The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

'SARASOTA, FL—Bowing to pressure from alumni, students, and a majority of teaching professors of Florida State University, athletic director Dave Hart Jr. announced yesterday that FSU would completely phase out all academic operations by the end of the 2010 school year in order to make athletics the school's No. 1 priority. "It's been clear for a while that Florida State's mission is to provide the young men and women enrolled here with a world-class football program, and this is the best way to cut the fat and really focus on making us No. 1 every year," Hart said. "While it's certainly possible for an academic subsidiary to bring a certain amount of prestige to an athletic program, the national polls have made it [clear] that our non-athletic operations have become a major distraction." FSU's restructuring program will begin with the elimination of the College of Arts and Sciences, effective October 15.'

'In the 2004-05 fiscal year, [Berkeley] spent about $13.5 million more on athletics than it earned, its highest deficit ever. ... Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said he was shocked when he opened the financial books after taking over the campus in 2004.

"When we did the in-depth analysis, we discovered the shortfall was somewhat larger than we previously thought," said Birgeneau. "We absolutely have to decrease the size of the deficit." ...

"I've been studying infections all my life, and that's what this is like for the university," said Loy Volkman, a UC Berkeley virologist who was on [a review] panel. "I don't think we have any business doing it like this. What other part of university life loses $13 million per year?"

Volkman and others also have balked at spending so much on the program when the majority of Cal athletes are admitted to the school only because of relaxed academic standards.

But Birgeneau, the former president of the University of Toronto and dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said UC Berkeley's broad sports program is essential to the campus and school spirit. ...'

'University to cut crosses from its coat of arms

Change sparks uproar at Simon Fraser

VANCOUVER - Simon Fraser University is in the final stages of removing images of two crosses from its four-decade-old coat of arms and replacing them with representations of books.'

'Some academics and legislators, contending that college football's multibillion-dollar building boom detracts from schools' educational mission, are targeting tax laws that treat payments for luxury seating and naming rights as charitable gifts.

...Critics say these payments should not be deductible as charity because they purchase a valuable asset -- either premium seating or, in the case of naming rights, advertising. The 80% deduction is "ridiculous," says Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist, author of a book on college sports. "I don't think intercollegiate sports support the educational mission. It's a separate activity."

A tax deduction for luxury boxes "isn't my style," says Rebecca McGowan, one of the University of Michigan's eight regents. She initially opposed the Michigan renovation out of concern that skyboxes "were going to be enormously expensive, for the benefit of relatively few people." But she switched sides after receiving assurances that more athletic revenue would be devoted to academic programs.

Mr. Duderstadt, the former Michigan president, told the Senate Finance Committee at a hearing this month that the "perverse treatment" of "mandatory fees" for luxury-skybox leases and season-ticket licenses as charitable contributions is "fueling an arms race in college sports, driving universities to debt-finance massive stadium expansion projects, exploit young student athletes, and tolerate multimillion-dollar coaches' salaries."

...Even with the 80% deduction, some universities haven't raised as much money from premium seating as anticipated. The University of Colorado has leased nearly all of its 40 luxury suites but only 38% of 1,850 club seats, which cost between $1,500 and $2,200 a year, athletic director Mike Bohn says. Revenue from suites and club seats falls just short of the $3.2 million needed to pay down debt, he said, instead of the $5.7 million that leasing all of the seats would generate.

Opponents of Michigan's renovation doubt the university will find enough customers for its luxury suites, where alcohol will be banned. "Why pay a whole bunch of money, drive up to Ann Arbor, sit behind a glass wall and not be able to get a beer," says Laurence Deitch, one of two regents on the university's eight-member board who voted against the plan last month. "I think I'd stay home."'

Despite free admission [to games] for students, many have yet to catch the buzz. Although the school said it sells nearly all 17,000 seats for home games, marching band member Leoncio Alvarez said he often looks up to a half-empty stadium.

"It's sad that we have to pay so much money when the students, I guess, mostly don't even care," said Alvarez, a journalism major from Miami who plays clarinet.

Denise Cardona, an education major, said most students are commuters and do not have time to attend games. A small group -- dominated by fraternities and sororities and student government -- is in the stands, she said.

A Dec. 15 Athens-Clarke County Police Department report says Gene Whitner Milner III is 6 feet 2 inches tall and that he weighs 163 pounds. What it doesn't say is that every single inch and every single ounce is nothing but pure, unadulterated punk. Nor does it say that Milner, for the time being anyway, is the public face of the University of Georgia.

Milner, 21, is a UGA student with an arrest record including charges of underage alcohol possession, possession of a fake ID, giving false information to a police officer and a probation violation. His antics got him barred from Athens-Clarke County for a time.

