Valley of the jerks

 Tonight the Madness revs up again, and that means a good week gets better for coaches who've behaved badly. 

This week, after all, St. John's brought Rick Pitino home to New York City, apparently convinced none of his assistants will be running a brothel out of the basketball complex the way they did on the Rickster's watch at Louisville. Meanwhile, in the Sweet Sixteen, both Sean Miller (Xavier) and Kelvin Sampson (Houston) will send their teams out, apparently having been cured of the scofflaw-ery that got them fired at Arizona and Indiana, respectively.

Yes, sir. It's a good week for redemption, whether or not it's actually real.

It's also a good week for one coach who needs no redemption.

That would be Micah Shrewsbury from Penn State. whose team nearly won the Big Ten Tournament and reached the round of 32 in Da Tournament before losing by five to 2-seed Texas. That wasn't a bad showing for a football school, and Shrewsbury did it right, besides.

That's why Notre Dame hired him as Mike Brey's successor. 

It's a great hire, a character hire, and Shrewsbury will represent Notre Dame the way it likes to be represented. And the Blob said so on the Magic Twitter Thingy.

Which took me right back to the Valley of the Jerks, social media being the hangout for creeps and racist cruds it is.

Not long after I tweeted what I did, see, someone responded that "Ray Charles could have seen that coming." Then he topped that by complaining about all these Woke universities (his caps) hiring black coaches, and how Indiana will probably "hire a black guy ala Purdue" when it fires football coach Tom Allen.

To which I probably should have responded, "Speak up, son, I can't hear you through the sheet and hood."

I didn't, because you never want to encourage these, um, people. Plus, trolls hate it when you ignore 'em. 

But more and more now I wonder what the hell is wrong with people, and it's not just because I'm a certified Cranky Old Man.  It's because people say stuff now they've  apparently always thought, but now have either the cloak of anonymity or the approval of an audience who think it's edgy and bad-ass to be a bigot to say it out loud.

The other day, for instance, some radio foofs in (surprise, surprise) Boston were ranking "top five nips" in a discussion about favorite hard liquors. Then one foof -- producer Chris Curtis - piped up and said of his favorite "nip": "I'd probably go Mina Kimes."

Who of course is ESPN's premier NFL analyst, and who happens to be Korean-American, not Japanese ("Nip" being a long-time pejorative for the Japanese). But, hey, never let accuracy get in the way of a good racist taunt, right?

Curtis tried to walk it back, but succeeded only in making things worse. He tried to claim he meant to say "Mila Kunis," not "Mina Kimes,"  and that he was referring to Kunis' nipples. Hey, I'm no racist! I'm just a sexist pig!

Like one is better than the other.

In any event, so it goes, so it goes. Meanwhile, Kimes, who gets endless crap from the knuckle-draggers because she's a woman and  Wimmen Don't Know Nothin' 'Bout Foo-ball, took it all in stride. She immediately replaced her Twitter photo with a photo of  Mila Kunis.

Now that's funny.