One of Raj’s insider trading associates — the man on the left, Mark Kurland — sports an elegant sweater for his perp walk.

UD finds the detail on Kurland’s sweater of the little man playing golf strangely moving, in a Great Gatsby sort of way… This guy’s saying goodbye to his world… The world he’s wearing on his sleeve…

Ave atque vale, Calusa Pines.

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

UPDATE: This photo, from

the LA Times, suggests

that the sweater

in fact features three

golfers, each representing

different part of the swing.

NEW UPTE MEDIA CAMPAIGN ASKS CALIFORNIANS:
WHO’S UNIVERSITY?

… where a scientist, Malcolm Casadaban, has died after exposure to a weak strain of the plague.

University of Chicago molecular genetics professor studying the origins of harmful bacteria died last weekend after contracting an infection linked to the plague, officials said today.

University hospital officials said there “does not appear to be a threat to the public” following the death of Malcolm J. Casadaban, 60, at the campus’ Bernard Mitchell Hospital on Sept. 13.

None of the people the researcher had contact with has reported illness and symptoms typically develop within 2 to 10 days, officials said.

The researcher was studying a weakened laboratory strain of Yersinia pestis that lacked the plague bacteria’s harmful components, officials said.

… University officials said the weakened strain of the bacteria is used as a vaccine to protect against the plague.

According to university officials, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has approved the weakened strain for laboratory studies. It does not require special safety precautions required for work with more virulent strains, according to the release.

Once the lab strain was identified Friday, officials contacted the Chicago Department of Public Health…

Raymond Clark is now under arrest for murder in the strangulation of Annie Le.

Yale’s president, in his email to the Yale community, writes

This incident could have happened in any city, in any university, or in any workplace. It says more about the dark side of the human soul than it does about the extent of security measures.

Given the panicked stupidity of his response to what he had done, and the resulting reams of physical evidence Clark left, UD wonders… If the crime was – as appears – unpremeditated, might that change in any way the severity of the charge or punishment against him?

… between Raymond Clark, a lab technician, and material in the Annie Le murder.

At this point, if the reports are correct, investigators have an immense amount of evidence against Clark, including this:

Swipe cards Le and Clark used to move through different areas of college buildings showed they were in the same room shortly after 10 a.m. on Sept. 8, The Hartford Courant reported.

Le, 24, wasn’t seen alive after that, and her card wasn’t used again. But Clark swiped into the area where she was found strangled five days later in a crawlspace, a law enforcement source told the paper.

I’m thinking about a couple possible motives:

•  Unrequited passion.  He had perhaps long lusted after her and been rejected.  He knows she’s about to get married, and he decides to make one last try.  Things go very badly.  Enraged, he kills her.

•  He thinks she disrespects him.  He’s a man; she’s a woman.  He’s a big muscular guy; she’s a scrap of a thing.  She should be subordinate to him.  It drives him nuts that he’s a janitor, she a researcher, higher than he on the professional scale.  He has accumulated, over a number of months, an intense sense of grievance against her.  He’ll show that bitch.

… is apparently the suspect in Annie Le’s murder.

… his ex-wife. In a parking lot near a graduate student housing complex.

They were fighting over child custody. He killed her in front of the child.

… are emerging in the Annie Le case. But so far they’re just rumors.

Here’s Yale’s official investigation page.

(A psychotic stalker, as in the Johanna Justin-Jinich case? How did he get in the building?)

(Or, as others suggest, someone who worked in the building? Who knew where crawl spaces were, etc.)

… is now up at Inside Higher Ed.

lie.

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

Update: Wilson’s site now says it’s down due to extremely high traffic (the earlier lie was that it was under maintenance). Ain’t that the truth.

PROFESSOR TO STUDY RISKY BEHAVIOR WITH SCIENCE GRANT

This piece has idiotic graphics and calls university students kids, but look past that. It lists five ways to avoid swine flu on campus.

Summary: Don’t take some sniveling miserable person to bed with you. Wash your hands compulsively, and spray anti-bacterial stuff on shared surfaces (classroom desks, cellphones if you pass them around, etc.). Avoid salad bars; don’t share food. Ixnay on the moronic drinking games. Keep your spliff to yourself (the article forgets to mention this).

And don’t touch your face!

… a few riled Cornellians aren’t such a big deal.

The hot Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, fond of mid-rise buildings with holes in them, designed the CCTV Tower annex (headquarters of Chinese tv) in Beijing,

and now that it’s up, hundreds of millions of Chinese think that if you really look at the primary tower and the nearby annex, it’s obvious that together they “were meant to look like a penis, next to a bent-over woman.”

Here are a couple of

efforts to make the case.

Koolhaas has had to give an interview denying it all, etc.

Meanwhile, his design for new architecture workspace at Cornell has annoyed many faculty there, who think it’s too expensive, and insufficiently environmentally minded. A government professor writes to the campus newspaper:

This $55-60 million building project comes at a time of deep cuts to core academic programs in many other departments… It is not fancy buildings that attract people to a university. It is faculty, research funding, graduate stipends, library collections. And ideals … like a genuine commitment to sustainability… The architect Rem Koolhaas has made no secret of his contempt for sustainability… He belongs to that old fraternity of starchitects who brook no human or natural interference with their artistic ‘vision.’ So we will get an absurd set of glass boxes projecting forward and backward (because the projecting glass box is this architect’s signature), instead of a future-oriented building of the sort other Ivy universities are building, at LEED platinum standards, beautiful to look at and work in, and concordant with the movement to fight climate change.

