Down the slippery slope

MAY 3 UPDATE: Lift-in has been postponed from May 4 to May 18 because, as you may have noticed, we still don't have any piers yet! (Who wants to bet it will be postponed again come May 17?)

Lift-in is now scheduled for next Saturday, May 4. As of this past Friday, the National Weather Service was forecasting 5–8" of snow for yesterday, April 27; Madison got half an inch. Nevertheless, the forecast and 35° temps were enough to suppress turnout at the annual Mifflin Street Block Party (photo at right), and it would have been an awful day for lift-in. Yesterday's mini-blizzard did get us thinking, though...

As Hoofer Sailing completes its transition to a draconian kiddie fest where everyone in any position of authority has plausible deniability, the UW-Madison continues its slide into mediocrity. One alarming symptom of the slide: library closings. The Biology, Business, Chemistry, Geography, and Engineering libraries have already been shuttered, with many more to come. They are being turned into "book free zones" where students can go to hang out. Engineering (Wendt) was a major campus library.

Not only is the UW closing libraries; the idle minds in Bascom are canceling journals by the truckload and have been for some years now. Not just the printed journals, mind you, but the electronic (PDF) versions as well. In academia, technical journals are the only thing more important than books.

“I think it’s very sensible and practical,” said Ed Van Gemert, vice provost for libraries. And much cheaper too.

The reasons for "consolidating" libraries are two-fold. One is budgetary--as fewer and fewer full-pay (read: wealthy) students, e.g. from out east and overseas, choose UW-Madison, and as the Republican legislature continues to slash funding, something has to go. Why not the libraries? The second reason, which is entirely unadvertized: it's much easier to manage surveillance at a smaller number of large libraries (with their smaller number of entry choke-points) than at three dozen smaller libraries. In other words, the savings obtained by cancelling hundreds of important professional journals is being used to install more and more surveillance cameras. The self-serving fearmongers at UWPD are pushing this, in part through their campus-wide poster campaign. Of course, cops who can barely read or write have no use for technical journals.

One has to wonder what the UW's priorities are. As UW-Madison plummeted from the 10th ranked U.S. university overall in 1982 to 44th in 2017, the football program has gone from a perennial also-ran to a powerhouse, and the UW has become the top party school in America. Libraries may be crucial to academics, but they aren't needed for football or parties! The overall plan is to get rid of an astounding 75% of research materials.

The latest proposal is to turn Memorial Library into an all-season, multi-level playing field for frisbee golf.

But seriously, how about a climbing wall on College Library with some zip lines leading down to Hoofers?! Meanwhile in HSC, responsible adults are prohibited from taking beer on cruises and are required to wear their lifejacket at all times lest they stumble overboard in an alcohol withdrawal-induced catalepsy and drown.

'Judgment' has officially been removed from the requirements for a keelboat skipper rating.

The Hoofer TOP 10

APRIL 11 UPDATE: Hoofer Sailing Club (i.e. BOC, paid staff, and instructors) wants to assure customers (a.k.a. "club members"), potential customers, parents of potential customers (youth sailing), and UW-Madison's Chancellor Blank that we are doing our best to weed out incompetent instructors. At this point, most of them either became alcoholics and disappeared, or else club leaders used the latest keelboat insurance money to exercise the buyout clause in their lifetime contracts and sent them to work for tech start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area. Oddly enough, the club is still paying some of them, but at least it's not to wreck Hoofer keelboats anymore.

We've added a handy new menu button on the right--check it out. These are the result of a couple of us talking the other night, possibly after a few brewskis, so it is a work in progress. If you recall a good one that's not on the list, leave a comment!

Hello Yellow Brick Road, or Why we hate Wisconsin, Part 3

No one can argue that there aren't a lot of dogs around campus. It seems like almost everybody has a dog, though in reality it's probably every third or fourth house.

Twice a day, each dog's owner takes poochie out for a "walk", whereupon it leaves a yellow stain in the snow. No one wants to make their dog wade through deep snow to a tree, so most of it gets deposited right at the edge of the sidewalk. Now let's do a little math.

Most people don't walk their dog more than a few blocks, so let's assume a 4x4 block home range. That's 16 square blocks or roughly 480 houses. If we use a conservative estimate of one dog every four houses, that's 120 dogs, each depositing some 8 oz of liquid twice a day. This occurs throughout the winter, with continuous snow cover typically from December to March. Hence, in a given 4x4 block area--your neighborhood--that's:

120 dogs X twice a day X 8 oz X 90 days = 1350 gallons of dog pee.

Enough to fill a swimming pool! Now divide by 64 (16 square blocks X 4 sides on each block) = 21 gallons of dog pee right along your block, i.e. the 6-8 houses in a row that are your neighbors.

We can zoom in even closer: 21 gal / 8 houses = 2.5 gallons of other people's dog pee right in front of your house. About now, this all starts to melt and flow straight onto the sidewalk. You may think you're wading through melted snow on your way out the door, but....

Go, Wisconsin!

