Get ready for the 1. hagiography and 2. insistence that any mention of the scandal is dishonoring the dead, so it must appropriately be completely buried forever.
O: What's the biggest threat to kids right now?
AV: The biggest threat to children is always inside their houses. The much-mythologized predator with the ski-mask who grabs the kid out of a van, while a real thing, is a tiny percentage of those who prey upon children. Most victimization of children is within the circle of trust--not necessarily a parent, but somebody who was led into that circle, who can be a counselor, or a coach, or someone at a day-care center. The biggest danger to children is that we have never made a connection between today's victim and tomorrow's predator. The biggest danger to children is that they're perceived as property, not human beings.
It is kind of strange, the timing of his passing. Like when a long-term couple is married for 50 years, and then shuffles off only days apart. Or Jefferson and John Adams both shuffling off on July 4th, 1826.
2: Oh, there certainly will be a lot of that especially in my fair Commonwealth and among the ranks of those whose livings depend on college sports, but I don't think it will be universal. For instance, the Yahoo! News headline was "Fired Penn State coach Joe Paterno dies", and a quick survey of other headlines and leads shows the scandal being mentioned one way or another. But sure, the sports pundits will soon be along to tell us what we should think.
You have to figure that while the scandal didn't kill him, the cancer did, it probably sped things up. Going from universally beloved demigod to notorious facilitator of child rape can't be good for a sick man's health.
One wonders. Sometimes scandals dominate one's obit and sometimes it's bad form to mention it. Derrida's Times obit was basically about Paul de Man, if memory serves. I haven't read JoePa's obit yet.
No IRB will allow the facilitator intervention in a study, so I suppose we will never know for certain.
7: "Joe Paterno, who won more games than any other major-college football coach, and who became the face of Penn State University and a symbol of integrity in collegiate athletics only to be fired during the 2011 season amid a child sexual-abuse scandal that reverberated throughout the nation, died Sunday. He was 85."
Could be stronger, but they put it in the same sentence.
6: Yep, not something that's going to get you into Chicken Soup for the Surviving Soul: 101 Healing Stories About Those Who Have Survived Cancer even if you do survive.
Kind of makes the whole "desperately hoping to be allowed to retire at the end of the season instead of NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW" thing make more sense. What a sad end.
NYT obit ends:
Paterno said he was disappointed by the trustees' decision to fire him after he announced he would retire at the 2011 season's end. But in a statement just before the board acted, he expressed remorse over his personal failing. He chose a word that he had used in describing what he saw as the spirit of athletic competition back in 1989, but this time in a very different context -- the episode that ended his storied career and left his reputation in tatters.
"This is a tragedy," he said. "It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more."
Idols are hollow and all fall in the end.
12: I was about to post how they ended it. The same quote also appears early in the Post-Gazette's write-up. I suspect it will become a bit of a tagline for his life.
Those are not the last words that anyone should want the world to remember of them.
Head and shoulders better than "I did nothing wrong," in the same context.
It's got appropriate regret but not appropriate contrition. "In hindsight": lingering meal in the mouth.
I hate sport pundits so, so much. They need to wash out their belly buttons and get real jobs.
"Bryant once said, "I'd probably croak in a week if I ever quit coaching." On January 26, 1983, just 37 days after he had coached his final football game, Paul William "Bear" Bryant died of a heart attack at the age of 69."
Looks like Joe was trying to beat Bryant's record in that too. And he would have done it too, if it weren't for those meddling trustees.
re:16, though OT: did anyone else listen to the most recent RadioLab podcast? (link) Made me see the Milgram studies in a whole new light.
Relevance to 16 being that, in short, people do bad things (hard things) because they think it's necessary for some greater good; when told to "just follow orders" people pretty much universally refuse.
I was led to self-doubt by the podcast description. Thanks Minivet.
Anyway, typos aside it's an interesting topic. Though apparently I killed the thread.
Seen on Twitter (retweeted if anyone wants the source): "Joe Paterno actually died last night, but his doctors didn't feel it was their responsibility to report it."
I was curious what the headline would be at the Harrisburg Patriot-Times which has been my source for "inside the bubble" stories, but also is the paper the broke most of the key developments. They managed to come up with one that is downright odd, "Joe Paterno is dead: College football's most successful coach leaves an unmatched legacy forever shadowed by his life's astonishing final chapter".
It reminded me of Melvin Van Peebles' version of an old joke with regard to the title of his novel/memoir A Bear for the FBI.
Author turns in book titled A Bear.
"Too boring, spice it up."
I Fucked a Bear.
Too racy.
I Fucked a Bear for the FBI.
Still no good.
I Fucked a Bear for the FBI and Found God.
Which they publish as The Most Amazing Animal I Ever Met.
25: Or earlier yesterday: "Just another case of Schrödinger's cat syndrome, move along, folks."
OT: The new 3-D movie effects are great. I just saw Beauty and the Beast. Visually, outside of giving Belle some nipples, I couldn't think of an improvement to be made.
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CT get hacked by forced-birthers?
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Nosflow, I know that joke, but the way I heard it it was an article that had to be tweaked to be published in the Readers Digest.
The final title was, "I fucked a sea lion for the FBI and found god." Must have been the San Francisco version
31: I first heard from the Van Peebles book (read it in the '70s), but from some searching it seems to have first appeared in the late '40s as the Reader's Digest version and ending with the "and found God" version being accepted (bear though). I assume he had some hassle with the publisher over his actual proposed title.