Milner managed to make the news again last week, as Athens-Clarke County police officers found themselves rolling up one more time to the 555 Riverhill Drive house where he lives, to investigate yet another complaint of a loud party. Early on the morning of Dec. 15, Milner found himself charged with providing alcohol to underage persons.

Despite his run-ins with the law, Milner managed to re-enroll at UGA for the recently concluded fall semester, a circumstance which the university has blamed on the fact that a student who is out of school for just a semester can re-enroll without attracting attention from the university administration.

Obviously, university officials ought to be questioning any circumstance that keeps someone like Milner enrolled when there's ample reason he shouldn't be on campus.

But that's not the most important question arising from the tragicomedy playing out between Milner and UGA. The most important question is what dreams are being dashed and what potential is going unrealized as long as Milner warms a seat in any UGA classroom. And we're not talking here about Milner's dreams or Milner's potential. Anyone who's watched this spectacle unfold can guess Milner's dreams don't extend much beyond his next house party, and his potential likely is going to be measured in terms of how successful he can be in keeping himself out of jail over the course of his life.

No, what we're talking about here is the question of what worthy student Milner is keeping out of the University of Georgia. Is it someone from rural Georgia, perhaps a young woman who sees UGA and the HOPE scholarship as her ticket out of a town too small to contain her dreams? Or someone from a suburban Atlanta school system, whose work in a gleaming high-school science lab has given him the potential to become a shining star among students interested in the university's burgeoning commitment to biological and health sciences? Or a single mom looking for a college degree to increase her earning power so she can give her kids everything they need? Or an Iraq war veteran wanting a start on a post-military career?

It's those dreams, and that kind of potential, that were at stake in the university's inability - or failure, or whatever it's been thus far - to keep Milner from further sullying the reputation of the state's flagship institution of higher education, and making a laughingstock of a university administration that has waged a model campaign against underage drinking.

There is, however, some reason for hoping the university will eventually do right by that prospective student whom Milner is keeping out of the school. It's a hope provided, ironically enough, by Milner himself, whose past record suggests strongly that, sooner or later, he'll screw up again and wind up in the back seat of a patrol car on his way to the Clarke County Jail. Thus the university will, sooner or later, have all it needs to rid itself of a "student" clearly not yet ready to accept the responsibility - or recognize the privilege - of getting a college education.

In that hope, we'd like to be the first to bid Milner goodbye. And in case he doesn't make it to graduation, here's an abridged commencement speech for him - courtesy of Dean Vernon Wormer, the character in the movie "Animal House" who uttered these immortal words:

"Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son."

See if you can connect these dots. The University of Alabama Geniuses will pay $4 million over the next several years for the privilege of never again seeing Mike Shula wearing a headset on a Crimson Tide sideline. They were willing to pay another $2 million to West Virginia University to buy out the contract of the Mountaineers’ football coach, Rich Rodriguez, and bring him to Tuscaloosa.

Florida, which is paying $2.1 million each season to Urban Meyer, still has an even higher obligation ($2.6 million) in severance to former coach Ron Zook. Colorado’s athletic department actually had to borrow $8 million to help pay off its ousted coaches.

And when the Gators traveled to Jacksonville in October for their annual meeting with Georgia, instead of making the 90-minute bus trip on Saturday morning, they left school a whole day before and spent a chunk of the program’s $1.2 million travel budget at the Marriott Resort and Spa in Sawgrass.

Don’t be too hard on the Gators. At Colorado (among others), it’s a familiar practice for the football team to bag the dorms in favor of five-star hotels even before home games.

The University of Texas recently expanded Memorial Stadium to the tune of $150 million. Not to be outdone, financier T. Boone Pickens wrote a check for $165 million to his favorite charity, the athletics program at Oklahoma State.


Florida State can afford to pay an annual salary of $228,000 to the president of Seminole Booster Inc.—which raised $42 million in 2004 for the university’s athletic programs.

Before the deal fell through, Alabama-Birmingham boosters were going to cover most of the proposed $600,000 for LSU assistant Jimbo Fisher to become their new football coach.

Of course you’re right if you identified having more money than sense as the operative common denominator here.

And you’re not wrong if you answered that the big problem is the obscene deluge of money flowing into major-college football and basketball.

But if you want to get at the source of many of these flows, take a gander at our federal tax code. You may not have realized it, but we taxpayers help foot the bills for the oil-sheikh-opulent salary packages and off-campus spa weekends. And we do it even when those luxuries are covered from private donations.

It’s because the NCAA, which signs billion-dollar contracts that allow TV networks to broadcast its sports entertainment products, enjoys tax-exempt status. And how can a huge entertainment conglomerate—not to mention the fans who shower money on independent booster organizations in volumes that would inspire Pat Robertson to babble in tongues—get itself a free pass from the IRS?

To hear the NCAA boys explain it, they all merit a break because big-time athletic programs are integrally involved in higher education. You have to give them credit. Not even Jon Stewart could make that up.

