a sense of joy and then a panic

One of the little joys in my life is staying at other people's houses and reading their books.  For some reason it comes much more easily than reading books I bought for myself - it's like they're just there, free, weightless, "read me or don't read me, I don't care."  It's how I read The Quiet American and The Bell-Jar, and now it's how I've read Revolutionary Road (in the span of three nights) by Richard Yates.

For me, two things stuck out: how much the 1950s reminded me of Lincoln, Nebraska (and 1950s New York is apparently what girls who go to Barnard still seek), and how great Richard Yates is at structuring plot and character development, and how extremely readable he is without sacrificing depth.  Everything just flowed with the sense of inevitability (and dread), from tense but mundane beginning to horrific end (see Stewart O'Nan's assessment).  I hate to sound so hallmarky, but it is pretty inspirational from a writing standpoint.

I think if I were to pick a song for this book, it would be one that has no sense of the 1950s at all:



* A couple chapters in the main character accuses his wife of acting out something from Madame Bovary, another book that was condemned by many of my AP Lit classmates as having no sympathetic character (as I recall they were happy when Emma finally died, in a "good, bitch is dead" sort of way).

My experiment with Mad Men is now over - it just got too depressing for me.  I have started devoting my couple hours of free time between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. (seriously) to Nip/Tuck, which so far I'm enjoying a lot more.  It's interesting, because they're ostensibly very similar shows - main characters are male professionals, there's a lot of emphasis on objectifying the female form and shallow facades (advertising, plastic surgery) - but whereas my reaction to Mad Men was "oh my God, I hate you all," my reaction to Nip/Tuck is "yeah, that's pretty much the way it is," and even though neither Troy and McNamara are anyone I want to know, I give them more leeway than I do anybody in Sterling Cooper.  I think it's a generational thing, though.  Like, which set of men and women are we taught to consider normal, or something like that.  Once again, I don't really like anyone (but ugh to McNamara's teenage son in particular), although I do have a strange fondness for Kimber and Julia.

I must say that I also enjoy the insanity and grotesqueness of Nip/Tuck.  And the music.  This is the full-length version of the opening theme - unsurprisingly, there's a ton of thinspo videos set to this song, but there's also a bunch of thinspo shit set to Radiohead's "Creep" and Fiona Apple's "Paper Bag," so whatever.  It makes me think of... well, grad school, but life in general if you're living in Go Getter World.  And I realize now that I am back in that world, and deeper in than I was as an undergrad because the emphasis now really is on becoming a full-grown yuppie, not just getting hot drunken pictures of yourself on Facebook (which is, I think, what it was in undergrad).  I kind of consider myself lucky that I fell into this job, even though I hate it and am fairly bad at it, because it hooks me up to the two professors who can connect me to anything/anyone in the very narrow field that I want to enter.  Hilariously I apparently decided to wed myself to this field in a matter of, oh, a month.  But I've sworn off government work as an option, so there you go.  I am left with think tanks.  I think I'm just kind of like, "okay, fuck it, Southeast Asia politics it is, fuckin' good enough."  My point is I don't necessarily feel like I have to struggle as hard as other people I know who are just starting to feel out a direction.  Of course, there is more to life in Go Getter World than having a well-connected job, as we all know, and I still feel pressure - "perfect soul, perfect mind, perfect face" - like whoa. 

Added: I think this pressure is also there for men in the grad program - obviously.  But it is different for women.  It's like we have to impress fucking everyone, all the time.

Also: It reminds me of whenever I'm asked "where else did you apply?" and I say that I chose AU over George Washington.  Even AU people don't get why I would, sometimes - why wouldn't you go for the better name, regardless of anything else?  And when I explain that GW didn't click with me, and AU did, I tend to get blank stares.  I usually have to add "well, AU is giving me way more money than GW would have..." before I get the "oh" of understanding.

This was entertaining, much more so than most superhero or pseudo-superhero movies.  It's not particularly subversive, and the humor is kind of slapstick, but oh well.  The bad guys (to the extent that there even are bad guys...) are all aliens, so at least there's no demonization of human cultures going on.  The parts that take place on Earth are way more fun than the parts that take place on, uh, Thor's home planet.  Overall, alternated between funny and campy!dramatic, but in a very non-annoying way - and we all know how easy it is to annoy me.

