Friday Follies

(1) Welcome to the panopticon: The University of Alabama is offering its students an “app” that records if they attend Alabama’s home football games, and whether they leave early. If they stick around for the whole thing, they get “points,” which can be redeemed in the form of a better chance of purchasing tickets for the college football playoff.

Alabama’s coach, Nick Saban, is extremely concerned about how lots of Bama students don’t have the Commitment to Excellence necessary to stand in subtropical heat for four hours while his helots once again annihilate the University of Easily Clubbed to Death Baby Seals, in another classic SEC out of conference matchup.

(Saban is scheduled to earn $8.7 million this year, in his unending quest to maintain the glorious purity of amateur collegiate athletics.)

This idea has many obvious extensions: you could for example earn points for attending the ruling party’s local political rally, in exchange for social security payments or police protection.

(2) Tim Tebow makes some super-weird arguments about how denying college football players any right to receive compensation when schools market jerseys with their names on them helps maintain the purity of our precious bodily fluids, and also explains why college football is more popular than the NFL (Ron Howard voiceover: “It isn’t.”)

It goes without saying that this guy will be POTUS in the not-too-distant future.

(3) I find I can name just two Eddie Money songs. For me, this makes him similar to literally hundreds of acts: I can name between one and three of their songs, and the rest of their oeuvre is a complete blank slate. (I wonder if Kids Today are different in this regard, what with Youtube and Spotify and that Other Thing? It’s so much easier now to explore a performer or a genre than it was when we were slaves to the radio radio, and walked seven miles to school, uphill both ways.)

(4) It wouldn’t be Friday without yet another hallucinogenic Trump story:

Recently, Mulvaney told donors about his instructions to one White House policy adviser, who was scheduled to brief the president on budget cuts, government spending and regulations. Mulvaney warned that no one gets through a presentation without being interrupted multiple times by the president.

This official did manage to deliver his full briefing, Mulvaney told the crowd. But instead of asking a follow-up question, Trump asked the White House aide who he would be in the world, if he could be anyone — himself or, say, Tiger Woods?

The aide then joked with the president that he would be the Tiger Woods of deregulation if the administration accomplished all it wanted to. It was Mulvaney’s stab at wonky humor.

H/T commenter Stepped Pyramids for digging out this nugget from the story Erik linked earlier today.