Neil Sinhababu: Was Michael LaCour Really the Texas Longhorns' Mascot?

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Was Michael LaCour Really the Texas Longhorns' Mascot?

I just looked at the CV of Michael LaCour, who is notorious for falsifying political science data and even a departmental teaching award. It has this curious entry under "University and Departmental Service" at the end of the second page:

The University of Texas at Austin
• Mascot, “Hook Em”, The Longhorn, 2007-2009.

I have no idea whether LaCour was the Texas Longhorns' mascot for two years, or if he made that up too. Any journalists reading this blog might want to check out whether LaCour is again full of bull, or if in this case the bull was actually full of him.

If it's true, I suppose he could go back to that line of work, since it doesn't require him to show his face in public.

Update: A few people have sent me this blog post from 2008 discussing Longhorn mascots of that time period, which doesn't mention LaCour.

Welcome to my blog! You can visit my homepage here if you like.

You can check out this fun philosophical interview I did in 2017 if you're interested in my views on a number of issues ranging from the Humean theory of motivation to romantic relationships with people from other possible worlds.

I've been blogging since 2004 at a number of different sites. Maybe this is a good place to show you the best posts from previous sites I've run.

One of the more interesting things I've made on the internet is a blog called "War or Car" that described things you could buy for the price of the Iraq War. I was running it for four months in 2008, through the Presidential election. You could buy every American household its own Toyota Prius -- hence the name of the blog. More amusingly, you could buy every living panda its own stealth bomber, and do a variety of other awesome whimsical things instead of killing a ridiculous number of people.

At my longtime personal blog, The Ethical Werewolf, I made a logic puzzle loosely based on Sir Mix-a-lot's "Baby Got Back". It occasionally gets tweeted or otherwise linked around for public amusement.

A few years ago, people at the Philosophers' Cocoon asked me to do a blog post for them about my job at the National University of Singapore. I'm still there today, and I like it!

In 2012 I ran a little site called VoteSeeing that ranked the accuracy of pundits trying to predict the Presidential election. Some nice people at a philosophy blog called NewAPPS asked me to post my results there. Daily Kos won, and Nate Silver took second place.

I did a guest post for Daily Nous on the undersupply of journal space. This is why rejection rates at good philosophy journals top 90%. I think a lot of good work isn't making into print, and can't be discussed by the community.

My color vision isn't very good, so I tried out some color vision glasses to try to see green. I was wondering whether I'd see a color I hadn't been able to imagine before, and I wrote about that for Amy Kind's imagination blog. I think the answer might be yes, though it's unclear.