[SOS says: Lose the contemptuous quotes around vision. You’re attacking Koolhaas for being contemptuous; you shouldn’t be contemptuous in return.]

Having looked at all sorts of images of Milstein Hall [click on the images for a slide show], UD would have to agree that it ain’t pretty. To her eye, it looks like an awkward over-sized fill-in (the task was to connect established buildings and close a gap).

UD‘s got nothing against its break from the historical context of the buildings around it. Rather, it’s the severely flat-topped, too-big feel of the thing she dislikes.

As for the overhang – UD‘s spent decades driving under (being driven under) the Kennedy Center overhang, and it’s just deadly. Dark, loud, creepy. Why do it if you don’t have to?

LONG ARM OF THE LAW FINDS
HOLLOW LEG OF THE LAWLESS

Officers located dangerous drugs in the prosthetic leg of an arrested subject.

Daily Sentinel, Nacogdoches.

A 2007 article in the New York Times last year takes us inside America’s Syrian Jewish community:

… At the end of this past August, Jakie Kassin, a community leader, grandson of the author of the Edict and son of the current chief rabbi [This man, the current chief rabbi, was arrested today, along with other rabbis from the same community, for money laundering. “[T]he rings were led by rabbis who used charitable, nonprofit entities connected to their synagogues to ‘wash’ money they understood came from illegal activities.”], received a laminated wooden plaque measuring 4 feet by 2 feet for his inspection. It was the most recent incarnation of the Edict. The original Edict was a document signed by five dignitaries. Since then, it has been reaffirmed in each generation by a progressively larger number of signatories. The newest version, issued last year, was signed by 225 rabbis and lay leaders, testimony to the growth of the community and the enduring power of the Edict.

“Never accept a convert or a child born of a convert,” Kassin told me by phone, summarizing the message. “Push them away with strong hands from our community. Why? Because we don’t want gentile characteristics.”

… In addition to the strictures imposed by the Edict in instances of proposed intermarriage, any outsider who wants to marry into a Syrian family — even a fellow Jew — is subject to thorough genealogical investigation. That means producing proof, going back at least three generations and attested to by an Orthodox rabbi, of the candidates’ kosher bona fides. This disqualifies the vast majority of American Jews, who have no such proof. “We won’t take them — not even if we go back three or four generations — if someone in their line was married by a Reform or Conservative rabbi, because they don’t perform marriages according to Orthodox law,” Kassin said. Even Orthodox candidates are screened, to make sure there are no gentiles or converts lurking in the family tree. In addition, all prospective brides and grooms must take marital purity classes…

… Syrian Jews have always regarded advanced secular education with something like suspicion. Not only does it promote outside values, it also distracts a boy from his proper role as an apprentice in the family business.

… SY females are expected to stay home, rear children…

… [Israeli] Rabbi Ovadia Yosef … has found financial backers for his theocratic Shas Party. Jakie Kassin claims, in fact, that the party’s seed money was raised in his living room in Deal, N.J., in the early ’80s.  [Shas shares the enlightened attitudes toward higher education we see in the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn.]

… For many years, the most famous SY in the world was Eddie Antar, known professionally as Crazy Eddie. In the ’70s, he revolutionized the home electronics business and created an empire.

Nobody did retail theater better than Crazy Eddie. His souk-smart salesmen — many of them relatives and friends from the enclave — choreographed the shopping experience, waltzing the zboon (SY slang for “customer”) in well-rehearsed steps toward the be’aah, the sale. His ads (“His prices are insane!”) were commercial performance art. And when he was caught defrauding his investors for almost $100 million dollars and subsequently fled to Israel, Eddie provided an international drama that ended in extradition and prison…

…  Solomon Dwek, … universally known as “the rabbi’s son,” is … the scion of a prestigious clan. His father is a highly regarded spiritual leader in the SY summer enclave in Deal, N.J. Solomon, still in his early 30s, made a name for himself as a high-stakes real estate developer in Monmouth County, N.J. Then, one memorable day in April 2006, according to an F.B.I. statement filed in federal court, he rolled up to the window of a PNC Bank branch in Eatontown, N.J., deposited a personal check for $25.2 million and later wired out by telephone $22.8 million against it. After the check bounced, Dwek was arrested by the F.B.I. for bank fraud. [Dwek is now the man of the hour — the cooperating witness who has brought down the leading rabbis of the community. They did the perp walk today because of Solomon Dwek…. But Dwek’s family doesn’t have any gentile characteristics, so I’m sure the community will forgive him.]

… Seventy years after the promulgation of the Edict, it seems fair to say that, taken on its own terms, it has been an almost uniquely successful tool of social engineering. The enclave grows and thrives beyond the dreams of its founders. It offers a secure economic future and a sweet family life to those who remain within its confines. As for those who could not or would not fit in, well, every fight for survival has its collateral damage. [The New York Times reporter really nailed it.  Successful, thriving, secure, and sweet, the Syrian enclave has today really done itself proud…  The reporter seems to have missed an earlier article in the NYT about the same community, whose writer who found things less sweet: “Although it is made up of ordinary city streets, the area has something of the flavor of a gated development in Los Angeles, with vehicles bearing the insignia of private security companies on patrol. The reporter was stopped on the street by two men in a car belonging to a company called City Investigations Security…”]

“People have to make a choice,” Jakie Kassin told me. “Sure, it’s rough sometimes. But I’ll tell you something — we should be an example to others. We’re building the No. 1 Jewish community on planet Earth, right here in Brooklyn.”