#sure there are some people new to receiving letters from our good friend jonathan harker

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

Hot take maybe but I think Bertie would be FAR more likely to survive the first two months of Dracula than Jeeves would be. Bertie has a healthy sense of self-preservation. Jeeves consistently underestimates how dangerous a situation might get (Steeple Bumpleigh, the club book) because he’s overconfident about his level of control over any given situation. He'd handle Dracula masterfully if they faced off in England, but on Dracula's home turf? Much more doubtful.

I realize this might be a tough sell, so I will explain further (or it's not a tough sell, and I'm going to explain further because I want to). (criteria taken from @canyourfavesurvivecastledracula) Without further ado.

Would Jeeves and Wooster survive Castle Dracula?

Jeeves

Jeeves' survival will depend on how long Dracula finds him more entertaining than irritating. On that basis, I don't think he's long for this world. On the one hand, he has a huge wealth of knowledge about English society and culture that he can recite perfectly from memory. That should buy him at least a little time with noted teaboo Dracula.

On the other hand, he would be absolutely no fun as a vampire plaything. Jeeves cannot be got. Sneaking up on him while he's shaving will yield zero reaction (though that's at least good for his short-term survival--given that, although he DID take the crucifix from the old woman out of politeness, he certainly isn't going to wear it. The rules of fashion don't go out the window just because you're in a spooky castle). Then, although managing the whims of rich jerks is not an insignificant part of a valet's job, Jeeves usually does this by bending his employers to his will. Dracula is not the sort of employer this will work on. It'll just add insult to injury when on top of being impossible to scare, NOW Jeeves is telling Dracula that his favorite cloak is several centuries out of fashion and he's not allowed to wear it anymore.

Jeeves will 100% go exploring in the areas he was told not to go-- though to be fair, he MIGHT actually get away with this, what with his superpower of appearing in rooms without being seen or heard. Said superpower might save him from the brides as well (though this is by no means guaranteed). Since I find it doubtful that Dracula would come to rescue his annoying ass, not being noticed is his best defense.

There are a couple other things working in Jeeves's favor; the question is just whether they'll be enough to save him.

He DOES know shorthand, and could try to send coded letters. He might even have the foresight to squirrel away some extra stationary where Dracula can't find it. But could he get them posted? Would it even do him any good?

He certainly has enough cultural literacy to figure out what his new boss is pretty quickly. If he didn't chuck the crucifix out the carriage window, he might start carrying it around in his pocket.

Psychology of the individual, sure, but the individual in question is a 400-year-old vampire who lives in an isolated castle in a foreign country and is regarded as a terrifying mythological figure in the surrounding villages. Jeeves has never come up against anything this alien before, he's cut off from his normal resources, and opportunities to play people against each other are limited.

He probably has enough upper body strength from all that shrimping and fishing to climb the wall, so he COULD escape if he wanted to, if he survived long enough. It's just, again, that overconfidence, and also Dracula has a vast library full of rare old books that are entirely at his disposal. He's keeping his eyes and ears alert for potential escape strategies, of course, but I don't see him being as desperate to get out as Jonathan was.

There are just a lot of "depends on"s here, and I'm not convinced that luck would shake out in Jeeves's favor, all things considered.

Bertie

Bertie is so perfect for the job of Castle Dracula Prisoner it's like it was made for him. Think about it. Being held against his will in big manor houses comes more naturally to him than breathing. He's afraid of things that are scary. A lifetime of dealing with Aunt Agatha has made him the world's preeminent expert in "curl[ing] up in a ball in the hope that a meek subservience [will] enable [him] to get off lightly." He will NEVER go exploring in places he's been warned away from if nobody is forcing him to (Rev. Aubrey Upjohn's office notwithstanding. There were biscuits in there). He's both fun to talk to and easy to toy with (and extremely English). A+ prisoner. Dracula adores him.

