What a controversial premise! The good news is that, thanks to my good friend and noted soccer researcher Joshua Zeitlin over at Princeton University, I have some pretty impressive statistics to back up my argument. What I’ll prove is that in the last 10 years, the EPL has been an extremely uncompetitive league, judging by various metrics: first, the points gap between the teams that ranked 1 and 4, 1 and 10 and 1 and 20, and secondly the overall number of separate teams that ranked in the top 4.

What’s impressive about this chart is that over the last 10 years, the EPL has had massively larger point gaps than La Liga in every single category, which shows that there is much less competition in the league itself. This point difference could be credited to various different factors: a major skill gap between the top teams and the middle and bottom ones, the massively different amount of money spent in comparison, or other factors. The point is that this difference in skill and level makes the EPL less exciting because its teams are generally mismatched: other than ManU-Chelsea-Liverpool-Arsenal games, the league becomes boring when these teams play anyone else.

This is even more obvious when one takes into account the number of teams that have even been in the top 4 (the C means they've won the league in that time).

EPL (7): Manchester United (C), Liverpool, Chelsea (C), Arsenal (C), Everton, Newcastle United, Leeds United.
La Liga (13): Real Madrid (C), Barcelona (C), Sevilla, Atlético Madrid, Villarreal, Valencia (C), Osasuna, Real Betis, Deportivo La Coruña (C), Real Sociedad, Celta de Vigo, Mallorca, Real Zaragoza.

That's 13-7 Spain, and 10-5 in the top flight.

So I guess this gets to the crux of my column for this week: the EPL needs teams like Manchester City who can come in and place in the top 4 so that the league itself can break out of the conventional “top 4” mode that its been in for the last 10 or 15 years. Say what you will about European competition (again, statistically, La Liga is at least as good if not better in Europe), but the truth is that domestically, the EPL is far from the dominant super-interesting powerhouse that many in this country (USA) make it out to be. It needs a team to really shake things up--and that team, I think, can be Man City.

I knew my addiction was bad when I started eating mozzarella cheese for breakfast. Not just any mozzarella cheese, but mozzarella di buffala that I buy in bucket form (literally a plastic bucket of cheese) from the grocery store down the street. The cibo (food) in Bologna, and especially the food where cheese is involved, is on a different level than any other food I have consumed. Even the pasta from a box that I make for myself in my own kitchen is better than the pasta from most Italian restaurants at home. Bologna is known as the food capital of Italy, especially for its traditional rich pasta dishes with heavy meat or creamy cheese sauces. I have been exploring the city in terms of the food that it has to offer, and from cooking classes to restaurants to the food market, I am creating a very detailed and delicious map.

Last night I went out to dinner at a trattoria- a restaurant where they hand-make many of their dishes from start to finish- called Incrocia Montegrappa. I had two of the most delectable dishes that I have had since I have been in Italy, both of which unsurprisingly involved cheese. The first was a mixed cheese plate with five different types of Italian cheeses and three home made marmalades to go with each cheese. There was red onion marmalade, pumpkin marmalade, and kiwi marmalade. This reflects two things that I have learned about Italy – 1. Italy is the world’s second largest exporter of kiwi and 2. Italian cooking is focused around only using fruits and veggies that are in season, like pumpkin. My main course was tortelloni con crema di gorgonzola ai noci. When you think of tortellini, multiply them in size by about three and you will have tortelloni. They were filled with ricotta (which is not considered cheese in Italy because it does not contain the proper amount of fat) and they were covered in a gorgonzola and walnut cream sauce. Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed my meal.

When I leave Italy in about a month and a half I know I am going to have serious issues with withdrawal from the food. Until then, I will keep navigating around the food in Bologna and I will definitely continue eating mozzarella for breakfast.

Gordon is a member of the Class of 2011. She is studying at the Università di Bologna through the Wesleyan-Wellseley-Vassar Program program in Bologne, Italy. 'Notes from Abroad' is a Blargus feature dedicated to sharing Wesleyan students' international escapades, in an effort to keep study abroad experiences less disparate from life at Wesleyan.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out this archive of the October 13th edition of Argus News Radio, which features my interview with WSA member Ben Firke '12, the guy responsible for bringing Zipcars to Wesleyan.  To hear Firke explain what Zipcars are and how they work, listen up: Argus News Radio 10.13.09.

