FAILING YOUR MARKET TESTS. The latest trade-union survey of average annual faculty salaries has been released, and Inside Higher Ed presents the salient tables along with a great deal of hand-wringing.

In a new emphasis, the AAUP is drawing attention to the growing gaps between professors in different disciplines. While the trend of paying business and law professors more than those who teach literature and philosophy is nothing new, data released by the association indicate a significant growth in the gaps over the last 20 years. And association leaders want to focus more attention.

Those are the same 20 years over which the rest of the world has noticed literature and philosophy losing sight of intellectual coherence.

The disciplinary gaps are most evident comparing average salaries for assistant professors. The following table uses English language and literature professors as the base and expresses other disciplines’ salaries in comparison. Only other arts and humanities professors earn less, and a few disciplines saw smaller gains — while business professors are now earning twice as much.

Put another way, not all disciplines have industrial reserve armies of underemployed Ph.D.s.

[Research director John W.]Curtis of the AAUP said that the aim in providing this data was not to set some kind of acceptable or unacceptable salary gap among disciplines, but to promote a more open and full discussion of the topic. “The nature of higher education is changing, and has changed — and it’s not the product of any one decision, but the outcome of trends that have been ongoing for decades and that are beginning to show some stark inequalities,” he said.

The large gaps between some fields “raise questions of whether you can speak of faculty members who have a common perspective and a common situation,” he said. Curtis said he worried that those on the high end may be “more concerned about their own careers than the profession.” And while AAUP doesn’t rule out salary differentials by discipline, Curtis said that the association believes that these policies should be set by the faculty — something he does not think is always happening.

Haven't the people on the high end of any salary spectrum, whether it be within a discipline, among disciplines, or among lines of business, always been those with the best outside offers? Is a difference of perspective necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps others who have applied themselves to the task of making their work marketable to others are doing a more effective job of challenging the lowering of standards in higher education by their exit than I have by my voice, and let me assure you, difference of perspective in a curriculum committee is not the road to great popularity.

The reaction of a prominent member of an organization that has contributed much to higher education's poor image amuses.

Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, said she wasn’t surprised by the pay gap, but was worried by it. “I’m someone who thinks the value of a society — and the well-being of its citizenry — is reflected in the value we collectively place on arts and letters. Language and literature study offers students skills that they need to imagine and build a better world, and I think that’s something we should all care about and want to reward and support.” She noted that plenty of English majors end up in medicine or law or business, so those who think they can spend less on such departments may be having an impact on the professions they worry about.

The impact, dear reader, is often in the frustration of a professor in a senior-level course dealing with the poor writing of students, whether converted English majors or otherwise. Perhaps it's time for the Modern Language Association to rethink its oppositional stance.

“We ought to be rewarding those who help us learn the lessons of Shakespeare’s plays just as we reward those who can teach us the lessons of Enron,” [Feal] said.

That is, if there are people teaching Shakespeare. Si quaeris Ward Churchill, circumspice!

And salaries do send messages, Feal said. “The gap in pay worries me because it might discourage those who want to teach language and literature,” she said. “I see some evidence that those who love language and literature and aspire to be college professors are questioning the viability of their vocation. Narrowing the pay gap is a way for colleges and universities to say ‘we value the humanities.’ Market forces are one factor in determining pay, but the value we place on humanistic learning in institutions of higher education should never be subordinated to that factor.”

Restore the trivium and the Canon and then let's talk. But bear in mind that whatever the academy subsidizes, it gets more of. Is an expansion of the reserve army of culture-studies grievance-mongers efficient or fair?

SELF SELECTION. Some people describe the world.

The introduction of Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education divides students into four basic groups, of which only one, the smallest, being scholarly/intellectual. This group has probably always been the smallest, but has always represented the majority of the professors, with a few exceptions like Party Girl. Professors are almost set up to feel a certain disdain for their students, as the other categories are not especially attractive, as they consist chiefly of social butterflies, vocational drudgers, and slackers.

College faculty are self-selected from a different subset of the population than the great mass of students. Big deal. That's true of accountants and engineers and model railroaders and golfers and patternmakers. (I hesitate to labor the obvious: why go into a line of work that requires you to interact with a variety of curious, in all the senses of the word, young people? Get to know them as people. They'll surprise you.)

Does it have to be the case that college faculty also self-select for pusillanimity? What is the point of enjoying all the protections of tenure if the best one can do is post anonymous whinges at Rate Your Students?

So why not get involved and change things?

As a result, the general intelligence of students probably is at least somewhat lower than it was, say, 50 years ago, but more importantly, the outstanding students are simply swamped by the masses.

Why? Have your faculty councils and department chairmen acquiesced in a dilution of admission standards that somebody has sugar coated as access? Clearly, the policy isn't working. Say so. Change it.

Numerically speaking, the outstanding students are still probably around, even if they don't seem as prevalent because there are so many of those "other" students professors don't much like—the ones not in Sperber's category of intellectuals.

Did that happen by accident? Who consented to offering retakes of high school, sometimes for college credit, and defended it as remediation? What incentives were your faculty councils, department chairmen, deans, and provosts, responding to when they proliferated content-free courses and majors and explained that such offerings boosted retention? Don't go along. Speak up.

Are you complicit by your silence in the fraud? When the proliferation of image consultants, failed scholars, schmoozers and hack politicians engages in an orgy of self-congratulation and praise and refers to it as a favorable assessment, where are you? Posting anonymous whinges? Call "nonsense" and name names.

YOU DON'T SAY. Iran may be helping Iraqis build bombs.

Commanders of a splinter group inside the Shiite Mahdi Army militia have told The Associated Press that there are as many as 4,000 members of their organization that were trained in Iran and that they have stockpiles of EFPs, a weapon that causes great uneasiness among U.S. forces here because they penetrate heavily armored vehicles.

CLEANING UP THE CULTURE? I follow the women's basketball competition for the play value. It appears, though, that a rather ill-advised remark about the tournament by a radio yakker might serve to marginalize excessive behavior in entertainment more generally.

"This is the end of the shock-jock era," said Richard Levick, chief executive of Levick Strategic Communications, a crisis communications firm in Washington, D.C. "When your advertisers start abandoning this form of entertainment, it's all over."

Or not.

All three instances of failed shock humor -- Richards's, Coulter's and Imus's -- led to condemnations and calls for sensitivity from a myriad of politicians and activists; Democratic Senator and Savior Barack Obama chastised Imus for his "divisive, hurtful and offensive" words, further suggesting that no one with "a public platform" should attempt to find humor in race-based stereotypes. The problem with this viewpoint is that the majority of Americans -- of all colors and classes -- have laughed at these hideous prejudices at some point; if you try to disassociate yourself from the hordes of hatemongers, your DVD collection better not include anything with Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Sacha Baron Cohen, Mel Brooks, Trey Parker or Matt Stone.

Or it's an opportunity to generalize other grievances.

