The college might begin by asking the players union reps, in their estimation how much value added is provided by their clients to a Dartmouth education, offer their replies to the Daily Dartmouth, and ask for comments.
True, Ivy League practice (to its great credit) is not to offer athletic scholarships and the players, no matter how bad they are, must still put in long hours practicing and traveling; but did they really come to Dartmouth and the other Ivies for the prestige of their sports departments, or simply for the pleasure of the sport in their college years?
“Professor” Schickele had a big influence on this blogger while he was still in school. The purported scholar of the life and works of the “youngest of J. S. Bach’s 20-odd children and certainly the oddest,” Schickele never once let up in public that P. D. Q. Bach was anything but a real composer, and would display mock irritation whenever the existence of his subject was questioned.
Schickele owned a unique brand of comedy. He deftly combined sophisticated musicological jokes, aimed at musicians and those knowledgeable on baroque and classical music, with old-fashioned slapstick and wacky invented musical instruments, such as the “tromboon.” This way, all could laugh themselves silly when attending a P. D. Q. Bach concert.
Schickele was also a “legit” composer, with many serious compositions to his credit, and did studio and soundtrack work as well. Back in the ’60s, I remember noting with surprise his name in the credits of a Joan Baez album, in which he had composed and conducted the lovely arrangements. For I, like so many other P. D. Q. Bach fans, was oblivious to Schickele’s serious side.
After years of intense study of music history and theory, I enjoy going back to my P. D. Q. Bach albums, and inevitably finding more musical jokes, which had gotten by me before.
Rest in peace, Professor. Make those angels laugh.
STATEMENT from priests of the Cathedral of San Francisco about “FS” and “blessings
This is worth notice. Priests of the Cathedral in San Francisco have issued their own statement about FS…
We will note with interest the reaction to this statement among Church higher-ups. Will they respect the counsel of St John’s Fisher’s concerning conscience.
Soon we will have priests reduced to the role of social workers and the message of faith reduced to a political vision. Everything will seem lost, but at the right time, only in the most dramatic phase of the crisis, the Church will be reborn. It will be smaller, poorer, almost catacumbal, but also holier. For it will no longer be the church of those who seek to please the world, but the church of believers in God and his Eternal Law. The revival will be the work of a small, seemingly insignificant, but indomitable, remnant, undergone a process of purification. Because that’s how God works A small flock withstands evil.
Benedict’s prediction is bearing fruit, but there are many more setbacks to endure. Consider this sad news from the Society of St Hugh of Cluny:
31 Dec
2023
End of Traditional Mass at St. Stanislaus in New Haven
Posted by Stuart Chessman
We are reliably informed that two minutes before today’s Traditional Mass a decree of Archbishop Leonard Blair of Hartford was read suppressing the Latin Mass in New Haven as of January 14. There had been no previous communication with the congregation. They have been referred to St. Patrick’s, the church of the Institute of Christ the King, in Waterbury!
Your Tatler, when living in New York, knew some of these wonderful people; observant, pious Catholics whose only wrong was to embrace the Mass that Catholics have celebrated for 1500 years, with only minimal and organic changes, up to the 1960s. Then, in an audacious action forever to be deplored, a group of men arbitrarily decided this glorious work of faith–and art–should be “modernized.” Substantial parts of the order of worship were trashed and the remaining carcass translated into jejune vernacular, reading like a second-rate sixties pop song (the lyric of a Beatles song is much superior).
Benedict’s prediction will prevail. The rebirth he cites though may likely not occur until most or all of us are dead. It thus behooves Catholics who love the Mass to pray and keep it alive. Even, when necessary, playing whack-a-mole with Archbishop Blair and his colleagues’s desperate attempts to extinguish it once and for all. They will not succeed. Most of those clerics are old and older, but the Mass is older still, eternal, and will survive them and their destructive acts.
Biden Looking at Huge Concession to GOP on Border Policy . . .
How badly does Joe Biden want that funding for Ukraine? That’s the question Republicans are asking as border negotiations tied to Ukraine funding continue this week.
If the reports about what’s been agreed to are true, Republicans have already won a big victory. Senators and the White House have reached agreements on “tightening asylum interviews, expanding expedited deportations, and creating an authority to expel migrants without humanitarian screenings when border agents are overwhelmed,” according to CBS News.
It’s a virtually certainty, shortly after the president [sic] signs this bill, soon after, while campaigning and reading the speeches his minders craft for him with big block letters, he will take full credit for the bill’s passage, claiming he had been working tirelessly for its passage for months; at the same he will blast Republicans for their obstructing it every inch of the way, for purely cynical and political purposes.
The fact the boarder crisis is entirely Biden’s and the Democrat’s creation will of course receive nary a mention in the media and they, getting in on the fun, will further the charade by praising Biden for at last showing real leadership and resolve, thus relieving them of the irksome and unpleasant task of criticizing him on the matter. Instead, the media will resume their far pleasanter and easier job of covering up for Biden; praising him to the sky and covering up his multiple and collosal failures, as is mete, right and their bounden duty.
Whatever faint grasp of reality the left might have had once is rapidly disappearing. Might it be, despite having control of most of the major institutions in this country, their sense the never-high public support they had is waning to insignificant? It must be terribly frustrating not having anyone in the pews to preach to, other than a light sprinkling of your fellow wackos. It might explain the deluded woman in this video insisting to a McDonalds employee the company’s new blue and white wrappers for their chicken meals are, in reality, the company’s clandestine expression of support for Zionist pigs.
