Link that works. (Just took the "baylor" off the front.)
Whoops, thanks. I'll go fix that.
Also, that first paragraph at the link seems like total nonsense for any lesbian playing professional sports.
Who could have guessed that the Baptist university which thought it was a peachy idea to hire Kenneth Starr as its president would have problems with gays and lesbians representing it?
I'm sure Baylor President Ken Starr will sort things out real quick and do the right thing.
Although he sings hymns on his morning jog and keeps a calendar with daily Scripture verses at his private residence, he did not bring his religion into the workplace, they say.
4,5: Truly one of the most despicable and morally bankrupt operators in Washington during my lifetime. And that is saying something.
Success at Baylor basketball = Not getting killed by a teammate and having it covered up by your coach. So she shouldn't complain.
The sanctions [in 2004] so crippled the Bears that they didn't have another winning season until 2008. It is one of the harshest penalties ever imposed on a Division I program that didn't include a death penalty.
4 years without a winning season! Harsh!
Wow, I don't think I ever knew the full story of that murder.
It's not the cover-up that gets you, it's the recruiting violations.
Baylor is totes uninvited to unfoggedecon.
Baylor is awful, but perhaps Griner could have chosen to accept a scholarship from a place that wasn't so hypocritical and where she could have been out in public.
God damn it, I'm gonna troll this place alone. Would we be so accepting of a white UMC athlete who deliberately hid her sexuality in this manner? Are we not giving Griner fair accountability because she is black?
Also, while women's basketball is admirable, the quality of play and level of excitement simply isn't comparable to the men's game.
Doesn't an institution like Baylor have a responsibility to its alumni and its principals to avoid highlighting an out athlete? If this were a public institution, it would be one thing, but are you seriously suggesting that private religious institutions can't ask their students to, at least in public, adhere to the rules of the institution?
It's of course typical of this blog that a story like this is highlighted but the AP Press scandal is dutifully ignored. Enjoy your smugness, liberals.
I think Griner is kind of hot. I wish her uniform were a little more revealing.
I'm unclear why we consider Griner a great athlete when there are at least 100 men in the NBA who are demonstrably better than she is.
When line fishing doesn't work, throw out a grenade.
I admit that 12 gains some traction with me. I mean, I have no idea if Griner had other options. I'd never heard of her.
That first paragraph at the link does seem like overkill:
When celebrities come out these days, it is almost always a carefully choreographed PR song and dance intended to garner maximum attention while controlling the message from every angle. Magazine covers, talk show appearances, pre-written personal tweets and blog posts. It's brave, yes. But most celebrities massage the situation to be as lucrative as possible.
I've gotten the impression that it's just not true that most athletes orchestrate a great song and dance. Apparently any number have come out quietly, no big deal (I heard this explained on the teevee, so it must be true).
20: It doesn't work as well when you tell everybody the grenades are fake first.
Halford, have you listened to the old Bill Simmons podcast where he asked NBA Commissioner David Stern about the NBA supporting and subsidizing the WNBA? It wasn't revealing, exactly, but you might find it sympathetic.
I seem to remember the ABL having a higher level of play than the WNBA, but it didn't exist for very long.
In terms of geological time, even association football is barely a blink.
In terms of geological time, even association football is barely a blink.
The Lord sees even the fall of an XFL.
Bill Simmons' head is unfortunately still way too not chopped off.
What do you have against sports fans from Los Angeles, Halford?
4,5,6: And as if on cue, Bill "Retire Already" Keller with a column in the Times entitled I kid you not.
It's actually not quite as stupid of a column as the title would lead you to believe, but it's pretty close.
No one made you take Simmons' advice about your fantasy teams, Halford.
By the way, Griner is totes hot in that second photo at the link, in the white tuxedo. However:
another gay Baylor grad, told the NYT: "Someone always has to be first. And when there's a great shining beacon ... [blah blah blah]. There's so much commercial benefit to Baylor and its national profile. And you can't separate that from who she is."
What's that? Commercial benefit? To Baylor? For harboring a master athlete, I take it.
Sports is - are - so weird. I've been only vaguely aware of Baylor, but wikipedia tells me it's a highly respected research university -- a Baptist one -- which also does sports. Lots of sports. I'd rather institutions of higher learning not be sports driven; it is just so fucking weird.
wikipedia tells me it's a highly respected research university
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Wikipedia is wrong.
