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LAX morals?

In response to the gang-rape case involving members of Duke’s lacrosse team, Dave Jamieson writes on Slate about the unique messed-up-edness of lacrosse, framing it as a perfect storm of jockdom, class elitism, and the permissiveness of contemporary university life:

More than any other sport, lacrosse represents the marriage of athletic aggression and upper-class entitlement. While a squash player might consider himself upper-crust, he can’t prove his superiority by checking you onto your ass the way a lacrosse defenseman can. And while lacrosse may share with football a love for contact, it is far more socioeconomically insulated than the grid game (except in odd places like Maryland, where it’s managed to cross class lines). Some aficionados take pride in the fact that their sport was invented by Native Americans, but I don’t imagine many members of the Onondaga Nation end up playing lax at Colgate.

Still, how could college lacrosse players be any more misogynous than your typical football-team steakhead? Perhaps it’s because, unlike their football brethren, an unusually large proportion of college lacrosse players spend their high school years in sheltered, all-boys academies before heading off to liberal co-ed colleges. Most guys from single-sex schools are able to adjust. Others join the lacrosse team. The worst of this lot become creatures that are, in the words of a friend of mine, “half William Kennedy Smith, half Lawrence Phillips.”

Of course, at my alma mater, we didn’t have issues like this. Our ultimate frisbee team was too stoned to get into trouble.

Read on.

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I knew it was the Coptics all along!

Here’s an article about the “Gospel of Judas,” replete with some great quotes:

“Whether or not one agrees with it, or finds it interesting or reprehensible, it’s an enormously interesting perspective on it that some follower of Jesus in the early Christian movement obviously thought was significant.”

“It really would be a miracle if Judas was the author of this document, because he died at least 100 years before it was written. It may yield some interesting insights, but there’s nothing here to undermine what Christians have believed throughout the centuries.”

“It contains a number of religious themes which are completely alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which did become popular later, in the second century AD. An analogy would be finding a speech claiming to be written by Queen Victoria, in which she talked about The Lord of the Rings and her CD collection.”

I hear the manuscript has a passage where he complains about Harvey Keitel’s portrayal of him in the Last Temptation.

My favorite passage in the article is the one that seems to exonerate the Jews from the crucifixion:

[The manuscript] is believed to be a copy of a still earlier Gospel of Judas, which may have been written about 150 years after Jesus’s death by Coptic scholars.

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The Cos on the Cleanup

Bill Cosby spoke at a rally in NO,LA about reconstruction:

Cosby, whose criticism of some aspects of modern African-American culture has stirred controversy in recent years, told a rally headed by black leaders that the city needed to look at the “wound” it had before Katrina struck.

“It’s painful, but we can’t cleanse ourselves unless we look at the wound,” Cosby told the rally of about 2,000 people in front of the city’s convention center.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you had the highest murder rate, unto each other. You were dealing drugs to each other. You were impregnating our 13-, 12-, 11-year-old children,” he said.

“What kind of a village is that?”

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Pastor Johnny Ray Youngblood also discussed the introspective portion of the rebuilding process:

With Katrina, as with East Brooklyn and North Philadelphia and Southeast Washington, the way out is straight ahead. We have to act our way out of this — as in constructive action by hopeful actors who work with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other.

We have to raise our own money, not just wrestle over government money. We have to find our own housing sites. We have to hire and monitor builders and developers who work for us, not for some bureaucrat in Washington.

We have to deflect all the hustlers and talkers within our community who see this catastrophe as just another opportunity to shake people down and line their pockets.

We have to see this as a generational struggle — 10 years, maybe 20 — not as a quick fix.

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Write your own caption

“Where’s my coke, Dwight? I’m coming for you next, Darryl!” seems kinda pedestrian.

That commenter who posted, “It’s sad when stars that bright fade into Bolivian,” deserves a medal.

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Cocker-spaniel tilt

Drudge just linked to this story about a, um, voluntary castration dungeon running in North Carolina. I’m really hoping this is an April Fool’s item, because what’s even more bizarre than the existence of said dungeon is the part about how North Carolina has “castration without malice” on its criminal (I almost wrote “penal”) books.

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More wedding pix

Lifelong friend (okay, part of the family) Gail DeStefano (nee Kutyla) just zapped over her pix from the wedding! This one’s of lifelong friend (okay, part of the family) Cathi holding my niece Sela.

A bunch of Gail’s pix are pretty blurry, but I swear Gail wasn’t drunk when she took them! (her sister, on the other hand . . . )

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Roses

Until last night, I hadn’t watched The Colbert Report on Comedy Central (myriad reasons, centering on lack of time & disinterest). Over dinner, Amy & I caught the broadcast, which included a profile of Congressional District 29. As part of the segment, Colbert interviewed Rep. Adam Schiff, which included this priceless exchange:

Schiff: Well, it was the most expensive race for the House in history.

Colbert: How much did it cost?

Schiff: We raised about $4.3 million and there were about $5 million in independent expenditures.

Colbert: After you were elected, did you pass legislation banning the very sort of unregulated donations that helped you win?

Schiff: Yes.

Colbert: Isn’t that the political equivalent of . . . sleeping with a prostitute and then strangling her to hide your shame?

Schiff: I wouldn’t want to say that.

Colbert spent the rest of the interview trying to get Rep. Schiff to accept a $100 bill.

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Long Last Love

Journalist and screenwriter Josh Friedman wrote a beautiful piece about his self-composed eulogy, necessitated by his recent cancer surgery:

[W]e all know that there’ll be a last time we do everything and that time and that day may be closer than we think. There’s already things we’ve done for the last time, maybe because we don’t do those things anymore, or maybe they don’t do us. I won’t anchor the 400m relay again, despite the fact that leaning into the curve of a black asphalt track with the baton in my hand, the finish line in front of me and the field behind me is the closest I’ll probably come to heaven.

Of course, I’ve had an asthma attack while losing my virginity for the last time, so maybe things even out.

These are lasts long lost, but they’re buried in the shallows and you don’t need cancer’s sharp edge to dig them up. We all straddle the past and future, and the present’s jammed up our ass like Tom Sawyer’s fence picket.

Read it all.