As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in that one book you kind of remember from high school, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
Of course, things don’t exactly get crisp around these parts until well into November, but hey! Enjoy your scarves, pink cheeks and steaming lattes while you can.
And now, your turn-my-sweater-swag-on edition of Darts & Laurels.
First, a DART to Grambling State University in Louisiana.
The Grambling Tigers staged a boycott of practices and games in protest of the bad conditions it faced both at home and during travel games, according to Deadspin. Although the boycott ended this week with school officials agreeing to pay for upgrades to the team’s locker and weight rooms — which had damaged floors and ceilings, plus some nasty water damage — the school is still attracting attention.
The online editor of the Grambling student newspaper, The Gramblinite, was fired from his position at the paper. He said he was fired for tweeting statements from anonymous players and photos of the rundown football facilities. So much for freedom of the press.
Our sympathies go out to the Tigers’ football players and newspaper staffers, and we’re forever thankful for our sprawling football program and independent-newspaper status.
On to happier news in our very own Alachua County: This week, Peaceful Paths, a network that provides aid for victims of domestic violence, announced it would open a High Risk Team in Alachua.
The goal of the task force is to provide stronger support for victims of intimate-partner violence by working on a case-by-case basis. This week, we’re handing off a LAUREL to Peaceful Paths, which has been operating in the area since 1974.
You guys may remember the infamous pepper-spraying cop of the viral video that appeared in 2011. The cop, a former University of California, Davis police officer, was awarded more than $38,000 in worker’s compensation, the San Francisco Gate reported this week.
If you don’t remember, the video is enough to make you sick. The cop, former police Lt. John Pike, let loose a stream of pepper spray on student activists — who were nonviolently protesting tuition hikes — while blocking their exit from the school’s quad.
Yeah. So it goes without saying: a DART to the State Division of Worker’s Compensation Appeals Board. Pike claimed psychiatric injury — a gross perversion of justice for the students who sustained both physical AND psychiatric injury from being, you know, pepper-sprayed in the face.
On a happier note, we’re awarding a taking-girl-power-to-the-next-level LAUREL to Paloma Noyola Bueno, a 12-year-old girl from Matamoros, Mexico who stunned her teacher after answering a complex math problem — adding up every number between zero and 100 without a calculator — in minutes, when the task should have taken an hour.
Paloma reportedly took an achievement exam and earned the highest math score in the country. Meanwhile, you still need your iPhone to calculate the proper tip on your tab at Gator City.
Happy weekend!
A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 10/25/2013 under the headline "Darts & Laurels"
