Oh man, is it football weather outside! 57 at 8:30, getting up into the seventies today. There’s a welcome fall chill on the air, yet the sun is bright and warm on your face. If I wasn’t pumped about tailgating/football before today, I am now.

I guess I’m not the only one. Last week, we got a MASSMAIL that, once again, to thank the university community for its dedicated service in this dismal financial period when real compensation is “hard,” the university admins are giving staff two tickets to the football home opener. A game over Labor Day weekend that no one is going to go to anyway. With a brand new coach after a pitiful season last year. Gee, thanks guys. I’d rather have had Friday afternoon off. But Cantor never did such things for us, so I still think Dick Her Man is a-okay.

Sometimes he makes me laugh, especially with today’sm ASSMAIL about the chief, included below for those who can’t look them up. Ah, politics… the art of saying something without saying anything at all…

Dear Members of the University Community,

The Presidents and Chancellors on the Executive Committee of the National Collegiate Athletic Association recently adopted a new policy to “prohibit NCAA colleges and universities from displaying hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery at any of the 88 NCAA championships.” As those of you in the University of Illinois community know, we have been debating and discussing the Chief Illiniwek issue for many years now. The Board of Trustees has been actively engaged in addressing the matter and 18 months go set about an effort to reach a consensus solution to the issue. The Board is now considering what response it will take to the University being included on the NCAA list of schools with imagery deemed “hostile and abusive.”

To those who honor and revere the Chief, these harsh words will seem a terrible distortion. To some of those who oppose the Chief, these harsh words will ring true. The NCAA recommendations also seem to argue that the very names “Illini” and “Fighting Illini” are themselves hostile and abusive references. I believe that this is an unwarranted extension of the debate. We are evaluating the NCAA recommendations now and will seek all necessary clarification in what appear to be ambiguities in the decision. In the meantime, no change is being made in the use of the terms “Illini” or “Fighting Illini” or in the Chief Illiniwek tradition.

The University of Illinois is dedicated to an environment of respect and dignity for all individuals. Exactly what that means, of course, is the nub of our long debate. As a great university, we cannot shrink from freewheeling debate. That commitment is at the core of our mission, the core of our nation’s value of free speech, and the core of our national character. Yet let us acknowledge that our varying beliefs about the Chief are sincere matters of the heart and the head, and let us resolve to continue to work respectfully across our differences to find common ground.

Very truly yours,

Richard Herman
Chancellor

This mailing approved by:
The Office of the Chancellor

• When Reality Knocks » How to be organised, Part 1

I’m not sure why Wally or Josh haven’t posted this first, but DIA released the 2005-06 Men’s Illini basketball schedule (FightingIllini.com link.) I’ll echo a few others criticisms that the pre-season games at the Assembly Hall are lacking. There isn’t a Duke or Wake Forest to get us pumped up early like we’ve had in the last few years. Oregon will be fun, but Georgetown just doesn’t scare me. Arkansas-Little Rock will be tough.

Not that I would trade in my season tickets or anything. Only one stab at Wisconsin this year, and it’s on the road on a weekday (boo. One of these years I’ll make it up there for a weekend Illini basketball game.) We get Iowa away and at home, for our home closer/senior night.

Now, I know we’re two weeks away from football, and I’m looking forward to a fresh start there. But part of me knows basketball is only a few months away, and that makes me pumped!

• Innovative Backup System Uses Unused Disk Space
  I’ve only had this idea like 6 times over

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
by W.B. Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

I’m not really sure what it means, but I like it. I did a paper on Yeats in high school, and I’d forgotten how quietly powerful he is. I’ll have to borrow another book of his and refresh my memory.

• Graduate College Master Calendar

There’s definately a correlation between computer security incidents and late August. Sasser, then Sobig. This week I’ve probably gotten 6 emails from CITES security on all sorts of new exploits and patches (or workarounds) from Microsoft, or Adobe, or Apple. What is it about the return of hundreds of thousands of students to colleges where their unpatched-from-the-summer-computers get turned back on to high speed, well-connected networks that makes netadmins and security analysts so nervous?