I thought they actually did a really nice job with the everyday folk in this one - Natalie Portman's character was very likable and relatable and cute (and everything about Thor was filtered through her perspective, which was awesome, because it almost felt more like he was the love interest, not her - which is really fucking rare in action movies, to allow women to show desire - usually it's just like, Exasperated Love Interest Suddenly Becomes Willing To Make Out With Hero, How Did That Happen? Don't Ask), with her main adjective probably being "clever."  Her assistant, Darcy - the political science student - was the comic relief, and was a riot.  Then their beleaguered scientist mentor dude was Stellan Skarsgard, and he did a good job; I generally like Skarsgard anyway.  It all takes place in a very desertified New Mexico.

The aliens - Thor's people, and their enemies the Frost Giants - are a little headscratchy.  They have a nice-looking planet, sure, with the cosmos as their sky and a long psychedelic crystal highway that leads out to the rainbow bifrost bridge - kind of like something off a sketchy "space art" web site.  And their attire reminded more of Saint Seiya than anything else, did anybody watch that show?  Disturbing anime, that.  Anyway, they're all completely identical to humans aside from their ridiculous armor, which was played for some laughs when they eventually came to Earth.  The Frost Giants are corpse-gray with red eyes and live in a desolate ice world.  Character development in this "realm," as Thor would say, was a little weak, but I think is a good example of what I was saying the other day - heroic heroes are more interesting than antiheroes. 

Thor comes straight out of Hero Mold, you see.  He is a total stupid dumbfuck when he first becomes an adult, but his flaws are hero flaws - wants to go after the enemy and teach them a lesson, doesn't want to wait for diplomacy, must defend honor, blah blah blah - a lot of sound and fury and prideful bombast, but he doesn't angst or consider switching sides or even behave all that reprehensibly.  There was one part where I thought he might suffer A Very Painful Lesson (TM) because he's smashing all these Frost Giants with his whack-a-mole hammer while miles away his friends are about to get eaten by a gigantic ice Balrog/Troll, but no, he sees that they're in danger and saves them.  He has some character defects, but they're heroic defects.  And he becomes much less of a dumbfuck as the movie progresses.  But thank God, you know, thank God that he wasn't "I'm just a loser and I'm sad about my average life but holy shit look I have superpowers now I am uber cool woohoo."  I am so done with that kind of superhero.  With Thor, at least we've moved beyond the standard "what does this power mean?" conversations, because you know, Thor knows he has power.  He's been groomed to be a leader all his life.  So instead of "you too can be a leader" claptrap you can actually concentrate on what good leadership is (not that this movie is very deep, but eh).  And if that means that fewer boys in the audience can "relate" to Thor, too damn bad for them.  Captain America looks right up their alley.

Loki, his brother, the "bad guy," is a whole bucket of crazy.  He's kind of sympathetic, and he's certainly Thor's shadow-self, and he doesn't seem to be motivated by Unrepenting Evil or whatever, but neither his motives nor his personality are consistent.  I don't mean that he develops as a character like Thor does - he's just wildly inconsistent.  I accept that he's keeping his true motives and plan to himself, but towards the end I kept going like "Loki, why are you doing that?  I thought that's what you wanted!" and "Loki, what the fuck?"  Unlike Thor, you never really figure out what Loki believes or values - we get that he values himself, yeah, but he seems to have literally no opinions or belief system beyond that - which is just as bad as the villain that is evil Just Because.  

But, oh well.  The movie ultimately comes down not on the side of genocide, which for an action blockbuster, is pretty good.

From a Ferretbrain review of Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear (review by Dan Hemmens):

What annoys me about Kvothe is not so much that he's a gratuitous Mary-Sue, but that despite this fact he is taken incredibly seriously by critics. People bitch about how unrealistic it is that everybody fancies Bella Swan [A/N: From the much-maligned Twilight series], about how stupid it is for teenage girls to indulge in a fantasy where powerful supernatural beings are sexually attracted to them. People laugh at characters like Sonea and Auraya [A/N: Heroines written by fantasy writer Trudi Canavan] because they're just magic sparkly princesses with super-speshul magic sparkle powers. But take all of those qualities – hidden magic power, ludicrously expanding skillset, effortless ability to attract the opposite sex despite specifically self-describing as being bad at dealing with them, and slap it on a male character, and suddenly we get the protagonist of one of the most serious, most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the last decade.

