Full sun, as usual, and glorious whiteblue sky, and light green water. But the woman at Fury recommends, “especially because you’ll be here awhile,” that I wait for a less windy day for snorkeling.
The reefs nearby aren’t any good. It’s one hour to get to a good one, one hour snorkeling, one hour back to the harbor.
UD was all packed: swimsuit, shirt to protect her back, towel, sun cream, book (Key West Tales), writing tablet. Money. Allergy pills. Hat.
“I wouldn’t recommend going out on the water at all today,” said the woman at Fury. “If you take a glass bottom boat, you’ll definitely get seasick. Leaning down to look, then sitting up again… Seasickness guaranteed.”
Two massive cruise ships spilled passengers onto the harbor walk.
“Everybody here? Anybody been to Key West before?” A tour guide addressed twenty Asians from Celebrity X Cruises. “Well, if you’ve been here, you know it’s not Key West. It’s Key Weird.”
But it wasn’t weird here, country clubby Sunset Harbor, with standard luxury hotels and upscale shops, and even a gated community.
UD‘s always astonished at how illiterate the advertising copy meant to appeal to pretentious people can be. Note that the short paragraph describing the Truman Annex bursts with blunders.
Pedestrians are allowed — only between certain hours, to be sure — to walk Truman’s gated ground.
… when you live near the University of Southern Mississippi football team.
Southern Miss’ all-time rushing leader Damion Fletcher was arrested outside the apartment complex that houses the football team late Sunday night on charges of discharging a firearm inside the city limits.
… Malachi Martin, an adjunct professor who lives on nearby Mable Street, said he heard about 15 gunshots late Sunday night. Martin said he looked out his window to see an unidentified male firing four or five rounds from a handgun into the air.
“I was working on a lesson plan when I heard the first few gunshots,” Martin said. “When I looked out the window I saw a guy standing over there holding something up, then I saw flashes and heard shots that coincided with the flashes.
“The police pulled up and talked to me for a minute or so, then they saw someone moving outside the apartments and flipped on their lights and flew into the parking lot.”
A Hattiesburg Police Department release corroborated Martin’s observation, and said that a small-caliber hand gun was found at the scene.
Fletcher was the team’s leading rusher for the 2008 season with 1,313 rushing yards, and his 4,287 total career rushing yards make him Southern Miss’ all-time leader in that category. He was also named Conference USA Offensive Player of the Year following the 2007 season.
… The incident is just the latest of several involving football players that has taken place since the athletic department approved a measure to move the football team to the off-campus apartment complex on 38th Avenue.
In early October, police responded to gunshots and a report of fighting at the complex, but no arrests were made. Two weeks later, a student’s residence across the street from the apartments was burglarized during a Halloween party, and former Southern Miss running back Torris Magee was arrested and charged with burglary after leading police on a foot-chase….
Not really that big a deal. If you’re a USM professor working on a lesson plan after a certain hour during the weekend, you should probably go someplace else, like the library, or a Starbucks.
Heidi Ritt, in The Times Delphic:
“A rare sight occurred [at Drake University] around 4 p.m. on Monday afternoon: a herd of 11 deer used the Drake campus as their playground. Apparently, they came from behind Olmsted, through Helmick Commons and across Forest Avenue.
Ed Stang (P2), a resident assistant in Goodwin-Kirk, said he was in the lobby when he saw eight of them running up and hitting the glass windows.
“One little doe hit the plexi-glass window and popped it out enough to squeeze in,” Stang said. “It went sprinting across the lobby and through the first set of doors, which was propped open, and then hit the second set hard enough to get through. She must have nicked herself because you can still see the blood spots where she hit the doors.”
Goodwin-Kirk resident Allison George (AS2) watched the event from her bedroom window on the third floor. “I thought I was hallucinating,” George said. “I screamed for my roommate to come see what was happening.”
The remaining deer that were outside the building ran around in circles in the Goodwin-Kirk courtyard area. A few deer ran up onto the sidewalk that runs the length of the long hall connecting the two sides of the building. Confused by the reflections in the clear plexi-glass windows, eight deer rammed their heads into the second window on the Kirk side, popping it out. Drake Security responded within minutes and called maintenance to begin repair on the window.
Des Moines Animal Control did not respond to the incident because none of the deer were injured. However, a representative did say that, with the recent flooding, a lot of deer have migrated into cities because of depletion of their food sources caused by floods. Additionally, animal control sees deer get into buildings at least once a year.