In my opinion, Bertie is at Castle Dracula either because Aunt Agatha got some wires seriously crossed and thinks he’s going to meet an eligible potential bride (I mean, there are certainly brides there), or because Dracula has something Aunt Dahlia wants him to steal (far less likely, given that one of Dracula’s THINGS is famously not owning anything silver). Either way, he's shown himself entirely willing and able to escape down drainpipes if a sitch gets too scaly.

He DOES take the crucifix, and DOES wear it (which is what will save him during the shaving scene, because you KNOW he's going to jump a foot and cut himself like the dickens). He's read enough supernatural goosefleshers to be genre savvy about terrified old women cryptically pushing crucifixes into one's hands. I also think his sunny disposish endeared him to the villagers, and they were particularly vehement about urging him not to go. He doesn't speak German or Romanian, but he's empathetic enough to recognize Pure Terror. So by the time he actually gets to the castle, his imagination is already running wild and he's plenty aware that he is in imminent danger.

I think the biggest risk to Bertie will be the brides; whether or not he's susceptible to trances, if he thinks they're trying to marry him, it's against the code of the Woosters to turn them down. But that only becomes an issue if he comes face to face with them, which, luckily, I think is unlikely on account of the aforementioned "won't go exploring" (and if he did, Dracula would definitely rescue him).

I'm inclined to say due to his drainpipe-escape habits that he WOULD be able to climb the wall and MAY attempt to sneak into Dracula's room to look for the keys if his desperation grows to outweigh his fear. Whether he does or not, though, he does NOT have the stomach to attempt shovel murder, and therefore won't get magic brain fever, and may very well simply walk out the front doors when the people come to take the boxes away. OR he climbs his way out like Jonathan did. Either way.

When Bertie tells this story at the Drones later, Tuppy will say that no doubt it's been greatly exaggerated and all that probably happened was that he spent a couple months in an oldish house entertaining a weird loner.

#do YOU think jeeves and wooster would survive castle dracula? let me know in the comments! #they're in the castle separately instead of together because those are the rules ok #the isolation is key #though if anyone wants to speculate about what would happen if they went together i will NOT complain #i don't even know what's going on with the tenses in this post i'm sorry #// #jeeves and wooster #reginald jeeves #bertie wooster #dracula #do i need to tag dracula spoilers? #sure there are some people new to receiving letters from our good friend jonathan harker #here it is just in case: #dracula spoilers #i have done my due diligence

[sportsgeekonomics]

Competition once again sniffs out a bogus claim of principle

In 2015, after having lost the O’Bannon case, the "Power 5″ conferences (P5) (who like to call themselves the Autonomy 5, like some sort of super hero coalition)[1] agreed among themselves to start allowing their scholarships to include cash payments to cover the off-campus elements of the full Cost of Attendance (COA) that had been prohibited by NCAA rules since 1976, such as living expenses and travel expenses.

Under the new “autonomy” rules the NCAA had passed the previous summer, these five conferences were now allowed to collude among themselves and no longer needed to collude with the rest of the schools in D1, as long as they did not exceed COA.  Thus, when they made this move in January 2015 (effective August 2015), they essentially moved to the absolute highest level the NCAA allowed them.  Those same rules said that any other conference that wanted to do so, could match the P5.

There were a lot of people who knew deep in their bones that few, if any other schools could afford to match the P5 on this.  The Colonial Athletic Conference, an eastern conference with schools like Delaware, William & Mary and Elon, was one of just two conferences that voted against allowing the P5 the independence to make this change (the Ivy League was the other).  The representative of the Colonial Athletic Association, University of Delaware President Patrick Harker explained:

“Division I is very diverse — schools with very large budgets that are very well resourced and those like us that subsidize athletics,” he said. “Often the media think of all college athletics as making millions of dollars. That’s not true. The majority of us don’t.”

Colonial conference leaders and others say that in addition to widening the wealth gap in college sports, already deeply entrenched, the new structure does not address important issues that could have just as well been dealt with under the old structure.

