Newt Gingrich Aides Resign En Masse.
The candidate’s too dégueulasse.
Each gets a pin
From his Tiffany’s tin
In remembrance of things past.
Here are two.
The first, from UD‘s old friend Dave, comments on the resignation, this week, of Ohio State’s sweater-vest-wearing coach, Jim Tressel:
A mountain of sleaze (size: Everest)
Has finally buried the sweater-vest.
On this day of slow news,
Free cars and tattoos
Have brought about change for the betterest.
The second has to do with a professor at the University of Houston who reportedly served his students marijuana on a trip abroad:
So how did I spend time in Ghana?
I guess you could say marijuana.
Some reefer and buddha,
With weed and construda,
And cannabis too if you wanna.
Support structure withdrawn.
Ohio State’s ex-coach Jim Tressel
Has made of himself the Lord’s vessel.
He’s preached and he’s preached
And he’s preached and he’s preached.
But he overlooked 21 (Thessal.)
Newt Gingrich has had an epiphany:
“The music of love’s a polyphony.
I would thee endow
With five hundred thou.
Thank God for the Chevy Chase Tiffany’s.”
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A man with a past.
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“Thunderbolt”? Not quite the word.
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From The Economist:
Leave aside the details of the allegations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the IMF (his lawyer indicates he will plead not guilty) Just note that the New York Times states that he was staying in a $3,000 a night suite and was taking a first class flight to Paris. This is the IMF, the body that imposes austerity on indebted countries and is funded by global taxpayers. And this was the likely leading socialist candidate for the French presidency.
You remember Fulvia Morgana, the rich sybaritic Italian Marxist in David Lodge’s Small World? She explains herself:
Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the ‘istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role which we know ‘ow to perform with a certain dignity.
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If true, this was the behavior of the pathologically entitled. Just imagine the effigies and rage from the Portuguese, Greeks and others who will receive IMF lectures about the “moral duty” of paying one’s debts. Lost authority, lost order.
A couple of somewhat similar observations – first, from Ann Althouse:
Let’s assume that the maid’s story is true. When things like this happen, I suspect that this is a man who has had sexual encounters like this before, many times. He’s gotten more cursory and abrupt over time, because he’s been successful in the past. Here is an illustrious man, staying in an extremely expensive hotel room — a room with many amenities. Seems you can get whatever you want. A woman appears. Is she beautiful? He imagines that the woman is another thing the hotel subtly offers to men who pay $3,000 a night for the hotel.
Second, Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker:
[F]or lovers of France and French life, there is something deeply depressing not only in the apparent elimination of one of the more plausible alternatives [to Sarkozy], but by what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life—the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…
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Strauss-Kahn is proving a sagacious leader.
Joseph Stiglitz writes the worst-timed op/ed of the year.
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The Socialist Party’s Strauss-Kahn
Is a rather bizarre sort of mahn
He takes fancy trips
At his hotels he strips
And tries to play cahtch as cahtch cahn.
The governor couldn’t be prouder
To reappoint Robert E. Lowder.
A trustee supreme
For a school that’s a dream!
(Though of course there are one or two doubters.)
A tamarin monkey named Wowzer
Worked closely with Dr. Marc Hauser.
Her lifestyle was fab
She had run of the lab
But nothing he did could arouse her.
Robert Conquest condenses Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man:
Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps’ rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.
Christopher Hitchens quotes it in his memoir.
Max Brod, you recall, ignored Kafka’s request (in writing) that he destroy all of his manuscripts… Which, you know, I guess was okay since Kafka’s manuscripts were really good.
But then Brod gave all the originals plus lots of other not-yet-released stuff to his girlfriend, who was nuts and hid it away, and then she left it all to her children (now old ladies), also nuts. Nuts and mercenary.
They’ve been selling it off bit by bit (it resides in Israel and Switzerland in bank vaults) for millions. To Germany.
Israel, finding this grody to the Max, and quite certain Brod intended all of it for the state of Israel, has been suing for decades, etc.
Here’s the latest chapter of The Trial:
… Four safety-deposit boxes were opened in Zurich Monday by order of the Israeli court, revealing a wealth of Kafka-related manuscripts that now are being catalogued. In the next few days, five other safe deposit boxes are to be opened in Tel Aviv.
