SUPER BOWL SIBERIA
Take heart, Broncos fans. We may not be playing in the Super Bowl, but at least we don’t have to fork out thousands of dollars for the privilege of hanging out in Indianapolis for a few days. It only seems fitting that all those wealthy East Coast fans who are paying as much as $10,000 per ticket are headed to a place where the most exciting pastime is a temporary zip line designed to fly SB attendees through the heart of this nightlifeless cow-town some 50 feet above the entertainment desert below where no club or modern drinking and eating establishment has ever taken root. Most Super Bowls are played out in the shadows of our nation’s prime centers of debauchery, such as New Orleans’ French Quarter, Miami’s South Beach or San Diego’s Gaslamp District, but not this year. The only way this could have worked out with more humor is if Salt Lake City had an NFL stadium. We sure hope all you Manhattan/Cambridge elites don’t forget to check out the Polled Hereford competition over at the fairgrounds where we hear they have a Budweiser fountain flowing right next to the butter sculpture exhibit. Y’all have fun.
‘IF I HAD A MILLION DOLLARS’
Not even the Barenaked Ladies could have come up with this real-life whackjob example of what can be had provided money is no object.
Boulder real estate developer Stephen Tebo reportedly laid out more than 160 grand for the privilege of being able to tell people that he owns the very Cadillac hearse that transported President John F. Kennedy’s dead body from a Dallas Hospital morgue to Air Force One following the beloved leader’s assassination.
The man with more money than taste will apparently be adding the fourwheeled reminder of one of our nation’s darkest moments to his existing collection of cars estimated to number near 400. Congratulations … sort of … or not.
OVERPAID CU ADMINISTRATORS
We love it when the University of Colorado regents wake up and smell the coffee.
It was suddenly news last week that — gasp — a portion of the tuition hikes heaped on the narrow shoulders of our college students is going towards salary increases for already overpaid administrators.
This has been going on for a long, long time, but it’s especially putrid in the current economic environment, when many people are still unemployed, or at least underemployed, and students are holding down menial jobs in addition to their coursework. And it doesn’t pass the sniff test when CU officials are constantly whining about budget crises and how the state has slashed the university’s funding over the years.
Hooray for the regents who are publicly questioning this practice of giving ridiculous raises to people who are already making well into six figures — and who, in some cases, are not exactly superstars that we need to pay well to keep.
The tired old argument that you need to pay someone $250,000 to retain him or her in a competitive market is bullshit in most cases. We could afford to lose some of these bozos and replace them with more competent people pretty easily — and maybe even pay them less.
We can see having to pay good faculty to keep them from being lured away to another university, but as for padding the pockets of administrator fat cats? We urge you to check out the online petition asking CU to rescind the raises of nine university administrators: http://chn.ge/CUpay.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
