Listening to conservative talk radio came in handy today when I found newly-former Georgetown professor Doug Feith on the Dennis Prager Show. Apparently, Feith isn’t too happy that his contract wasn’t renewed, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

The real fun came, though, when Feith talked about a talk he had with Provost James O’Donnell around the end of his time at Georgetown. Feith told O’Donnell that he thought discussion about his renewal should consider that he was the only faculty member with his viewpoints (i.e., armed intervention in the Middle East).

Rather than mentioning this guy, or that applying Feith’s recruiting theories would mean hiring a Pastafarian to teach theology, O’Donnell instead said, “I always consider it peculiar when conservatives talk about diversity of thought.” That provost is outspoken!

Much radio harumphing ensued, including host Dennis Prager wishing he had bought an ad in The Hoya for a petition supporting Feith.

Speaking of petitions, Feith complained that New York Times never reported on a counter-petition students circulated arguing for his renewal. Considering that the petition’s signatories included such doubtlessly genuine people as Feith & Crimes Against Humanity, Fire Feith Fast (3 times), and Moqtada Al-Sadr (Hawsa wa Qum ‘11), it was probably too hot a potato for the Gray Lady to handle.

Update: Provost O’Donnell says “no comment” via email. Fee Feith fo fum.

While Roy Hibbert is packed off to Toronto (or was it Indiana?) and Patrick Ewing Jr. joining Sacramento, let’s remember the Georgetown basketball players who weren’t so lucky.

Lee Scruggs from the class of 2001 is one of them. Trying to finagle an NBA career by playing abroad, he ended up dodging bullets in Venezuela:

“I was staying in a run-down hotel with just a mattress on the floor. There were chickens running around the hotel. It was bad,” he recalled.

“I do believe during the time I went there, that there was a civil war going on in Venezuela. There were militants riding around in Jeeps with guns. It was bad. I stayed there about two weeks and me and another American guy, we snuck out in the middle of the night, got our own plane tickets and came home.

Despite his derring-do in the pursuit of basketball fame, Scrugg’s is currently playing for the Edmonton Chill. If he can’t into the NBA, he says he plans on becoming a real estate agent.

Basically, Scruggs’s is Will Ferrell in Semi-Pro, but with more pathos.

Someday all this will be yours, my son

It’s Aaron Golds, class of 2011. He’s the first known candidate now for the student spot on the Advisory Neighborhood Commission (and the choice housing that entails), according to an email from outgoing commissioner Jenna Lowenstein, who watched interested students drop out of contact with her until only Golds was left.

Golds didn’t respond to my email, but he did leave his Facebook open to anyone on the Georgetown network, so we can find out some things about the boy who would be commissioner.

With only 39 friends on the Georgetown network, can he stand against a better-networked challenger? He’s also a College Democrat, so if he wins the 3 most recent commissioners will be Dems.

At least one more challenger needs to step forward so Georgetown will have an election dust-up. Surely more than one student wants to spend their Tuesday nights ruling on construction permits.

ANC picture from the Voice’s Flickr account

She’s a “fitness professional”; he’s looking for someone athletic. They’re both disheartened by the fact that as 30-somethings, everyone they want to date is taken. Best of all, they both have ridiculous favorite foods. (Mandarin oranges and California Pizza Kitchen; ice cream and lemonade.) Give the DL matchmakers credit for picking a pair that looks promising, if not interesting.

When it comes to the actual date, though, she’s totally overthinking it. She’s pissed when he doesn’t give her props for her outfit (”Normally when I wear that dress, men compliment me”), and one of her post-date quotes is, “I really wish I really liked him.” Nevertheless, they find common ground in their past failed romances, so at least they’ve got something to talk about.

Her tendency to overthink shines through again in her 3.9 rating–any gradation smaller than .5 is getting ridiculous. It’s a date, not nuclear fusion. She follows it up with the typical “This guy is great, but you can’t make that spark happen.” He gives the night a slightly more generous and significantly more normal 4.5, and keeps things positive by calling her “a wonderful girl.”

Rating: 2. There’s really nothing to read in these interviews; it’s all just weird overanalysis on her part and benign platitudes on his.

Chance of Success: 2. The weirdest part of this week’s match up is the total 180 the girl pulls in the post-date update from the DL crew: “A couple days later, Carolyn called Date Lab to say: ‘The more I think about it, the more great I think Van is…I’m definitely going to try to date him. Cross your fingers for us.’”

If she’s that upfront about her self-deception and lack of genuine emotion, he’s going to pick up on it and these two are going nowhere.

I’ll be honest: I’ve never really understood what the job of provost entails. I know it’s a vaguely important position, a step below President and outranking all the various Vice Presidents and Deans. Beyond that, I’m clueless.

So when I saw that Georgetown provost James O’Donnell had penned a commentary piece intriguingly entitled “What a Provost Knows and Can’t Tell” for The Chronicle of Higher Education,  I was expecting a little insight. Unfortunately, the article is more self-aggrandizing than enlightening.