Of course, this may come as startling news to the rest of us, who note that defending national champion Texas graduated only 29 percent of its players. Or who remember that, University of Georgia president Michael Adams, defending the academic underperformance of his school’s scholarship jocks, noted, “We still have to compete in the Southeastern Conference.”

Congressman Bill Thomas, the outgoing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, apparently also found the NCAA’s justifications a mite hard to swallow. “Why,” he wrote in a letter to the organization during the fall, “should the federal government subsidize the athletic activities of educational institutions when that subsidy is being used to help pay for escalating coaches’ salaries, costly chartered travel and state-of-the-art athletic facilities?”

And by the way, Thomas wanted to know, “What actions has the NCAA taken to retain a clear line of demarcation between major college sports and professional sports?”

Surely the University of Michigan, which is spending $226 million to add 3,200 luxury seats and 83 suites to its 107,501-seat stadium, isn’t drawing that line. Nor is Oklahoma State, which imposes a $2,500 “annual donation” for the right to buy tickets for the best seats. As columnist George Will observed, “These may be sound commercial decisions, but why should this commerce be tax-exempt?”

Excellent question. The new Democratic-controlled House should keep asking it, and finally close this ridiculous loophole.

No, this one action will not magically restore integrity to big-time college sports. But it would dry up many of the channels of free money now flowing into bloated salary packages, spa stays and cherry-paneled locker rooms.

If T. Boone Pickens needed to reduce his tax liability, he could still give his $165 million to some area of the university—perhaps a library expansion or scholarship fund—that actually relates to education. And maybe the rest of us, starting with the NCAA, could stop pretending that big-time football and basketball are something besides a business.

"My fear for the MLA report,” he wrote by e-mail, “ is that it will be shelved like the report of the Iraq Study Group. And there may be another similarity: The ISG made a mistake with Bush. They gave him 79 recommendations, not one. This report runs that risk, too. ...[T]he report offers up ideas that it will suit many to ignore.... Churchill said it so well — the Americans will do the right thing only after they have exhausted all the other possibilities. The problem is that this relatively frail creature, the university, has survived so well for so long in the US because for the most part it was located in a place where, like poetry (to cite the immortal Auden) executives would never want to tamper. But they are tampering now. And they are using the same management techniques on the university that they used on General Motors, and they may have the same deadly effect."

The House Ways and Means Committee sent shock waves through college sports when it asked the National Collegiate Athletic Association to justify its federal tax exemption by explaining how cash-consuming, win-at-all-cost athletics departments serve educational purposes....[Auburn] is embroiled in a scandal involving athletes who are said to have padded their grades and remained eligible to play by taking courses that required no attendance and little if any work. This summer, James Gundlach, an Auburn sociology professor, laid out the problem in startling detail, telling reporters that corruption at the university was pervasive. An internal audit by the university, made public this month, has uncovered a new round of problems. It found that a grade for a scholarship athlete had been changed — from an incomplete to an A — without the professor’s knowledge. ...[U]nethical behavior often associated with big-time college sports doesn’t always end with athletes. It can easily seep outward, undermining academic standards and corrupting behavior in the university as a whole.

The University of Georgia red-flags students with outstanding library fees or bad behavior, but a student with a history of alcohol-related offenses - including ones that had him barred from Clarke County for a period - re-enrolled this fall.

Police arrested Gene Whitner Miller III on Friday and charged the UGA student with providing alcohol to minors after officers responded to a late- night party at the same house where a UGA freshman partied the night he died of a drug and alcohol overdose earlier this year.

After being barred from Clarke County on Jan. 4 for a string of alcohol-related arrests, Milner moved to Colorado.

He re-enrolled at UGA for the fall 2006 semester, according to UGA records.

Students can automatically re-enroll if they dropped out for less than a calendar year, UGA officials said.

But students whose records are flagged because of outstanding debts or cases with UGA's Judicial Programs office may not re-enroll unless they clear their record with the office that placed the flag, said Tom Burke, associate vice president for student affairs.

...100 and 125 windows had been smashed with bricks, rocks and chairs, and police had been pelted with bottles and pieces of concrete. ...[C]harges including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, failure to disperse in a riot, minor in possession of alcohol, possession of marijuana, breaking and entering, mistreatment of a police horse or dog and destruction of property.

...About 60 campus, town and state police officers in riot gear were needed to squelch the riot that drew more than 1,800 students to the plaza of the Southwest residential area. Students threw bottles, cans, bricks, pieces of concrete and other items at the officers and yelled obscenities.

At least two officers were slightly injured from being hit with objects. O'Connor, who was on site during the riot, said someone threw a gallon jug of liquid from a high-rise dorm that missed her by a few feet.