Oh, yeah. Exactly that. But even so, why so much publicity around late August. Some of these vulnerability have been around for months. Do hackers go overdrive in the summer, causing more ‘ploits in August? Do they think about college students coming back? Or do developers work all summer on their bugfixes and roll out the patch packages in mid-August, when they hope more people will install them?

Or am I just naturally busier in August? Security incidents/reports/notices pull me away from my other projects, and I notice them more?

• Historic home price increases
  timely

I’m taking a break from watching some Dead Like Me episodes to do laundry and catchup on the blog(s). Writing in my other blog, I used the word ‘glean’ – but I’m having a very bad speling day so I checked at m-w.com first if it was an een or ean. And one of the definitions was:

glean: 1 a : to pick up after a reaper

I think that sounds like fun, lurking behind Mason or Daisy or Roxy or Milly. Which reaper would you follow? (And no fair saying Rube– we all wonder what he does with his day. You know, besides looking for the guy with six fingers on his left hand.)

Of course, it doesn’t take long for the word glean to strike a memory:

…Something have you heard
Of Hamlet’s transformation; so call it,
Sith nor the exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was. What it should be,
More than his father’s death, that thus hath put him
So much from the understanding of himself,
I cannot dream of: I entreat you both,
That, being of so young days brought up with him,
And sith so neighbour’d to his youth and havior,
That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court
Some little time: so by your companies
To draw him on to pleasures, and to gather,
So much as from occasion you may glean,
Whether aught, to us unknown, afflicts him thus,
That, open’d, lies within our remedy.

It’s funnier when Ros and Guil recount it later. I still would like to see that play live, or see the movie version on TV again (it’s in my TiVo wishlist)

I’ve spent the last few weeks doing what I’ve always done: Searching, reinventing, learning, forgetting, self-criticising, confronting, abating… Sometimes we get so used to our ways that we don’t even recognize them anymore, and we need to be jolted from our routine to recognize who we are. Just as glass is tempered in a fire and steel is forged in flame, it’s the hard things that make us better. And I will be better. I’m just going to sit in the fire a little longer, and later rise from the ashes.

But this post is not to find poetic ways to slam at people; I’m not sure Stuck is smart enough to get it anyway. I haven’t seen any proof he’s empathetic enough to care – whether that’s from laziness or emnity or just plain immaturity. I do know if people don’t care about my feelings, I don’t care about them. It just takes a while to get over trust being duped. Those scars, scratched fresh by new wounds, heal slowly for me.

I’m reading the book Good Poems compiled by Garrison Keillor, and found the following I wanted to share – the real purpose of this post. I’m about a third of the way through the book, and none of them yet have really spoken to my mood above. (And if they did, I would likely keep them to myself. A poem or a song that patches your soul is like a magic gift; you hold it close and savor every bit for yourself.) But, in honor of the summer weddings and these murky August storms, I give you this.

Summer Storm by Dana Gioia

We stood on the rented patio
While the party went on inside.
You knew the groom from college.
I was a friend of the bride.

We hugged the brownstone wall behind us
To keep our dress clothes dry
And watched the sudden summer storm
Floodlit against the sky.

The rain was like a waterfall
Of brilliant beaded light,
Cool and silent as the stars
The storm hid from the night.

To my surprise, you took my arm–
A gesture you didn’t explain–
And we spoke in whispers, as if we two
Might imitate the rain.

Then suddenly the storm receded
As swiftly as it came.
The doors behind us opened up.
The hostess called your name.

I watched you merge into the group,
Aloof and yet polite.
We didn’t speak another word
Except to say goodnight.

Why does that evening’s memory
Return with this night’s storm–
A party twenty years ago,
Its disappointments warm?

There are many might have beens,
What ifs that won’t stay buried,
Other cities, other jobs,
Strangers we might have married.

And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.