Don't thank me; thank thousands of bitter, grudge-holding nerds, busybodies, borderline personalities and pettifogging scolds!
bitter, grudge-holding nerds, busybodies, borderline personalities and pettifogging scolds
New mouseover?
Huh. So this is wrong?
Baylor is now a preeminent research university with a distinct undergraduate focus. Its emphasis on education is demonstrated by a small student body and 14:1 student-faculty ratio, among the lowest in the top American universities and the state of Texas. The university has produced various Fulbright Scholars, Truman Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and Rhodes Scholars. The university has a very high level of research activity for its size. Baylor is also notable for its Law, Business, and Pre-Med programs.
Sorry for the lengthy quoting - it's just to indicate what I'm talking about. It sure does sound like it's written by a Baylor PR team, but still: wikipedia!
So what's Baylor actually like?
"Highly respected" and "preeminent" are exaggerations, I think. But it may be true that it has a high level of research activity for its size. But now that I look it up, it has 15000 students, which isn't that small.
36: I see. Why did Griner go there, again?
I knew via her own twitter that she was gay from the time she started at Baylor (because I followed a girl with an obsessive crush on her) and saw her get progressively more closed about it. I was honestly shocked that she came out before leaving Baylor, which to me seemed like a huge, brave leap.
I have not lived a life of brave Halfordismo. I married a man because I thought I didn't deserve to have a happy or satisfying relationship and that no one decent would want me anyway. Brittney Griner chose a homophobic school but was the best player in the country anyway and did it by being quietly honest but not closeting herself and while dealing with outrageously homophobic and transphobic discussion online almost constantly. I think I'd judge a teen of any race who made the same decision just as non-harshly. It's a fucked-up heterosexist system wherever you go and she managed to keep a lot more sanity and grace than I did, so I have no stones to throw.
40: Just a guess, but academic value may not have been on the top of her list of criteria.
I don't follow the sport, but she was surely one of the most highly-recruited players in her class. She went to HS in Houston.
"Halfordismo" would make a good name for a blog.
I married a man because I thought I didn't deserve to have a happy or satisfying relationship and that no one decent would want me anyway.
There are other reasons?
So what's Baylor actually like?
Rich baptist asshole school full of hypocritical teetotalers?
41: I think I'd judge a teen of any race who made the same decision just as non-harshly
Oh, to be clear, I'm not judging her harshly at all. I just honestly don't know how college recruiting of athletes works. I wasn't sure why/how Baylor offered her a more attractive option than other schools which might have made offers, assuming she was that good an athlete. Maybe she just wanted to stay close to home.
45: Security?
Parsimon, student athletes are often concerned with the quality of the team and athletic program at the school in question.
49: You mean the security deposit on the hall?
I think the Baylor Medical Center is, by some measures at least, a world-class institution. That said, I totes rejected an offer to speak at Baylor recently -- though, not surprisingly, not at BMC -- because no thanks. I also recently was barred from speaking at the Reagan Library, which was fine with me.
I'm sort of notorious, is what I'm saying.
I also think Greiner is totally baller. And, as a bonus, she seems to be pretty not-horrible as a human being, so I'm a fan.
50: Okay. I apologize for being so dense about this. I gather that the quality of the team and athletic program at Baylor is superior.
It seems like it must have been, since Griner has gone on to greater things. I really just don't speak this language. I was just finding it baffling that someone who happens to be a lesbian would go to Baylor.
Recently? They've never even considered having me speak there since they opened.
I also recently was barred from speaking at the Reagan Library, which was fine with me.
Interesting—say more?
I would have liked to have said my things serially, but, you know, the best-laid plans.
"Baller" is a term?
Wow, you weren't kidding when you said you didn't speak this language.
"Baller" is a term?
No. What gave you the idea that it was?
58: I was supposed to keynote a fundraiser for an organization with which I'm affiliated, but their advance people said absolutely not. Believe it or not, this was because of a pretty innocuous blog post I co-authored (with a mutual friend of ours) in which we spoke sort-of-but-not-especially unfavorably of his Gipperness. Give this to movement conservatives: they police the boundaries of memory very carefully.
