Robert Kraft's recent donation to Columbia got the Lions some sort-of-big-time sports coverage. Gregg Easterbrook, who writes the 6,000- word Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN's Page 2, wrote a paragraph on Columbia's fundraising program.

Easterbrook writes that Columbia may be trying to move into the upper tiers of Ivy athletics by, like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, schools he says are offering de facto athletic scholarships even though Ivy rules forbid them.

Kraft's New England Patriots have also been accused of bending (or breaking) the rules, but are 6-0, while Columbia sits at 1-4.

- DHI

• Robert Kraft, alumnus and New England Patriots owner extraordinaire, just donated a crapload of money to Columbia Athletics ($5 million, to be exact). Consequentially, Lawrence A. Wein Stadium has become the Stadium Formerly Known as Wein, AKA, Robert K. Kraft Field.

• Apparently another noose was found on a lamppost outside a ground zero post office yesterday afternoon. Indeed, no words can probably describe our reaction to this better than "WTF?"
  
  
• In case you were wondering on how much Professor Hamid Dabashi had to say on the Ahmadinejad/Bollinger face-off, he's got a recent lengthy response to the incident in a Cairo publication. To cut it short: he's not happy, and he mentions Rudyard Kipling.
  
  
• Former J-School visiting professor/VP Al Gore has been announced as co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (alongside the IPCC) for his fight with global warming. It's kind of surreal, actually.