Alternatively, here's what the WSA had to say about the service in a recent all-campus email:

As part of the continuing effort to "burst the Wesleyan bubble," Zipcar, the world’s largest car sharing service, has arrived on campus.  The permanent parking location for the cars is behind the Allbritton Center–a Toyota Prius and a Honda Civic are both available for use now!

Zipcar provides you with a convenient, economical and environmentally-friendly alternative to having a car on campus. Simply stated, its wheels when you want them––self-service cars you can use by the hour or day. Zipcar provides you the freedom of car ownership – the ability to get off campus for errands, entertainment or road trips – without the cost and hassle of owning a car. All reservations include fuel, insurance, parking, roadside assistance and 180 free miles per day of a reservation.So––how do you join and what does it cost? All students (18+) can join Zipcar for only $35/year! You’ll also get $35 in free driving credit in your first month of membership. Reservations also include a low hourly or daily rate starting at $8 an hour or $66 a day.

For more information, and to join, go to www.zipcar.com/wesleyan This is an exciting new way to get off campus and we hope that students will take advantage of this great opportunity.

First of all, I’m always happy when I learn to appreciate a new genre of music (or a new author, or a new type of cinema, or a vegetable I didn't like when I was a kid). In my humble opinion it’s more fun to enjoy things than to not enjoy them. I’m also pretty sure a willingness to try new things with an open mind is an important part of maturity, and saying “I like all kinds of music except metal and country,” is equivalent to saying “green beans are gross.” It’s fine if you don’t like green beans, but you should have some well-prepared ones before you make up you mind. And you should listen to Sugarland before you say you hate country. 

Anyhoo, I’ve yet to encounter a genre that I couldn’t find some value in after some cursory digging, and it bothered me that I had a big Satan-shaped gap in my palate. I think my problem was the lack of a good entry-point, a critical tool in stylistic adventurism. Entry-points are basically the same thing as crossovers, but backwards: music that features the stylistic tics of some genre enough for you to get used to them, but not so prominently that you get bewildered and scamper off. So Daft Punk is a good entry-point for post-rave dance music and Taylor Swift is a good entry-point for country, because both write straightforward pop songs with a twist.

Problem is, not a lot of metal bands specialize in accessible pop (or the ones that do just really don’t do it for me – sorry Axl). And the ones that do tend to cross over into the province of indie-dom do it for reasons that don’t appeal to me. Mastodon’s proggy guitar leads and Moby Dick and Rasputin referencing lyrics should tug at a Decembrists fan’s heartstrings, and Sunn O)))’s droning is great for all the post-rockers out there,  but this just ain’t for me:

So I was pessimistic about metal, at least until last week when, on a whim, I listened to a new leaked track (“Dark Horse”), by Converge, a quartet of Boston OG’s beloved of my angrier friends in high school. And man was I hooked: turns out mathcore (stupid word, I know), the metal-hardcore hybrid pioneered around the turn of the century by Converge and the Dillinger Escape Plan, was just what I needed. It’s a non-traditional approach – these bros specialize in brow-knitting time signatures, salvos of noise where riffs usually go, and lots and lots of screaming. But as a great man said, I dig their energy. This music evokes drama, both musical and emotional, that resonates with the part of me that likes Arcade Fire, and a particular kind of honest, righteous rage that tickles my inner punk. I think making that emotional connection with a new scene is probably more important than making a sonic one.

Just a few last notes on entering metal:

First off, a lot of people in internetland (across the Misty Mountains from the province of indie-dom) refer to metal, hardcore, and, to a much lesser extent, noise using the umbrella term “aggressive music.” Until they decide that Toby Keith and Ghostface Killah can come to the party, I think this is the stupidest handle any scene has come up with.

Secondly, I've noticed a very cute trend. Occasionally, Pitchfork.com (maybe you’ve heard of it) reviews some record, almost always punk or metal, and gives it a very high score by their standards, something in the high 8’s. Then they won’t make it best new music, remember it on a year-end list, or give it any sort of hype at all. I remember they did that to the Gaslight Anthem, who put out one of the best albums of last year, and did it just this week to two different metal bands, Converge (whose Axe To Fall I’ll be reviewing soon) and Baroness. I think they are most prone to give such underhanded reviews to music they’re suspicious teenagers might actually like. Now usually I’m a big Pitchfork defender, but what are they trying to pull here? I thought there were no more guilty pleasures. Oh man. That’s totally the topic for my next column.

