TOMBCOMING 2011
So, our beloved Hoosiers lost yet another game yesterday. Football, that is. Nothing new in that.
Only the team that established itself as superior to our hometown heroes is, um, uh, Northwestern.
Northwestern?
Yup. 59-38. On homecoming Saturday.
Irish Pat, an IU season ticket holder tells me Memorial Stadium was only two-thirds filled. More like Memorial Mauseleum, I’d say.
The Homecoming Throng
Looks like the only point of the season now is to determine which team is more execrable — the Hoosiers or the Indy Colts.
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HIGHER EDUCATION
My bus driver on the No. 6 route was in a particularly chatty mood Friday afternoon. Even though I like to sit toward the rear of the bus, he kept up a running conversation with me until the Bradford Place students boarded. It was a rather one sided chat.
“I can’t get over these kids,” he said. “With all these missing girls and all these sexual assaults going on, they’re doing that run without their clothes on.”
Not Naked But Close Enough (IDS Photo)
He was referring, of course, to the Nearly Naked Mile charity run, the homecoming week kickoff event Monday night.
“Yeah,” he said, “I worked that night. After the run was over I pulled up to the stop and these three young girls are waiting there, right? They got their arms folded across their chests and they’re shivering. They’re next to naked as jaybirds, you know? They get on and I said, ‘Can I see your IDs?’
“They look at me like I’m crazy. One of ’em spreads out her arms and says, ‘This is all I’ve got on. Where am I supposed to keep an ID?’
“I said, ‘Sorry. No ID, no ride.’
Man, I thought, that’s cold. “So what happened?” I asked.
“They got off!”
“Well,” I said. The run, in case you didn’t know, concluded sometime around midnight. I added, “Hmm.” All the while, the driver’s looking at me in his rearview mirror, no doubt anticipating I’d offer hearty congratulations for his slavish adherence to The Rules, The Rules, The Rules. Finally I said, “That’s something.”
He nodded emphatically as if I’d promised to nominate him for a civic award. “They go to college but they don’t learn much, do they?” he concluded.
I suppose not. I suppose, though, they now know not to be college sophomores wearing skimpy bikinis to raise dough for charity and have no place to keep their IDs ever again.
They also know there’s at least one Bloomington Transit driver who is both acutely aware of missing girls and sexual assaults but finds it acceptable to force three barely clad teenagers to walk the streets in the middle of the night.
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A TALE OF MAN AND BOY, ALONE TOGETHER
Linda Brady is rightfully proud of Monroe County’s program to keep the area’s registered sex offenders occupied while the kiddies are going door-to-door begging for candy.
For the last ten years, those on the registry have had to report to a county facility for a mandatory get-together. Brady, the county’s Chief Probation Officer, told me last year at this time the meeting not only protects the kiddies but the chaps on the registry as well. This way, she explained, if anything untoward happens to any kid while trick or treating in a neighborhood, the local sex offender has an airtight alibi.
Fair enough.
The old gang’ll get together Monday from 5:30pm through 8:30pm, prime Halloween doorbell-ringing hours. Like last year, the registered sex offenders will watch a movie.
Brady and the Monroe County Circuit Court Probation Department have not released the name of this year’s movie. Last year, while interviewing Brady for a story about the mandatory meeting, I learned the movie would be “Up.”
“Now Fellas, Don’t Look At This As A Training Film, OK?”
You remember “Up,” don’t you? Came out in 2009 from the Pixar/Disney CGI factory. Was the first animated feature ever to open the Cannes Film Festival. Nominated for a Best Picture Oscar®. Won Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score.
A pleasant way to kill a couple of hours, right?
Only “Up” was the story of a curmudgeonly old goat and a chubby kid in a Boy Scout-like uniform taking a trip together in the old bird’s home that’s carried aloft by thousands of helium balloons. The trip takes some weeks and the two eventually land in South America. No mention is made of the the chubby lad’s parents who, one would assume, are back home worried sick about their missing son.
By the way, among other adventures in South America, the old goat and the chubby kid cause a man to fall to his death down the world’s tallest waterfall.
A regular riot, huh? The homicide is bad enough — but the idea of a curmudgeonly old goat and scout-uniformed chubby kid spending weeks together in an airborne home, far from the prying eyes of parents and authorities seems a tad, oh, inappropriate for screening for a bunch of sex offenders, no?
As I say, the county’s Probation Department hasn’t released the name of this year’s film. I hope it isn’t “Lolita.”
And Kubrik’s Version Wasn’t Half As Discomforting As Adrian Lyne’s
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