"If it hit me, it would have killed me," O'Connor said.

O'Connor said two officers immediately read an order of dispersal to the mob, which responded by throwing items at them.

"You could tell right away they came out with malice in their hearts. They were bent on destroying things," O'Connor said. "They were assaulting us."

An estimate on damages had not been completed as of yesterday, but O'Connor said it's "going to be quite high." O'Connor said between 100 and 125 dorm and dining common windows were smashed with chairs, bricks and rocks, with a price tag of $250 to $1,000 per window.

Police used pepper balls, sting balls, flash bangs and smoke to disperse the crowd, at a cost of between $2,000 and $5,000, O'Connor said.

Apparently it's not enough that BP [one of the oil companies] has a basketball tournament at the University of Alaska Fairbanks named after the company. In November 2005 in front of basketball fans, BP officials "produced two UAF jerseys bearing the number 2.28 to represent their gift of $2.28 million," the News-Miner reported. Can UA get much more tacky?

As UA professors, we are uncomfortable watching our university president shill for oil companies.

... Pandering does carry risks. Sadly, [UA President] Hamilton's hustling for the oil patch is neither necessary nor honest. These payments are not outright gifts to the university. They are installments in a negotiated payment schedule for which the state has granted the oil companies valuable consideration. Hamilton knows that.

Our university president should not be pimping for Big Oil. We Alaskans do not employ him as an industry publicist, but as a guardian of a university's integrity.

[A] recruit [was] shot outside an Albuquerque strip club during an official visit....[P]olice sought help finding the shooting suspects... The players and Palomar College offensive lineman Ervin "Una" Smiley went to the Spearmint Rhino Gentleman's Club, 1645 University Blvd. The athletes got into an argument with two unidentified men, accompanied by two women, around 2 a.m. Dec. 9.

The athletes were getting into Cardenas' SUV, when one of the men fired shots at the vehicle. Cardenas drove south on University Boulevard and stopped at a light at Indian School Road, where police said the man fired more shots at the SUV.

The man fired at least 17 bullets at the SUV.

The players headed to UNM Hospital, where Smiley was treated for gunshot wounds to the legs and Cardenas was treated for an eye bruise caused by flying glass.

An officer interviewing Smiley, who is 20, said the recruit appeared to be intoxicated.

'From: 12/15/06, 12:05 a.m. to 1:15 a.m.

Disorderly Conduct

555 Riverhill Dr

On 12-15-06 I responded to Riverhill Dr in reference to a possible loud party. I parked near the 500 block and got out on foot. I immediately could hear people talking loud and yelling. I saw a group of approximately 10-12 people standing in a yard. As I walk toward them along with OFC Patterson the group saw us and ran to the house. The location was 555 Riverhill Dr. There was 4 or 5 people standing underneath a lighted carport, some with what appeared to be beer cans in hand. They saw us walking up the drive and hurried into a side door.

As they were going inside I yelled for someone to please have someone that lives there come out. I heard someone yell "The cops are here" just before they slammed the door shut. The lights were on inside and I could see people with what appeared to be beer cans in hand along with others with plastic cups. I also saw beer sitting around. Everyone inside started running toward the back of the house and at this time I could hear people running in the back yard in the leaves. I advised dispatch of the people running and OFC Patterson went around the left side of the house while I went to the right.

I found one male coming my way breathing hard and asked why he was running and did he live there. He said yes he did and I asked for I.D. He said he was Whitner Milner and he did live there. I recognized the name from past incidents at this location involving underage drinking and people running everywhere.

At this time two females and a male came around the house in a hurry. All were identified and only one was 21. Mr. Milner did not want me to talk to the three and kept telling them to go inside. I told everyone to go with me back around front. Mr. Milner asked if he could put his dog inside and I said yes. He want into a lighted basement room but did not call the dog. He stood inside and folded his arms. I told him to come on out and around front. He just stood there. I told him again, and he still just stood there. OFC Patterson asked him if he was going around front and he said, No, I don't know. At this time we stepped toward him and he tried to slam the door. OFC Patterson stopped the door and we detained him (handcuffed D.L.-B.B.) I told him he was not under arrest at this time but due to his actions he was being detained.

Somewhere during this he asked if I had arrested him here before and was I out here the night he escaped by running and getting into a canoe and going down the river. I told him yes on both accounts. His friends told him to be quiet and he said that was fun and it was a great story. We walked to the end of the drive at the road.

I began to try and explain to Mr. Milner why we were there (noise ordinance violation). He wanted to explain the law to me because he said he knew the law better than I did. He was very intoxicated and extremely loud. I again tried to explain to him while writing his citation for noise ordinance violation. He was upset and saying we (police) hate him and he had to spend 2 weeks in jail the last time for underage possession. He began saying we kicked in his back door.