Of course you can't ever really say, for certain, how a book would have been received if you reversed the genders of its author and protagonist, but something tells me that a book about a red-haired girl who plays the lute and becomes the most powerful sorceress who ever lived by the time she's seventeen, and who has a series of exciting sexy encounters with supernatural creatures, would not have been quite so readily inducted into the canon of a genre still very uncertain about its mainstream reputation.

This, by the way, is why I love Ferretbrain.  And have a very low tolerance for reflexive bashing of Twilight.  Some of it, I'm convinced, is straight up fear/disdain of catching girl cooties.  Some of it is under the guise of a "concerned citizen," in this case people who say it's "bad for girls" - it's bad for young girls to idolize unhealthy relationships, but apparently it's totally fine for young boys to idolize unhealthy relationships.  Female wish fulfillment must be guarded very tightly so that it doesn't go down bad paths and stays on a realistic straight-and-narrow, but male wish fulfillment?  Boys will be boys.  Or even better, that's just entertainment!  Or I guess in this case, that's the standard-bearer. 

Boy, when I become famous some day and someone asks me in some well-meaning interview which genre (out of science fiction/fantasy/horror) is the least hospitable to female writers and readers, it's going to be so hard to decide!

As usual, haven't read the novella of The Mist.  Consider this a commentary on the 2007 movie.

The monsters were fun; the bigger the better.  Liked that it was all because of a military project trying to contact other dimensions. 

I really dug the ending of the movie.  I wanted the awesome old people to live and I still dug the ending!  The ending, IMO, made this movie work.  It made bland, anonymously heroic David with his beloved little son (I am starting to get really tired of a certain set-up, if you can't tell) - and the rest of his team - accountable characters instead of the holier-than-thou messengers of righteousness that they were sort of set up to be (I have found that movies that try to lampoon/criticize holier-than-thou messengers of righteousness on one side of the political spectrum - in this case, the religious fundamentalist side - usually end up erecting their own holier-than-thou messengers of righteousness on the other side, to act as the correct counterweights.  Left Behind for Leftists, right?  It's ugly no matter who does it, though.  And I've done this myself.  I know it is hard to resist).  I really didn't think another version of Mike the Dutiful Constable from Storm of the Century - whose greatest sin was cheating on a goddamn test! - was really necessary, but at least Frank Darabont had the balls to let this version of Mike make a wrong move.  I give him A LOT of credit for that.

Also, there's been some talk about the role of condescension in politics these days - the idea that educated liberals condescend to "red-state Americans," so to speak, and uh... this movie didn't exactly dispel that.  Having the red-staters say things like "Do not condescend to me!" (while essentially validating any feelings of condescension toward them) did not help.

See, if we just could have paired the first 90% of War of the Worlds with The Mist's ending... we would have like the best, most depressing, most realistic monster invasion movie ever.  Oh yeah, and with the cast of W of the W, please, because the guy who played David could not act, on top of the already crippling setback of David being the most boring character in the whole movie.  It is crazy to me how boring main characters can be.  And I don't mean main characters who act as windows to the world - I mean genuine protagonists.

I mentioned a while back that I got a free copy of The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, through a give-away at SF Signal.  I've finished it.  It is one of the worst books I have ever read - but maybe I'm the wrong reader for it, because I don't read the action thrillers that this thing is modeled on. 

I suspect that a lot of readers are just happy that these vampires are not Twilight vampires.  Indeed, they are unmistakably fiendish, murderous, grotesque.  They even defecate as they drain you of blood!  While I sympathize with the "finally, GORE!" crowd, these vampires aren't really vampires either.  They're more like zombies.  Can you imagine Lucy shambling down the road in a bathrobe, flailing mindlessly for anything that's got a vein available?  No.  Vampires are supposed to have some degree of charisma, some amount of style - I'm the person who thinks Herzog's Nosferatu is one of the most gorgeous and romantic movies ever.  They are not supposed to be a sexless horde.  Yes, The Strain's monsters suck blood.  But they fit the zombie category better.  Same with the vampires in the I Am Legend movie.*

Onto the thing that really bothered me.  More than the bad writing and unconvincing battle scenes (several Amazon reviewers mention the improbability of an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor with broken hands being the kick-ass action hero that he is), more than the repetition of vampires attacking their neighbors and turtle-slow pacing: I accurately predicted what would happen to the main characters. 

