Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Anybody else see the end of "Casino"?

One of my favorite movies is this classic.

I'm fascinated by organized crime at all levels, from "The Godfather"-like behavior of the old school to the more modern "Sopranos" style of management.

"Casino" falls sort of in the middle. If you've never seen the movie, it focuses on the building of what we know as "new Vegas." It's the transition from the 1950s-1960s Dean Martin-Frank Sinatra kind of Vegas to what we see today ... the mega hotels, the roller coasters. The movie ends in the 1980s, so it ends with right where the serious changes start to take place.

But, I digress. Again. I'm always digressing.

Anyway ...

At the end of the movie, I guess with about 10 minutes or so to go, you can hear "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals start playing in the background and EVERYBODY STARTS DYING. It's kind of like falling dominoes -- one mob guy goes down, and starts to take everybody else down with him and it's nothing by 10 solid minutes of death.

So, you could imagine that when I read this story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today, I started hearing "House of the Rising Sun" play in the background:

WVU's provost unsure of records on MBA

This is a followup to an extensive story they did Dec. 21 about how, well, an MBA (and, oof, it just sorta happens to be for the governor's daughter ...) just sort of showed up. It's all very intriguing and if you're a conspiracy theorist, it's pretty much as good as Christmas.

This was the paragraph in today's piece, though, that caused me to kind of let out one of those long, ooooooooooooof kind of breaths:

Yesterday, Mr. Lang acknowledged that those records are lacking and that no other students have reported problems with their records since a Dec. 21 story by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette raised questions about how the university went about retroactively granting the degree to Ms. Bresch, a longtime friend and business associate of WVU President Mike Garrison.

Oh. Hell. Something on the inside tells me that probably wasn't the right answer.

It's almost like if you listen really carefully, in the background, you can hear it very faintly:

"... there is a house in New Orleans they call the rising sun ..."

2 comments:

carissaad said...

So I guess now really isn't the time to consider going back for an MBA from WVU. That was on the short list should I decide to go back to school

Jacque Jo said...

Um, yeah. ... I'd hold off on that for *just* a little bit longer.

UC has a pretty good EMBA program from what I heard. :)