When the very first of the total of 10 boxes was opened last week in Israel, one of the sisters, Eva Hoffe, is reported to have burst into the bank in an effort to prevent the vault from being opened, shouting “It’s mine, it’s mine!”
Though present this week in Switzerland, Ms. Hoffe was barred from the bank vault and from the conference room where the papers were examined.
… The library has produced evidence that Max Brod intended the manuscripts for it and, in three decades of frustrations worthy of Kafka himself, found its deal to receive the papers repeatedly blocked by Ms. Hoffe.
Sure, there’s a limerick or two here. I’ll give it a whirl. Later.
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Okay. So here’s what they find in the vault.
Codicil
Dear Max, here’s my scariest thought:
That this writing, so painfully wrought,
Will fall to some bitches
Who’ll sell it for riches
And, oddly, will never be caught.
… the latest in Norwegian faculty speech codes.
The University of Oslo recently fired Arnved Nedkvitne, a medieval history professor with a mouth on him. He appealed, but a court backed the university, which argued that he often said mean things about his colleagues.
Spurred on by this victory, the university’s human relations specialist Mette Børing
… proposed to work out guidelines as a kind of code of conduct at the university with lists of words and expressions not to be tolerated when describing a colleague. She claimed this was needed, having four or five other cases on her table after the Nedkvitne case, with similar accusations of improper characterisations of colleagues. She said something had to be done.
This strange proposal brought her to the front page of the major Oslo finance newspaper, Dagens Næringsliv, with a comment by Kristian Gundersen that he regarded this as a clear breach of his democratic right of expression. The following day, Oslo Rector Ole Petter Ottersen denied such a work was in progress.
Several people commented on the proposal with Professor Bernt Hagtvet of political science at the university asking rhetorically: “Would for instance the expression ‘braindead perfumed puma’ be accepted in her list of words?”…
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Update: Limericks:
1.) From Ahistoricality:
There was a braindead perfumed puma
subsisting on gossip and rumor:
“When I make up rules
to govern these fools
I can fire all these Molly Bloomers!”
2.) Dave:
I said “you’re a puma: brain-dead, perfumed”
To the Dean, and my tenure was doomed.
It wasn’t much to the liking
Of a censorious Viking.
“Should’ve called him a lynx,” I assumed.
3.) UD:
The brain-dead and perfumèd puma
Lives deep in the hills of Exuma.
At first it was Prussian.
Then, quite briefly, Russian.
Until banned from the halls of the Duma.
SUNY Binghamton’s Lois DeFleur
Told her students “I’m totally seur —
As the sports program grows,
We will smell like a rose!”
Only now the place smells like maneur.
The University of Limerick has denied allegations of nepotism over the appointment by the university’s president of his wife to a senior management position, without consideration of any other candidates.
Philip Larkin at the Hull Festival
The ghost of the poet from Hull
Found his festival terribly dull.
“Exhibits, a play…
What is there to say?
Nix naught nonexistent and null.”
A Limerick About An Asshole
An envoy from Guinea-Bissau
Got a ticket for two hundred thou.
I was over the limit? Oops. Sorry.
You know how it is with Ferraris…
I’m immune from your laws anyhow.
Forest Labs budgeted $100,000 for ghostwriting articles about its antidepressant Lexapro. The news came in a copy of Forest’s 2004 Lexapro marketing plan, unveiled by the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging. [Forest] budgeted $100,000, including “honoraria” for authors, for articles that would appear in medical journals, consumer publications, and on the internet.
… The document will doubtless be of interest to federal prosecutors, who in February sued Forest for allegedly promoting its anti-depressants for pediatric use without FDA approval, and paying kickbacks to doctors to encourage prescriptions. The complaint also alleges that the company hid a negative study that later was used by the FDA in a decision to give both drugs black box warnings.
The document also indicates that Forest expected to put Emory University on its payroll.
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Our anti-depressants are rife.
We give them to you and your wife.
With no ifs or maybes
We give them to babies
And make them pill-poppers for life.