The main character (MC) is a "handsome," "genius" CDC dude who's in the middle of a divorce.  He really, really, really wants to be around his son Zach, who is just like him, brilliant and intense, etc.  Unfortunately, his beautiful ex-wife (who was the one calling MC a "handsome" "genius"), who never understood him and was always second to his work, wants custody of Zach.  And she has a new boyfriend who MC thinks is trying to replace him in Zach's life.  New boyfriend is pathetic (works at Sears) and sniveling.  Also, MC has a new love interest, who also works at the CDC (has the potential to understand his brilliance!) and gets along with Zach.  

So I'm like, hmm.  Clearly new boyfriend is going to die a horrible death.  Clearly Zach is going to end up with his rightful father.  If not for the new love interest, ex-wife would also end up with the MC, but given the new love interest, she will also die to make way for the MC's new and improved family.  I knew this because it is the plot offered up by disaster movies such as 2012 and War of the Worlds**.

I was exactly right.  Not only did new boyfriend turn into a vampire, providing the MC with the opportunity to stab him repeatedly (I think this was actually narrated in the book as stabstabstab), but the ex-wife was turned into a vampire who now wants to steal away Zach, the bitch!  One of the final lines of the book?  "The custody battle for Zach was not over."  She escapes to presumably reappear in the second book, as the MC laments that she will "haunt Zach forever."  And the girlfriend?  She stays behind in the final battle to take care of Zach. 

This kind of thing really bothers me, and I'm trying to figure out why.  For one I'm not sure about a custody battle subsuming the end of human life in New York City.  And on a basic level, it seems unrealistic as hell.  Disasters - or genocides - are not typically wish fulfillment scenarios (imagine if instead of vampires, people were being annihilated by an army instead; imagine the outrage that would ensue from trotting out genocide as an excuse for the main character to get whatever he wants [assuming he's seen as righteous and not a war profiteer, of course]).  Then there's the nasty little "why are you so special that the disaster works out aces for you, when everyone else is dying?  why should I be happy for you?" feeling, like it just doesn't seem fair, or justified.  But of course who am I to criticize what someone else wants to do with their story?  Why do I even want stories to be fair/justified?  I wouldn't care if the MC wasn't also this heroic figure that we're supposed to cheer for - I love to hate Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22, for example - but this book is written in such a way that there's no negotiating what side you're on, no unreliable narrator, no perspective except for the MC's.  Maybe I'd prefer it if the MC was scheming to use the vampire apocalypse to get Zach, get rid of his ex-wife, impress his girlfriend.  Etc.  Sure, he'd be a dickface.  But he'd be more interesting.  It would seem more accurate.  The outcome would not be inexplicable. 

And then there's the whole Hooray for Patriarchy aspect of it all.  Mothers are pretty much all doomed in The Strain, and by doomed I mean "turned evil."  There are two female characters of any importance - the ex-wife and the girlfriend, both defined entirely by their relationship to the MC - and the ex-wife goes bad, of course, while the girlfriend is billed as this sort of tough, smart counterpart to the MC but is really just the MC's toadie and on-call baby sitter.  She mostly stands back and screams in horror.  Two other female characters at least appear repeatedly: a blood-sucking lawyer turned vampire who eats her neighbor's kids (and then hunts her own kids) and just wants to get rich off lawsuits, and an unstable OCD-afflicted housewife who kills herself when her husband becomes a vampire (because she needs him to survive).  Contrast with the only vampire who shows any degree of complexity and morality - OCD housewife's husband, who nobly chains himself up in the shed so that he won't hurt his family.  D'awww.  Maybe this would make a good Father's Day present or something.  Certainly not a good Mother's Day present.  A father's love is protective, self-sacrificing, virtuous.  A mother's love is possessive, harmful/deadly, frightening.  What the fuck, you know?

* I suspect that somebody who's well-versed in the I Am Legend story could argue that it influenced The Strain, but that somebody is not me.
** To give W of the Worlds credit, though, it doesn't kill off mom's new boyfriend (or mom, but mom only dies if there's someone to take her place anyway).  I also appreciate W of the Worlds for clearly showing Tom Cruise's character's flaws - i.e., showing why his wife got a divorce, why he doesn't have custody.  In the case of 2012, though, mom's new boyfriend actually steps aside and then dies so that the "real family" can be together. 

