Dartmouth Gets Its Ass Kicked by Fighting Sioux
2006-12-31
Posted by: badanov
One or more of the fellas at Powerline Blog went to Dartmouth college, so they would naturally follow such things as Dartmouth athletics.
To us in Oklahoma, college ice hockey is a little like college rodeo. We like them both but we also understand that one sports' fans has a strong prejudice against the cultures which spawn or maintain the sports as a part of the college curriculum.
With the arrival of the Internet, that sophiticated set of standards and protocols that allows us to publish a column, also comes a certain snootiness when it comes to traditions.
The Internet Bubble of 1998 to 2000 was symptomatic of that snootiness. Gather together a group of people with more money than sense, pitch an idea which includes using web servers, databases and scripting, and voila, you have millions of dollars to throw around like there was no tomorrow.
One of the most memorable vignettes we read about the First Internet Bubble was that those who were driving these "new businesses" began to believe, awash in all that cash, that the traditional rules didn't apply to them. They could spend and display content, and somehow the money would come rolling in.
The old rules such as capitlization, valuation, profit, expense, income and loss didn't apply, because they were smart, dammit!
Many of the stories we read from the Wall Street Journal outlined incredible excesses, such as a $1 million plus web logo, something that could have been created now as then with a paint program.
The First Internet Bubble troubles are identical to the troubles otherwise venerable institutions such as Dartmouth college are suffering, except that there really is no accountability.
Fortunately there's not that much cash, but the damage that is done on campus and in the classroom does have costs and consequences that impact the real world over many, many years and probably many millions of real dollars.
Dartmouth's first step in removing references to Indians, and a much longer road in their condescending outlook towards the world outside Hanover, ( AKA snootiness ) took place in the 70s, when their school mascot became the "Big Green" after decades of being the Dartmouth Indians. Recently the Dartmouth college athletic director took the extreme step of apologizing to native Americans ( Indians ) for scheduling the college hockey game with the North Dakota Fighting Sioux.
That game took place last Friday night in a rarely packed Dartmouth house where the Darmouth Formerly Known as Indians got their collective college hockey asses kicked by the North Dakota Fighting Sioux, 4-2.
Yes, there was a protest with a grand total of one person and one sign. The protestor was an English professor, a feminist racist socialist. ( say that ten times real fast )
You gotta believe that the Dartmouth athletic director had an inkling that this game would turn out badly and maybe she was trying to force a forfeit, apparently Dartmouth's only chance of coming out ahead in the game.
Well, like a body check, the North Dakota Sioux saw through that play and decided to show up anyway.
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