Who knows? Meanwhile, enjoy the show. We’ll likely be seeing more comic vignettes of this kind, but no matter how high their number, they’ll always leave us in stitches.
The venerable Glenn Reynolds, proprietor of Instapundit, asks poetically in his Substack blog: “Claudine Gay has gone away, is this the dawn of a new day?”
Professor Reynolds is referring to, inter alia, the ubiquitous and heinous policy of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) when hiring: in the private sector, government, and the academy. Read a short description of this discriminatory woke practice here, in typically banal and seemingly benign language.
Diversity, equity and inclusion is a term used to describe policies and programs that promote the representation and participation of different groups of individuals. DEI encompasses people of different ages, races, ethnicities, abilities, disabilities, genders, religions, cultures and sexual orientations. It also covers people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, skills and expertise.
A still shorter definition: all genuine qualifications for a situation are secondary in importance to minority status. If a job candidate is fortunate enough to be a member of a preferred minority group, he gets first dibs at a position, even if less qualified than ones not so lucky in birth, i.e., whites and Asians (Asians, it is true, are a minority also, but since they are generally successful, they are disqualified).
Claudine Gay is an obvious example of DEI hiring, possessing zero qualifications that higher ed institutions not long ago used to demand of potential officers. Ms Gay rode the DEI express to the front of the line of those seeking Harvard’s presidency. Her DEI qualifications? Her race and her sex, the PhD in a worthless discipline just frosting on the cake.
That scholarship played no part in Gay’s hiring is patently obvious. Her publications in putatively scholarly journals are mostly jargon-filled gobbledygook posing as fact. She would also, using slightly different wordings, copy the works of others in her field, or even copy them verbatim, often “neglecting” to cite her sources, an absolute basic of scholarly writing.
The problem is, and this is where your Tatler parts company with the estimable Instapundit, the academy today is rife with low-grade scholarship, even among those holding high administrative positions in the most august colleges and universities. The majority of members on the Harvard Corporation’s board are no exception, including Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker, a Barack Obama crony who, notwithstanding her billions in wealth, shares much with Claudine Gay. So far she has refused repeated demands to step down. To Pritzker and most Corporation board members, the faux-scholarship of Claudine Gay is status quo, the model of modern scholarship, not to be dismissed, but rewarded.
The Board of the Harvard Corporation did appoint Alan Garber, who is highly qualified, pro-tem president when Gay finally quit (blaming racism, of course, for her plight). Garber, a widely respected scholar of the law, happens to be black. He is however not likely to be considered for Harvard’s presidency. As permanent president he would no doubt feel irrepressible urges to shake things up at Harvard, ridding it of its numerous fraudulent mediocrities and restoring its once formidable reputation. The present board wouldn’t dare allow such heretical acts.
Given the make up the Harvard Corporation’s board, Denise Gay’s replacement will be her academic double, an identical twin. Similar hires will take place at other, once respected, institutions as well. Glenn Reynolds’s new day, alas, is still a long way off.
This splendid piece ought to be read by those who labor under the illusion the Pope is the Church and the Church is the Pope, and that anyone who believes otherwise is, as this writer was recently informed in a scathing message on social media, not a true Catholic.
Not at all, according to Eric Sammons, Editor in Chief of Crisis Magazine, and he provides much persuasive evidence to prove his point
Some excerpts:
If you read the Catechism of the Catholic Church from front to back, you’ll note that at least 98% of the content has nothing to do with the papacy. Creation, Original Sin, the Incarnation, hypostatic union, the Resurrection, moral commands against killing and lying, the inspiration of Scripture, sacramental grace, the all-male priesthood: none reference the pope. In fact, the subject “pope” doesn’t even get its own entry in the subject index; instead, it reads, “Pope: see Apostolic Succession;
Yes, indeed. This writer, who did read the Catechism front to back in his remarkably thorough instruction 15 years ago, before his reception into the Catholic Church, can testify. Apparently the subject of the Pope was not of overriding importance to the writers of it.
Sammons offers a number of explanations how the change of emphases regarding the place of the Pope evolved, positing especially that the
most important factor, however, is that we all live in a post-Reformation world, in which a large section of Christianity decided to chuck the papacy to the curb. Because of this, Catholics realized they needed to defend the pope and the papal office, for fear of falling into the same individualist errors of Protestantism.
Most plausible, and Sammons goes further, pointing out, not surprisingly, this is particularly evident “in the area of morality,” despite the many other virtues in Church teachings.
When we enter the territory of morality and the Catholic Church these days, controversy is bound to ensue, as it almost always involves sexual matters. That has happened, in spades, with Francis exploiting it to the max.
If the pope says that artificial contraception is wrong, then you need to avoid that practice out of obedience to the pope. Not because artificial contraception violates human sexuality in so many ways, and fundamentally undermines the purpose of marriage, the procreation and education of children. No, it’s because the pope said so.
The problem with this distortion of Catholic teaching is that it places the entirety of morality on the shoulders of one man. If a pope rightly condemns artificial contraception, fine. But if a pope suggests (or even his advisors suggest) that perhaps there are “exceptions” to the moral law in this area, then a debate opens about what should be an undebatable topic—at least if you understand the reasoning behind the prohibition.
THE TAOS TATLER. 