Presumably smart people accepted the idea that this was going to permanently severe the Haves from the Haves-Nots, the schools that could afford to pay COA from schools, like Delaware, that clearly could not.  As the Dothraki attendants of Daenerys Targaryen were fond of saying, “It is known” that only the P5, or maybe a fringe of other schools, had the money to match this.[2]

Quickly, it became clear that the extent of the ability to pay COA to athletes was far greater than the 65 schools in the P5.  In early 2016, an expert report by Daniel Rascher[3] estimated how many schools had adopted (or announced plans to adopt) COA, and already it reached deep into the non-P5 ranks, with all but 5 FBS schools announcing the adoption of Full or Partial COA, and over 200 D1 basketball schools (out of a total 340 non Ivy League, non-military schools in D1) doing the same.

By mid-2017, the schools themselves had to declare whether they had adopted some form of COA or not.  Over 260 schools admitted in legal proceedings that, yes, they had in fact adopted COA for some or all of their football or men’s/women’s basketball athletes.

Now, to be clear, this left about 80 or so hold out schools that had not done some.  Among these were HBCUs, which struggle with funding for all elements of their campuses, sports included.  But there were also some well-funded schools that made a big deal out of the fact that they were not going to adopt COA, because COA was, essentially, immoral.  That it was wrong to provide a true “full ride” to athletes when so many other deserving students were getting less.  Chief among these were nine schools that wrote an open letter in September 2015, declaring their principled opposition to the very idea of increasing athletic scholarships to cover the full attendance, who I like to call the Nine “No, No, Never!” schools.  

The four most prominent of these schools were Elon University, James Madison University, the University of Delaware, and William and Mary University. They explained that:

“While we are happy for that very small number of students who are able to pursue professional sports careers (which typically last only a few years), we must maintain our focus on the education that we provide that will prepare them for life after college and life after sport. Given that focus, we believe that we must continue to treat these students as we do our other students.” 

And thus, while other schools “have recently opted to offer ‘cost of attendance’ payments that provide additional economic benefits for miscellaneous expenses to some or all student-athletes (particularly in high-profile sports that receive significant media attention),” these nine schools “have chosen not to offer additional “cost of attendance” payments to student-athletes at this time.”

As they explained, their opposition was based on principle, because as they saw it, paying Full COA was, “a more professional model towards individual compensation” and, as they put it:

“Spending even more money on payments for certain high-profile sports could lead to pressures to eliminate other varsity sports on campus, which would limit the athletic experiences available to many of our students or cause an increase in tuition and fees for all students. It is our responsibility to ensure that the disproportionate media and financial attention on certain high-profile sports does not undermine opportunities for large numbers of students or get in the way of larger institutional interests. Accordingly, we are committed to administering our institution’s athletic programs in ways that are consistent with our mission, culture and values.”

You can read the full thing, but be sure to wear a hazmat suit or whatever, because the sanctimony might drip all over your shirt while you read it.  Keep in mind that these schools essentially laid down a marker – paying COA is inconsistent “with our mission, culture and values.”

Of course, as a matter of competition theory, this is how markets should work.  If 260 schools want to pay their athletes COA, and 80 don’t, and among that 80 the reasons vary from lack of funding to a desire not to compete on price, that’s great.  It’s a little troubling that 9 schools seems to have agreed among themselves, but the Presidents of those universities were clear each had reached the decision independently, so if we take them at their word, then 9 schools choosing not to compete using COA as a recruiting tool is really the same as Chick-fil-A choosing not to open on Sundays, out of principle.

But competition theory also says, in the words of the philosophy Bobbi Fleckman, that money talks and bullshit walks.  Even before the second season of COA was underway, James Madison (JMU) had changed its tune.  Facing an angry fan reaction (along the lines of: how dare you not compete for talent as hard as other schools), principled opposition turned into acquiescence to the market.  Eight months after the letter, JMU announced that it would offer Full COA to men’s and women’s basketball (but not football) athletes beginning in the 2017-18 year.  