O’Donnell was once your average cerebral, antisocial academic. Then someone went and made him Provost and apparently two things happened: he had to start being nice to people and he became damn-near omniscent. From the mundane (problematic ceiling tiles in the dining hall, drafty windows in classrooms) to the scandalous (whatever academics find scandalous), he knows it all. The provost also knows a lot of Georgetown’s financial details, so he’s probably battling depression.

You might think knowing all the secrets is nice, but omniscience isn’t easy:

“That’s the burden of the job: knowing all the things that others don’t know or would rather not know. Much that I know I can’t talk about, and I have had to get used to being the object of (usually) undeserved suspicion. Because I know so much, my actions are not fully intelligible to those who observe them.”

A provost, like God, works in mysterious ways. So mysterious, in fact, that I’m not clear what he does.

Georgetown basketball has the Thompsons and the Ewings, and now Washington neighborhood politics has a dynasty of its own in Kathy and India Henderson, mother and daughter and former and current ANC5B commissioners. Then again, maybe “puppetmaster and puppet” is more appropriate than “dynasty”:

When she relinquished her seat last year to run for city council, [Kathy Henderson] had her teenage daughter, India, run in her place (Henderson told me she “told” her daughter to run). And ever since India won the seat, her mom has exhibited masterful control over the young comish, marching her out of one meeting so a quorum wouldn’t be met.

And you thought Georgetown ANC’s, with its monomaniacal focus on alcohol, was weird.

This post was only partially motivated by my bitterness at having my own ANC commissioner chances dashed by accident of class year.

It’s easy to find high-end chain retail in Georgetown, but we’re desperately lacking in the hand-decorated moleskin journal/reconstructed t-shirt/jewelry made from recycled balloons departments. Luckily, we have Crafty Bastards.

Between 10 and 5 today at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, indie crafters will showcase their wares at the annual festival, either making you kick yourself for not thinking of turning old library books into purses first, or wonder why a designer felt it necessary to create a fetus-shaped cookie cutter. There’ll be a lot of Etsy staples like knitted cupcakes and printed t-shirts, but also unique items like “The Prick Cushion” (an anatomically-correct pin cushion), oil portraits of the cast of The Office, and elaborately crafted shadow puppet toys.

City Paper sponsors Crafty Bastards, and it’s tough to get past their judging panel for a spot at the fair. Along with the deserving vendors, Bastards also features music, food, a craft supply swap, and a ton of workshops on printmaking, crocheting, and more. Because of the fair’s success in the its first four years, there will be two this year (the second one coming along in September), but all items are one-of-a-kind and probably won’t make a repeat appearance.

The Pyramid Atlantic Art Center is located at 8230 Georgia Avenue (Silver Spring Metro on the Red Line.)

-Sara Carothers, Voices Editor

Losing your GOCard sucks. You can’t get into your dorm, the library, Leo’s, or anywhere else on campus that matters. Non-college student D.C. residents will soon get the same feeling when the One Card–a new centralized identification system which will be their library card, public school attendance sheet, rec center pass, and more –spreads its mark of the Beast all over the District.

At first I was a little freaked out by the 1984-ishness of the new card, but then I remembered how excited I got when I found out that the new GOCards come with SmartTrip.

Plus, the ACLU gives it the thumbs up, and as people better at spotting threats to civil liberties than me, I’ll believe them when they say the One Card doesn’t infringe on privacy. Hopefully the city will ignore Georgetown’s lesson and not charge $25 for a replacement.

A Georgetown basketball star has been the prize of a Draft Day trade.  The Hoyas’ beloved big man Roy Hibbert, who was pegged to fall somewhere in the early 20’s in the draft, worked his way up to the 17th spot where he was drafted by the Toronto Raptors.

But like Georgetown teammate Jeff Green, who was selected by the Celtics last year only to be traded immediately to Seattle, Hibbert had no chance to imagine a future north of the border before talks of a trade to the Indiana Pacers. Hibbert will join Kansas star Brandon Rush, who was traded to the Pacers via the Portland Trailblazers on Draft Day.

It’s difficult to imagine a long, successful career in the NBA for Hibbert.  His size, passing and solid all-around fundamentals might make him effective, but his athleticism (read: rebounding) is beyond suspect at this point.  Expect to see Big Roy get his two-step hook shot thrown back in his face a few times before he figures out the NBA’s bigger, faster style.

After the jump, Patrick Ewing Jr.’s chances.

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You can buy a hat, you can buy a rat, but you still can’t buy a gat in the District, no matter what the Supreme Court says about the gun ban. The Wall Street Journal says DC will try to use zoning and a helpful (for once) dose of NIMBYs to keep people from opening gun stores.

None of the eight wards are interested in a gun store, and the government is happy to oblige them. This will hamper the imports of guns from other states, as guns ordered from out-of-state gun merchants are mailed to other gun stores for customer pick-up instead of directly to the customer.

The government is just being a sore loser. Let the neighborhoods fight if they don’t want gun stores, but forcing gun sales across the state line just takes money out of DC.

What do you think?

Flickr photo from user barjack used under a Creative Commons license. Article via The Goodspeed Update.