While I was doing this the others were identified and found to be underage and drinking. These two were placed under arrest. Mr. Milner continued to yell and curse at times and his friends kept telling him to be quiet and cooperate. It was determined while talking to the others the alcohol was furnished at the party. I told Mr. Milner he was under arrest for furnishing alcohol to persons under 21. He became more upset at this time.

I told him we needed him to talk to someone inside and have all of them to leave or turn the residence over to them. He said we had no right to go in his house. I told him we did not need to go in, just go to the door and talk to someone inside. He cursed a little more at this time.

We determined Mr. Turner was sub-leasing here and he was more than happy to turn the home over to someone. SPO Moss advised over the radio someone was running out the front door. SPO Johnson stayed with the individuals at the drive. I saw two come from the front of the house and run to the left of the house. One in brown fell just after leaving the door and the other wearing a white shirt and light colored pants continued running. He looked back and saw me and I yelled several times "Get on the Ground Police." As we entered into the next yard I tackled him from behind. We scuffled while I was telling him to get his hands behind his back. OFC Patterson arrived and helped get his left hand behind him to handcuff. (D.L.-B.B.).

As I stood him up he said I'm sorry about running. I'm under 21 and have been drinking. He also had an odor of alcoholic beverage on his breath. He sustained a small scrape to his upper lip area that did not require medical attention.

We went back to the driveway and SPO Moss and OFC Patterson were dealing with another female (Laura Gillis) and a male (Casen Milner).

Whitner Milner started yelling and screaming, cursing at this time. He was placed into a patrol vehicle and transported with Casen Milner.

All were searched prior to being placed into patrol vehicles and transported.

'Amsterdam's mayor is apologizing for plagiarizing a Pearl Harbor address President Bush made in 2001.

Mayor Joseph Emanuele used the president’s remarks as he addressed a Pearl Harbor remembrance in Amsterdam.

In a written statement released Friday, the mayor said he was struck by Mr. Bush’s words and decided to repeat them.

“I regret that I overlooked to acknowledge the author of a majority of my remarks and for this I humbly apologize,” he added.'

My art history has always been reactive. Its enemies have been the various ways in which visual imagining of the world has been robbed of its true humanity, and conceived of as something less than human, non-human, brilliantly (or dully) mechanical. In the beginning that meant that the argument was with certain modes of formalism, and the main effort in my writing went into making the painting fully part of a world of transactions, interests, disputes, beliefs, “politics.” But who now thinks it is not? The enemy now is not the old picture of visual imaging as pursued in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns, but the parody notion we have come to live with of its belonging to the world, its incorporation into it, its being “fully part” of a certain image regime. “Being fully part” means, it turns out in practice, being at any tawdry ideology’s service.'

What formalist ever believed a work of art or literature was literally “brilliantly (or dully) mechanical,” or, at least, that a proper response to art was one that regarded it as “something less than human, non-human”? Has anyone ever really confronted a work of art “in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns”? The very fact the a human being experiences a work created by another human being, both of whom presumably draw on very human attributes--creativity, attentiveness, for that matter even the ability to self-induce a “trance-like” state--would seem to make the transformation of the puerile metaphor of the “mechanical” response to art into something real, something to be contrasted with “human,” manifestly preposterous. Yet this association of formalist criticism of all kinds with merely “mechanical” aesthetic appreciation and “engaged” political criticism with the fully “human” world of “transactions, interests, disputes, beliefs” has been an operational assumption of academic criticism for almost three decades now, producing such an endless stream of ideologically sodden “scholarship” that apparently even Clark has had enough.

It’s good that T. J. Clark wants now to challenge the pseudo-analyses of “belonging to the world” and “image regimes,” but maybe he should have realized that his own interpretation of formalism was itself a “parody notion,” that he was exchanging one “mechanical” approach for what was inevitably to become its equally distorted mirror image. It now seems a fixed law of academic criticism that one generation will dismiss the previous generation’s preferred critical method based on its least representative, most exaggerated characteristics, while going on to practice a new method that seems designed to provoke a similar reaction from the next (or in this case, from one of its own.)

poured out of buildings and began setting fires, smashing windows, and throwing rocks and cans of beer after the university’s football team lost the Division I-AA football championship to Appalachian State University Friday night. State police were called to help university officers quell the two-and-a-half-hour disturbance, according to a university statement, and two officers were treated for bruises after being hit. More than 60 officers in riot gear used pepper spray, smoke, and other tactics to break up the gathering.

My husband of more than two decades bought a motorcycle, went on the Atkins diet, and began to lose his middle-age belly. He started taking martial arts classes and brought home books about Zen Buddhism, dharma and karma. He surfed the Web to find childhood classmates, looked up old girlfriends, and — well, you know the story. [Great goofy details, winding up in a place so cliched that the writer wisely leaves it up to you to finish the thought.]