Whatever the motive, the push to censor blasphemy on campus in guise of "tolerance" is extremely bad policy. It is bad because it tramples on speech and expression, bad because it promotes a religious double standard, and bad because it is an invitation for other religious groups to seek the same protections. When Muslims claim the "right" to be free from insults to their faith, Christian conservatives won't be far behind.

I'll let Janet at SCSU Scholars deliver the summation.

Ladies, you are superb athletes. What you are learning bodes well for you for your entire life. Relish in your achievements! Ignore all those who will try to put a label on you. You are first class. Congratulations on your successes! Now, move forward and play even better and harder next year!

If the public culture becomes less coarse, let's call that a spillover benefit.

YUM. Morning, noon, or night in Vienna, that's an opportunity for dessert.

Pastries and sweets are as Viennese as the waltz and the foods for which Viennese cuisine is best known around the world. Culinary connoisseurs fill the city's 2,000 cafés, bakeries, restaurants or bistros nearly every hour of every day to savor life one bite at a time.

My mistake a few years ago was to book too little time in Vienna. I mentioned the bratwursts there and on the station in Frankfurt-Main, but not the desserts. Rest assured, dear readers, they make pretty good desserts at Panhans in Semmering too.

The idea is not to eat and leave. It's to stay a while.

On the other hand, hanging out with new colleagues talking about railway history on top of the Hirschenkogel was worth it. (The chaser was beer, not tortes! Ein prosit!)

BARGAIN HUNTING. Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel covers Opening Day for the Milwaukee Braves Cleveland Indians:

Pushed out of its stadium by deep snow, the team played its roam opener against the Los Angeles Angels before an astonishingly large and mostly local crowd Tuesday at Miller Park. The Indians won 7-6.

And they were clearly the favorite of the two teams. Around here, we understand how snow can mess up your life. We northerners have to stick together.

Think about it. Neither team on the field was ours, but the lines at the will-call windows were 40 people long. And that was in the third inning.

It was an unusual convergence of online and telephone buyers showing up at will call, plus the robust walk-up crowd that wanted a piece of this surreal event.

In the coverage, do I hear an echo?

The game already was an hour old, and Laura Bemus of Elkhorn finally had made her way out of the traffic jam leading to the stadium lots and was waiting in another line with her two sons to get tickets.

But she wasn't complaining.

She was here for the bargain - $10 for any seat in the joint, all concentrated on the lower two levels. Major-league baseball at a minor-league price.

Not surprisingly, cost was the top reason people gave for showing up on a cold Tuesday night to watch two teams from that other baseball league. The heavy snow made it impossible for them to play at Jacobs Field in Cleveland, so our domed and toasty Miller Park was offered as an alternative.

"We just thought a major-league baseball game for 10 bucks, sounds good to me," John Behrens said. He and his brother, Mike, both Cubs fans, drove up from Libertyville, Ill., to enjoy seats in the fifth row near third base.

One can even teach baseball fans some new tricks.

In the top of the seventh inning, the crowd of 19,031 that nearly filled the two lower decks got a wave started and had Miller Park looking like Camp Randall Stadium for a Badgers football game.

First the wave went clockwise, then reversed to counter-clockwise. On the third time around, in brilliantly coordinated fashion, it went in slow motion, and the fourth time around went as though it was being fast-forwarded on a VCR.

"That locked me up a little bit," Cleveland manager Eric Wedge said. "I've never seen the slow wave before. That locked me up a little bit. Then they sped it up." Then he had to point out, "I was watching the game. But I did see that," he said, laughing.

(See also Paul Noonan's coverage.)

A BOOT STOMPING ON A HUMAN FACE?

(AFP/Getty photo by Natalia Kolesnikova)

Russian troops march during a rehearsal for the May 9th Victory Day parade in Balashikha near Moscow on Tuesday.

REMEMBERING KURT VONNEGUT.

Margaret Soltan of University Diaries prepares for a radio interview (subsequently annulled) honoring the recently deceased author.

I decided to take a sentimental old hippie approach to Vonnegut's death. I said that for people like me, in high school in 1969 when Slaughterhouse Five came out, it's a somewhat emotional occasion, since that novel is caught up with so many other things about that time...

Let me direct your attention to Mr Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" (which originally appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, also known as the place to look for "Von Goom's Gambit," but I digress.)

TAX OFFSETS? I just finished my tax returns (to the accompaniment of a Democratic Saturday radio address complaining that the "alternative minimum tax" is ensnaring all sorts of families but precisely no millionaires: remember when the count of millionaires who paid no taxes served as a metric for the injustice of the tax code?) With the Internet, there might be some way for people to trade their allocation (use the simpleminded method defenders of controversial programs use: a taxpayer with a $10,000 tax bill paid only half a cent for that degenerate video) of the federal budget to others: for example, somebody could swap my share of the National Endowment for the Arts budget for his share of the Amtrak budget. Such a service could make for interesting policy analysis: which items would nobody be willing to accept others' allocation?

PROFESSIONALS STUDY LOGISTICS. Two former supply officers who were not all that well-regarded in the antebellum Army and who were initially overlooked in favor of more politically connected captains and colonels became the leadership team that quelled the Rebellion. In Book Review No. 6 I highly recommend Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War, particularly for readers who would like an overview of the Civil War that provides a balanced presentation of individuals, intrigues, campaigns, the trials that total war brings, and their triumphs and struggles after Lee and Johnston surrendered. The generals were together at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga and worked together on the coordinated campaign in Virginia and Georgia that gave rebel commanders more contemporaneous challenges than they had resources to meet. I've provided previous commentary on the western campaigns in a review of Nothing But Victory and see little reason to repeat previous material. I note a few snippets from Grant and Sherman. During the Georgia campaign, the Army of the Tennessee had a few problems with improvised explosive devices, which Gen^l Sherman dealt with by conscripting residents of towns thought to be harboring bomb-planters to go on bomb-clearing patrols. The book makes no mention of patrician pacifist abolition types in environs such as Boston being appalled by such practices in the service of their cause. That Army was so committed to scavenging off the land that as their boots wore out, many soldiers opted to march, and to fight, barefoot. Some even refused an issue of new boots on the eve of the Grand Review in Washington, D.C. that marked the end of major combat operations.

ON THE ACADEMIC JOB MARKET. Signifying Nothing's Chris Lawrence weighs in on dysfunction in political science.

Anyone who believes that “racist, sexist, and homophobic” attacks are solely motivated by a lack of civility—rather than being based on (quite likely falsely-held) beliefs about widespread non-merit-based decision-making in hiring, tenure, and promotion at most institutions and within APSA itself—is quite simply dangerously naïve.

Question: why is the president of the American Political Science Association following a comment thread at a weblog specializing in academic job rumors?

ON CUB WEEKEND, IT MIGHT AS WELL BE A NEUTRAL SITE. Miller Park becomes a neutral site during Cleveland's snow emergency.

