The Badgers may have lost the Rose Bowl but they won at selling merchandise
It's a cool sweatshirt, but we'd really like to buy one of those cool Oregon football helmets.
Since sifting through dull newspapers, hyperbolic blogs, and overflowing RSS feeds for meaningful news can be an arduous process, News Net catches and compiles both the amusing and the significant reports that were overlooked over the holiday break. Here are some things to think about as work week begins.
• Even though it ended with lots of Bielema bashing on Twitter, the Rose Bowl trip to Pasadena netted the Badgers at least one trophy: an enormous pile of money. Increased purchases of licensed Badger gear throughout this season brought in $3.3 million this year, a 36-percent increase over sales last year that were boosted by the first of two consecutive Rose Bowl appearances. Half that money goes straight into the need-based financial aid pool, so even fair-weather Badger fans did some good for the students, even if they just ended up using all of it in an effigy to be burned on the head coach’s front lawn.
• Governor Walker made it out to Pasadena as well, greeting Badger fans for a “concise appearance” on the Santa Monica pier last week. (READ: He may or may not have been booed off the stage.) Walker’s presence at the Rose Bowl was no secret, but plenty of his other extracurricular activities might be—the Wisconsin State Journal reports that the governor has a pretty vague definition of what constitutes “personal time” on the schedule of appearances he’s supposed to keep available to the public. Walker’s personal time evidently includes plenty of out-of-state fundraising and rich-dude handshaking, and for all we know, pagan rites. Hey, all that recall campaign cash has to come from somewhere—who’s to say it isn’t from the Triple Goddess and the Horned God?
• Our craziest news events of 2011 had one glaring omission, so a special “Largest Brawl Related to a Charity Event” award goes to the 30 people caught beating each other senseless in the Majestic Theatre on December 23. The mob was apparently incensed to the point of gun-pointing by the “Twas the Soul Before Christmas” party, which was a benefit for the Madison Prep project. A runner-up for the award? The fun folks who got into a gunfight at Frida’s on New Year’s Eve.
• But if you worried that the holidays were all about heartache and conflict, be comforted to know that Wisconsin and Michigan have worked out their mitten-related differences to launch “The Great Lakes Mitten Campaign,” a charity drive in both states to rustle up winter clothing to help keep the less fortunate mitten-state dwellers warm. More importantly, we can rest easy knowing that Wisconsin and Michigan now officially make quite a pair of mittens, pinned with care to the jacket of the simple child we lovingly know as Canada. Now we just have to decide what to do with the vestigial half-mitten that is the Upper Peninsula.