I saw the red flags but ignored them. In my mind, our marriage was strong, we were in love, and he was simply making changes in his life to make himself happier. [The key to this essay's charm is the writer's easy-going acceptance of her ditziness. She's a good-hearted person who misses a lot. She knows this.] After he left for one of the old girlfriends, I saw that I should have been more vigilant, but it was too late to go back and I was forced to take up residence in Divorceland, a sad and lonely country. [In another writer's hands, this would come across as off-putting self-pity, but here, because the writer's control of her writing conveys a larger control of herself, we accept it as reportage.]

Our older daughter left for college the same week my husband moved out, so suddenly it was just our younger teenager and me in the house. Walking through my neglected, empty and shabby home felt like I was wearing dirty old clothes. [Again, no self-pity here; just the truth of certain painful new recognitions.] I had no heart for chores like cooking, cleaning or gardening and instead spent countless hours slumped at my computer playing spider solitaire and sudoku. Honey, you are pathetic. [She's going to do this clever shift of voice -- from third-person address to the reader to first-person address to herself -- throughout the essay. It works well, given that she's already established her cluelessness. A person like this needs to and will talk to herself.]

Of course there was less money than before. Not to mention more anger and grief. Everyone thought we had the best marriage. Our next-door neighbors once told me that we were their role model for the perfect combination of friendship, passion and love. [Note the short choppy sentences. This also feels psychologically authentic, given that she was in shock.]

I was embarrassed in front of my girlfriends, despite all their love and affection, because I sensed they saw me as someone who had failed to secure what most matters when you are the woman in a middle-aged couple: devotion, fidelity and support.

But the absence of my husband did lead me to one surprising realization: I was now free to abandon my former ideas about my life and come up with new plans. [This is nicely, simply said: "abandon my former ideas about my life."] Maybe I could rent out one of my empty rooms and generate some income.

Having a witness to my pathetic habits, I hoped, also would force me to clean up and live better. [Pathetic again. Her wry self-awareness is winning.] So when I received an e-mail message from my friend Georgette in Argentina, saying she was coming back to complete and defend her doctoral dissertation, I took it as propitious. I offered her a room and kitchen, bath and laundry.

It felt good to clear out her room and clean it. I bought a dresser and a rug at Ikea. I washed the windows. The day she arrived I put a vase of flowers in her room. Welcome!

Now, Georgette is like no one else I have ever met. Tall and beautiful, she has prematurely gray hair and intense dark eyes. She is Latina, which according to her means she is emotional and excitable — traits I had already seen on display during her previous United States sojourn. And then she believes in astrology, magic and the kabbalah (whatever that is).

I had never believed in such arcana.[By the way, note that Crosson knows about one rule of good writing UD has often talked about on this blog: In most cases, you should end a sentence with your strongest word. Here, it's arcana.] But Georgette’s certainty in divine intervention was compelling. Her protector, she said, is the handsome and debonair god Mercury. Mine, she told me, is Saturn: dark, cold, harsh and mean. Well, fine. [Again, note how these little well fines and welcomes and you are pathetics make the essay run along two separate but nicely compatible tracks -- her public address to you, and her private address to herself. Read Saul Bellow's Herzog, or James Joyce's Ulysses, for this trick worked up into something really big.]

Georgette produced the most beautiful deck of tarot cards I have ever seen and read my future. Money was coming, she said, but love — not so much. At least for now. It seemed that I was still preoccupied with the past. I was convinced that Mercury was a better protector than Saturn and I envied Georgette’s luck. After all, how had Saturn protected me while my husband was laying his plans?

Georgette could see more than the messages from the stars. Looking around at my unkempt house, she announced, in her fluent, heavily accented English: “On Saturdays — I clean!”

We went out to buy Pine-Sol, her preference, and a bucket, as somehow I didn’t seem to have one. [I love this somehow I didn't seem to have one. Maybe it's because I'm a pathetic domestic specimen myself, but that genial astonishment, along with an ongoing confusion about what a well-provided house should have, rings wonderfully true.] Georgette was disappointed at being unable to find the special mop and mop cloths of Argentina, but she made do.

While she was busy mopping, the moral imperative for me to vacuum and dust the living room was clear. The house was getting clean. Her energy was inspiring. Her flood of e-mail messages — from her room downstairs to my office upstairs — were always punctuated by a series of exclamation points. “Idea!!!” was her typical subject line.

I learned from her that we were in a month with an annular eclipse — a celestial event that augurs change, good and bad — making life extra hard for everybody. She warned me not to try anything difficult during such a dubious period. The eclipse foretold endings and beginnings. We would be lucky to make it through to the month without disaster, but after that, things were going to get better. [Note how the writer leaves in abeyance whether she believes any of this shit. This is also a very smart move. She's desperate, miserable, intellectually and emotionally adrift... So the confident ideologies Georgette brings into the house are okay with her... they're at least a direction...]