When asked about the change under oath, JMU President Jonathan Alger explained:

So basically -- we didn’t want to lose good athletes, and we didn’t want to lose good coaches if they were afraid of losing good athletes, and they didn’t want to lose basketball games.  So we know what JMU’s real principle always was.  And perhaps for this reason, it was not stated in the announcement, whether it was now consistent with JMU’s mission to adopt “a more professional model towards individual compensation” for basketball, but remained inconsistent for football, or whether it was just the fact that JMU is more competitive in basketball than it is football, with its football still in FCS, the lower half of D1 football.

Other schools on the list of the “No, No, Never! Nine” slowly changed their minds as well.  According to public information from the “Alston v. NCAA” case, New Hampshire began offering COA on a case-by-case basis in 2016-17, and Delaware began offering Full COA to MBB and WBB athletes beginning in the 2017-18 year.

But still William and Mary (W&M) and Elon stood out.  Neither was on the list of the ~260 schools that acknowledged they had adopted some form of COA in the settlement of the damages portion of the “Alston v. NCAA” case, which included all schools that “provide, have provided, or have indicated by or before June 1, 2017 an intent to start providing any portion of the gap between the amount of GIA allowed prior to August 1, 2015 and full COA to at least one” football or basketball athlete.

So, principle over profit, right?  Well, as the philosopher Lee Corso has said, not so fast my friend.  

New methods of competition, like any innovation, takes time to diffuse throughout a marketplace.  Not every company adopted on-line shopping on Day 1 of the internet.  Not every household bought one of those new-fangled color TVs on the first day they hit the market.[4]  And not every school that was on the list of 260 COA schools had adopted it on August 1, 2015, when they were first allowed to.  It took some time, but the number of adopters grew and grew.  And not surprisingly, the cut-off for the settlement of June 1, 2017 was also not the end of the process of adoption.

Steely Dan saw it coming all along, when they sang “Woah no, William and Mary won’t do.”  Very under the radar, even for someone like me who keeps tracks of hypocrisy with respect to “amateurism,” in August 2016, it was announced that William and Mary would do COA for men’s and women’s basketball:

“A William & Mary representative on Friday said that the Tribe this school year will start providing cost of attendance to men’s and women’s basketball scholarship recipients. The COA stipend will range from $2,800 to $3,000, depending on various factors, among them being whether the student does or does not reside in Virginia.”

At the same time, JMU expanded its COA offers beyond basketball, announcing

“James Madison will begin providing cost of attendance for football players and all scholarship athletes starting in the fall of 2019, the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record reported this week. JMU already was offering cost of attendance in men’s and women’s basketball, at about $4,000 per player.”

But Elon stood firm.  Mere economic pressure cannot sway a school if it’s committed to the principle of amateurism, and is standing firm against “a more professional model towards individual compensation” and intent on “administering our institution’s athletic programs in ways that are consistent with our mission, culture and values,” right?

Wrong.

As anyone who believes in the power of markets as a lie detector might have predicted, competition got the better of Elon’s claims of principled opposition.  Last month, Elon announced that it too had begun paying its athletes full COA:

“In what registers as the calling of a considerable audible, Elon is changing course on the cost of attendance stipends that are permitted by the NCAA and will pay those allowances to its athletes, beginning with men’s and women’s basketball players…. Men’s and women’s basketball players will start receiving cost of attendance during the approaching 2019-20 school year, as Elon embarks on a phasing-in process across its 17 sports teams. By 2022-23, athletics director Dave Blank said the Phoenix plans to have the stipends implemented for all of its scholarship athletes.”

Elon’s reasoning?   Doing well in basketball (and other sports over time) is apparently more important to them than “administering our institution’s athletic programs in ways that are consistent with our mission, culture and values.”  Or maybe a better way to say it is that the “mission, culture and values” of Elon is more about avoiding “competitive disadvantage in recruiting in our region and our conference” than it is about refusing to pay the going rate for top talent.