52: I think the Baylor Medical Center is, by some measures at least, a world-class institution
Yes it is (DeBakey was there). However, it is located within the Texas Medical Center in Houston and has very little connection with the campus in Waco. (Oops, via Wikipedia, it has been independent from Baylor since 1969, only retaining the name.)
To finish my thought -- serially, I hope -- the show went on, though at the Autry instead. It was a nice event, but I don't think as much money was raised as the organizers had hoped. I expect that richer people would have graced the halls of the Reagan Library. Moral: blog posts can follow you around!
The "their" in 63 refers to the Reagan Library's advance people. Also, I did not know that BMC had nothing to do with Baylor, though I'm not surprised. In that case, I'm not sure there's anything world-class about Baylor -- except the depths of the institution's assholishness.
No. What gave you the idea that it was?
It's more of a t̜̻̻̓͌͑̿͛ͨͯ̀͘͝e̖̲͍͑͌͝͝r̭̞͖̞ͤͪͣ͆m̸̺̲͕̣̼̝̮ͪ̾͒̇̕͜.
I thought the Reagan library's partisan years were supposed to be over now. I continue to think the presidential library system is a bad idea. I blame FDR.
61: Assuming it's a sports term, I was not.
On preview: good lord! 67 appears as gibberish. Do I need to download some special character set or something?
SOMEone isn't familiar with all internet traditions.
Do I need to download some special character set or something?
You may just need to switch browsers. Chrome sucks at rendering special characters, but 67 comes through fine for me in Firefox.
I'm using Firefox!
I'm going to assume that "balling" is an untoward term best rendered as a string of garbage.
Oh, sorry, "baller" was the term.
I'd had vague thoughts that it had to do with a particular playing style. Sports-wise.
"Baller" is used to refer to someone who's still using a mouse with a rolly ball in it.
Baller is the Spanish infinitive for "to ballet".
"Baller" as a noun refers to a (basket)ball player. ("Balling" meaning to play [basket]ball, for reasons which are hopefully pretty transparent.) As an adjective, "baller" therefore means "like a basketball player," i.e., awesome. When applied to an actual basketball player, as in this example, it is a clever play on words in addition to being a compliment.
74 is funny. We can meld this thread with the OMG thread yet.
"Baylor," on the other hand, despite being superficially similar phonetically, is etymologically unrelated.
"Baylor" is a corruption of the original, "Bailar". It started out as a dance academy founded by Antonio López de Santa Anna himself. Then the Texans baptized it.
76: I thank you, teofilo; it's kind of you to explain. I'd been coming to that conclusion. I have never heard anyone use that term, ever, of a [basket]ball player, so, you know.
79: Actually it gets its name from originally being an educational outreach mission of the The Great Sept of Baelor in King's Landing.
Parsimon suffers from debilitating agooglia, but with your help—and inordinate patience—we can help her yet.
Gah, I wish I hadn't repeated "help" like that.
I'm having some kind of laughing fit: 79 is also funny.
Fucking baptists.
Gah, I wish I hadn't repeated "help" like that.
You wish you'd repeated it some other way. "Help! Help!" perhaps.
Did Santa Anna found the dancing academy before or after they buried his leg with military honors?
82: Oh, neb, you know my view is that compulsive googling is the way of the beast, for how shall conversations be had, short of an exchange of links?
In general, in these cases, the exchange of links goes like this:
PARSIMON: I don't understand this isolated term or reference and I'm unwilling to find out for myself.
SOMEONE ELSE: here, I'll google up an explanation for you: [link].
Conversation!
86: More Santa Anna leg trivia: Santa Anna famously used a prosthetic cork leg; during the Mexican-American War, it was captured and kept by American troops. The cork leg is displayed at the Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield. The Mexican government has repeatedly asked for its return. Santa Anna had a replacement leg made which is displayed at the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico City>
But Stanley probably knows all of this via the King of the Hill episode.
I learned about the Santa Anna leg thing in a history class, and King of the Hill fucking blows.
I just learned about the leg today.
Such anger in one so young. A pity really.
92: I was just trying to relate my opinion in the vulgar tradition of Stormcrow-speak.
To tie the subthreads, I was thinking that Baylor College of Medicine might be on San Jacinto St. (pronounced with the soft 'J" sound), but it ends just north of the Medical Center.