One evening [Like a lot of good essays, this one is essentially background material and then narration. We have now begun narration.] she sent me a mysterious e-mail message while I was paying an overnight visit to my ailing mother. Georgette wrote that she had found something in a drawer and “We have to talk; it is very important!!!!!”

When I returned she took me by the hand and led me into the kitchen, saying, “I was looking for an extension cord, and I saw it.” She opened the drawer and showed me. It was a playing card, the seven of hearts. Typical. Where was the rest of the deck?

“It is the end of your marriage!” she said. Well, O.K. I was already aware of that. But apparently this card made it official; it seems the seven of hearts in the tarot deck is the card of total disillusionment and disorder.

And what a tarot card. So different from the ordinary one in the drawer, her card was a blue and green image of seven weeping, melting fountains dripping futility into a sad pool. [Nice visual emblem of the writer's despair, which is also, because it's a card, kind of funny and tacky.]

“You must burn it,” Georgette continued. “And put the ashes in a container and bury it. During the eclipse.”

A bit unusual, sure, but I couldn’t say that my own approach to life had worked out so well. [My favorite line: "but I couldnt' say that my own approach to life had worked out so well." Funny, open-minded, self-critical and self-accepting all at once. The mark of the Real is upon it.] It is one kind of failure to have a single playing card in a jumbled drawer along with dead batteries, random drill bits, price stickers for a yard sale that never took place and seed packets from 1993. [Again, great details.] It is another kind altogether to be suddenly without a husband and to have no idea how it all happened. Obviously, I could use some help.

That night we lighted some candles, and I prepared my strategy. The next morning I held the playing card over the burner of the commercial stove my husband and I had bought back when we thought we were cool. It made a lovely flame.

Where to put the ashes? I already knew. Those ridiculous little china spice jars in the shape of roosters that he had found in a thrift store one day and happily brought home. I never liked those birds. They languished on a shelf for the next 10 or 15 years while I kept our spices in their original McCormick cans like everybody else. My husband hadn’t taken them when he cleared out. Hmm, perfect.

Georgette told me I needed to think hard about what else I wanted to put in the rooster jar. “Something sweet,” she said. “For the sweetness of your marriage, and for the sweetness of your future. A teaspoon of honey.” She had given me the “eclipse schedule” the night before: between 7 and 7:40 the next morning. The timing had to be right, she said.

I knew where to bury the rooster: in Router’s grave. Our beloved dog had been laid to rest in the backyard five years earlier — up until my husband left, the worst loss I had ever faced. Such innocence.

We had always intended to plant azaleas over his burial site but had never done so. Instead there were cinder blocks that had sunken and become overgrown with vines and weeds. How long had it been since I had been out here? I couldn’t help but notice that the yard appeared to be just as disheveled as the house had been.

I found our shovel under the porch, pried up one of the cinder blocks, and began to dig. Almost instantly I hit something whitish — was it bone? I took a small piece and added it to the rooster jar. I loved you, Router. [Again, what this writer has achieved is an emotional tone at once sentimental and absurd. It's a wonderful mix.]

I thought I had to work quickly to make sure I finished before the eclipse ended. With a marker, I wrote the word “Done” on the faded label that once said “Thyme.” Then I covered the jar with earth, patting it down with my hands, and replaced the cinder block.

Finished, I stood over the grave in my unmatched pajama bottom and top, my ailing mother’s castoff robe wrapped tightly around me.

Inside, my daughter was still choosing outfits and putting on makeup for school, unaware of my strange backyard ceremony. She seemed so impervious to everything that had happened, insouciant and preoccupied with her friendships, yet I felt fiercely protective of her and her sister. I was ready to believe that by burying the china rooster I might find some release from the pain I had been suffering, however ridiculous such a notion might be. A release that would be for the good of all of us. It was worth a try, anyway. Maybe that’s the way of faith — you just try. [Again, humor, self-aware credulity, hopefulness. A good mix.]

But as I walked back to the house, I felt no different. Even Georgette seemed oddly unexcited when I gave her my report after my daughter left for school. ‘Yes, yes, is for you,” she said. “I just thought — the eclipse — is a thing.”

But that night, as I lay in bed envisioning the rooster jar buried in the dark earth, filled with ashes, bone and honey, I thought, finally, about the sweetness of my marriage. I thought about how for many, many years my husband and I had truly loved one another and made each other happy. And I waited to see if this acknowledgment would help temper my anger and grief.

It did, a little. Maybe with time it would a little more. This small sweetness seemed the best I could hope for, but it was enough.