Everyone has songs that remind them of home. Similarly, countless songs have been written about going home/missing home/being home/leaving home. Across all genres, artists have written about their own hometowns. My personal favorite of these, the song that conjures up the strongest memories of home is “On My Block,” by Scarface off his seventh solo album, The Fix. As an original member of the Geto Boys, Scarface helped bring Texas rap to the world. This song is about the 5^th ward of Houston, but, for me, it’s about the west side of Austin Texas.

“It was really the students that got together to start texting and calling everyone they knew to try and figure out where their classmates were,” said Dr. Mikey Vergara, a Professor at the Medical School. “They found the last student four days later, wearing the same clothes he was wearing the day the typhoon hit.”

I sat down with Dr. Vergara on October 19, three weeks after the typhoon actually hit. In addition to being the best man at my parents’ wedding and now the personal doctor of my grandfather, Dr. Vergara has been regarded as an outstanding member of the Philippine medical community because of his extensive community service work in poorer, rural areas which have extremely limited access to proper health care. Having grown up in a more fortunate and affluent family, Dr. Vergara branched out in a way that many of his colleagues would not have by helping the less fortunate in remote areas of the Philippines. Even with his recent return to the capital city, he has continued his work, and has become a very beloved professor at the Medical School. During our interview, students were continually coming up to him to give him updates on medical missions, ask questions, and just chat about their lives.

Hearing about my two-week trip home and the goals I was trying to achieve, Dr. Vergara was incredibly enthusiastic about my efforts and was among the first to sit down with me to share what information he could. Throughout the trip, he continued to help me in providing medical information that I could share with student leaders I spoke with at various universities who were also intent on helping in relief efforts. Dr. Vergara, who served as a National Director in the Philippine Department of Health in the early 1990s, when he was heavily involved in the establishment of the Disaster Management Unit, was quick to step up and help students figure out what they could do to help, given the medical knowledge they had acquired so far.

“The students have been so active—in fact many of the victims themselves were among the first to volunteer,” he said. “But, in my opinion, the fact that we have to rely on disaster relief is a failure of the government’s institutions. We should be involved in disaster management before the fact, not disaster relief after.”

Dr. Vergara pointed out that only 2.4% of the Philippine national budget is allotted to the Department of Health, despite the fact that the World Health Organization recommends 5-6%. The government reaction to Typhoon Ondoy demonstrated its shortsightedness when it came to disaster preparedness. Many people had drowned during the storm because only about 30 rescue boats purchased for such situations were able to get to the affected areas. Dr. Vergara noted that when he was in government, they had purchased 300 boats, and this was only about a decade ago. One might assume that a government facing increasing incidence of natural disasters, such as the disastrous Typhoon Milenyo that hit in 2007, would have increased their budget for emergency vehicles such as boats. Rather than positioning the boats in disaster-prone areas, they had been placed in one area, so that they were stranded when the storm hit.

Dealing with seriously affected areas, Dr. Vergara led a seminar with students, to help them establish what it was that they could realistically do. On medical missions, first-year students mostly conducted psychosocial consulting for traumatized victims, while others became involved in diagnosing and directing various patients to the physicians who could give them help.

Even Dr. Vergara and his students, however, quickly discovered the dangers such medical missions truly presented. Victims were not only suffering from the flash floods and landslides that immediately killed hundreds of people. When we spoke on October 19, Dr. Vergara said that the death count caused by the bacterial disease leptospirosis had risen to 96—which doesn’t even account for the undiagnosed deaths that have likely occurred in the poorer areas. The incidence of this disease has become especially prevalent in lowland areas, where water from the sewers have risen to the surface. The bacterial disease, spread by rat urine, affects people through breaks in the skin, and takes about 10-14 days before its fatal symptoms begin to show.

In addition to the increased incidence of leptospirosis, victims and even relief workers have to protect themselves from dengue, a mosquito-born disease that becomes prevalent during the rainy season, and even more so in stagnant waters. While only two of the four strains of dengue are actually fatal, the incidence of dengue doubled in 2008 from the year before. The fatal strains act quickly, and Dr. Vergara explained that volunteers on medical missions must be extremely vigilant in watching for those strains, as well as H1N1. In addition, volunteers themselves must take preventative measures to protect themselves from contracting these diseases themselves.

In addition to their medical efforts, the very active student body is trying to help victims and people living in the most affected areas through awareness education, by creating pamphlets about drinking clean water, treating fungal and bacterial infection, and spotting serious illnesses.

