

Oh, and there was a guy whose only claim to fame was having a giant penis.

Anyway, I ran across this (admittedly old) incredible story about Chinese parents who pay $200,000 for a prep program designed to get their kids into Harvard. And I have to ask: if you have $200,000 laying around (and presumably another $120,000 for tuition), WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SENDING YOUR KID TO COLLEGE FOR? Presumably, the very point of college is so you can make $320,000 through your life in the first place so you can stop licking people's asses at the office and start working for yourself and your own ideas. Why not skip the 4 years of drinking and getting ignored by rich white chicks and just read a couple of books and start your own business or venture capitalism immediately? What's the point of going to Harvard?

It's like...well, killing your entire workforce by forcing them to build a wall to protect them from invaders.

Shame on Eliezer Alfonzo

Not for his PED suspension, but for his typical lame what-could-possibly-have-happened excuse, the second most annoying excuse right after "I just wanted to get back quickly from an injury because I LOVE THE GAME SO SO MUCH."

For once it would have been nice if he had said, "Look, my career OPS is .648 and if I'm not playing baseball for $400,000, I'm going to be cleaning the fry machine at McDonald's, so yeah, I took steroids."

I can respect that kind of candor. Not that it makes it okay to break the rules or anything, but I know plenty of people who inexplicably think it's okay to cheat through high school or falsify their resumes in the holy name of advancing their own interests, and then hypocritically turn right around and tut-tut the rash of athletes on PEDs.

TL;DR - Everyone's a douche. So why won't anyone just admit it?

Another Year of Not Buying NCAA Football

I vowed never to buy NCAA Football again until they put Division I-AA teams back in, and four years into the boycott, they still refuse to do it. I know you can download individual teams from Teambuilder, but that's so ghetto, like having your own name put on the back of an NFL jersey. I thought the most fun in that game was taking William & Mary to the BCS championship after 3-4 years of struggling to beat I-A teams and land recruits.

But my own idiosyncrasies aside, I don't know why they won't just put them in already. It won't take much extra space or time if they just give them all generic stadiums like they used to. I feel that NCAA is one of those games where if you don't have a personal connection with your team, there's really no motivation to play it. Why the fuck would I want to be USC or Boise State? Even in NFL games it's fun to be the Vikings for a game or two, but playing as a different school just feels wrong.

With that said, I once wrote a post a long time ago about colleges having to take the blame for their shitty graduates if they were going to take credit for the great ones, so in the interest of fairness, I apologize on behalf of my institution to the entire United States for producing Michele Bachmann, LLM '88, and Eric Cantor, JD '88 (What was it about 1988 and crazies coming out of the law school? Must have been something in the water).