The odd turn of events presented something of a logistical challenge for baseball, which has been rocked early in the season by wet and cold weather in the East. The Indians, it seems, have been hit the hardest and still have not been able to host a home opener after canceling an entire four-game series against the Seattle Mariners. And with more bad weather expected in Cleveland this week, the Indians knew they needed help.

"This is a tough situation for Cleveland," [baseball commissioner and onetime Ford dealer Bud] Selig said in a telephone interview from Phoenix, where he was in town to attend the home opener for the Arizona Diamondbacks. "We knew yesterday we had some trouble; we didn't like the alternatives. So this morning, Paul Dolan called me very early from Cleveland and suggested Milwaukee."

Paul Noonan directs your attention to "Rick Vaughn Glasses Night" and Sean Hackbarth suggests in proper Milwaukee fashion that being able to watch major-league baseball at minor-league prices is a deal.

I suppose it's too much to ask for the calendar that went file taxes - Opening Day - Memorial Day - pennant race - Labor Day - World Series - Hallowe'en - Presidential election.

IDENTIFYING CLIMATE CHANGE. Aldo Leopold's daughter continues her father's work.

Nina Leopold Bradley walked nimbly along a trail to a weather-beaten cabin that figures prominently in modern environmental history.

Bradley is 89 years old, and using a pair of hiking poles, she pointed out places where she has recorded the arrival of spring for the last 30 years. Her father, the famed ecologist and pioneer of wildlife management Aldo Leopold, had done the same before her.

But spring's advance has been so dramatic that if Leopold were alive today, he'd have to rewrite parts of his seminal book, "A Sand County Almanac."

Identifying as anthropogenic any of the changes remains a challenge.

The higher temperatures coincide with rising levels of carbon dioxide, most of which is the result of burning fossil fuels.

But there are additional explanations for the Earth's warming. Some scientists believe the natural cycles of cooling and the current warming trend have been overlooked.

Edward Hopkins, assistant state climatologist, believes that these natural cycles and rising levels of carbon dioxide are both at work.

"Nobody wants to say that we just don't know," Hopkins said. "I am willing to say that we don't know completely."

Today the majority of scientists believe that an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the key reason for why the Earth has warmed so quickly in the past 50 years.

The article details a number of changes in seasonal rhythms, some of which, if continued, are scary. (It will take a few more snow days in April baseball to be evidence of a reverse trend, the way long-term observation works.)

IT EVEN LOOKS LIKE A BIG ELECTROLINER. Here's Destination: Freedom on the French speed test with a specially configured TGV.

While the United States struggles to keep its passenger rail system (AMTRAK) from being dismantled by the Bush administration and continues to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into an archaic highway system that no longer meets the needs of America in a global economy, here is what’s happening in Europe:

France has unveiled the world’s fastest high-speed train that broke all records by reaching a speed of 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph).

Last Monday, France announced it would try to surpass its own record of 17 years ago - 515.3 kph (320.2 mph). On Tuesday, they succeeded. A black V150 train rocketed along a stretch of the new high-speed line between Paris and the city of Strasbourg on France’s border with Germany.

The speed is comparable to that of a freight propeller airplane.

Bernard Collardey photo courtesy Destination Freedom.

And check out that trolley spark. (I'm informed the train drew all its power through one collector, in the best Indiana Railroad tradition.)

JM Frybourg photo posted by DoDo at European Tribune.

WE'RE CARING PEOPLE. So caring that we'll make your life miserable if you don't care in precisely the way we do.

The social-work school at Missouri State is now headed by an interim director, Etta M. Madden, who is an English professor.

The report says that the school's faculty members spend "way too much time meddling in each other's business and looking over each other's shoulders," and that they "bully" and "browbeat" not only the students but one another.

It was that observation more than any other, [(Southwest) Missouri State president Michael T.] Nietzel said, that persuaded him to release the report to the public. The report indicates that faculty members demean students with ideological differences. It also says that faculty members have sufficient experience in social work, but not much experience in the classroom.

Via SCSU Scholars' King Banaian, who has additional excerpts and annotations.

GETTING THE INCENTIVES RIGHT. Via Phi Beta Cons, another rage over the alleged neglect of the undergraduate.

Ninety-five percent of each college's score is based on measures of wealth, fame and admissions selectivity. As a result, college presidents looking to get ahead focus on marketing, fundraising and recruiting faculty with great research credentials instead of investing their resources in helping undergraduates learn and earn degrees.

This problem can't and shouldn't be fixed by government regulation. Independence and diversity make our higher-education sector strong, and that shouldn't change.

The way to drive higher education institutions to stop ignoring undergraduates in favor of pursuing research is to provide more information about their performance with undergraduates to the consumers who pay tuition bills: students and their parents.

By investing in new ways to gauge the quality of teaching and learning and by requiring taxpayer-subsidized colleges to disclose their performance to the public, the federal government can change the market dynamics in higher education, creating strong incentives for colleges to produce the caliber of undergraduates we need to compete in the global marketplace, incentives to make the rhetoric of being first in the world in higher education a reality.

The problem with the policy proposal, dear reader, is that it does nothing to address the positional arms race that is driving the popularity of the name colleges. As long as the alternative to the "you teach yourself, you have smart classmates, let me find a shorter proof of Fermat's Theorem" model of higher education (itself a mischaracterization of what goes on in the best universities) is a non-challenging degree program driven by an access-assessment-remediation-retention mindset, the oversubscribed Ivies, wannabes, and state flagships are going to have no reason to do things differently.

LOWLIVES. Don't you dare call it transgressiveness.

The East Troy Railroad Museum is scrambling to repair damage done by vandals over the weekend.

Four vintage railroad cars were broken into and covered with spray-painted graffiti. Some of the cars date back to 1907.

The preservation season is about to begin, with the museum commemorating the opening of the East Troy branch of The Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light in 1907.

FIRST WE'RE GOING TO CUT IT OFF. Vicksburg, Mississippi, which I visited a month ago (during that first false hint of summer, is it really snowing in Dixie today?) was the last rebel strong point on the Mississippi River. The mind boggles at the thought of the square-riggers of the New Orleans blockading squadron making their way upriver (even on their steam propellors) past Baton Rouge to take on Vicksburg, but they did, only to be frustrated. General Grant's intended to avoid dealing with the fortifications by digging a shortcut for the river. Some traces of it remain just south of the interstate on the Louisiana bank of the river.


The embankment in the background is the current Mississippi River levee. Soldiers and contraband laborers dug a canal, but the river decided it was a good place to deposit silt it had scoured elsewhere.

Instead, the army went further south intending to isolate Vicksburg first from the south and then from the east. A small fleet of gunboats and transports ran past the Vicksburg fortifications to support the landing. The Grand Gulf Military Park is on the site of a rebel fortification that diverted but ultimately didn't prevent the Army of the Tennessee from crossing the Mississippi River and isolating Vicksburg.