This week, we feature headlines with Andrea Domanick '10 and a Homecoming Weekend preview with sports contributor Abaye Steinmetz-Silber '12. Be sure to catch our exclusive interview with Dylan Marron '10 and Jo Firestone '09, creators of the Ridgefield Middle School Talent Night. Thanks to contributor Gianna Palmer '10 and producer Sam Bernhardt '10 for making this week's show possible!

ANR 11-03-2009

The debate in the Wesleying comments section has been lively and surprisingly civil, raising some interesting questions about Roth's salary in relation to his predecessors and his colleagues. I dug around on guidestar.org, which provides the 990 tax forms for nonprofit organizations, in order to give this conversation a little more context:

In 2006, his final year at Wesleyan, President Doug Bennet earned $412,974. The next year, his first at Wes, Roth earned $564,007--a $150,00 salary hike.

The 2008 form lists the salaries for top officers and administrators. A glance:

Thomas Kannam, VP & Chief Investment Officer: $460, 610

Barbara Jan Wilson, VP President for University Relations: $260, 334

John Meerts, VP for Finance and Administration: $240, 060

Joseph Bruno, VP for Academic Affairs and Provost, $221,120

Peter Patton, Interim Dean of College: $221, 339

Justin Harmon, VP Public Affairs: $197, 244

Nancy Hargrave Meislahn, Dean of Admissions: $167,149

It should be noted that Tom Kannam and Justin Harmon no longer work at Wesleyan and that Peter Patton is no longer the Interim Dean of the College. The 2008 form does not list top faculty salaries, but the 2007 form does:

Jeanine Basinger, Chair of the Film Studies Department: $213,420

David Beveridge, University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics: $186,830

Anne duCille, Professor of English and African American Studies: $181,880

Nathanael Greene, Professor of History: $181,500

Ruth Striegel-Moore, University Professor of the Social Sciences: $180,467

Anyhow, the most interesting fact for me is that the president's salary was raised by $150,000 when Roth arrived in 2007. Do what you like with the rest.

“People's races varied. Some people were pleased with their performances and others not so much,” said Julia Mark '13 of the women's showing in the 3.8-mile race. “Overall, though, the team was really happy about placing fourth.”

Neville took second in the event with a final time of 21:40. Finishing only one second behind the first-place finisher, Amherst’s Sophia Gelleher, Neville led the group for the majority of the race, but Gelleher snuck by her right before the finish line.

Mark, who took home fifth place, also ran well for Wesleyan with a time of 22:15. Next for Wesleyan was Rose Keogh ‘13, who took 19th with a final time of 22:53. Eleven seconds later, Sarah White ’11 finished the race in 27th place with at time of 23:04. Rounding out the group was Tess Crain ’12 who completed the course in 23:29 for 42nd place.

“As the season is closing, it is great to see our team's training pay off at a competitive race like NESCACs for a fourth place,” said Keogh. “We are already just feeding off each others' success and energy—it's why we've been able to consistently perform well.”

The final tallies for the women were Middlebury with 49 points, followed by Williams with 59, Amherst with 71, and Wesleyan with 87.
Led by freshman Bryan Marsh, who placed 23rd with a time of 27:27, the Wesleyan men finished eighth out of the 11 teams. Although the team was not completely satisfied with the results of its race, the Cardinals remain confident in their abilities.

“As a team, we work harder and have the potential to be much better than the eighth-place finish indicates,” said captain Justin Spring ’10. “We just have to put races like this behind us and refocus.”

Coming in next for the Cardinals was Charles Lang ’11. Lang placed 28th, completing the race in 27:42. Matt Katz ’11 clocked in a second later, placing 29th with a time of 27:43. Marc Whittington '13 was next to cross the finish line for the Cards. Whittington finished the five-mile race in 53rd place with a time of 28:05. Close behind was Spring, who placed 56th with a time of 28:07.

Williams ran away with the men's race, earning its NESCAC-record 12th title with 40 points, followed by Amherst with 88, Tufts with 90, and Middlebury with 104.

“Today was a little disappointing because we know we could have done better,” said Marsh. “Although we weren't able to show what we are capable of today, Regionals [are] in two weeks and that will be our time to run up to our potential and beat some teams we should have beaten today.”

After a solid showing on Sunday, the Cardinals are looking forward to seeing some of the same teams again next weekend.

“We have some really big and important meets coming up,” said Mark. “It should be exciting to see what we can do. We've been training hard throughout the season and for the months and even years prior. I think we have the potential to make this a really memorable season.”
The Cardinals compete next at the ECAC Division III Championships, which will be hosted by Williams at Mt. Greylock High School on Saturday, Nov. 7.