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© 2007 Mary Elizabeth Lake

Discovered this week that Mainspring is up for pre-order on Amazon. Check out Trial of Flowers [ Clarkesworld | Amazon ] now, and reserve your copy of Mainspring for this summer…

Also, on Wednesday morning Frank Deford was on NPR talking about Birmingham Southern and what a Division I athletic program can really cost a school. My favorite part was the comment about the college president and chairman of the board of trustees discussing why Birmingham Southern offered 116 full athletic scholarships and one full academic scholarship. and I have kicked this around. I’m highly dubious of the overwhelming financial emphasis on college athletics, and indeed of athletic privilege in general, having grown up in the 1970s and early 1980s when student athletes at both secondary and college levels were essentially immune from administrative or legal consequences of their actions pretty much right up to the brink of murder. On the other hand, I’ve never been any kind of sports fan in the first place, so never having drunk the kool-aid, it’s pretty hard for me to see the magic, whatever that might be. All I see is institutions of higher education lavishing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on coaches and much more than that on stadiums, which I don’t see the educational value of.

Meanwhile, it’s killing cold here. What I call “moustache cold”, when my breath freezes on my moustache as I walk from the building to the car. I’ll be glad to go home tomorrow, weather permitting, but I’m not sure the weather in Oregon is much of an improvement right now.