Wario Balotelli
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| Number of Posts: | 175 |
| Registered on: | 6/2/2011 |
| Online Status: | Not Online |
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re: Whole Foods: The Temple of Psuedoscience
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 8:07 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:
the daily beast is a liberal arse publication, so i'd imagine he's a liberal. i didn't look at his history though
Yes. Very liberal. The comments from "open-minded" liberals on the article are pretty great as well.
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re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 8:01 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:
if you believe there is a single type of "good college town" then yes, it isn't. i think you and mike are looking at this through the perspective of the cliched/typical college town
I didn't mean to imply a type. What makes a good college town for me differs from your definition, obviously. I have lived in places worse than BR and Ttown, and plenty of places better. But I place value on certain things over others, and there are certainly people who value the same things I do. It's not exactly rare. I also didn't mean to ignore the sports culture of each city, which is fantastic. In this case, your average fall Saturday in those towns is probably better than the towns I mentioned. For me the perfect town that balances all of this well is Athens. fricking love that city.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 7:46 pm to LSU fan 246
quote:
like genro said, youre looking at this from an adult perspective
I freely admit that, but having the referential experience of other "college" towns makes me skeptical of any claim that either town is a "good" college town.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 7:38 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:
I KNEW IT
Go on.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 7:38 pm to LSU fan 246
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and how many college kids are going to be going to these events? barely any
How would you know? There are plenty at all of these events. No is expecting them to sell out an amphitheater.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 7:37 pm to genro
quote:
We're all also viewing this from the adult perspective. We've graduated, gotten careers, and pay taxes. The overall dynamics, infrastructure, and amenities of a particular city matter more to us.
If there is anything I am guilty of in this thread, it's this. I go to a fun college town now, and I find myself wishing Ttown had this or that. Or I say I would have loved that in college.
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They matter very little to your typical undergrad. Colleges are, by their very nature, insular.
Absolutely, which for me is a greater problem, especially with critical thinking in the classroom.
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I ate at dining halls, went to frat parties, and had a lot of stoney existential conversations. That's the college experience. As I moved up in school, i would venture more often into center city or old town or South Philly for cheesesteaks, but mostly I didn't care about the quality of the surrounding city. It was an insular experience.
I would venture to say that yours is a typical experience of the undergrad, but having worked in higher education I would say that insularity is a massive problem. You end up dealing with a massively entitled student population who feels they deserve certain grades and administrations who only seek to get them out of school as quickly as they can. They have no context for their immediate experience, and I would argue, and I think the other guy would argue for the same thing, that this is the age where you can gain that context with very few consequences (typically).
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 7:31 pm to LSU fan 246
quote:
art galleries? besides art majors, very few, if any, college kids would go to these
You are misunderstanding how galleries can be used. You can readings, meet and greets, book signings, all sorts of cultural events in galleries, as it's about the space rather than the fact of it being a gallery.
I think galleries and museums are awesome, and I try to go and support events held at those places. I know they aren't for everyone, especially for the student population that LSU and Bama seem to attract. Even if we cross those off the list of a "good" college town (which I think is fair) I still don't see Ttown and BR moving up a tier.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 7:26 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:
naw brah LSU doesn't have enough art galleries, b/c art galleries are what all the kids are doing these days
:violin:
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 7:24 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:
you were doing so well until you devolved into that
Oh I don't use that phrase lightly. It was billed as the biggest Starbucks in the world or something, and I really fricking hate it. Allow me one pretentious caveat. I just hate Starbucks with an unholy passion.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 7:23 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:
baton rouge isn't my favorite town either, but you don't have that many legit medium-sized (over 150k pop, under 1M metro) towns with a legit/major university, either. orlando, tampa, and a variety of places in cali?
This is true, and I realize that BR is in a weird position. LSU suffers massively from being in BR in my opinion. Still, the area has a shite ton of potential, but you have leaders with absolutely no vision.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 7:18 pm to genro
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Tuscaloosa has all those things as well, and public transit. I'm on the Crimson Ride every day, along with thousands of other students; it's excellent.
The only place to get coffee on the strip is TCBY, otherwise you have to go to the campus Starbucks, a place devoid of any soul. There is an awful "coffee shop" next to Five, and really shitty restaurants and shops (Epiphany is good). There's two art galleries which rarely have new shows, and there is a new cultural center. The Bama theater is nice, and I'm glad that we have some breweries starting up. Crimson Ride needs to be better to curb all the morons who insist on driving a half mile or less to class. It's fricking ridiculous. And the rebuilding effort after the tornado has just been shameful. Condo after fricking condo. It wasn't a surprise they couldn't fill them.
All these places are fine. It's just that there are colleges and towns that offer so much more.
quote:
Tuscaloosa/BR are not Portland or Austin. That is true. But if you spend 4 years of your life from 18-22 at LSU or Alabama, and you don't have an awesome time, the problem is you, not the city.
