Proportional Dissonance

Every Day is Mother’s Day

by Ygal Kaufman

I love my mama. She believed that I was the future. She taught me well and even let me lead the way. To put it in less Jacksonian terms, she sacrificed for me.

We don’t live in the same state, but I spend a fair amount of time checking in with her, shooting the breeze, sending her articles from good publications (occasionally even the Advocate…) and of course pictures of kittens I think she’ll enjoy. When she accidentally clicks on a phishing link that infects her computer with cyber-syphilis, I bottle the urge to scream, “How the &%*$ did you not know we’re not actually related to a dying prince from Nigeria?”

And what’s most important is that these two things are unrelated.

See what I did there? You were all nodding your heads to the beat, but you didn’t realize what a scummy thing that is.

I’ve got news for you: your mothers aren’t the neighbor who watches your cats when you’re on vacation. You don’t get her a card once a year or take her out for dinner to thank her for raising you. Only a fool (of which my mama raised none) thinks that one “thanks” their mother for a lifetime of sacrifice by one day a year where they don’t act like ingrates.

Your mom spent 18 hours a day wiping your nose and putting up with your incessant blathering for a long time. Since the economic downturn, that snot-wiping and blather-suffering has increased from a roughly 18-year job to more like a 25-year sentence. And trust me when I tell you, you were super obnoxious, probably until like age 23.

So for Mother’s Day this year, try my method: don’t insult her with one day scheduled by Hallmark. Treat her to 365 days where you show a tiny fraction of the hard work and love she’s shown you your whole life. And stop treating it like quid pro quo. She did all those things for you when you hadn’t done a thing for her yet. Maybe take the payment aspect out of it, and just be good to your moms.

Craig Robinson’s Big Pay Day
By Sidney Reilly

OSU brought on Michelle Obama’s brother, Craig Robinson, after a successful run at Brown University (successful inasmuch as he took a terrible team and made them significantly less terrible; they were still pretty bad) to coach the men’s basketball team here. After two seasons where he lost more games than he won, they signed him to a contract extension. They had to, had to, lock this guy up lest he flee to a rival university with his mediocre record and rather short list of credentials in tow.

In fairness, he had already gotten Barack to attend a Beavers game, and in the ensuing years would snag his sister to give a commencement address. This reveals the strategy behind bringing him on in the first place: his name recognition would pay dividends in recruiting.

But the recruit bonanza that was expected never really came. Aside from him looking a lot like a young Bill Duke in Predator, few people have anything measurably positive to say about Robinson’s tenure.

Now after realizing that candidates short on resumes and long on charisma can be rather ineffective leaders (wait, are we still just talking about Craig?), the university is cutting bait. Although that may be a bad analogy, unless you frequently bait your hook with $4 million, the amount they had contractually agreed to pay him should they fire him early.

I’ll go ahead and choose not to hold my breath for an income inequality lecture from his brother-in-law on fat cats getting paid to do nothing…