In other words, money talks and bullshit walks.

If you are one of those old fuddy-duddies who reads this and thinks, o, alas! How filthy lucre corrupts even the best of us, you aren’t paying attention, remember that no one made JMU, W&M, or Elon pay college athletes anything.  They aren’t required to give a single scholarship in men’s basketball if they don’t think athletes should be paid. (and yes, a scholarship is pay.)

They were not required to add a monthly COA pay check when it was adopted, and they said they would not.  But in markets, choices have consequences.  The consequence these schools suddenly faced was that the quality of their basketball (and other sports) programs faced the risk of declining.  Coaches maybe started losing recruits to other schools.  Now remember, these are schools that explicitly claimed they do not make money with sports – go back to their letter from 2015 and you can see they included themselves among the schools that “invest millions of dollars annually beyond the monies generated by athletics in order to support their student-athletes and the benefits and values intercollegiate sports bring to the institution.”  So by their own logic, spending more on sports was just a waste, right?  Not making any money at the old price, why spend more?  And it’s not like Elon is so dominant in men’s basketball that its identity was at risk or anything.

No, despite the claims that “everybody’s broke,” when the schools faced the prospect of having slightly lower-quality sports on campus, they eventually realized that their principled opposition wasn’t really all that important after all.  After all, explained Elon, they were the last hold out in the Colonial Athletic Association [a conference which voted AGAINST allowing the P5 the ability to allow COA without a full NCAA vote], saying “The other nine schools were going to be doing it, so we felt it was important to keep up.”

Chick-fil-A doesn’t feel the need to keep up with other fast food places on Sundays, because, whether you agree with them or not, they hold a deep principled belief that Sunday is a day of rest.  That’s what principle over profit looks like.  “We felt it was important to keep up” is an admission that your claims of principle were bogus rationalizations.  If your principles are so weakly held that at the first contact with economic reality, you abandon them, they probably weren’t worth a damn to begin with.

And that sums up the Principle of Amateurism pretty well.  Not worth a damn to begin with.  Thank you, James Madison, William & Mary, and Elon, for showing the world your true principles and making it clear that Amateurism is a Con.

[1] As you probably know, these five conferences are the ACC, Big Ten, Big Twelve, Pac-12, and SEC.

[2] Another thing that was “known” was that in order to afford COA for superstars, schools were going to have to cut the scholarships of benchwarmers… this little post doesn’t cover that, but rest assured, that too was false.

[3] Full disclosure, Dan is my friend and business partner, and I helped him with the research to build this table back in 2015 and 2016 when he wrote the report.

[4] In economics this process is known as the diffusion of innovation.  You can read more about it at Rogers, Everett M., “Diffusion of Innovations,” Fourth Edition, The Free Press, New York, 1995 (http://bit.ly/1xzRwkp).

[musicangel100]

@procrastinosaurus-rex gave me the opportunity to ramble on about books... I shall not disappoint you, my friend.

1. Diabetes - a very sweet book:

Neil Gaiman has been my favourite author for years and probably will remain untouchable for a good while longer. Even though I love his more popular books like “Coraline”, “American Gods”, “Good Omen” or his essay and short story collections (especially Trigger Warnings and The View from the Cheap Seat), the first and sweetest of his books, shall always remain “Stardust”. This cannot be described as anything less than a modern fairy tale, in which a star falls from heaven and enamours the young protagonist Tristran Thorn. With its witches, lords, faeries and beautiful maidens, this story plays into every fairy tale cliché, but due to Gaiman’s ever amazing writing style it still feels like a fresh tale, leaving you with a smile and a soaring heart, gazing out into the night sky.

2. Chickenpox - a book that you read once and will not read again:

“Winnetou” by Karl May. I was expecting excitement and action. Winnetou was neither. Not sure if I spent more time sleeping on the book or reading it. 

