Sam Thomas, a history professor at UAH, where Amy Bishop taught (he, like a number of people on that campus, knew her to be violently unstable before she began shooting), corrects one of the several destructive misintepretations of this event:

…[B]y linking Amy Bishop’s insanity to workplace frustration, [people] are implicitly pathologizing all women. If the shooting were simply an extreme reaction to a common frustration (as opposed to the most deadly spasm of violence from a severely unbalanced individual), the logical conclusion is that all women are capable of (or even prone to) this kind of violence. Given that, why in God’s name would I ever hire so unbalanced a creature as a woman?

… about the survivors of the Huntsville shootings.

Stephanie Monticciolo, the department staff assistant, has had her condition upgraded to good.

Although Joseph Leahy, a professor, is still in critical condition, he seems to be improving.

From al.com:

… Leahy’s family has set up a blog to keep friends and family updated. He also has a head wound and had reconstructive surgery Wednesday morning to make repairs to his cheek and jaw.

In blog updates, the family has described how Leahy is able to respond to commands. Nurses have created a yes/no board. Doctors are trying to wean Leahy off the ventilator.

Leahy is a microbiologist who teaches many of the UAH nursing students, and some of his former students have been his caregivers in the intensive care unit.

Leahy’s sister posted, “At one point Joe shared with a colleague that he wanted to give all of his students the best education possible because ‘one never knows if one of your former students will some day be taking care of you.’ Eerily prescient but a grace-filled moment as well.”

A student there describes the view from the last row of a classroom.

… Through the course of a 75 minute class, I observed what was on [their laptop] screens: One person on Blackboard.com, four people taking notes in Word documents, three people viewing the professor’s PowerPoint presentation; four people on Wikipedia.com, seven people on Facebook.com and eight people checking their e-mail. There was also one guy who played games for literally the entire class period. In fact, it could be that most students were actually on Facebook, and I just didn’t see because I was so distracted by the laser shooting around this guy’s screen.

As I continued to be distracted by the browsing all around me, I noticed students visiting other notable Web sites and programs. These included: Gmail, Google.com, the Bloomingdale’s Web site (such cute boots this season!), iChat, PerezHilton.com, Google Calendar, CNN.com, SI.com (oh, Sports Illustrated…), YouTube.com (including a trailer of the upcoming “Toy Story 3;” did you see it? It looks so good!), online versions of sudoku and solitaire, Verizon.com and various blogs.

One kid in the second row was even checking his bank account…

… has been murdered by her mother.

Marissa Pagli’s father is campus maintenance supervisor; she grew up on campus, and still lived there in staff housing with her parents.

She was on the

volleyball team.

University of Mississippi athletics is looking for a new mascot. A local writer recommends William Faulkner.

… I first wrote that Faulkner should be Ole Miss’ mascot in November of 2006. …Faulkner went to Ole Miss as a student, the university owns his home, Rowan Oak, and his Nobel Prize for literature, Faulkner played quarterback in high school, and, most importantly, the alums I’ve heard from all love the idea. It’s impossible to do better than Faulkner.

… Faulkner was a literary rebel, a man who refused to follow contemporary ideas of what a story should look like, and, as a result, millions of people know the state of Mississippi through his words. Are you telling me that a Faulkner mascot, a student dressed up in a tweed jacket, with a pipe in the corner of his mouth, a mustache, and a cane,* wouldn’t immediately become the most iconic mascot in the South? Maybe the entire country?

What’s more, Faulkner actually encourages football fans to read — and if you read message boards, the e-mails I get, or even the comments after these articles, who could be against that?…

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* And a drink.

[Jimmy Anderson Sr.] called his son “a very docile guy, a little too docile.’’

Yes. This rings true to my sense of him, as I follow the Amy Bishop story. While everyone describes Amy – all her life – as verbally and physically aggressive, as sure of, and loud about, her political and social views in public settings, her husband consistently emerges as her worshipful wimp, her useful tool, as Prufrock says of himself. Anderson’s an attendant lord to Amy’s archbishop.

Watch for Anderson’s father to make his implicit attacks on his son’s mad mate more explicit as time goes on; but don’t expect Bishop’s enabler – and in some cases probably her co-conspirator – to change, unless it’s in the direction of yet greater appreciation of her genius.

From the New York Times:

… [Medical residency programs] where fewer graduates passed tests from the American Board of Internal Medicine — “one indicator of program quality” — were also more likely to accept the [financial] assistance [of drug companies for things like meals, office supplies, and drug samples].

… “As the pass rates went down,” [one observer] said of the new doctors’ test scores, “the odds of accepting pharmaceutical support went up.”

… Dr. Martin J. Blaser, chairman of the department of medicine at New York University, said his organization’s internal medicine residency program decided about five years ago to stop accepting food or financial support from industry.

“I spend a fair amount of my budget feeding my residents,” Dr. Blaser said, “but then they can learn in a way that is not unduly influenced by who is feeding them.”…

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Wear it proudly.

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UD thanks Brad.

… Dagblog, and she thanks Dagblog for its kind words about UD‘s coverage of the Amy Bishop story.

Note that University Diaries has a category – amy bishop – which collects all of my posts about this ongoing criminal case.

From an editorial about President Lois DeFleur, responsible for the worst scandal in SUNY Binghamton’s history. The editorial appears in Pipe Dream, the university newspaper.

Tiger [Woods] allegedly only slept with 14 women.

DeFleur fucked us all.

More and more attention gets paid to James Anderson, the bizarre, prevaricating, threatening husband of Amy Bishop.

When a great university goes out of its way to hire a cheater, all it has to do is sit back and wait.

Extra point: He’s costing them a fortune.

A few months ago, a kind reader put this blog on Facebook.

UD wants to remind her regular readers, and tell her new ones, about this UD resource.

… this is excellent writing. Not the initial email from the student. The initial email’s okay, but nothing special.

Galloway’s response. Read that one.

Nicely written piece in On Milwaukee about the forthcoming basketball arena at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

New information on the pipe bomb mailing in 1993.

Bishop must have learned from her remarkable success in the 1986 shooting that refusing cooperation with investigators is the ticket.

“Both suspects have retained an attorney and have refused to participate in further interviews, have declined to give consent to a search of an unattached garage to the rear of their house, and have refused to take a polygraph,’’ according to the documents [about Bishop and her husband].

The professor targeted, Paul Rosenberg, told police that “weeks before the attempted bombing, he played a role in Bishop’s resignation from her job as a postdoctoral research fellow in the hospital’s neurobiology lab because “he felt she could not meet the standards required for the work. …Rosenberg said Bishop’s co-workers felt she had “problems with depression,’’ that he thought “she was not stable,’’ and that there had been growing concerns because she had “exhibited violent behavior.’’

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Boston Globe

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And Washington Post.