I know, I only randomly do Friday links.  That doesn't mean they are not still links on a Friday.  Also, I changed my layout!

• The wonderful Abigail Nussbaum writes about the TV show Justified.  I don't watch it, although it seems like my kind of thing.  I don't know, you can only have so many FX gritty crime shows in your life.  And by "so many" I mean one.  Nevertheless, the review itself is, like all of her commentary, delicious:

  Justified pokes and prods at its characters' concept of masculinity, but it leaves Raylan's alone.  This has the unfortunate consequence of suggesting that Raylan's is the true masculinity, the one to which all other men can merely aspire--unfortunate because Raylan's version of manhood is so very tenuous, based on a fictional construct probably garnered from TV shows, rooted in a culture a hundred years gone to which he has no personal connection... and quite obviously arrived at due to his burning desire to leave Kentucky and Arlo Givens in his rearview mirror. As I've said, Raylan often acts as the silent witness to other men's struggles with their manhood, only coming out of his shell when the season's overarching plot, involving the Crowders and his father, heats up.  It's only in these scenes that we see Raylan's polite exterior crack, and only in his interactions with Arlo that he comes close to earning Winona's characterization of his as the angriest man she's known.  But it's also in these scenes that the cowboy persona is most tamped down, so that the question of Raylan's anger and his relationship to violence is never really addressed.

• Elizabeth Tamny makes a remarkable discovery about the way Hollywood portrays female writers: "It seems like there is this trope of the female author just transferring (painful events from) her life to paper. Bing bang boom. Writing!"  Mark Athitakis comments: "It may be that male writers on screen tend to be presented as Important Authors while female writers are presented as "Sad People Who Can Only Manage Their Heartache by Getting It Down on Paper.""
• My friend Yue wants to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter like so bad, dude (article is not G-chat convo with Yue).  Although NGL, that Forbidden Journey rollercoaster sounds cool.

K, that's all I got.  Sorry, and have a good weekend.

Context:  I saw the first Iron Man because our passes didn't work on Speed Racer (I was one of those crazy people who liked Speed Racer, btw), and I must confess that it was a little much for me.  I know, "too much" is basically the definition of a superhero movie, but the whole uber-American rock star CEO thing was just not something I could get into. 

This Movie: Because of the above, I actually ended up liking Iron Man 2 more than Iron Man.  Things go wrong in this one.  There's some doubt cast on the viability of the military-industrial complex, both for a nation and a person.  The whole thing is basically a metaphor for nukes - right down to flashbacks to Iron Man's dad making '50s era, Jetsonian promotional vids for technology that will save the world, etc. - so fittingly the two big specters in this movie are: 1) Dangerous, angry people who've been steamrolled by America and its shiny, fancy nukes making shitty, dirty nukes; 2) Nuclear energy turning out to be poisonous in the long-run.  And in the end, the bravado is toned down.  I for one appreciated this.  My favorite scene was probably Iron Man's disastrous birthday party that kind of highlighted how ridiculous the "techno-fantasy" can become.  No wait, my favorite scene was actually the one where Iron Man (or rather the guy that wears him, Tony Stark) presents Pepper with strawberries as an apology, and it turns out that's the one item she's allergic to.  That's what I mean: things go wrong for the rock star CEO in Iron Man 2.  I mean, I was actually rooting for him at the end here, and I wasn't rooting for him in the first one.

The action is a little meh on this one, to be honest - my eyes kind of glazed over - but since The Dark Knight my standards for action sequences have gone up astronomically.  There's also this whole subplot with the Avengers that I thought could have been junked, because introducing random people who look like they're from another superhero universe just distracts, frankly.  If I was not sitting with someone who knew who the hell these people were I would have been going, "who the fuck are these clowns?"  And do we really need to have the "climactic" battle between weaponized mechas intercut with Scarlett J. in a leather catsuit using sexy martial arts to take down security guards?  Don't answer that.  My point is I'm here to watch medium-sized robots fight, and Scarlett unfortunately reminded me way too much of this Scarlett, from this horrible, horrible movie.  That's bad.

Overall, though, I liked the movie and can recommend it.  

4s Marry 4s, 7s Marry 7s:  Yes.  But I think Pepper is awesome, so YMMV.  I thought the snippety interaction between RDJ and Paltrow was one of the best things about this one, and the saving grace of the first. 

