Cardiac Spill: Abstract Basketball Preview

January 31st: Notre Dame at Pitt

You heard of the Hyperloop? It's Elon Musk's - Elon Musk, he's rich, google him - proposed high-speed transit thing. No, it's not magnetic. It's like... pneumatic tube technology, or something. Whatever it is, it goes fast, y'all. Or it will go fast. It should go fast. It's a train in a steel tube and then something happens with air pressure and it goes 800 miles per hour down the California coast. I don't know. My point is, I've got this idea for whenever it starts happening that I'm very excited about.

So somehow, the night before the thing debuts I'm gonna sneak into the tubes somehow. I'm gonna wait it out, maybe bring light reading or something. Then, I'm gonna wait for the train car (loop tram?) to start heading towards me. Then I'm gonna open my mouth, hold up my knife and fork, and swallow the car whole.

I'm going to eat the Hyperloop. It's gonna go so great.

February 2nd: Bryant at Pitt

Any given flight, your chance of surviving a plane crash is in the neighborhood of 99.999815%. To put it another way, that means that if you fly 5,405,405 times in your life, you'd survive 5,405,404 of those. The average human being lives perhaps eighty years; if that average human flew twice a year their entire life, they'd have to live something like 34,000 lives to fly that many times.

And yet people are still afraid of flying, and those numbers do not make them feel any better. I know those numbers, and they don't make me feel any better. What's up with that?

February 7th: Syracuse at Pitt

"Do you remember the days before it was dark all the time, and everyone started only having nightmares? Like, the days back when all our buildings weren't wreckage and food tasted good."
"I'm not sure I do."
"Same."

February 11th: Pitt at Louisville

Halfway through a surprisingly slow trip to the grocery store, Julie flipped her car's radio on. That is to say, she pushed the button that turned the radio on - everything is buttons in a Prius. Conveniently (to her), it was already tuned to NPR. A female voice - the interview subject, by her cadence - was halfway through a sentence.

"...and so on the consumer end of the equation, things are looking up in some ways. When surveyed, over 70% of people say they consider whether or not the product is green when shopping."

"But we're still in trouble?"

"Oh my, yes. There are a million ways to put this, but consider this: people are concerned about their cars emissions, right? Like by buying the right car, a cleaner car, it's a step in the right direction. And to most people, buying a car is one of the bigest decisions they make in terms of their finances, what they have control over, et cetera. So when people are doing the best the can under reasonable circumstances -"

"When they're not going off the grid."

"Exactly. But then you look into things further - where the emissions are actually coming from, and one giant ship emits as much as fifty million cars. Sixteen ships pollute as much as all the cars. So it's tough to really make a difference as one person, or even a good-sized group."

"So are you the sort to use canvas bags, buy locally, drive a hybrid, do that sort of thing, or do you not bother?"

"I buy locally when I like the local product, but I use plastic bags when I get groceries. I have a dog, I walk the dog, I prefer the plastic bags."

"Danielle Maslek, associate professor of Environmental Studies at Buzzkill University -"

"Barnard College, Robert."

"...her new book on climate change is titled We're All Gonna Die Desperate, Starving Cannibals, Last Of Our Kind, In A Prison Of Our Own Design and is available now, thank you for joining us. Moving to the world of sports now, the name on everyone's lips is Walsall after - "

Julie, having arrived at her destination, pushed one button to kill her engine and another to pop her trunk. Crap, she thought. I forgot the canvas bags again.

February 14th: UNC at Pitt

LANG 2201: Dolphin Language

In this exciting semester-long course, students will become fluent in the language of the dolphins. By the end of the course, students will have mastery of dolphin grammar and syntax, and be able to give simple commands and compliments to all major varieties of dolphin. Course includes two weeks of residence and isolation at the university dolphin chamber (chamber fee: $60). This course is a requisite for graduation for all majors.

ROBOTICS 451: Robotic Telekinesis

This three year course examines the theoretical implications of a telekinetic robot on the mass public. As a culminating project, students will build a robot with no arms and program it to perform simple telekinetic feats such as spoon bending (spoon fee: $75). This course is a requisite for graduation for all majors.

SOC 2311: Women

A twenty-minute course instructing students how to understand women (woman fee: $55.20). This course is a requisite for graduation for all majors.

February 16th: Pitt at Virginia

The rabbit looks up at the sky. The hawk is above it still. The rabbit runs. The hawk follows. The rabbit must avoid obstacles. The hawk has open sky. The rabbit tries to hide. The hawk waits. The rabbit looks up at the sky. There are now two hawks. Had the rabbit just not noticed the other hawk? Now there are five hawks. The rabbit runs. The hawks are still in the sky. There are a dozen of them. No, dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. The rabbit feels the eyes of a million hawks on it.

The rabbit stops, lays down, and tries to remember a time when the sky was not only hawks.

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