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Ruminations of a nerd snob
Sep. 1st, 2020 10:40 pmBy the skin of my teeth (having survived 3 months in graduate school in 1959) I count as a Harvard alumnus. That turns out to be valuable: I get to buy a library card, and I receive the free house organ every month, which is worth browsing in. I usually skip the sports, but this month my eye lit on a paragraph about how my fellow alumni are doing on the Cleveland Browns football team. One of them, it turns out, is "a first-year offensive quality control assistant".
I note the indefinite article, which implies that there are at least two first-year offensive quality control assistants. And (assuming that "first-year" is what people now say instead of "freshman") there must be some upperclass (varsity) offensive assistants, and they must all have an offensive quality control manager to report to. And then there must be a parallel defensive quality control hierarchy. Clearly, Browns quality control agents are numerous enough to form a little club of their own. Perhaps, at their picnics, they kick a football around for fun.
There is no end to the foolishness of this world.
When I was at Caltech in the 1950s, we had a football team. It had no quality control apparatus, but it did have a real professional coach, who IRRC had been discarded by UCLA after a losing season. It consisted of actual students who, being in college for other reasons, happened to fancy playing football. It won a game about once every four years, so you stood a good chance of seeing that happen before you graduated. When it did, we built a bonfire in a neighboring intersection, and the Pasadena fire department put it out in good humor.
Nevertheless, it was considered meritorious to cheer the team, and the student houses competed in turnout for games. For an odd historical reason, Caltech's home field was the Rose Bowl. We occupied a narrow lighted strip up from one end of the 50-yard line, and the enemy did the same on the other side.
LET'S GO ORANGE
LET'S GO WHITE
LET'S GO BEAVERS
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
BLOCK THAT KICK (FWIW)
I note the indefinite article, which implies that there are at least two first-year offensive quality control assistants. And (assuming that "first-year" is what people now say instead of "freshman") there must be some upperclass (varsity) offensive assistants, and they must all have an offensive quality control manager to report to. And then there must be a parallel defensive quality control hierarchy. Clearly, Browns quality control agents are numerous enough to form a little club of their own. Perhaps, at their picnics, they kick a football around for fun.
There is no end to the foolishness of this world.
When I was at Caltech in the 1950s, we had a football team. It had no quality control apparatus, but it did have a real professional coach, who IRRC had been discarded by UCLA after a losing season. It consisted of actual students who, being in college for other reasons, happened to fancy playing football. It won a game about once every four years, so you stood a good chance of seeing that happen before you graduated. When it did, we built a bonfire in a neighboring intersection, and the Pasadena fire department put it out in good humor.
Nevertheless, it was considered meritorious to cheer the team, and the student houses competed in turnout for games. For an odd historical reason, Caltech's home field was the Rose Bowl. We occupied a narrow lighted strip up from one end of the 50-yard line, and the enemy did the same on the other side.
LET'S GO ORANGE
LET'S GO WHITE
LET'S GO BEAVERS
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
BLOCK THAT KICK (FWIW)
