From the Chicago Trib:

The Mortuary Science program at Wayne State University is opening its doors to the public, offering a look at how people are autopsied, embalmed and buried.

The program holds its annual open house from 6-9 p.m. Thursday. It’s a tradition that began in 1991 and drew 900 people last year.

This year’s event includes a chance to see a bomb response unit of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and a display on celebrity funerals and the history of burial customs.

The university says visitors also can tour “embalming, anatomy restorative arts and microbiology laboratories.”

One area displays caskets, burns, vaults and other funeral accessories.

Animal liberationists are trying to kill research scientists in California. They’re also trying to kill their families.

Two University of California-Santa Cruz research scientists were targets of firebombs early Saturday, a troubling sign authorities said of escalating violence against university researchers who use animals in their labs.

Law enforcement labeled the incidents “acts of domestic terrorism.”

In the off-campus incident, a well-known molecular biologist and his family, including two small children, were forced to escape a smoke-filled house using a second-story ladder after a firebomb was intentionally set, Santa Cruz police said. One family member sustained injuries requiring brief hospitalization, and police are calling the firebombing, which occurred shortly before 6 a.m., a case of attempted homicide.

About the same time, a car belonging to a researcher parked at an on-campus home was also firebombed, destroying the vehicle.

… The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are leading the investigation. They were also called in after another UC-Santa Cruz scientist’s family was terrorized. In late February, six masked intruders broke into the home as the family celebrated a daughter’s eighth birthday.

“The pattern and string of attacks has been escalating against the research and science community here as well as at other University of California campuses,” Clark said.

… Professors and researchers at the UC-Berkeley and UCLA have also been targeted, including firebombs in Los Angeles. More recently in Berkeley, nine hooded protesters showed up in front of a toxicology professor’s off-campus home, scrawling “killer” in chalk on the doorstep and shattering the window of the home, and a window in a neighbor’s home who scattered the protesters with a garden hose.

UD’s blogpal Mary Beard, a British professor of classics who has a blog called A Don’s Life, writes about alcohol today.  She’s taking herself off the booze for awhile:

Long term readers of this blog, with good memories, may recall that this is not my first attempt at taking forty days and forty nights off the bottle. Last year I had a pretty good go at it, but with a get-out clause: namely, I allowed myself to drink “abroad” (and abroad started the far side of security at the airport and included the Irish embassy).

Far as UD can tell, Beard’s an unaddicted, more or less daily drinker… Alcohol matters to Beard; it’s an important part of her life.  She ends today’s post with praise of it:

[T]he bottom line is that – while there are both sad and bad reasons for drinking, and some tragedies in its wake  – for the last 8000 years alcohol has, on balance, provided more pleasure than pain. It tastes nice, it oils the social wheels, it helps you put the screaming toddlers to bed without resorting to violence, and it hasn’t yet brought any civilisation to its knees. As drugs go, it’s really not got such a bad track record.

UD, usually a confident writer, hesitates to take up the subject she’s about to write about — alcohol (and other drugs), tobacco, and firearms — but she’s wanted to say something about all three of them – especially drugs and guns.

Here’s why she’s hesitated: By nature, UD’s libertarian. She loves the fact that America is the sort of country that tends to leave people alone, and she thinks for the most part people should be left alone.  Ron, who does UD’s hair, is an Israeli, and he’s told her all she needs to know about living in homogeneous, tight-knit, socially constrained cultures.  Everything in UD rebels against interfering in — even showing any particular interest in — the private pleasures, crutches, vices, extracurricular activities, of others.  Although she’s the only one she knows attracted to  it, she’s always liked Richard Rorty’s sharp distinction between the private and the public realm, in part because it offers some philosophical warrant for these attitudes.

Indeed the very militancy of UD’s social libertarianism (UD recognizes that Rorty himself was not libertarian) is bound up with her recognition in herself of a tendency toward just the opposite of the live and let live thing that underlies this social attitude:  She has in her much of the moral scold.  She doesn’t like this aspect of her personality, but she recognizes it exists.  She sometimes thinks she overdoes the laissez-faire social attitudes in order to keep this opposite tendency in check.  Her detestation – expressed quite often on this blog – for what Saul Bellow calls Reality Instructors – the Dr. Phils who tell you how to live – is, again, probably as intense as it is in part because she sees and hates tendencies along the same lines in herself.

UD wants to distinguish here, by the way, what she hopes is her moral seriousness (an excellent thing in anyone) from her tendency toward a certain cold and impatient judging. 

