This morning, for the first time, my ancient Florida memories revived. I was walking up Margaret Street at six, on my way to Yankee Freedom’s trip to the Dry Tortugas.

Key West is eerie at six. The sky is blue velvet, and in the silence the palms clatter to a strange life, human-feeling. Their long trunks and massive heads whisper to the houses, and the houses whisper back.

Streetlamps shed a thin light, and as you pass the island cemetery the stacked coffins glimmer.

It was the scent and the feel of the air that revived my memory of waking up early in Florida campsites – the same warm salty wind, the same velvet sky. Or maybe I’m remembering the wildness of the palms against the subdued start of day.

… in need of your UD fix… UD‘s been away all day on her Extreme Seasickness Adventure, and she will be called away again any minute to have dessert at El Sibony with friends. But until then she will share with you another narrative of her Key West day.

Oops. There’s the call. Back in a bit.

The University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon handed hundreds of millions of dollars over to money managers who pocketed it.

… for Dean in Charge of Placing Thieving Professors on Leave With Pay. It has so many of them.

USF has only just gotten rid of the bicycle thief professor; now at UF there’s the NASA funds thief professor.

The FBI searched the offices of a University of Florida scientist Wednesday who is accused along with his family of taking “hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegally obtained government funds” from the nation’s space agency.

Court documents filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tallahassee describe a criminal and civil investigation into “fraudulent” invoices that resulted in funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to professor Samim Anghaie, 59, his wife, Sousan, 54, and their two adult sons.

Federal officials would not talk about the details of their investigation, which UF reacted to by placing Anghaie on leave with pay. He could not be reached for comment.

Also working the case are agents of NASA’s Office of Inspector General.

Perhaps the university system should consider building a holding pen on one of its campuses.

… Key West evening,
I looked for a cab
near Duval, and
found a pink one
stopped at an
intersection.

The guy didn’t have any passengers, but he didn’t see me. I tapped on his window. He was talking on the phone.

He nodded me in.

The conversation on the phone was intimate and urgent. He drove distractedly.

I gave him my address. He nodded again, staggered down Duval, and kept talking.

Then he put the phone down and said to me:

“She wants me back, but I’m still under the restraining order she took out on me. I’m tellin’ her I don’t want to go jail. I know what that’s like. It’s the roommate’s fault. A real bitch that one. I fixed her. I have a friend at the housing office and they’re out of compliance. She don’t know it but she’s getting thrown out. Ha ha.”

The phone rang again. “Honey, what if you change your mind? I don’t want to go to jail.”

the end

Once she got her mask properly tightened, UD began the calm slow kick and arms-to-the-body stillness of snorkeling around The Danger. These weren’t the massive rounded coral reefs of Cozumel, teeming with fish, but they had their moments, and UD encountered a flock of cuttlefish.  She’d have called them elephant fish, because when they stare right in your face, the way these stared in UD‘s face, they look like flimsy little elephants.

PBS did a special about them because they’re “one of the brainiest, most bizarre animals in the ocean.”

The water was warm and shallow (pretty warm; UD wore a wetsuit), and the views, when you lifted your head from the water, were all light green waves and light green islands.  She could see around her because for the first time she had on a prescription mask.

Later, when she, as feared, lowered herself into a bobbing kayak with her partner already in it, UD handily slipped into her seat in the back, where she took charge of steering.

She steered pretty well, only once drifting into mangrove roots.

And she saw many varieties of that shag, or cormorant, that Elizabeth Bishop described in Cape Breton.

It was so quiet where they paddled.  The quiet, and the prehistoric pelicans, made you feel as though you’d fallen out of time into some antechamber of existence.

Back on board, we gathered to watch the famous Key West sunset, just the opposite of the soft ponderous Rehoboth dusk.  Here, the sun, a trembling bronze, all but hurled itself down into the horizon.

end of part three

This is from a customer review of El Siboney, an excellent Cuban restaurant steps from UD‘s apartment.  Doesn’t look like much on the outside, but as she started her afternoon walk in search of food, she peeked in.  Hopping.  Clearly the place to be.  So she sat down and had some grilled mahi-mahi and was very happy.  And she ordered two more plates to go.

“Are you the captain?”

UD leaned over the marina railing and greeted a leathery guy in a fishing boat.  She had ten minutes to kill before her boat, thrillingly named The Danger, set sail.

“I like to be the mate.”  He had that Hemingway thing going — bristly beard, red face, squishy sweaty white hat.

“It says you take novices out.  That right?”

“We love first-timers.  Haven’t developed bad habits.”

“You’d show me how to fish?”

“Yup.  Last week a little kid caught a shark.”

“How big.”

“Eight feet.”

“You wouldn’t be telling me a… a…”

“Fish story?”

He leaned back in the cabin and came out with a photo album.

“You’d help me reel it in, right?  Looks a bit on the heavy side.”

“Sure.”

“How much is it to go out?”

“If you charter the boat for yourself, eight hundred dollars.  But you’d want to do a split charter.  That’s much less.

“Thanks.  Enjoy your trip.  Beautiful day to go fishing.”

“It’s freezing.”

“What?”

“Cold day for Key West.”

UD laughed and went to join her fellow kayakers.

