The void, ‘thesda-style.
Sitting at my desk writing a lecture about Blood Meridian, I just watched, from my front windows, an enormous hawk stand on my post and rail fence and look for a few minutes at the half-eaten body of a rabbit that I earlier this morning watched a crow pick at.
That was certainly a long sentence.
Let’s rewrite it McCarthy-style (the hawk has since descended, picked up the body in its claws, and taken it halfway up an adjacent tree).
She wrote the lecture and looked out of the window and a hawk was there and it watched the body of the crow-picked rabbit and looked around itself and then it floated down and lifted the dead rabbit in its talons and took it up to a tree and began to eat.
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(Looked like this. Without the snow. Plus maybe that’s a squirrel.)
A red tailed hawk waits. It waits and waits. It sits high up in one of our big old trees, staring down at a tree stump under which a rabbit sits frozen. Ten minutes ago, while Les UDs ate lunch, they were startled by the hawk rushing out of nowhere onto a crazily running around rabbit.
Wait. Hello. There are two hawks up there, roosting in slightly separated trees, staring at the stump.
For the last few weeks I’ve seen hawks flying overhead in our backwoods. I think they may have eaten the squirrel that for hours was madly circling in our driveway yesterday. Animal Control said it had probably been hit by a car and its brains were fried. (Hm. It occurs to me that the squirrel might have been beaned by one of the hawks… My manners are tearing off heads… ) Eventually it circled into the street and died along a curb – these hawks must have dined on that and decided more than ever that chez Soltans was the place to be. Mice, rabbits, and squirrels galore, some of them just lying there dead for the taking.
Its thrilling to see the hawks – they’re massive, beautifully feathered. The current setting – light snow along the trees, broody skies – is positively mythic. But now UD gets to worry about their hitting her upside the head while she’s walking her small (but not too small – I think she’s safe) dog on her property.
… this.
We named her after Emilia Plater, a Polish heroine to whom Mr UD is related.
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Oh, okay. So this is
what she really looks like.
La Kid‘s in San Diego for work.
But she had time yesterday for the zoo.
(Click for the big pic.)
Click on this photo, which La Kid
just took from inside the house,
to see UD‘s icy Buddha atop
an upside down birdbath.
What woke me early this morning felt like raw cold, not house cold. I followed the cold to the living room, where the wind had blown open a set of casement windows.
I’m in the habit of latching them in the middle and not bothering with the bottom and top. Now the doors were flung open to the incredible cold and the incredibly clear night sky. A blast of arctic reality.
The NYT story is here.
Here’s Campos:
… Only when [national university] rankings expanded in the mid-1990s to encompass 50 and then 100 schools in numerical order did GW appear on these lists. Like the vast majority of colleges and universities, George Washington’s ranking has always been very stable. The school lurked and continues to lurk on the edge of the top 50, with practically no variation in its ranking from year to year. This suggests, of course, that what [ex-president Stephen] Trachtenberg did for the school’s overall reputation was exactly nothing, although his ability to convince credulous journalists that he had taken a humble inexpensive commuter school and transformed it into a high-priced academic powerhouse no doubt played a role in helping raise his salary by the time he departed to $3.7 million. (To the — very considerable — extent that a university’s endowment can be considered a proxy for its overall academic status, the history of GW’s endowment suggests strongly that the school’s status didn’t improve at all during Trachtenberg’s tenure.)
… Stephen Joel Trachtenberg might be considered academia’s king of meta-bullshit. His oft-repeated claims that he cynically and successfully exploited the Veblenesque yearnings of America’s middle and upper classes in order to make George Washington University much richer and more prestigious turns out to be just so much bullshit. But what most certainly isn’t bullshit is that he managed to exploit those claims themselves — although the prime beneficiary of those claims turned out not to be the institution that ended up paying him millions of dollars a year for his services.
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UD thanks Dr_Doctorstein for the link to Campos.
UD‘s sister-in-law,
with her colleague Alahna,
says goodbye to her office.
… that raise?
Because of the misconduct allegations against him, [Rakesh] Kumar has not been able to find another research job. He also alleges that GW denied a “promised” raise to him.
… often take off for a few days in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. UD‘s sister swears up and down that the weather for the next few days will be mild there, so off we go.
She’ll blog from the beach, of course. She blogs from everywhere.
… ranged from leading an early morning corporate seminar on John Updike’s short story, “Trust Me” (the participants were managers who have been doing some long-term thinking about trust and organizations) to attending a GW faculty seminar on the subject of “Christian Zionists” (a term UD had not heard before). She needed to cover large swathes of DC in a hurry – she metroed, ubered, and shuttled her way up and down and all around.
Best of all, at the end of the day, a generous colleague gave her a lift right to her door.
It was cold, and intensely sunny, with no snow. It was so cold that UD wore her massive alpaca coat, which she rarely does because it feels as though you’re carrying around a massive alpaca. But the thing undeniably keeps her warm.