Dan DiLeo Op-Ed in Daily Sun

[RichH]

[quote KeithK][quote ugarte]Bad in the sense of 'tasteless' and 'inappropriate for the Sun' if it was meant to mock religious belief. I didn't - and don't - have any reason to believe that DiLeo was insincere in his belief in Catholic dogma.[/quote]
Exactly.  Since it was 4/1 I had to consider the possibility but the article seemed sincere.[/quote]

Plus, in the past, the Fools Day articles are usually obvious by the headline.  "Skorton to Mount Johnny's Sign on Day Hall" would be an example.  This is not obvious, nor did I see any joke stories on the website from yesterday.

[Jim Hyla]

[quote RichH][quote KeithK][quote ugarte]Bad in the sense of 'tasteless' and 'inappropriate for the Sun' if it was meant to mock religious belief. I didn't - and don't - have any reason to believe that DiLeo was insincere in his belief in Catholic dogma.[/quote]
Exactly.  Since it was 4/1 I had to consider the possibility but the article seemed sincere.[/quote]

Plus, in the past, the Fools Day articles are usually obvious by the headline.  "Skorton to Mount Johnny's Sign on Day Hall" would be an example.  This is not obvious, nor did I see any joke stories on the website from yesterday.[/quote]And wasn't it common for them to start and then to be continued on a nonexistent inside page?

[David Harding]

When I went to the Sun web site yesterday (4/1) I found an announcement that their electronic version, or maybe the whole effort, was being converted to Twitter.  Then there was a string of twitters that were clearly spoofs.  Today it's back to normal.

[Josh '99]

[quote RichH][quote KeithK][quote ugarte]Bad in the sense of 'tasteless' and 'inappropriate for the Sun' if it was meant to mock religious belief. I didn't - and don't - have any reason to believe that DiLeo was insincere in his belief in Catholic dogma.[/quote]
Exactly.  Since it was 4/1 I had to consider the possibility but the article seemed sincere.[/quote]

Plus, in the past, the Fools Day articles are usually obvious by the headline.  "Skorton to Mount Johnny's Sign on Day Hall" would be an example.  This is not obvious, nor did I see any joke stories on the website from yesterday.[/quote]Hmm, maybe I'm wrong then.

[billhoward]

[quote jtwcornell91][quote KeithK]The main point of the piece was the morality argument about contraception as it relates to relationships.  You can agree with it or not.  Let's try to refrain frmo general bashing of religion (or of specific religions).[/quote]

I believe ugarte's point was that the piece would have done better to stick to the morality argument rather than to include dubious-at-best assertions like "NFP ... has been shown to be equally, if not more, effective as contraception when practiced correctly."[/quote]
Ugarte, it seemed, went out of his way, here at least, to steer clear of the minefield of organized-religion-bashing. (Pervert ministers and priests inadvertantly do the bashing for us.) When an op-ed piece such as this includes asides claiming as fact things that just arenn't so, that's fair game. The article's validity is tainted whether it's a sentence or half the word-count.

It's good that an athlete inserts himself in in the public arena in more ways than flipping a puck over the side glass. But the cardinal error of the piece wasn't fact. It was that it was dry, plodding, and not very convincing. Even if DiLeo got coaching from William Safire or Peggy Noonan on how to write a conservative-viewpoint piece with style and warmth, it's still going to falter the moment it suggests there's science to support the benefits of keeping condoms out of all-AIDS, all-the-time places like Africa. It didn't get that far. No offense meant (which often means the opposite), but the dry nature of the writing did give me pause, too, to wonder if that was the writer's natural style, or if it was a clever 4/1 spoof of other overly dry opinion pieces.

A good 4/1 counterpoint piece might be a defense of the Vatican's ban of massaging shower heads an an impediment the natural love between husband and wife. Especially the flexible shower heads with massage settings Low, Medium, and Who Needs a Man.

I sometimes fall into the same trap as others perhaps do of thinking of Cornell athletes one-dimensionally, as athletes and not as students. When I was on the Sun, one of the goalies, David Elenbaas,  needed to write for the Sun to fulfill part of a Comm Arts course. David was a great writer with an incredible knowledge of baseball, and a warm and natural style of writing, something that was not the case of all Sun sportswriters. I was probably a bit of a better writer, but when we laced on skates, it was clear who was the better student-athlete overall.

So no matter the quality of DiLeo's piece, it's good to see athletes exposing other sides of themselves.

[CKinsland]

In the print version of the Sun, the outer layer of newspaper (so, the front page and the back page with their facing pages) was clearly the April Fool's Day issue.

On the front page, the name was "The Cornell Diaries Sun".  The headlines were clearly false "Keystone to be Served in Cornell Dining Halls", "Skorton Arrested on Embezzlement Charges; 600 Students Robbed Blind", "CU Has Biggest Porn Collection"...all those articles went to non-existent interior pages.  Back page had "M. Basketball Player Brawls in Trillium" and, my fave, "Beavers' Frozen Four Spot Revoked After NCAA Can't Find Bemidji St.".

Removing that outer layer of newspaper left behind what, to all intents and purposes, appeared to be a "normal" edition of the Sun.  "CU Admits 19.1% of Applicants", "Engineering Prioritizes Instruction and Research in Face of Budget Cuts", etc.  None of the articles in the "normal" section seemed to be spoofs or pranks.  

I'd have to say the 4 pages of the out layer of paper were the April Fool's Day issue.  DiLeo's column is in the normal section and was, to all appearances, not a joke.

CK

[ugarte]

[quote billhoward]David [Elenbaas] was a great writer with an incredible knowledge of baseball, and a warm and natural style of writing, something that was not the case of all Sun sportswriters. I was probably a bit of a better writer, but when we laced on skates, it was clear who was the better student-athlete overall.[/quote]
You might have been just as good a student-athlete if you hadn't hurt your shoulder patting yourself on the back.

[CKinsland]

http://www.livescience.com/health/090331-bad-pope-condoms.html

[Trotsky]

[quote billhoward]it's good to see athletes exposing other sides of themselves.[/quote]

Huh huhuh...

[billhoward]

[quote Trotsky][quote billhoward]it's good to see athletes exposing other sides of themselves.[/quote]

Huh huhuh...[/quote]
Someone else old enough to remember Lance Rentzel, Joey Heatherton, and those exhbition season jokes.

[billhoward]

Funny, it's a repeat injury.