There are still traces of the parapet at Fort Cobun. The river has changed course since the battle.


The fort sites, which are also home to a collection of regional history, are worth the $3 fee to visit the grounds. Many more pictures here. Among the inventions deployed during the Rebellion is an armored train. This model is inside the visitor center and museum.


The Army of the Tennessee made a relatively unopposed crossing near Port Gibson and maneuvered to secure its rear before isolating Vicksburg. Coordination between Rebel general John C. Pemberton at Vicksburg and Joseph Johnston inland left much to be desired, with Johnston never quite committed either to reinforcing Vicksburg or to providing a corridor for Pemberton to retreat. An aggressive rebel commander took on the entire XVII Corps southwest of Raymond. Although the rebel unit was driven back, Grant and Sherman opted to go as far east as Jackson to secure their rear before turning to Vicksburg. There is now a walking trail around the battlefield. The right of way of an Illinois Central branch is approximately the route of approach from Port Gibson to Raymond.


In Raymond, a classic courthouse and Confederate monument.


I'll take up the siege of Vicksburg in a subsequent post. My focus tonight is on cutting off the garrison at Vicksburg. Naval operations on tributaries of the Mississippi were crucial to the preparations. Another invention of the rebels was the maritime improvised explosive device (later called a sea mine), one of which sank USS Cairo on the Yazoo River. Some years later, preservationists raised her, and this part-original, part-reconstructed (although the reconstructed parts do not place any load on the original parts) is in the Vicksburg Battlefield Park proper, and cleverly placed where the road turns back from traversing the outer, attacking lines, to the inner, defensive lines.


There's at least one other Civil War ironclad that might be a candidate for recovery. CSS Tennessee is submerged in shallow water near Savannah.

MONOPOLY.

The recent release of Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game (not yet an acquisition, but it's a candidate for this years book challenge) attracts reviews. Reason's Nick Gillespie has a short, generally favorable review.

The author of "The Game Makers" and an executive who worked at Parker Brothers among other game companies, [Philip] Orbanes' narrative is filled with fascinating characters. Elizabeth Magie Phillips, for example, created The Landlord's Game and saw it as a way of winning folks over to the crank ideas of single-tax enthusiast Henry George. Then there's Columbia economist Rexford Guy Tugwell, who used Phillips' game as a teaching tool and who, as a member of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal "Brains Trust" pushed "for a full state-administered economy" during the Depression. And the unemployed plumber and "ordinary American" Charles B. Darrow who created - and wisely patented - Monopoly in the form we've all come to know and love.

Financier J.P. Morgan is in the tale, too: He provided the model for the game's mascot, originally known as Rich Uncle Moneybags and later dubbed "Mr. Monopoly."

He includes the obligatory praise of plentitude.

Today, Monopoly is going as strong as ever, partly because it continues to evolve in response to - and anticipation of - consumer demand. There are now versions that range far beyond the familiar streets of Atlantic City, from The Simpsons' mythical Springfield to those on the computer screen.

"Capitalism," writes Orbanes, "has many virtues, and one of the most notable is choice. For Monopoly and its maker [now Hasbro], choice has become a passion." As important, he notes, the game "is a bountiful giver of enjoyment." No wonder, then, that its future looks as rich as its past.

There certainly are lots of versions of Monopoly available today. A longer review by The American Interest's David Parlett calls out some of the limitations of corporate-sponsored product histories.

Modern board games, in contrast, arise not through evolution but by a known originator’s act of invention, a one-off product of “intelligent design” in a relatively brief period of time. They are published and subject to trade protection such as copyright. Although abstract games are still produced, they are a minority taste; modern board games are mostly thematic, overtly representational, even theatrical. Johan Huizinga, in his classic 1938 study Homo Ludens, defines play as either a contest for something, as in the play of a game, or a representation of something, as in the performance of a play. In this latter case, there is a natural tendency for much if not most of the play to take place above the board in the form of transactions and agreements with other players. Such games involve more talking, and are naturally regarded as more sociable.

From a creative point of view the most remarkable feature of Monopoly is that it actually falls into both categories, something Huizinga did not anticipate. It is now well known to have originated in a precursor called The Landlord’s Game, which sprang apparently fully-formed from the brain of a Maryland Quaker called Lizzie Magie and was patented by her in 1904. Well known, that is, to all but the compilers of Hasbro’s Monopoly web page. That page still insists on crediting Monopoly to an out-of-work heating engineer named Charles Darrow, and on dating its origin to the years of the Depression immediately preceding Monopoly’s first publication under that name by Parker Brothers in 1935.

This leaves an explanatory gap of some three decades, which, in the first century of mass communication, probably equates to about three centuries of traditional game evolution. During that period several versions of the game were published under different titles and by different nominal “inventors”, including Lizzie Magie herself. But the real point of interest lies in the fact that most of the game’s development over that time took place in colleges and private dwellings, by players using homemade boards, transmitting the game’s essential rules by word of mouth, and modifying components and elements of play as the fancy took or inspiration seized them.

Ah yes, unanticipated and unintended consequences, even in a product originally conceived (a la Social Justice Legos?) as an instrument of social transformation.

To understand why, we need to note that our inventive Quaker, far from devoting a game to the praise of Mammon, actually devised it as a moral tale showing how unfair rents could be charged by unscrupulous landlords, for which, if there is any justice in the world, they will—in the game world, at least—rightly fetch up in jail. The object of the game, as she stated in her renewed patent of 1924,

is not only to afford amusement to the players, but to illustrate to them how under the present or prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprises and how the single tax would discourage land speculation.

In this she was not merely following, but purposefully promoting, the tenets of economist Henry George, creator of the single-tax theory, who was convinced that property speculation formed the basis of society’s economic and social problems.

Although as she developed her concept, she unwittingly created a model of competitive capitalism that illustrates the difficulty of creating a monopoly.

I believe the answer lies in the complete originality of Lizzie’s mechanisms of play. The distinguishing mark of her prowess at game design lay in a technical invention that far outweighed her ability to appeal to a mass audience or desire to gratify popular taste.

Taxonomically, Monopoly classifies as a race game, belonging therefore to the same broad category as backgammon and Parcheesi, as distinct (for example) from the war-game category of chess and checkers. Abstract race games go back to deep antiquity; examples found in ancient Egyptian tombs are older even than backgammon. Thematic race games are historically younger, though still pretty old. They include, for example, the Chinese game of Mandarin Promotions (Tang Dynasty) and the Royal Game of Goose from 16th-century Europe. As Orbanes points out, the vast majority of “early modern” (19th-century) board games follow the Game of Goose pattern in being race games with some sort of pictorial theme, be it fox and hounds, or treasure islands, or the Game of Life itself (Milton Bradley, 1861).