UD made friends with the fifteen or so people on her outing, all of them desperate escapees from places like Thunder Bay, Ontario and Duluth, Minnesota.

She liked Bess, the only woman on the crew, immediately. She’d already seen Bess – twentyish, looking like Jean Seberg in Joan of Arc – in a little harbor shop where UD had gone to get something to drink before the trip. In front of UD in line, Bess had insisted that the cashier put a twenty dollar bill from the register into the tip jar.

“Do it! Do it! I promise people will give you higher tips. When they see the twenty… It’s psychological… They’ll give more.”

“Or they’ll steal the twenty,” said UD.

Bess was one of those pushy oblivious women — much like UD — whom UD privately saw as the future of the female race. Odd, out there, genial under a vast array of unsettling conditions, Bess was perfect for the job of standing up in a kayak under mangrove trees and barking away at people about birds who make nests out of their own shit.

Or something. I wasn’t really listening. I was gazing at Bess, standing up in a boat like George Washington on the Delaware.

At one point in her talk Bess got carried away about the blight of human beings upon earth’s delicate ecosystems.

“I hate to get all morbid with you, but it’d be better if we were all dead.”

end of part two

… to criticize the Bobby Knight of Connecticut.   Throw a chair at her!

UD will now relate the events of yesterday in a series of sentences and paragraphs organized in terms of beginning, middle, and end.

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

“I’d be too scared to do that.”

The wife of the retired dermatologist (they’re renting the apartment next to UD‘s) sat poolside watching UD emerge from her morning swim.  UD‘s neighbor had been thinking about UD ‘s plans for the day.  “So you’re going snorkeling.  And kayaking too.   When I was younger, maybe.  But when you get old you only think about what could go wrong.”

UD pulled some water out of her hair and decided it was time to get a cut and color somewhere in Key West.

Then she decided it wouldn’t be in the free, free as the wind spirit of Key West to do that.

“Oh, snorkeling is for sissies.”

UD immediately felt guilty for saying this, so she covered it over with a big fake laugh.

“How long will you be on the sailboat?”

“Five hours.”

“See… I’d worry about getting sick way out on the ocean or whatever…”

UD had focused on only one thing to worry about.  One teeny teeny very particular thing:  Getting from the boat to the kayak.  Doing that while not falling into the water.  Doing that while not capsizing the kayak, into which her partner would already have settled her butt.  Everything else seemed doable.

“How do you manage to do laps in that thing?” asked UD‘s neighbor, pointing to their rather small pool.

“I do small little breast stroky movements… It seems to work.”

“We bought all these bottles of wine and we’re not going to be able to finish them before we go.  Will you come over tomorrow night and have some wine with us?”

“Of course!  Thanks.  I won’t be able to put away too much of it, but I’d be glad to have some with you.”

On her walk to the marina, UD reflected, as she so often did, upon Gore Vidal‘s words of wisdom: “It is not enough to succeed.  Others must fail.”  It is not enough to spend the day on the ocean snorkeling and kayaking.  Others must be afraid to do so.  It is not enough to be walking on a palm-lined street on yet another day of full sun, mild wind, and temperatures in the high seventies.  Others must endure hailstorms.

She took Elizabeth Street, her favorite among the sunny sumptuous streets of Key West, and she smiled and paused when she got to her favorite Key West house.

At the dock, she paid for the outing. The woman in the kiosk also reserved a trip for UD on Thursday to the Dry Tortugas.

UD loves the name Dry Tortugas. For some reason, it always reminds her of how, when they were kids, she and her siblings used to say Tough Noogies.

end of part one

The dean of the Kent State University Stark Campus, who resigned abruptly last week, did so after being stopped by security while spray-painting a parking sign on neighboring Stark State College of Technology’s campus.

The incident prompted a police report, but no charges have been filed.

Betsy Boze in an interview today said she “was simply correcting an error on the sign.”

Spray-paint was used to deface two signs on Stark State’s campus, according to police. Boze said the spray-paint was “not graffiti.

“But it was simply removing an arrow pointing to the parking lot that was incorrect and correcting it,” she said.

Boze declined to elaborate when pressed with more questions.

“I want to give you more, but I can’t,” she said.

She submitted her resignation Thursday, effective Friday.

Jackson Township Police continue to investigate the incident, which occurred at 11 a.m. Feb. 15. That was a Sunday when regular classes weren’t in session…

Two signs were altered during the incident — one sign on the east-end of the campus, near the main entrance and one on the west end of the campus…

As Mary Lee Barton, professor of management, spoke to her students, she couldn’t help but notice a couple of her students laughing and pointing at another student’s open laptop in front of them. The laughing and pointing continued, so she told the student to put it away and went on with the lecture.

Curious as to what was so funny, she pulled the giggling students aside once class ended, she said.

“I asked some of these fellas afterward, ‘What was so funny on his laptop?'” Barton said. “And they said he was looking at pornography.”…

The Orion, California State University, Chico newspaper.

… in the New York Times.

Not really enough meat in the article for UD to chew on, but maybe you’ll find something.

… kayaking and snorkeling the out islands off Key West.

Will blog tomorrow.

Meanwhile, a new Inside Higher Ed post.

… all over the place today, making futile arguments against bigtime university football and basketball.