No students or staff were injured during the incident. The window that was popped out is the only known damage that resulted. The herd traipsed back across campus safely, leaving behind hundreds of footprints, many bewildered students and a buzz of excitement.”
… by John Hersey, at Voltaire Books.
The proprietor was thrilled UD‘s doing a literary tour, and gave her various writers’ addresses, plus some literary gossip.
“Go to it!”
But if students from another university are within striking range, our students will attack them.
The University of South Florida will pay Dr. Abdul Rao $50,000 in exchange for his resignation, according to a settlement agreement released by the university on Wednesday.
Rao, senior associate vice president for research, was captured on surveillance video last week accompanying another man as they took a graduate student’s bike from a campus loading dock…
[An] acoustics professor, who works at Salford University in Manchester, has a long-running interest in the whoopee cushion and up until recently held the record for having the largest one in the world.
Prof [Trevor] Cox, who designs concert halls, said: “The whoopee cushion has much in common with the human voice and how wind instruments work, so it is a memorable way of portraying some important science.
“This is a great way to contribute to science just by having a laugh.
“For too long, acoustic engineers have concentrate on issues such as neighbour noise and concert hall acoustics; it is about time we got to the bottom of some more important fundamental issues.
“Really what acoustics is about is understanding people’s responses to different sounds so I’ve come up with a website which samples whoopee sounds for people to go on, listen to and rate in order of funniness.
“The idea is to get people thinking about sounds. My theory – although it is unproven at this stage – is that people will laugh the most at something unexpected.
“Like with jokes – it is more funny if people don’t expect the punchline. So the most unexpected noises will probably get the most votes.”
Here’s the website, which UD found pretty disappointing. She only laughed at one, and she laughed only mildly.
In her view, you don’t laugh at the unexpected ones; you laugh at the long, elaborate ones that sound like the person’s giving a speech. The longer, the funnier.
The laptop thing is heating up at many
campuses. Each morning, in UD‘s email,
Google News has sent two or three new
opinion pieces, articles, letters, from
either side of the controversy. It’s not
just occasional professors who ban
anymore – it’s entire schools, like
University of Chicago law.
In most classrooms, laptops, and their BFFs,
cell phones and iPods, are an ongoing debacle.
— Caroline’s — from the web, before I came to Key West. Of all the images of KW cafés I found, this was the most charming.
When you’re sitting at one of its tables, Caroline’s is about frond shadows on green umbrellas, the smell of good hamburgers, a big central bar, and views galore of Duval Street in the midday sun.
I’m eating my asian salad at a spot just across from the Hard Rock Café, a yellow gingerbread building also fronted with green umbrellas. Two glorious palm trees obscure Hard Rock’s second floor balcony.
The fashion of planting a tight line of high palms hard against KW’s flat facades makes the houses coy. They shake their leaf fans seductively, now showing their face, now hiding it.
Two sorts of humanoids walk and bike and moped and electric car about: Locals and tourists.
Locals seem to conceive of KW as what they call, on their house flags, the Conch Republic, and of themselves as (why not?) supremely fortunate citoyens de la République.
Signs of ornery individuality abound as you walk the streets. In front of a typical one and half story white dwelling, a welcome mat says GO AWAY. Another, similar, house advises BE AWARE OF STRANGE DOG. In front of a third house, a flag reads: DON’T TREAD ON ME.
Don’t tread on me also happens to be the motto of Garrett Park, Maryland, UD‘s home town. She’s not surprised by the coincidence. Both Garrett Park and Key West are haunts of Paul Fussell’s X’s — brainy non-conformists. In KW, you see them on their rusty red bicycles, front baskets stuffed with books and bread, and no helmet on the rider’s head. Slender, somewhere in his fifties, the KW X wears a tight save-the-reefs t-shirt, loose faded shorts, and sandals. He has a ponytail and facial hair and his skin is pleasantly weathered from sun and booze.
He exhibits a studied – long-studied – tolerance of the tourists. Although he finds them deeply uninteresting, he will give them directions, and he will gently get out of their way when they blunder into his bicycle lane.
… of Nelson Algren, at a Chicago event marking his centennial.
The University of South Florida dean who steals bikes has embarrassed his university, of course, and serious punishment makes sense.
But this detail from the story explains why USF did well to fire him.
After Rao learned he was captured on tape on Wednesday, [the bike’s owner, a graduate student] said, Rao called him into his office and pressured him to tell police that the matter was the result of a misunderstanding.