What Lizzie Magie came up with were at least two ideas for which I know no antecedents. The first, as Orbanes points out, was the transformation of a linear track running from start to home into a continuous loop. You might expect to win such a race by being the first to complete a given number of laps or circuits, which of course still amounts to being the first to reach Home. In Landlord 1909, however, you win by having accumulated the most resources after a given number of laps, and in Landlord 1924 and Monopoly you do so by being the last player left when everyone else has dropped out through exhaustion—of financial resources, that is.

Second, and more significant, was the unparalleled novelty of being able to own a space in such a way as to extract resources from any other player who lands on it. In traditional race games a piece that lands on a space occupied by an adversary sends the current occupant back to start, or, in the case of Goose, to that just quitted by the interloper. In these games, occupancy of a space always ran the risk of being ousted by an incoming opponent. In Landlord/Monopoly, however, the reverse is the case. Two pieces can occupy the same space without interaction. But this clever new rule enables you to buy a space and, acting as an absentee landlord, extract resources from any opponent who subsequently lands on it. This is a totally new concept in the evolution of race games.

That the game does not have to have an end raises the possibility that many games will not end. So, also, can it be with business competition, whether as taught in the textbook or as observed in industries without strong scale economies or network externalities. With sufficiently many players, the pattern of initial ownership of railroads, utilities, and properties can be one in which no player acquires a monopoly in the first few trips around the board, and no proposed trades of properties (Boardwalk for Kentucky, Mediterranean, and $100) are mutually satisfactory. The resulting infinite loop is loosely a competitive equilibrium, although the game loses realism in that no housing gets built.

ALL THEY DID WAS BREAK AN EVIL EMPIRE. A USA Today report on the rules of engagement for professional fighting at hockey games, or is it fighting in professional hockey games, notes

But the frontier justice strikes René Fasel, president of the International Ice Hockey Federation in Switzerland, as "Neanderthal" or even "criminal" behavior.

"One of the most cherished events in American sports history is the 1980 'Miracle On Ice,' a game without even a hint of a fight. Did anyone miss fighting in that game?" he says. "Would the American victory had been more emphatic had Mike Eruzione scored a knockout decision over Sergei Makarov and sent him bloodied to the locker room?"

The professionals, however, see some entertainment value in what the league rules, bordering on anachronism, refer to "fisticuffs."

For my purposes, the hockey season ended Saturday evening, when Michigan State decided the national title in the final minute.

Then Justin Abdelkader, surrounded by two Eagles, snuck in to poke in pass with 19 seconds left. Boyle was on the ice watching his dream crumble. It was thelatest that a championship game has ever been decided in regulation.

BC had been worn down and probably didn't even know it.

Give Boston College coach Jerry York props for the hockey equivalent of resigning in a losing position after Michigan State scored an empty-net goal in the final two seconds.

"There was no sense, just let it roll," said York, who suffered his second consecutive national championship game loss. "The gloves and the sticks were on the ice. No sense in putting it all back. We weren't going to score three goals in (that amount of time)."

That despite being defeated for the second straight year, both times after starting the season a favorite.

A SHORT FIRST QUARTER REPORT. I'm a little behind the proper pace for this year's Fifty Book Challenge.

1. Scaling Down: Living Large in a Smaller Space, 17 February 2007.
2. Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion, 3 March 2007.
3. The Fallen Colossus, 4 March 2007.
4. The Merchant of Power, 5 March 2007.
5. The Godfather's Revenge, 25 March 2007.

The prolonged winter has stunted my bookworm's growth.

Oooooo

Cross-posted at the European Tribune and the Fifty Book Challenge.

PEGGING THOSE CONTROLLERS. An Occasional Train Blog by the European Tribune's DoDo has much more on the French TGV speed test, including two different videos and a lengthy conversation. Hey, the test train is two cab units and two middle units! Trolley sparks are as much a part of the TGV experience as they were on our interurbans.

GET UP, GET UP, GET OUTTA HERE. Brewers salvage one from the Cubs. Never mind that it's a school night, hoist a Sprecher.

A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS. Mike Calvert of Gilmaur Models made up some motion brackets for the Andreyev.


Next step: create crosshead guides out of angles and channels (this locomotive has the usual pivoting crosshead and a forward, auxiliary crosshead to support the additional weight of what would otherwise be a very long piston rod and main rod) and make some pins out of round stock to mount the forward guide to the cylinders, and solder the lot together. Then set up the drill press in order to drill and tap 1-72.

CHEESEBOX AND RAFT. Opinion Journal's Stuart Ferguson recommends a visit to the recently opened Monitor Center in Newport News, Virginia, not far from the waters where Monitor checked Virginia (Mr Ferguson, a North Carolinian, describes the battle as a "draw;" inasmuch as the Blockading Squadron remained on station for the duration of the rebellion, Monitor achieved her objective.) Monitor's turret has been salvaged from North Carolina waters for conservation in the center, and there is a full-size replica on display.

[T]he USS Monitor Center is the most remarkable, informative and downright exciting history-museum experience I've ever had, with just the right combination of art, artifacts and technology. Curator Anna Gibson Holloway, her museum colleagues and the other consultants and collaborators are to be congratulated, including John B. Hightower, the museum's recently retired president and CEO, who oversaw much of the project. And the exhibition's Web site, http://www.monitorcenter.org/, is a model resource.

There is still an original hull in the Monitor pattern afloat in Budapest, although preservation efforts appear to be where they were a year ago. (I've observed a number of hits from google.hu looking for pictures -- would any of those readers be able to provide updates on Lajta or let us know if some Yankee Greenbacks would be helpful?)

THE EVOLUTION OF CONCENTRATION. A Nation writer confronts the tension between emergent distributed networks and vanguardism. A sympathetic reader of the column suggests some introspection among leading voices on the left.

Becca Golubock Watson writes about the difficulty experienced by progressive bloggers who do not have the financial resources available to a relatively small number of famous and successful bloggers on the left, and who does she quote or mention to make her case? Josh Marshall, Marcy Wheeler, Markos Moulitsas, Chris Bowers. These are the stars of the blog world; the blogs they write for or own — Talking Points Memo and TPMuckraker, Firedoglake, Daily Kos, My DD, are at the top of the liberal blogosphere’s A list.

With a minimal amount of effort, Watson could have found hundreds of blogs with only moderate or even little to no name recognition that are original, engaging, well-written, and deserving of a wider audience. Why didn’t she talk to the people who run these blogs? We are the ones who know what it’s like to be so in love with blogging that we would blog every waking hour if we could only afford to stay home and do that. We are the ones who have tried every marketing strategy from Google Adsense to affiliate programs to tip jars. We are the ones who leave comments on blogs we enjoy reading because we’ve heard it’s a good way to get noticed; who beg for reciprocal blogrolling. We work hard to polish and improve our writing, to write elegantly, concisely, engagingly — because we’ve been told and anyway we know for ourselves that top-notch writing is the best marketing tool there is.

The problem is, there are thousands of political blogs out there, and an astounding percentage of them are really, really good. Most will never get the kind of recognition that leads to $10,000 ads and the chance to quit your day job and blog full-time. And yes, one of those bloggers is me.

