Marco Polo Airport, Venice

Another well-named airport, and a pretty nice airport too. Among other things, it has some of the friendliest and most helpful people I’ve ever met in such facilities. On my way in five days ago, one of the information desk people followed me all the way to the other end of the arrivals gate (100 meters or so) just to return a 1-Euro coin I’d absentmindedly left in a slot. The people serving breakfast here today were unusually warm, and so forth.

I’m not sure it’s a Venetian thing: some of the people in businesses here can be extremely rude, presumably because they are sickened by the never-ending tourist onslaught. One unpleasant waiter came up and lectured me pompously the other day that I should have asked for permission to plug my laptop into a wall outlet, even though the cafe in question had “Free Wifi” emblazoned in several places on the outside as a selling point, and the outlet was empty and right next to a table.

As for that rude waiter, I had unexpected success in deflecting his lecture. Rather than respond to it, I pointed out that the wall outlets weren’t very good; they were poorly shaped for most electronic appliances. To my surprise, he became so defensive in sticking up for his company’s wall outlets (he wasn’t even the owner) that he expended the rest of his energy in an eloquent defense of the quality of the cafe’s facilities, and forgot to keep lecturing me about stealing electricity that was oviously there for customers to use in the first place. It was a weird interaction.

Bobby Knight vs. the NCAA

Funny to see Knight in a news story HERE, attacking the NCAA rule violated by the Ohio State football players as “idiotic.” They traded sports memorabilia for tattoos.

On the one hand, Knight is completely right that the rule is idiotic and that the NCAA is out of touch. Unlike Knight, I also think the players ought to be paid a small stipend, just like graduate students are paid for teaching or assisting classes. I can see the point of generally enforcing the notion of amateur athletics among university students, but (a) there’s no point being legalistic about it in the NCAA’s often petty and bean-counting fashion, and (b) the whole college sports system in the U.S. is now so corrupted by big money that the only real solution is to do what the Europeans do and shift toward a system of clubs or youth squads for professional teams, instead of pretending that these players are students first. The NCAA is ruining careers at Ohio State over what seem to be trivialities while major booster corruption is apparently underway everywhere. In Iowa City you could see football players on expensive motorcycles that were obviously out of their income range, at DePaul there was an air of general shadiness around the basketball program during my time there, and Iowa and DePaul are not generally regarded as anywhere near the level of the most corrupt programs.

But back to the main point. The point is: I don’t care that Knight is right in this case. He’s still an ogre looking for sucker-punch opportunities against an institution he loathes, and that’s enough to undermine whatever truth there might be in in his claims. Any Knight statement about the NCAA cannot be taken seriously even when it’s technically correct. There are a few good things to be said about Knight (he wasn’t corrupt, and he was a good coach). But he is still a person who primarily feeds off the thrill of his abuse of others, both individuals and institutions.

weird when this happens

I met someone here for what I thought was the first time, though he seemed vaguely familiar. After a few minutes of conversation, it turned out we’d met 20 or so years ago in Chicago, at a DePaul-related function. That kind of thing happens more and more often.

no word lately

About Tamanya. I take that to be a good sign that she’s still enjoying herself with the other two cats at Babysitter #2’s place.