3. Influenza - a contagious book that spreads like a virus:

Ever since Hulu turned it into a TV Series, “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood keeps appearing everywhere I look. At University, on friends’ night stands, in my own bag. I have never read a book before, which fills silence and none-eventfulness as well as Atwood’s dystopian masterpiece. The world she creates is almost touchable, makes us as readers uneasy, about how fast something like this could happen. How little it would take, to enslave women, in order to serve the greater good.

4. The Cycle - a book that you read every month, every year, or very often:

I’m usually not a huge fan of poetry, but “Milk and Honey” by Rupi Kaur is my favourite exception to that rule. The book kept following me around, appearing in every bookshop I went to and when I finally bought it, it seemed to know exactly what I needed to hear. I read it in small doses, over the course of a year and somehow, the right poems kept appearing. Words, I would have not been ready to hear a month ago, suddenly made perfect sense. This book keeps amazing me, no matter how many times I open it at random times in my life, somehow providing me with what I need to hear.

5. Insomnia - a book that kept you up all night:

After finishing “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak, I immediately went out and bought “I am the Messenger”. The tone of the book is very different, but Zusak’s gorgeous language remains immaculate. Ed Kennedy receives mysterious messages and is thus taxed to help others, before time runs out. He touches other peoples lives and sets off a chain of kindness, which ultimately changes his own life as well. The ending of the book is debatable, but ultimately, the riveting story and the thick blanket of unique writing Zusak puts around your shoulders, are enough to smother any doubts and to keep you reading page after page.

6. Amnesia - a book that’s been forgotten and failed to make an impression on you: 

I apologize in advance for this, but somehow “The Lord of the Ring” and I are just not compatible. No matter how many times I attempt to read this book, I cannot finish even the first part of it. I keep getting lost in my own imagination, stop reading and never take it up again. I understand why other people like it and I do appreciate the story, but somehow, I have never been able to form a relationship with these books.

7. Asthma - a book that took your breath away:

“A Monster Calls” by Patrick Ness might be labelled as Children’s Literature, but don’t let it fool you. This story of a young boy and his of cancer dying mother made my chest ache until I thought I would never breath again. The book never gives you any sense of falls hope and still...still you hope and pray that it might find some kind of happy end. And through all the sadness and pure desperation to hold onto the people that we love, as they are slipping through our fingers, just out of reach. Ness weaves a story, filled with intoxicating hope and love for life and creativity.

No matter how many times I read “A Monster Calls” its emotional impact never ceases to amaze me. 

8. Malnutrition - a book that lacked food for thought:

*cracks knuckles* Lets rip a classic to shreds, shall we? I hate “Dracula” by Bram Stocker. When I first read it in German, I blamed it on the translation. Surely such a classic with a fantastic idea could not be this boring and mindless? Tried to read it again in the OV, about two years ago. Turns out, that the heroes have not become any more interesting, nor the female characters any more three dimensional. Mina is about the blandest heroine I could imagine, making her constant praise even more annoying than it would already be otherwise. She and Jonathan Harker deserve each other. The letter format is a personal pet peeve of mine, which does not speak in the book’s favour either.

9. Motion Sickness - a book that took you on a journey through time and space:

“Nothern Lights/The Golden Compass” by Philip Pullman. How could I not mention Lyra Belacqua in this list? Pullman inspired me and captioned my imagination like few other writers, making me dream of the form my own daemon might take. Lyra was the fearless hero, I aspired to be (still do whenever I get my hands on a sword), smart, fast and more daring than anyone else around her. The books not only take you from one world to the next, they also took me on a journey from kid me - to young adult me.

And now it’s up to you:

 @quecksilvereyes @freak-of-chaos-n-stuff @winterzaubertee @vampiresinvienna

As always, I am desperate for new reading material and I’m sure that you wont disappoint 😉

#booklist #recomendation #personal favorite #stardust #dracula #margaret atwood