A number of other commentators have weighed in: see Outside the Beltway's James Joyner for a roundup.

We may be observing the phenomenon John S. McGee studied at length in In Defense of Industrial Concentration: a few economists do most of the publishing, a few actors get most of the leading roles. I'm sure there are plenty of culture-studies Ph.D.s who could do Katha Pollitt's column as well as she could, yet, there she is, month in, month out. For that matter, there are plenty of universities other than the Ivies from which The Nation could recruit interns, yet Becca Golubock Watson is yet another Harvard graduate in the annual crop of interns from the Ivies who hire out at the opinion magazines, whether those magazines are explicitly egalitarian in the Nation or Washington Monthly mold, or less concerned about such things in the Reason or National Review manner.

It's a good thing I'm standing down from class preparation for the evening, otherwise there's the germ of a question about monopolization policy in this post: is the hiring of a pundit on a long-term contract a suppression of competition in punditry? (Yeah, it's not that well-formed. I said I'm standing down.)

WHY INVESTING MATTERS. Updates to the National Income and Product Accounts can be occasion for introspection. The editors at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel avoid excessive handwringing about income inequality.

Median household income for those in their prime working years was more than $61,000 in 2005, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. Married couples did even better. So it's not like the middle class is drying up. Instead, it's that the incomes of those at the very top - bolstered by the power of the stock market - are growing much more rapidly.

The observation is noteworthy in that it doesn't preclude the possibility of some members of the middle class putting some money into the stock market (probably not a bad idea, given the unwillingness of Congress and of state legislatures to confront the unfunded liabilities in Social "Security" and the state employee pension plans.) In that vein, it's amusing to see the editors endorsing a variation on private investment accounts.

The government can do more to encourage savings, including making 401(k) accounts mandatory and seeding them with federal money. The government also must encourage innovation by boosting funding for both basic and applied research and offering targeted tax breaks for business innovation.

I doubt that the national government has any special advantage in picking winners: why not do a little research into the incidence of business taxes?

Methinks they buried the lead.

But nothing affects income more over the course of a working life than having a good education. The primary focus should be making sure that more Americans have one.

At one time the Milwaukee Public Schools made a decent effort to socialize their students into the upper-middle class. Will the Journal-Sentinel's editors take up that as their rallying cry? Will they direct readers' attention to a discipline deficit disorder in the schools?

LOSING INSTITUTIONAL COMPETENCE. Barbara Ehrenreich grasps the error in expecting too much of cost-cutting.

Since the late eighties, corporate America has pursued the beautiful dream of an employee-free company. Imagine: no payroll except for the top executives, no benefits to provide, and of course no unions! So the pattern has been that every time a company downsizes, its stock rises and its top managers drool over their burgeoning portfolios.

Since 9/11, the airlines in particular have been shedding employees like unwanted ballast, with predictable results. As the New York Times reports, there’s been an industry-wide “thinning of staff,” meaning that in bad weather, airlines often “do not have enough people…” Which might be OK if bad weather hadn’t become so routine that it’s crowding out all other news on CNN.

The budget airlines are especially skimpy when it comes to human employees. In late 2006, [Jet Blue CEO David] Neeleman announced plans to reduce its number of full-time employees per plane from 93 to 80. He should rethink that, since the major reason JetBlue couldn’t get back off the ground after the Valentine’s Day storm was that it lacks the personnel to connect crews to their flights. Pilots and flight attendants remained stuck in their hotels while passengers slept on airport floors.

Market tests provide continuous and rigorous assessment of faddish business models, no matter how noble the goals of "productivity" or "shareholder value" might be.

SMELTING IS NOT BURNING. Television's Rosie O'Donnell is properly taking stick for her endorsement of conspiracy theories about the structural failure of Building 7 at the World Trade Center complex. That said, nowhere in this video is either the reduction of taconite to iron or the decarbonization of iron to steel equivalent to putting solid metal into a crucible and positioning it over a flame. One does not turn down the gas in a basic oxygen converter, although one can moderate the reaction -- try it -- (which includes the generation of rust: contemplate the implications of that Fe -> FeO) by adding more scrap to the charge.

ECCE HOMO. John 19 interpreted for the twenty-first century.

WHY DOES MONEY MATTER TO A "NONREVENUE SPORT" WHEN THE OBJECTIVE IS AMATEUR ATHLETICS? Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel basketball pundit Jeff Potrykus makes the case for Wisconsin's Lisa Stone.

The UW administration faces two choices during the next six weeks: Renew Stone's contract and restore the year it did not roll over last spring or fire her.

Stone has earned a renewal and an extension.

There might be athletic directors who would not view a loss in the finals of the National Invitational Tournament, playing at angels seven before large Wyoming crowds (you can only look for 1995 - 8646 -8701 in Laramie for so long) as a setback. Wisconsin apparently aspires to more.

UW's record in the last four seasons - 21-43 in Big Ten Conference play and 56-64 overall - is below the standards of Stone and the UW administration. UW's NCAA tournament drought has reached five consecutive seasons, the last season under Jane Albright and all four seasons under Stone.

Those problems, which, again, might strike many athletic directors as crying with one's mouth full, are a direct consequence of prior penny-wise, pound-foolish administrative decisions.

In May 2002, the UW athletic board declined for the second consecutive year to extend Albright's contract. Because UW decided it could not bite the financial bullet and buy Albright out for $240,000 at the time, she essentially became a lame-duck coach in 2002-'03, her final season.

That led to a 7-21 finish and a roster that lacked talent when Stone took over.

That 2002 decision, coming after a 2001-2002 season in which the Badgers went from being ranked fifth in the country in late January 2002 into a slide in the second half of Big Ten play (Cold Spring Shops sources suggest the teams tendencies were too predictable) and early exits from the conference and national tournaments, allowed other teams to use Jane Albright's status as an argument against signing with Wisconsin. (Does such an attitude put too much emphasis on personality? If Larry Samuelson leaves Wisconsin for Yale, would that be a reason not to study industrial economics at Wisconsin?)

There's a local angle to Lisa Stone's early troubles. Among those 21 losses in 2002-2003 was one at Northern Illinois, and the next year the Huskies were churlish guests at the Kohl Center. That team included first-year guard Stephanie Raymond, who Lisa Stone pursued.

[Ms Raymond's] mother told [Northern Star columnist Ben Gross] that [she] had at least two paths ahead of you before college.

One was to NIU, the other to Wisconsin.

The Badgers had a house visit set up with you. Instead of going through with it, you called them and said no thank you.

Your next phone call was to former NIU coach Carol Hammerle saying you were becoming a Huskie.

Wait, you said no to Wisconsin?!? Who does that?

Asking your mother why, she couldn't provide an answer either.

But she did tell me this one thing: "I often ask her, 'Did you ever regret not going to a bigger school?' But she has no regrets going to NIU. She's enjoyed all four years."