As for the sweetness of my future, I am sure of at least a few things: my house will get cleaner, Georgette will continue to brim with good ideas. And if I ever come across a deck of cards that’s missing the seven of hearts — well, I’ll just toss it out.

'Less than a month after a harsh public rebuke from Rupert Murdoch, publishing provocateur Judith Regan has ankled HarperCollins.

News Corp.-owned HarperCollins announced the news late Friday on the East Coast with a terse press release headlined "Judith Regan Terminated." Termination was effective immediately, the statement said.

Move was clearly a reaction -- albeit a delayed one -- to the embarrassing scandal involving a Regan tome and T.V. special with O.J. Simpson titled "If I Did It," in which he described the way he would have committed the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. That event earned across-the-board condemnation.'

OSU-Michigan rivalry transcends vulgarity: This is sports as occupier; sports as the all-consuming Moloch bent on ingesting anyone trying to read a book on the quad or toss a frisbee. ... Fire is a real fear in the game's aftermath. I heard a local sports radio announcer joke uneasily Sunday about how people should make sure they burn their old couches, not new ones--a reference to the more than fifty fires that took place after Ohio State defeated Texas earlier this year. ... This is farce carrying the threat of tragedy. The game should be an invitation to have some fun. Instead it becomes a backdrop for a raging bouillabaisse of testosterone and alienation. To the people of Columbus, and a university with a proud tradition of student organizing and solidarity, cheer yourselves hoarse for the Buckeyes on Saturday. But save your anger for the people who deserve it: the administrators who hiked your tuition while spending hundreds of thousands on stadium upkeep ...

Auburn University reversed position Wednesday and said it would forward to the NCAA relevant information from an internal audit examining grade changes.

The audit showed that a grade for at least one scholarship athlete was changed without the knowledge of the student's professor. The change allowed the athlete to barely finish above the 2.0 grade-point averaged needed to graduate.

...Auburn continued to maintain any grade changes were not coerced by the athletics department.

"It's been indicated to me that Democrats really want to increase Pell grants but are facing an issue of pay as you go," Gundlach said. "So cutting the tax-exempt status on big-time athletics could put a whole lot of poor kids through college and would be very much the kind of things Democrats would like to point at by the time 2008 came around."

Hearings would include examining whether big-time athletics really promotes education. Gundlach was approached last summer by the House Ways and Means Committee about possibly testifying.

"I'm still interested in testifying," Gundlach said. "The thing that makes big-time sports actually detrimental to education is it has too much money. Too much money, too much power, too much influence."

One of the two remaining candidates for Windsor Southwest Supervisory Union superintendent lists on his resume a doctoral degree from a well-known diploma mill. [Bogus PhD's are popular among school administrators, since listing one on your resume can double your salary.]

Mychael Willon was named as one of two finalists for the job on Tuesday. On his resume, Willon lists a doctorate of philosophy from LaSalle University of Louisiana. In 1995, the FBI raided the unaccredited Louisiana school and its founder was convicted of fraud. [Of all the diploma mills I've researched, LaSalle is easily the sleaziest. Easily.]

When questioned about his doctoral degree on Wednesday, Willon declined comment. [Declined comment is step one. Step two will be "It's elitist to discriminate between non-traditional educational institutions and traditional ones." Step three: "I didn't know it was a diploma mill." Step four: Even if it was a diploma mill, I really worked for that degree.]

The Eagle Times received an e-mail raising questions about Willon's credentials on Wednesday. [These stories almost always break with an anonymous communication from someone who knows the truth -- an ex-wife, an ex-employer...]

When informed Wednesday night of the details of Willon's doctorate, Alison DesLauriers, superintendent search committee chairwoman, said she still considers him a viable candidate. She said Willon began his doctoral work in Maryland and elected to finish the degree online after moving out of state. [UD always finds this part -- and it's a totally reliable part -- of the story strange. People involved in the scandal will always begin by dismissing the bogus degree as of no importance. Here, the search committee chair seems to think it matters that he moved out of state...]

"He has significant experience in the field of education and has more than the base qualifications," DesLauriers said. [This is another absolutely time-honored move: The defenders will say that the job doesn't require an advanced degree, so the whole moral cesspool thing of this person having bought a bogus degree is irrelevant. And as to this man having "base" qualifications -- he certainly does, but not in the way this woman intends.]

The superintendent position has a budgeted annual salary of $95,000 plus benefits, she said. A doctoral degree doesn't have any influence on the salary, and DesLauriers said Willon's doctorate also was not a factor in picking him as a finalist. [See the move? Doesn't matter! And note that high salary -- a strong message to your local students that cheaters prosper.]

Willon has a masters of education in curriculum and instruction from the University of Maryland, which he received December 1984. In 1977, he received a bachelors of science in elementary education from the University of Maryland, according to his resume. [Many diploma mill people have legit other degrees. They just got impatient for higher ones.]