You wouldn't want to party with him, but at least the Grim Reaper has a sense of irony. Not 24 hours after the death of Czech dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel, possibly the greatest anti-Communist revolutionary of the 20th century, we learned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, the last Stalinist standing, had reached his final (iron) curtain. The symmetry is being noted by many. Havel's life was dedicated to piercing the upside-down disreality perpetrated by Soviet Communism — his slogan was "may truth and love triumph over lies and hatred" — and he's definitely the only world leader to say, "I'm even secretly persuaded that if Kafka did not exist, and if I were a better writer than I am, I could've written his works.” For his part, Kim Jong Il dressed up the Kafka-esque in platform boots and a bad bouffant, starving his people under the slogan "Prosperous and Powerful Nation" while telling them he could make the weather change with his moods and shoot a 38-under par round of golf.
With bowl season upon us, Michael Weinreb and Jon Dolan reflected on the past year in college football, discussed their favorite minor bowls this year, and looked ahead ... to 2026.
One of my top five opening lines in a novel belongs to Samuel Beckett's darkly comic dagger-turn of a debut, Murphy: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." Don’t that just sum about 78.4 percent of it up? It certainly does if the "it" in question was the game I watched Tuesday night. The fluorescent sun did indeed pour down on Williams Arena for Minnesota (10-1) and Central Michigan (4-4) — warm-up threads were donned, layup drills run, and 40 minutes of going up and down an oddly raised wood surface with some maroon-painted polyurethane lines around were enacted. Fouls were called, bottles of water consumed. Then an overbearingly loud horn sounded and a Big Ten team's schedule was duly padded in an easy win against a middling mid-major. Padded for what purpose, you ask? Good question. None, really. Because the Minnesota Gophers season is over.