There’s another strand to this attitude, and it’s a feminist one.  Some readers dislike UD’s objection to campus codes strictly outlawing affairs between professors and students, and her preference for softer language about this.  But her preference derives from her knowledge of the wide variety of such affairs — some of them involving graduate students in their twenties and instructors in their thirties, for instance — and her revulsion at the idea that women students in their late teens and early twenties at American universities need the sort of protection from their libidos or their silliness or older men that strict codes offer.    She understands the matter is complex; she understands that some students will be exploited, and some professors will be exploitative.  Nonetheless, beyond the absurdity of attempting to outlaw something that ’s going to keep happening, the protectionist response, UD thinks, sends an infantilizing message to women at the very moment when they’re free from home and family and testing their liberty.

All of this is by way of suggesting UD’s pretty deep commitment to personal freedom, and her dislike of state or institutional intervention in one’s private life. 

Given these attitudes, the abuse of drugs and alcohol — abuse ranging from being a quiet, more or less functional, prescription pain killer addict, to being so severe an alcoholic that you cannot meet your work obligations — is something UD’s not keen to think much about.  She’s not even all that comfortable on the subject of cigarettes.  She’s glad people can’t smoke around her anymore, but it seems to her excessive that there are absolutely no bars where you can smoke and drink at the same time.  And she’s appalled by people on her own campus fussing about lines of smokers standing outside certain buildings; even this mild presence of smoke they object to!

 On alcohol : Mary says it’s not got such a bad track record, and yet in America at least alcohol seems to ravage huge numbers of people. 

UD has always been impressed by an essay written a few years ago by a woman who’s an English professor and a recovering alcoholic.  It first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, but UD’s found it in a more reader-friendly form here.   The whole thing’s interesting.  Some excerpts:

…Academics can rarely afford expensive addictions or frequent retreats to fashionable detox spas. But like the doctor with access to drugs and the executive with access to an expense account, we have fat caches of time and perks that can be abused. Long periods of isolated writing and research are ripe for binges. We can disappear for days or weeks at a time, during the summer or over semester breaks, ordering library books by e-mail and picking them up at the office late at night. The stretches of isolation are punctuated by carefully orchestrated public appearances (the lecture, the class, the conference presentation) in which style can compensate for content. The more successful we are, the more likely we will be rewarded with our own eccentric hours and class times; our hangovers are manageable by the time we get to the 11 a.m. Introduction to Critical Theory.

…It’s as easy to be an accomplished and respected academic drunk as a failed and unemployed one. It’s possible to have a five-page vita, a public and chronicled life, and also a private, unchronicled life of empty bottles in morning trash cans, emergency flasks in the suitcase at the conference, scrawled notes from phone calls not remembered the next day.

…Intellectual arrogance often impedes recovery; I was cocksure I could figure it out for myself, analyze and control my drinking, and certainly not rely on a club or cult for help. It’s also true that a solid anti-intellectualism within AA often impedes its access for those who need it most.

…Academics believe no one else is quite as smart as we are, as capable of brilliant insight or sharp analysis. But even early in recovery, I was impressed by the astuteness and honesty of comments during some AA meetings. Sick as I was, I realized how much of my supposedly liberal politics floated uneasily in snobbish assumptions about what kind of people are worth talking to.

…The addict’s world is wholly egotistical; nothing else matters as much as the fix, the altered perception that will blunt pain and enhance pleasure. In contrast, recovery entails self-perspective, the acceptance of both responsibility and boundaries, obligations and limitations. Recovery requires positing something — whether God or goodness — outside the self, bigger than the self, which is worth centering one’s life around. The “higher powers” to which culture invites us to dedicate our lives — careerism, money, the academic hierarchy, sex — eventually point back to the self as the godlike center of meaning (my career, my brilliance, my money, my reputation, my pleasure). Maybe AA works because it counters the emptiness of egotism.

This complicates, doesn’t it, UD’s cherished private/public distinction? It suggests that there are dangers attached to the enviable indulgence in our own private projects that tenured academic life so generously allows, that the successful academic character may contain a toxic arrogance and isolation…

Hope you’re not expecting any more than stabs at ideas here, by the way.

 I’ve kept guns for last because they’re the biggest problem of the three for UD. 

All her life UD’s been a knee-jerk gun-control person.  For all her libertarian tendencies, it’s always seemed self-evident to UD that you want the state to regulate guns very, very strictly.  She’s written plenty of posts on this blog about the obvious madness of states like Utah which allow students to carry concealed weapons on state campuses. 

Yet in light of the campus massacres, UD finds arguments in favor of designating as classroom marshals – not students – but some professors and staff who’ve had training in the use of guns more plausible than she ever imagined she would…  Indeed, she’s found (to the shock and disapproval of everyone she knows) that she’s interested in being less terrified and ignorant about guns.  UD thinks she should probably go to a gun range at some point and at least gain some knowledge of them.