re: Congress getting in on the basketball investigations

Congress can't even pass a budget. They need to shut the hell up.

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"As I Lay Dying" is one of my favorite novels. I read it in high school on the recommendation of an English teacher who knew I liked Faulkner. (Yeah I know how nerdy is liking Faulkner that young - I mean adults fake read him ). I was so taken with how the story was told that I wrote "My mother is a fish" on the sides of my kick arse Chuck Taylors. "Sound and the Fury" is great but I'd also recommend "Absalom, Absalom!" as Quentin's struggle with what it is to be southern stands to this day as the perfect illustration of what southerners of conscience and intellect struggle with.

My step-dad loved Lewis Grizzard and had a ton of his comedy tapes and as a kid we'd listen to them on long trips. I found his humor hilarious as a child but today I find it chauvinistic (in the classical sense where the word refers to regional prejudice or overzealous nationalism - seriously everyone should google the word because it's so associated with 'male chauvinism' that the true meaning has been lost.)

That's not to say Grizzard is without merit. In columns and in his standup he had some wonderful insights. He's just problematic because in many ways he promoted some of the very things southerners need to shed in order to get on with our lives and improve the standing of so many things within our states.

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My momma was very old-school South, so it makes sense she'd like something like that. Her whole branch of the family could be used as a promo for a much more authentic version of SCOTS.

I do love me some Faulkner too. There's just something about the Southern raconteur style that makes his stuff engrossing. I kinda twisted my brain with TSATF -- there were many times I wish Faulkner had gotten his way and printed the novel in 4 different font colors to mark when he changed characters in the middle of the damned sentences -- but I've read most of the major ones. "As I Lay Dying" is my favorite, with "Light in August" a close second.

Flannery is a favorite too, and one of my graduation presents from high school was a fancy edition of Eudora Welty stories. I wish I knew where it still was. My secret shame is that, while I've seen the "The Glass Menagerie" on stage, and "A Streetcar Named Desire" on both stage and screen, I've yet to read a single Tennessee Williams work on paper. I suppose, to Tennessee people, he's as much required reading as Faulkner is to us Mississippi folk.

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I get the feeling it won't stop there. We may be witnessing the last years of the NCAA as we know it.

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I doubt it. The NCAA as we know it is the products of many, many decades of development, legal processes, infrastructure development, financial entanglements, and general all-around system emplacement. While people may fantasize about burning it down, and sometimes even win a victory or two in changing how the NCAA operates, replacing it to a degree that we wouldn't recognize it (that is, as we know it) would be an endeavor that the hundreds of colleges and universities operating under its umbrellas would have neither the fortitude nor the desire to attempt. It's an old, old story, the entrenchment of the bureaucracy and the normalization of the status quo. It's how human society has always functioned.

The only way to fix this starts with destroying the AAU. Street hustlers using AAU teams as their own personal ATMs has to be stopped if this shite has any hope of being cleaned up.

Members of Congress just want to know how/why they did not get their piece of the pie. It's crazy how many people get elected to public office and walk out multi-millionaires.