What does this have to do with HSC? Sometimes people bring their dogs on board the keelboats, and sometimes, poochia has to do something that just can't wait. Some may recall this happening just last summer. There are also some other, more ephemeral links between pee and Hoofers, but we'll let you Mull over those.

The above calculation can of course be reduced to: 2 dogs/linear block X 16 oz/day X 90 days / 128 oz per gal = 22.5 gal along your block. But that 1,350 gal figure is impressive! And we haven't even mentioned the other stuff each of those dogs deposits once a day...

Overpaid

FEB 22 UPDATE: We've switched to embedded comments so it's easier to reply to particular comments, and this will allow sub-threads on those topics too (and possibly make it easier to ignore certain other comments). Let's see how this works.

A comment on our previous post inspired us to do a little research. Here's what your favorite (or least favorite) Hoofer staffer gets paid per annum:

• Outdoor Programs Dir. Joe Webb: $52,570
• WUD Cultmaster Jim Rogers: $47,922
• Hoofer Advoosigator Dave Elsmo: $46,205
• Director of Kiddies Susan Dibbell: $121,899
• Wis. Union Führer Mark Guthier: $158,500

That last one is almost eighty dollars an hour--to sit in his office on the fifth floor and come up with new ways to waste money. For reference, a full professor makes around $100K, although that can vary somewhat.

A sailing instructor? $10/hr, give or take a buck (which would translate to $20K/year if full time were possible)--to go out and risk our lives, get sunburned, cut, bruised, yelled at, and hammered. We do it all for a fraction of what the office minions make. We might as well be volunteering.

And do we really need an advoosigator? Hoofer Sailing always managed itself in the past. Why pay one individual $46K/year to tell us to be sure to tie our shoe laces? As far as Jim's returning as advoosigator, that's unlikely, but not because it would be a pay cut. As of 2010 Jim was making a cool $46K--about what he's making now (that's what is meant by stag-nant wages). There just isn't a whole lot of opportunity for advancement at the Wis. Union, unless you aspire to become Union director, which in fact is Jim's stated goal. (are you grooming him yet, Mark?)

Another comment questioned the need for a Head of Instruction. Alas, someone has to organize and schedule lessons, and a rotation, like we have for security, would be a mess IMHO. But that doesn't mean HOI has to be a full time position.

Note that the above are 2017 salaries, so they've probably all creeped up a few bucks since then.

Why we love summer (and hate Wisconsin the rest of the time)

JAN 29 UPDATE: Okay, this has to be a first--two days of classes cancelled in a block:

UW cancels classes through noon Thursday

I'm going ice skating! Let's have a snowball fight! Er, holy crap it's too cold out... How can there even be classes this afternoon? (there are)

Friday night's sailing weather recap:



That's -29 degrees celsius.

Sailing seems awfully far away right now, even sitting here in the lounge writing this. It's too cold to even go ice sailing, although there is plenty of ice out there.

'Nuf said.

We failed = end of blog?

Nah. This blog will probably outlive you (provided Google does). But we did fail to deter construction of the new "marina" which is now well underway. We took an interest too late, as did many others, even as the promoters worked quietly to make big changes. The technocrats, the hacks, the self-serving administrators planned and schemed and then unleashed their project when they knew it would be too late to stop it.

That's how such people operate--they do preliminary studies, make sure they have the support of key people, line up at least one big donor (to draw others in), and handle doubters with half-truths and misdirection, all with as little publicity as possible. Always the driving motivation is narcissistic--vanity, ego, self-enrichment (along with a bit of idiocy in this case, to waste $5 million re-dressing the Hoofer lakefront).

***Naming recognition opportunities still available*** :)

Do you think it's not narcissism? The new "marina" will have big bronze plaques proudly displaying the names of big donors, just like the old parking lot-cum-Alumni Park is dotted with huge, vain placards. If you can read this page in its entirety without barfing, you should win a roll of Tums. Try it, it's not that long. And how about the "Badger Pride Wall"... Does anyone really call it that?? Pride, the most egregious of the Seven Deadly Sins--sprayed in your face. I'm not religious, but I find the use of pride as a driving motivation disgusting. It's what motivates managers to remodel things that don't need remodeling.

As for Alumni Park's supposed raison d'être--celebrating the "Wisconsin Idea"--that philosophy has become an inside joke, along with its corollary of "sifting and winnowing." In the 21st century, the UW teaches students to grab whatever they can, to abuse those they can abuse, and to lie about it afterward--and to take pride in getting away with it. This isn't just an outgrowth of the creeping xenophobia at the UW; it is a sea change in the basic philosophy that governs the university.

Metaphorically speaking, UW-Madison is an aging, pimped-up East European whore lathered in makeup, carrying pepper spray and various diseases. Administrators prefer this to a less-glamorous-but-honest-persona because the former naturally draws more notice, more funding, more paying students, more gullible faculty, and so on. It works because people tend to believe what they hear, a fundamental flaw in human nature that lets the few prey on the many. Once a person realizes s/he may have been duped, most don't want to dig any further for fear they won't like what they find.

But hey, hopefully by July we'll have some new piers! Apologies to the poor muskrats who called the old piers home.