Two roads diverged in the wood ...

1995 - 8646 - 8701. Somebody at Union Pacific has had the decency to keep the Chicago & North Western Heritage Unit in a consist with the last two unrepainted lightning stripe GEs.

Chicago & North Western Photo of the Month for November 2006.

There's a Midwestern cottage industry tracking this consist. At 11 am on 5 April, they led a mixed freight through DeKalb. I was in the middle of converting coffee into logic at a local bagel shop and saw them, but was not equipped to grab a photo. (Lame excuse, and it's even lamer to note that I was on the backlit side of the tracks.)

ANTICIPATING THE FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT OF 2025. Seeking people of ability? Prepare to offer compensating differentials.

Companies' rising demand for top talent is a boon to job candidates. Compared with the not-so-distant past, candidates now are likely to get more-generous job offers, more promotions and flexible work hours.

Although overall wages are not rising at a fast clip, those in industries where talent shortages are particularly acute — such as engineering, health care and accounting — are seeing significant pay increases.

All of which means it's tougher on employers, especially those eager to hire top performers or appeal to the job market's newest demographic: workers from Generation Y, generally defined as those born from 1977 to 2002.

It's only a matter of time until the lawful "workweek" becomes 9 to 5 Monday-Thursday, and 9 to 1 Friday, at least for the individuals in greatest demand (although among those individuals will be many who will still start at 6 am and down tools at 10 pm.) That workweek will later be codified as a national standard, but, as we have discovered in France, it will not make the lot of mediocre and poor performers any better.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM. The dean at Anonymous Community contemplates the collegiate positional arms race.

If Iskabibble State somehow kept its f-t faculty ratio above, say, 90%, then it could market itself as Organic Free-Range Certified, or whatever they'd call it. Whether enough parents and students would care enough to pay the economic premium to cover the costs would be sorted out in the marketplace. Colleges that don't want to take that gamble could continue on down the path of cost-cutting.

Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops will recognize that the market test is precisely a revelation of preferences for higher education that is, well, higher. The persistence of U.S. News rankings (and higher education's acceptance of them: although the public position of presidents and such is negative, you should see the stuff I get from Wisconsin's alumni relations people) is itself evidence that such information is valuable: if not, that issue would not have the advertising content it has. The dean combines ideas from three articles. I focus on his invocation of Cornell's Ron Ehrenberg.

Finally, the Chronicle has a piece by Ronald Ehrenberg in which he can't quite decide whether pricy colleges are worth it, on a cost-benefit basis. He notes an aggregate correlation between educational spending and student achievement (and starting salaries upon graduation), but notes also in passing that the correlation largely breaks down on the micro level. So rich kids tend to cluster in rich schools, leading to better outcomes for grads of rich schools, regardless of what the rich schools actually do or don't do.

It's called assortative self-selection, and, yes, the dean is correct to characterize it as class sorting. The opportunities for the less well-known precincts of higher education, however, are not as grim as the dean makes them out to be.

The relevance for higher ed, I think, is that we'll see the elite institutions become progressively more so, marketing themselves more as boutique goods – the ocean liners of higher education. (Check out the student housing at Founders College! Yowza!) The non-elites will gradually descend into commodity hell, much like flying in coach; price and (surface) convenience will trump all other considerations. The elites will reject the adjunct trend, simply because they wouldn't want to dilute the brand. The rest will continue to embrace it, to balance the books.

What drops out is the vast middle. The flagships can probably sustain themselves with research money, high-profile sports, and double-digit tuition increases. Community colleges can sustain ourselves on occupational relevance, geographic propinquity, and low cost. But the regional public campuses and third-tier private colleges – the former teachers' colleges turned state universities that top out at master's degrees – have to make a choice. Move up, move down, or move on.

In aviation, it's less clear today that cost-cutting measures have lowered fares enough to compensate for shoddy service. Likewise, in higher education, it's not obvious that "move down" is the default option for the mid-majors, particularly with the selective institutions deliberately creating excess demand in order to appear more selective. That may be in Professor Ehrenberg's microdata. One never knows who the next striver might be: the muddle of college as a repeat of eleventh grade (my formulation) or simply thirteenth grade (the dean's fear), however, does not offer the striver an opportunity to self-identify. (That's where the comparison with cruise ships breaks down: there is a very real flight to perceived quality in those excess demands for prestige degrees, and it's relatively easy to hive off the impedimenta of an access-assessment-remediation-retention academic culture that savvy parents and students can all so easily see.) On that, the dean and I are in agreement.

If the midtier schools lose their viability, then the macro-micro disjuncture that Ehrenberg acknowledges but doesn't explore^(*) could easily dissipate. It may well be that the relative unimportance of attending a high-tuition college has been based on the better-than-you'd-expect quality of the middle tier. If that middle tier hollows out, then the relative bargain evaporates, and the up-until-recently-exaggerated fears of the Amazing Girls – that failure to get into a Name College will result in middling economic prospects -- will actually become true.

Quite so, but if that happens, the mid-majors will have left easy money on the table. More than a few of the faculty members at mid-majors recognize this, if their administrators don't.

There's a followup post by Dr. Pion that I recommend prospective collegians read.

^(*)As if Ron is going to use a Chronicle of Higher Education column to fully document the findings of several research papers.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Northern Star columnist Jenna Andriano discovers why life after college is the revenge of the nerds.

Teamwork is another gem thrown out by sadly optimistic outsiders when rattling off the non-academic positives of education. There's no such thing as teamwork. Group projects consist of one or more students avoiding work because they're incompetent and one student taking on all the work because he or she knows the other kids are incompetent. That kid gets an early taste of swimming in coffee to sustain life. I know, I was one of them. In college, the idea of working with other people is deeply disturbing.

So is the idea of contemplating income inequality, without due consideration of effort inequality.

TRADEOFFS. The managers of the collegiate women's basketball tournament confront a big one.

The women went from 16 sites to eight predetermined sites for the duration of the tournament three years ago.

"I'm not sure we're ready for neutral sites," [Tennessee coach Pat] Summitt says. "That's my biggest concern."

Despite some poorly attended regional games this year — 3,046 saw the regional final in Fresno — NCAA officials don't expect to eliminate the predetermined sites.

"I think that we're so intent to continue to try what we're doing because we feel like it's one of the only ways that we can grow our fan base," says Judy Southard, chairwoman of this year's Women's Basketball Committee for Division I. "I'm not sure that it would serve our game well to just be isolating ourselves to the five or six communities in the country that have demonstrated their support for the game."

According to Southard, attendance for the first and second rounds was up 25,000 compared with last year.

That boost could be a good sign for the women's game, which has struggled more recently at the gate. In 2006, average attendance for tournament games in the first two rounds was 3,770, down 33% from 2005.

It's amateur athletics, it has nothing to do with money. The tradeoff, however, is in scheduling games that appeal to the fan base at times television wants.

