Feel better, Beloit College kids.

At least my alma mater isn’t firing half its faculty or selling the Logan Museum.

Peter French, Brandeis’s chief operating officer, explained that the university’s situation is far more dire than it appeared in news accounts… He objected to the word “bankrupt,” but what would you call an institution with a projected deficit of $79 million over the next six years, a tapped-out reserve fund, a shrunken endowment and “quite a number” of big donors hit hard by the Madoff scandal?

Brandeis has already cut expenses and staff this year and last, and raised tuition and fees. French said the alternative now was either a drastic shrinking of the university or selling the art. Faced with the prospect of closing 40 percent of the university’s buildings, reducing staff by an additional 30 percent, or firing 200 of its 360 faculty members—any of which, French said, would drastically change the university’s mission and essentially cripple it—“We’d rather use Rose.”

HT: The Daily Beast

Is “whoring for a good cause” ok?

My friends Emily and Lindsey work at LCBH, a Chi-town nonprofit dedicated to providing affordable housing and squatters’ tenants’ rights (disclosure: I do some freelancing for them). They’re currently organizing Hearts for Housing, their annual Hearts tournament (with open bar!) and raffle, but they’re having a bit of trouble selling tickets. Now, I’d normally slap someone for trying to pull that do-gooder crap on me, but the raffle items are actually pretty good–a pair of plane tickets anywhere in the US, a day in the Moto kitchen with uber-famous chef Homaru Cantu, and an overnight and breakfast at Sofitel (one of the top 500 hotels in the world), among others. And Emily’s confided that they’ve only sold about thirty tickets thus far, but they have over 100 raffle items…so right now, your chance of winning is about 333%, according to my calculations. If you don’t like people or live in Chicago, good news! You don’t even have to show up to win. So give them yr money.

Good thing I don’t have an iPhone.

One of the drawbacks of Garmin/iPhone’s “find a ___” has been that they don’t really tell me anything about the business. What’s interesting about RA Sushi down the street from Whole Foods (decent happy hour deals on disappointing sushi, as it turns out)? Likewise, when Katy and I were trying to find somewhere to grab a drink in Glen Burnie, we accidentally followed the GPS to a brewery/bottling plant.

So I’m intrigued by outside.in‘s RADAR, an iPhone app that searches for blog posts, news stories, tweets and discussion threads about businesses near you (or near locations you specify). Although there are still some teething problems the developers say they’ve fixed (load times, crashing, etc.), I have to admit it sounds cool. So far, no BB commenters seem to have taken the plunge. Any of my iPhone-toting friends want to give it a shot?

Update: outside.in is also pretty cool its own right.

The wheel of fortune.

Andrew Sullivan feels prescient:

[Massive government spending] is Bush’s final legacy, and some of us saw it coming years ago: the creation of a massive social welfare state in America, with the potential of entrenching liberalism for generations. This is Bush’s achievement more than Obama’s. And without Bush, none of it would be thinkable.

During those years, I was terrified that Bush was steering the country irrevocably to the right, as his administration systematically eliminated civil liberties and social programs. It feels good to be wrong.

Also in another story I read about a spider who could write.

Former Falcons quarterback Michael Vick has been back in the sports-blogosphere recently for his early attempts to support his return to the NFL. And because PETA never met a terrible branding idea they didn’t love, in 2007 they offered to give Vick an animal “empathy test.”

As a rule, I try and avoid being a language prescriptivist. It’s annoying for those around me, and doesn’t do much good. However, let’s take a moment to review Vick’s answer to the first question:

I absolutely love the whole thing. The grades in the left-hand margins, doing “on to others”; the fact that PETA shows videos featuring “a young person hanging a live cat from the ceiling and stabbing the animal to death with a knife” while wondering if Vick has a “psychopathic brain disorder“; the letter (slash word) “u”. I crack up every time I read that highlighted sentence and correction, as well as some of these other gems:

“One act which really blew my mind was a 2 month old piglet who went after a drowning little boy in a story I read. Now that’s heroic.”

“Chickens have an uncanny ability to think and are very agile. They are very athletic to me after watching the video”

HT: Deadspin via Shutdown Corner