Other Texas Medical Center trivia: The TMC includes the site of the Shamrock Hotel built in the '40s by Glenn McCarthy who was the model for Jet Rink in Giant (and the famous gala opening party is at at the end of that film). It had a huge fricking pool. Swam in it once or twice.
95: Well you didn't do it right. Asshole.
96: Not me. Evidently somebody did.
The summer after my first year of grad school I went to a colli/der phy/sics sum/mer scho/ol at a certain institute in central New Jersey. I had to share an apartment with two douchebags, one of whom was a grad student at Baylor. Aside from being a misogynist, he thought he was smarter than all the other students at the school, because of his groundbreaking work on warp drives. He seemed a little fuzzy on the distinction between science and science fiction.
30: Folks should read @jamisonfoser's epic twitter rant triggered by Bill Keller's Ken Starr stupidity.
30: Oops, see I lost the article title. It was "Bring Back Ken Starr."
101: Are you saying he couldn't "make it go"?
King of the Hill fucking blows
That boy ain't right.
48: My (gossip-driven) understanding is that in fact she wanted to stay close to her girlfriend at the time and wasn't too interested in leaving Texas and I don't follow college basketball closely but certainly can't think of a better basketball school in Texas off the top of my head, though there are plenty of good programs in surrounding states.
It's sort of interesting to me that she could be semi-out at a school like Baylor and yet perennial powerhouse UConn apparently still refuses to bring in openly gay players and is notorious for queerbaiting and driving lesbians off the basketball team. I am probably saying something about myself here, living as I do in what's not exactly a liberal paradise and the sort of place people are supposed to leave when they're gay to go somewhere friendlier, and yet I see the value to myself and to the straight people around of being here. (I also talked with a new-to-the-neighborhood gay couple at Garden Club last night and I think it's time to start organizing official gay neighborhood get-togethers.) I do think there are benefits to stealthily infiltrating less-hospitable situations, though that has obvious downsides too.
Back on Griner specifically, I'm paying attention to her because she's really impressed me as someone who keeps her cool, coming out in her early teens despite lots of anti-gay and appearance-based bullying before she did so, finding a way through college that obviously worked for her, and now writing eloquently for the NY Times and also giving interviews about her love of skateboarding. To be that genuine and together when she's a star athlete AND coming out publicly AND the subject of nasty gossip for years AND black AND 22 years old is part of what makes her unusual and cool, IMO.
88, 100: Did she succeed in trolling this thread? Yes, yes she did!
To be that genuine and together when she's a star athlete AND coming out publicly AND the subject of nasty gossip for years AND black AND 22 years old is part of what makes her unusual and cool, IMO.
Her remarks about working with Kareem were also absurdly charming. Baller.
I thought "baller" was a terms for a big spender or flashy person. I didn't realize it was used for "basketball player".
And from the where-are-they-now files, the former Baylor coach (the "dead player was a drug dealer" men's one, not Griner's coach) is the Dean of Students/Athletic Director at a small college prepatory school in Texas. And where within less than a year of his arrival he was sanctioned by the high school sports association they competed in leading the school to withdraw and join an association of smaller Christian schools so he could continue to coach and where they have apparently done very well (winning at least on state title).
Was it as delightful as every other instance of trolling ever? Perhaps!
88, 100: Did she succeed in trolling this thread? Yes, yes she did!
FOAD
Jeez, neb. Lighten up? I tease you guys sometimes.
Wish I was a little bit taller!
In matters of slang, the speech and writing of Jewish history professors from the interior of California shall be determinative.
114: Whenever somebody order guac at Chipotle, I say, "You go big baller."
I mean, if I'm there and I'm eating with them. I don't stake out the place or shout at strangers.
115: wish I had a rabbit in a hat with a bat and a six-four impala.
neb's 112 is upsetting me a little bit: are you / is he really that angry with me? I do reserve the right to be playful from time to time; and of course I have a reputation here now for being unable to look things up, so it's not hard to play to that.
Maybe it's a cost of the trade I'm in: I google things throughout the day. What is gemcitabine? Who is Francisco Ayala?
In the event, there are times when I'd rather just ask people (who obviously know). I don't know -- I'm sorry I made you mad, Ben.