These are the same psychos who think DBZ is about Jesus, right?  Gotta justify our bloodlust somehow.  You see this in Jesus Camp too.

More Churches Promote Martial Arts to Reach Young Men

The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility.

“The man should be the overall leader of the household,” said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group. “We’ve raised a generation of little boys.”

Over the past year and a half, a subculture has evolved, with Christian mixed martial arts clothing brands like Jesus Didn’t Tap (in the sport, “tap” means to give up) and Christian social networking Web sites like Anointedfighter.com.

Men ages 18 to 34 are absent from churches, some pastors said, because churches have become more amenable to women and children. “We grew up in a church that had pastel pews,” said Tom Skiles, 37, the pastor of Spirit of St. Louis Church in Arnold, Mo. “The men fell asleep.”

In focusing on the toughness of Christ, evangelical leaders are harking back to a similar movement in the early 1900s, historians say, when women began entering the work force. Proponents of this so-called muscular Christianity advocated weight lifting as a way for Christians to express their masculinity.

Jesse Johnson, 20, a potential convert, was subdued in a chokehold and decided not to return home with the other church members after his bout. He stayed in Memphis, drinking and carousing with friends along Beale Street, this city’s raucous, neon-lighted strip of bars.

I agree that we've raised a generation of little boys, but disagree that encouraging MMA will solve the problem.  Not that I have anything against MMA.  But it shouldn't serve as medication for the bruised male ego.  That's making problems worse, dudes! 

And the fact that it's "predominantly white" churches getting involved leads me to conclude that there's a lame persecution-of-the-hegemons complex involved here too.

Strange things are afoot in Big 12 football.  At the end of the season, Kansas coach Mark Mangino was fired for abusing his players (one was made to do a bear-crawl until his hands bled, then a bunch of other (black) players said they'd been threatened with being sent home to get shot with their "homies").  Now, Texas Tech coach Mike Leach has been suspended from coaching Tech in the Alamo Bowl for putting a player who said he had a concussion in a closet as punishment for "faking" the concussion.  It is craziness.  It's also worth noting that Leach had been one of Mangino's big defenders: "The mean man told some player something he didn’t want to hear... Well, there’s a mean man in Lubbock that tells people stuff they don’t want to hear, too, and that’s just part of it.”

And it gets weirder.  The player who made the accusation, Adam James, is the son of ESPN announcer Craig James - who had been scheduled to call the Alamo Bowl.  He has been removed from that post, but Craig James has been calling Texas Tech games all year.  Said a user on Life In The Red: "his broadcast of the Tech-NU game was not close to being balanced. He made it sound like the NU D gave up 60 to tech, when in fact it was the least yards a Leach team had ever gained, and one TD was scored by the Tech D!" 

Yeah, see, this is why I'm glad I discovered sports blogs.  Not only have I discovered that I am not crazy to hate Brett Favre and Tim Tebow - and, Christ, that many other people, even Americans, hated the ridiculously bombastic coverage of the 2009 US Open - but they give me an alternative to the corrupt machine that is ESPN and its cohorts.  Because seriously, FUCK that shit.  This is why I watch Awful Announcing.

As a side note, I actually like Texas Tech (more than the other three Texas teams in the Big 12, anyway) - I like how Mike Leach is all "arrr I'm a pirate" and the team runs into the stadium in Lubbock led by this chick in a Zorro costume, I mean, it's awesome, you know.  Mike Leach clearly talks too much and has a really short fuse when it comes to his players (he's said that his players were wrong to listen to their "fat little girlfriends", he banned the players from having Twitter pages when one player tweeted that Leach was late to a team meeting because Twitter is just for "narcissists" anyway) - times like that that I'm happy our coach does not talk to the media at all, and mostly just goes batshit psycho on referees.  Still, I have always preferred blunt coaches to smarmy ones.  And God knows what all is going on in this story, but the whole Craig James angle makes it less straightforward.

But: I'm not one of those people who thinks that college football coaches should be able to do whatever they want to their players (if certain NFL coaches would grow a bit more of a spine, however, I would not object).  I'm never going to be all, oh those boys just need to toughen up, society's gotten too soft.  Because that just creeps me out, to be frank.  It's one thing to be blunt.  But if being blunt means you make it obvious that you're a sadist, you still suck.