Definitely beginning to sound like Borat.

And thank goodness a professor’s gotten involved. UD gets to cover the story!

The alleged crimes of the Brooklyn man arrested Thursday for dealing in black-market kidneys were first reported by an anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley, who learned of the man’s suspected involvement through her research.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes – whose contacts in Israel define her as the world’s leading authority on organ trading – says she heard reports that the suspect, 58-year-old Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, held donors at gunpoint after they changed their minds about the operation.

Such reports that she received from her sources compelled her to go to the authorities. She met with an FBI agent at a Manhattan hotel and gave him information about Rosenbaum, but she says that the Bureau acted only much later. The Berkeley scholar is said to have identified Rosenbaum to the FBI seven years ago as a major figure in a global human organ ring.

The anthropologist says that the man who led her to Rosenbaum says that he initially believed Rosenbaum was a man who saved the lives of people in need. According to Scheper-Hughes, that man told her he had changed his mind after meeting some of Rosenbaum’s donors – confused and impoverished people from Eastern Europe…

One out of every five adult males in some of Moldova’s poorest villages has had his kidney removed, according to Scheper-Hughes …

**********************

I boarded a broken-down jitney
To check out a show at the Whitney.
And jumpin’ jehovah
The Salle de Moldova
Was featuring recycled kidney.

Some details on who’s who, and background, here.

UD is, to say the least, flattered.

Under pressure from FIRE and bloggers, Emory University remembers that Doug Bremner works there, and that he’s perfectly within his rights to say so on his blog.

“Amid all the campus ephemery
We seem to have misplaced our memory.
Dr. Bremner, old boy!
What a bundle of joy!
And please say that you’re working at Emory.”

Emory and the Boys

The critical writing of Doug
Gets firmly swept under the rug,
While the lucrative quackery
Of Charles and Zachary
Acts on it like some kind of drug.

… words in English.

UD tried to write a limerick using all of the words beginning with one or another letter of the alphabet.  The best she could do was this.  She uses the words starting with L.  But she wasn’t able to use all of them. 

Here’s the L list:

Lagniappe
Lagoon
Languor
Lassitude
Leisure
Lilt
Lissome
Lithe
Luxuriant

And here’s her limerick.

At leisure within his lagoon

Gauguin spent luxuriant noons.

The Tahitians were lithe

And his languor so blithe

That he slept til the rise of the moon.

… writes T.S. Eliot, in The Waste Land.

On the Liffey, however, Samuel Beckett connects Sir John Rogerson’s Quay with North Wall Quay.

Like his mentor, James Joyce, Beckett now has a Dublin bridge named after him:

The Samuel Beckett Bridge, at 120 metres long and 48 metres high, will link Sir John Rogerson’s Quay on the south side of the river Liffey with Guild Street and North Wall Quay on the north side.

Dublin’s newest bridge was designed by Santiago Calatrava, and will be his second bridge in the capital. The James Joyce Bridge, near Heuston Station, opened in 2003.

The new bridge, costing about €60 million, will be capable of rotating through an angle of 90 degrees to facilitate maritime traffic.

It has four traffic lanes, cycle tracks and footpaths.

It arrived on a barge into Dublin Port on Monday morning having charted its way from Rotterdam, across the English Channel and Irish Sea in a week-long journey.

It was constructed for Dublin City Council by an Irish/Dutch joint venture consortium Graham-Hollandia.

The design evokes the image of the Irish harp lying on its side…

What would Beckett say?

“Bridge to nowhere.”

*****************************

They put up a bridge for Sam Beckett
And his characters came out to check it.
Vlad and Estragon waited.
And waited and waited.
Then Lucky and Pozzo both wrecked it.

Chuck Grassley is sticking around as the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, one of the centers of power in the health reform debate.

… Grassley and Max Baucus, who chairs the committee, had lunch at the White House today with Barack Obama and Joe Biden. They spent most of the meal talking about health reform, the Des Moines Register reports.

… The prospect [that Grassley might leave Finance] apparently had some pharma lobbyists pretty excited, given Grassley’s scrutiny of the industry.

But it didn’t work out that way…

***************************************

LAMENT OF THE MED SCHOOL FACULTY

We thought with the end of Chuck Grassley
We could go back to acting all crassly.
But our passion for pharma’s
Run into bad karma:
The man is alive, and it’s ghastly.

[Senator] Grassley, in a letter to Pfizer, wrote that he was “greatly disturbed” to read an article in The New York Times on Tuesday describing a Pfizer representative taking cellphone photographs of [Harvard] medical students last October at a campus demonstration against industry influence. “I find this troubling as I have documented several instances where pharmaceutical companies have attempted to intimidate academic critics of drugs,” he wrote.

New York Times

**************************

The curious lensman from Pfizer
Has become my new Harvard advisor.
“Promote my next pill
And you’ll be in the swill.”
To which all I can say is “Aye aye, sir!”

Official statement from the University of New Mexico board of trustees in response to the faculty no-confidence vote in regard to President David Schmidly.

We admit we were all bit piddly
When we voted to hire Dave Schmidly.
But who knew that he’d stink?
He looks good when you drink.
And now it’s too late to do diddly.