Dude, I've had an awesome time in both cities. Have tons of friends that I keep in touch with. But objectively Ttown and BR just aren't very good. I've seen much worse college towns, and I've seen a lot better. A lot lot better.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 7:11 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:
when i think of "college town" it's a very small (ignoring student population) town that dies in the summer and over christmas. BR has all of the objective things you listed ("coffee shops, art galleries, museums, nice outdoor spaces, bars, restaurants, music venues, diners,") except for maybe transport...but LSU's isn't that bad (esp for a southern city)
It isn't that good either. There's a real discontinuity in the city as a whole. The LSU area is nice but lacks cohesion. Baton Rouge isn't that great of a city. Having lived and been elsewhere in this country, I wouldn't live there again.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 6:54 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:
what makes a good college town?
A multitude of things that you usually would expect in college towns, like coffee shops, art galleries, museums, nice outdoor spaces, bars, restaurants, music venues, diners, excellent public transport, but also, and importantly for me, there has to be a certain energy that the town can create. BR and Ttown have their nice areas, but those cities aren't designed in such a way as to take advantage of a young, energetic population. The city planning in each city is extremely poor, which is not to say they don't do other things better than some of the other places I listed. And I really think both cities have an infrastructure in place take advantage of that population, but in Ttown (I haven't been in Baton Rouge since 2008), they insist on building cookie-cutter condo after cookie-cutter condo, with no thought of how it fits into the grander scheme of the city.
Obviously I don't think any of you will believe me if I insist that BR and Ttown are on the lower tiers of college towns, but in my experience they are.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 6:44 pm to genro
quote:
how would you describe Montgomery?
fricking awful. Way worse than any capital city I've ever visited. I would kill myself if I was ever stuck in this city.
quote:
Or Detroit for that matter?
What the frick kind of question is this? This is a massive shithole.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 6:39 pm to Mike da Tigah
quote:
Truth is, almost all will never leave and continue to think the exact same way relative to what they expose themselves to, and so they end up making big distinctions between various parts of the same region like BR, Oxford, and Tuscaloosa. Honestly, the only distinguishable deviation from the rest of the South in the South is New Orleans, because of the culture differences from French Catholic to say Scots Irish Protestant dominating the rest of the South, but still there's a whole other world out there that most of these young people will never be exposed to.
I agree completely. I laugh when people say that these towns are great college towns. I've been on college campuses most of my working life, and BR and Ttown are two of the worst. I haven't spent enough time in Oxford to make an accurate assessment. Athens is a great college town. Amherst is a great college town. Berkeley is a great college town. Cambridge is a great college town. Boulder is a great college town. I could go on and list way better "college towns."
The areas around UofA and LSU are nice, but the towns and cities they are situated in are awful. Absolutely fricking awful.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 6:27 pm to genro
quote:
"Getting away" in this context has nothing to do with cultural differences. It's about new friends, new people, new experiences. Going somewhere where no one knows you or expects anything of you.
Sure. It's more about finding the familiar in the unfamiliar, which is a common human tendency.
quote:
But as individuals, they are different people.
Haha. No shite.
re: Difference between European leagues
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 6:25 pm to hendersonshands
quote:
Yeah, punt and run is riveting.
Other than West Ham and Crystal Palace, who have managers who have used it historically, I don't know who else does in the league. It's an easy cliche about English football though.
re: Difference between European leagues
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 6:20 pm to SM6
quote:
I've often heard commentators/pundits mention how one player wouldn't fare well in another league or how his skills are best suited to this or that, for example that the EPL requires a lot more fitness because you must play up and down the field.
Most of the time it's the commentators talking out of their arse.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 6:16 pm to Mike da Tigah
quote:
Agreed... Leaved the state, even if it's just a semester. Matter of fact, take a year off and travel the country, South America, or Europe, and learn shite people with college degrees, 2.5 children and grand children will never learn. Learn about life, but jeezum, don't go to Bama, and Ole Miss and think you're experiencing the world. It's the same thing you left. Try leaving for someplace out of your comfort zone and away from the umbilical cord's reach and expose yourself to the rest of the world outside the region.
That's the irony of this thread. People thinking that going out of state to a neighboring state constitutes getting away. The places they inhabit in each school are the same as the places they inhabit in the places they just left. There is very little cultural difference in the move anywhere across the south, in my opinion, having lived in BR and Ttown for the last ten years and not originally being from the South. Because they are so closely related, minuscule differences seem large when in fact they are not.
re: What is up with BR area rich kids going to school at U of Alabama?
Posted by Wario Balotelli on 2/24/14 at 5:53 pm to genro
quote:
Fact 1: Alabama is a somewhat better school than LSU academically
I've worked at both institutions, and the difference here is negligible. Like in terms of teachers, students, curriculum. Some incredibly smart kids at both schools. Absolutely horrible administrations at both schools. At Bama the last year I was there the keyword was "consumer-oriented" institution, which was a ridiculous frame for student-teacher interactions.
Bama is the richer school though.
I absolutely wouldn't send my child to LSU or Bama without a full ride, and even then, I would seriously consider sending them elsewhere.
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