Your "playfulness" regarding your inability to function around unfamiliar terms is indistinguishable from your ingenuous inability to function around unfamiliar terms. Each is highly annoying, the former more because you're doing it on purpose. Why you would expect anyone to respond well to it is beyond my comprehension. Calling it "playfulness" doesn't make it playful.
I think saying that you successfully trolled the thread was a little inflammatory -- I understand that to mean "I asked for help in a way that I know people find annoying because I wanted to draw that reaction, and you were stupid enough to give me the reaction I wanted. I win!" Which is going to irritate people.
If what you meant was that you actually did want people to explain the meaning of "baller" to you -- that is, that your requests for help were sincere -- your 107 was a bad way of putting it.
I google for a living, too. Gemcitibine is a cancer drug, generic for Gemzar. Ayala is that philosophy of biology/evolution guy. I can tell you that stuff without googling and other things I google. If I want to learn something from someone here, I want to learn something interesting and an easily searchable thing doesn't hit that mark for me.
Just for reassurance, it's totally charming when I troll the blog, though. Right?
124: Of course, Eggplant!
Honeslty, I thought nosflow's reaction was over the top.
That's my last commenter
On the wall
You better not
Provoke me, peep.
121, 122: Understood. I won't do it again.
Grammar jokes, frequent one-liners, and in-jokes don't always work either.
Both here and on twitter, neither sincerity nor sustained irony work all that well, I think.
130: Silence is only foolproof method of communication, but I lack the strength to sustain it.
But did you have to goggle "FOAD"?
128.--It's like having ogged back! As in, terrifying.
Oh my god, I cannot believe I typed "goggle". I AM A WINNER!
Oh JM, you know just what to say to a guy.
132: I did. I remembered seeing it before, but not what it stood for. I was a little shocked when I saw it written out. The discussion had seemed so silly and harmless.
132: I did. I forgot what it meant. Don't travel in circles that would use the term much, or at all.
The other day I was jointly reading something online with my work partner, and he kept pausing to ask, "What's MSM?" "What's s/b? I guess that person is replying to someone called s/b" (no.)
131. Right, so one extends an assumption of at least partial good intentions absent demonstrated mental illness.
I goggled FOAD also, seems synonymous with fuck you, clown, right?
I think of baller as meaning, depending on context, many things, including some variant of cool. For example, "The Cheese Board has my favorite pizza of the day today. Baller." (This happens to be true, though I would never say such a thing.) That Greiner happens to ball, professionally, was a happy accident.
Is everybody in California afraid to mention eating carbs?
119: For the longest time I thought the line was "6' 4" father" -- you know, so he could be a little bit taller.
141: Some of us may not have realized that until comment 119.
142: Some of us may have had to google those phrases to figure out what in the world this was about, but even the commenters at songmeanings. com weren't sure why the fellow would wish for a rabbit in a hat with a bat. And so one question answered just leads to another question, and the neverending quest for knowledge continues.
I'd always been curious about the lyrics, but never curious enough to look them up. Thanks, Sifu!
bat is rum, yac is cognac.
trick, maybe? years ago, trick could be either an act that you paid for, the person who was paid, or a synonym for snitching.
I've finally come up with a satisfactorily non-racist reason for my inability to appreciate hip-hop -- I'm just not smart enough.
The fact that it took me so long to figure that out though -- that was probably racism.
You know who else never appreciated?
I'm invoking the "If you can't even type a short sentence get off the internet" rule.
Off to work on budgets.
I can proudly say that I never thought he wanted to get with a Yoshi.
We did in fact give our kid a so-called ghetto name, but neither Lil Hoopdie nor Big Al.
146
Illusion, Michael. A trick is something a whore does for money ... or candy!
Big Al is a ghetto name? Huh. This amuses me based on the Big Als I know IRL.
Personally, I find my own deliberate attempts to provoke conversation by stating strong claims, or what some may refer to as "trolling," charming and fascinating, though as already revealed I'm fairly delusional.
Still, I feel that simply acting like an idiot and refusing to Google simple terms while demanding that others do so for you is at best a very low form of trolling, one hardly worthy of the name. This blog demands a higher standard of trolling, in the names of masters Ogged and Urple.
I refuse to believe urple is trolling.
It's a genuinely novel trolling act.
Faux and/or intentional naivete is the lowest form of trolling.
I like my trolls like my dehumidifiers, reliable and efficient.