“This (research) is an ethical profession, and Rao is an unethical man,” Boyd said. “I don’t want him in here in my profession. I hope he’s fully investigated, because I would be interested to know what else he’s done.”
The student’s correct. Rao’s behavior throughout suggests a degenerate sense of entitlement.
Edward L. Glaeser, New York Times:
Cracking open the Champagne [UD‘s not much of a drinker] does not exactly feel in tune with today’s spirit of national austerity, but recessions get worse when prosperous people do not spend. In fact, if you can afford it, then this is exactly the moment to redo your kitchen [UD does not cook] or buy a car [UD does not drive]. Not only will you be able to get a good deal, but your spending will help revive the economy. The economist John Maynard Keynes convincingly argued 70 years ago that thrift was no virtue during a recession.
How, UD asked herself, to avoid the vice of thrift?
She could help keep Key West afloat!
So she has rented a palmy apartment here with excellent books in the living room and fine art (the owner’s an artist) in the kitchen. This morning she slept late (7:30) and then lay in bed, sometimes reading, sometimes gazing at the palms swaying outside her bedroom windows.
She blogged a little, and she felt the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe, as a calm darkens among water-lights…
No, no, no. That last bit was Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning. UD felt neither darkness nor encroachment. She felt fortunate, and light in spirit.
She did some writing.
Her breakfast was leftover bread from last night’s dinner at a Duval Street bistro. She dipped the bread in some flavored olive oil she found in a cupboard. Also she had the two weeny biscottis she’d been given on her flight to Fort Lauderdale.
All sinfully thrifty, but this was her first morning on the island, and her old ways lingered.
She fixed things right away this afternoon. She went to Panini Panini and bought THREE salads, each ridiculously expensive, and she’s now having one of them for dinner.
**************
For hours she walked through the sunlit streets of Key West. The wind took the edge off the sun and made the palms sway, and the palms made shadows on the white houses.
On Margaret Street (there’s a Margaret Street nearby), a man in painter’s trousers greeted UD. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
“Beautiful!” said UD, and then she wondered whether – since almost every day is beautiful – the greeting Beautiful day isn’t it gets a bit old around these parts. Maybe people eventually say it to one another sardonically, like that character in the film White Mischief – “Oh God not another fucking beautiful day.”
Here was the main cemetery for the island, everyone buried above ground in white body boxes with flowers and photos and dates of birth and death on them. A rooster and his girlfriend poked among the tombs. One of the boxes was a sculpted casket; it was sustained at a strange angle by four gray marble columns underneath it. It sort of looked like a model for an airplane.
Without the wings and shit.
“Ma’am,” said a fellow tourist to UD, who hates being called ma’am. “Do you happen to know where the marker is that says I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK?”
“Is that here? It seems every graveyard claims it, it’s so clever. No, I don’t know where it is.”
Then the guy found it, and he ran and got UD to show her.
Among the hypercharming houses across from the cemetery was one with the same tree that overlooks UD‘s bedroom windows. She wrote about this stunner yesterday; its bright copper leaves have fallen all over her balcony. The house’s owner had nailed a paragraph of description to the tree’s trunk:
TERMINALIA CATAPPA
NATIVE OF SOUTH ASIA
FLESH IS SWEET AND TART
“In Key West,” thought UD, “even botanical markers sound decadent.”
… seems to have learned his trade from the chef in The Dirty Fork Sketch is in trouble.
Having encouraged a student to give a speech on a controversial subject, the professor interrupted the student to inform him that he was a fascist bastard.
Yet more cleverly, the professor refused to give the student a grade, but wrote on his evaluation form
Ask God what your grade is.
Of course the best way to handle this sort of thing is to impose a speech code on the school that says you can’t say anything about anything to anybody.
No. There must be a better way.
The better way to go involves recognizing that the reason this story is ALL over the global media this morning, even though in the scheme of things it doesn’t amount to much, is that a real live professor – embodiment of thoughtful dispassion – flipped his lid. This doesn’t happen – at least on so spectacular and stupid a scale – every day.
Also that this particular lid flipping flips over into the culture wars.
What to do? Punish the professor. If he’s not tenured, you might ask yourself whether a rageful ideologue who attacks students is the sort of person you want modeling rhetorical form. If he’s tenured, he needs at the very least to apologize to the student (assuming accounts of the event are correct) and to the rest of the class.
Aren’t students and faculty at George Mason University angry enough at their president?
But, on the other hand, shouldn’t everyone know the full picture?
