The Big Picture and the Closeup

Of course, it’s not the State of Michigan itself establishing the threat, but rather the National Collegiate Athletic Association. “The NCAA has strictly limited the role you, as a Michigan Fan, may take with regard to prospects and student-athletes.” So the chill on Mark’s free speech works a bit like the scene we’ve all seen in the movies: the bad guy holds a gun to some terrified child’s head and says to a parent: “Keep your mouth shut or the kid dies.” It makes the parent think twice about exercising free speech rights to call the cops. The only variation here is that here the state actor issuing the warning isn’t the one holding the kid: the (supposedly private) NCAA is holding the kid.

It had many of the aspects of perfection. Against odds, we found the time to get together, we had the double date, we played in the surf, we had two meals and lots of dancing and necking on the beach. And yet, in the end, it should have been more.

Even if you think it’s a good thing to be trying to unseat Kadafi, you ought to be discouraged by the thinly-veiled mutiny Obama is waging against the law. Me, I had this naive notion that the president was supposed to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Silly moi! Nothing faithful about this bit of execution.

Of course there’s nothing original to be said about Joni Mitchell these days, but that stunning voice and those original chords and those poetic confessional lyrics were like nothing most of us had heard then. I can picture sitting in Steve’s parents’ front room and playing it when I probably should have been finishing that Philosophy paper. I must have played it enough so that two weeks later, writing Steve, the first thing I did is mention the album in a way I would only have done if I had known him to be as familiar with the order of the tracks as I was.