Talks with more than two dozen administrators, coaches, media representatives and players netted one constant: the need for better TV exposure.

They'd rather compete with The Masters or the start of baseball season than with the men's Final Four.

That's only part of the problem: television might want those 9 pm starts on the east coast to offer something in prime time, and the spectators might include those pensioners and kids who would like to be in bed at a decent hour. Full arenas or enhanced advertising revenue: pick one.

KUDOS. Northern Illinois senior point guard Stephanie Raymond, second round pick of the Chicago Sky.

THE RIVALRY CONTINUES. Although the Electroliner no longer sets passengers down at Addison Street, there is still a pennant race involving the Cubs and a Milwaukee team. Wisconsin Sports Bar has accessories to go with your Sprecher.


(Be careful opening the link: some of the entries are not safe for work.)

A PIONEER PASSES. Grambling football coach Eddie Robinson, February 13, 1919 - April 3, 2007.

"The greatest man I've ever met," said former Detroit Lions cornerback James Hunter, a Grambling graduate. "I've been in the corporate world for a few years now, and I haven't met anyone there who could move me the way Coach Rob did."

Knowing that he had that impact on his players meant more to Robinson than any of his victories.

"When you take a long hard look at the guys that you coached, what kind of men are they? This is the thing," he would say.

"I can't go to a football meeting and talk all Xs and Os. We're talking about drugs. We're talking about going to class. We're talking about
studying.

"When you're into this business, it's hard to tell what coaches what, what they're in the business for. Are you for the glamour? Are you for the wins? Or are you trying to make the people with whom you're working better people for having participated in the game?"

What does it say about the world we live in that the next quote uses the expression "old school?"

Robinson was from the old school of coaching. He was a hands-on guy who was involved in virtually every aspect of his team. He thoroughly enjoyed his work.

He'd go through the dormitory at 6 a.m., ringing a bell, waking up the team for breakfast. During practice, he would demonstrate the proper drop back for his quarterbacks and show receivers the correct way to run pass patterns.

"When you love a profession, when you're doing something that you love every day, it differs from when you're just doing something," he said.

Precisely. When it stops being fun, find something else to do.

The end of de jure segregation also meant the end of a Grambling recruiting edge.

After Grambling was 5-6 in 1987 and lost to archrival Southern in the Bayou Classic, Robinson hinted he might retire because "he wasn't putting people in his pocket anymore."

Grambling rebounded with an 8-3 record in '88 ,followed that with a 9-3 mark and a SWAC championship and I-AA playoff appearance in '89. However, Robinson and Grambling fell on hard times toward the end of his career.

The Tigers had losing records each of his last three seasons, a first for Robinson, and he was forced to retire.

Robinson made Grambling a household name in college football circles. He produced more than 200 professional players. In 1971, 43 Grambling players were in training camps, a pro football record that still stands.

On the one hand, expansion of pro football. On the other hand, expansion of opportunities for players with African ancestry. Those opportunities were enhanced by Grambling's, and coach Robinson's teams', successes.

JUICED. If you want to go fast on rails, go electric. The French have set a new rail speed record (via Best of the Web) with a specially equipped TGV train.

(AP Photo from the Indianapolis Star.)

You don't just switch a random consist out of the coach yard and turn it loose. There's this little thing called back electromotive force to overcome, which more voltage will do.

For its mission to break the speed record, the train was modified with a 25,000-horsepower engine, and adjustments also were made to the track, notably the banking on turns. The rails were treated so the wheels could make perfect contact, and electrical power in the overhead cable was increased from 25,000 volts to 31,000 volts.

The V150 was equipped with larger wheels than the normal French TGV - or "train a grande vitesse" - to cover more ground with each rotation, said Alain Cuccaroni, in charge of the technical aspects of testing. French TGVs normally cruise at about 185 mph.

I wonder if somebody in France learned about the field shunt tests (another way of overcoming that back electromotive force) with the Electroliner in which a train got up to 111 mph on jointed rail at nominal line voltage collected through a trolley pole. After the test, master mechanic Henry Cordell (what's French for who vas th' motorman?) had the field shunts disconnected: the train was too fast for the road crossing protection, and the relatively small wheels were turning too fast in Mr Cordell's judgement. (The bigger wheels squeeze more velocity out of the same motors: there is this phenomenon called "balance speed" at which additional power is exactly offset by additional back electromotive force and the motors spin no faster, but if the motors are spinning bigger wheels, the train goes faster, provided the added rotating mass isn't a burden.)

Despite improvements in train technology, some things don't change.

Outside, the train roared by like a jet, sparks spit from the overhead power lines and a trail of dust sprayed out behind.

On the Chicagoland interurbans, that's often a trail of snow. But I like this Electroliner image from a book I just received, Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee: Point of No Return (not enough text for a book review.) Also check out Streetcars and Electroburgers by the same author.


The book also mentions the late Lew Burdette. It's a sobering thought, Cub fans, that two different Milwaukee teams have lost the World Series since the Cubs last played in one. Look closely at the picture: those are the National League and American League standings on the flag hoists. None of this divisional stuff: one league, one pennant race, one World Series, and North Shore Line liberty specials to Great Lakes. Back to the speed record ...

It's still obligatory to have the fourth estate chasing trains with aircraft.

Then, near the village of Le Chemin, we hit the record of 357.2 mph. The train was speeding far faster than a passenger jet taking off. In fact, we kept up with planes flying overhead taking photos.

That used to be easier.

Indiana Historical Society image.

The context for the picture appears in an essay about the Cincinnati and Lake Erie interurban line that was part of the 2001 Interurban Symposium.

It is time to hoist a Sprecher Doppel Bock in tribute to the French speed record, and to Middle America's traction pioneers who started the tradition of fast running, electrically.

THEM THAT HAS GETS.

There are no more nets to cut down. The last top seed standing in the women's tournament, Tennessee, ousted a Rutgers team that had ousted inter alia Duke and Louisiana State. A Mid-American team made it to the round of sixteen. In the men's tournament, Florida handled Ohio State pretty roughly in a tournament field that was set up to take away most of the surprises.

The reality is that the tournament selection committee carefully set up this year's bracket to minimize the possibility of an overachieving mid-major.

This tournament was George Mason-proofed before the first tip-off.

When you look at the 16 remaining schools, what do you see? All four No. 1 seeds, three of the No. 2 seeds, three of the No. 3 seeds, a No. 4, and three No. 5 seeds.

The presence of sixth seed Vanderbilt and seventh seed UNLV hardly constitutes the inspirational, anything-can-happen element that makes the tournament special. It just means a couple of good teams were underrated, or two other good teams (Washington State and Wisconsin, in these instances) either were overrated or simply laid eggs.

The structure of a tournament can influence the outcome. I've considered the advantages of a Swiss-system pairing for the tournament (9 at 1, 10 at 2, ..., 16 at 8) to make it more likely that the winner of the tournament would make grandmaster norm to win it.