… bloomed today. You can watch it.

This is better.

This University of Connecticut video is informative.

… keep on earnin’!

With the latest resignation — they keep going up the food chain at North Carolina State; today it’s the chancellor — in the Mary Easley scandal, UD finds herself modifying her position vis-a-vis Mary, who, despite non-stop begging and bullying from a bunch of guys at NCSU desperate to get her out of her politically rigged, massively overpaid, totally corrupt job on campus, has refused to leave.  (Today we also discover, via just-released emails, that her husband — at the time the governor — got the job for her.)

UD now thinks Mary should stay.  Whenever a bunch of guys beat up on a woman it pisses me off.  Screw them.  They did all they could to get the little lady a big money do nothing gig at Patronage Acres and now they’re losing their jobs because they wrote emails to each other about what they were doing.  Mary did everything right according to the Corrupt Southern University System Handbook.  She kept her head down.  She didn’t write any emails.

She gets to stay.

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

Update: Mary just got canned.
Tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
Floor strewn with dead bodies, up to and
including Gertrude.

SOS has said it before on this blog: If, as a writer, you’re bringing bad news, you might want to use humor. Here’s an earlier example of what I have in mind – a University of Wisconsin Madison graduate student telling readers of the school’s newspaper that the campus lake is full of shit.

SOS‘s sister, the Morrissey fanatic (just back from a bunch of Morrissey concerts in England), sends her this charming example of the form, from the Baltimore Sun.

When Gregory Glass and his colleagues set out to trap rats in Baltimore neighborhoods for a recent study, they were welcomed by two-legged residents who were more than happy for the scurrying rodents to be taken away to a lab. They had just one concern. [Note two good qualities of intro paragraphs, newspaper-journalism-style: A rich, complex sentence, and a conclusion to the paragraph that makes you want more. What concern?]

“You’re not bringing them back here when you’re done, are you?” they asked.

No, after their DNA was extracted, all 277 rats collected in 11 alleys were killed, [Note how the writer smuggles in research project details without making them dry.] which is a good thing, given that what Glass learned was that death is among the few things that will get a Baltimore rat to leave the place it calls home. [Adorable. Note the intentional writerly awkwardness that makes this funny: what Glass learned was that death is represents pretty pedestrian prose on its own, but in this context it feels as though the writer’s amusingly easing us into this icky subject. She’ll get, we know, more explicit with each paragraph.]

In fact, the Baltimore rat is so wedded to its home turf, typically an alley a few hundred feet long, that at the molecular level, an East Baltimore rat is distinct from a West Baltimore rat. [The writer has intrinsic interest going for her too. Who knew this?]

“Give me a rat,” Glass brags, “and I can tell you which side of town it’s from.” [It’s another bit of luck that the study’s author is funny and warm.]

And it goes even beyond east is east, west is west, never the twain shall meet – the study, published recently in the journal Molecular Ecology, found that most rats apparently spend the bulk of their lives in the space of about a tenth of a mile. [Again, note how she seeds the piece with specific details. The details don’t get crammed, rat-like, into one paragraph.]

“Most rats are like people in Baltimore,” said Glass, who after 25 years in the city has had occasion to observe both. “They marry someone next door or down the block at most, and are happy to live in the neighborhood they grew up in.”

It’s that quality – our rats, ourselves – that makes the paper such great reading, both as science and local culture. It is the well-observed local quirk, the Baltimore homing instinct, rendered in charts, graphs, Euclidean distances and, of course, adjacent-allele heterozygotes. [Our rats, ourselves is very nice. Parts of the article are a bit hokey as the author pushes for humor, but basically what she does succeeds wonderfully.]   [I love the way she writes of course before the well-known adjacent-allele heterozygotes.]

The upshot: Nearly all the rats – more than 95 percent of them – exhibited what the researchers call “site fidelity;” they were bred and born in the alley in which they were trapped. (It made me feel a little sorry for one very lost rat that ended up in one of the traps, a veritable stranger in town whose DNA revealed it was unlikely to be from any of the alleys studied.)

“Most rat movements were limited within individual city blocks,” the paper concludes.

Here I’d always thought I was just a very grounded person; now, after reading the paper, I realized I am almost as site-faithful as the local rodent population. My first apartment here [Drop this here. Or the one at the beginning of the sentence.] was a couple blocks from the hospital where my elder sister was born. (My family moved to Harford County shortly afterward, which is where I was born, but then we moved away.)

My second apartment in Baltimore was two blocks away from the first one. Then in a fit of uncharacteristic wanderlust, I bought a house that was two whole miles away. I lived there until moving three blocks to my current house. [Drop uncharacteristic.]

Hopefully, that’s where the rat in me ends. [Drop hopefully.] Glass, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, tells me a rat burrow basically has a pair, an alpha male and an alpha female, that goes about breeding the next generation. Given what the paper calls “high fecundity and generation overlap in Baltimore rats,” the alley ends up as a community that is [Drop that is.] something like that song about a family filled with so many intermarriages that, as the narrator sings, “I’m My Own Grandpa.” [Drop as the narrator sings.]

More grossly interesting, or interestingly gross, [Charming. And notice she’s going to some trouble not merely to organize this through the use of transitional phrases, but to make those phrases witty.] facts about rat life: There’s only room for one alpha pair per burrow, so eventually some rats leave home and create their own communities. They’ll fight, “blood and skin,” Glass says, over territories. But they generally stay close to their ancestral home – there can be four or five burrows in a single alley, he said. The study found that rats within an 11-block area were part of one extended family. [Drop eventually and generally.]

The Jones Falls serves as a natural barrier dividing east- and west-side rats. The differences between them are at the DNA level, but after years of studying them, Glass has noted that there are [Drop that there are.] rats with black coats “and a beautiful white star on the chest” in one east-side neighborhood, around Jefferson Street above Orleans Street. “You go a couple blocks away, and they look normal again,” he said, “mostly yucky-brown.”

No doubt most urban rats behave like our own, but it is the Baltimore rodent that oddly enough is one of the most studied populations. [Note that she has a to be verb problem. Rewrite: but Baltimore’s rodent’s the most studied.] Glass and others in the field frequently cite 1940s research on Baltimore rats that probably were the ancestors of our current vermin. [no doubt ancestors of our current vermin. See how, in rewriting, I’m looking for ways to eliminate forms of to be?]

Rat scientists likely were drawn to Baltimore for the same reason Willie Sutton was drawn to robbing banks – it’s where the rats are. As a result, our rats have developed a certain je ne sais quoi among rat researchers. [I love her choice of je ne sais quoi. Like her choice later of Boswell, it’s the Oscar Wilde technique of yoking the lowest of subjects to the highest. Try it.]

“People from New York are always asking me to send pieces of Baltimore rats to them,” Glass said. “I think, ‘You’re in New York, you have your own rats.’ ”

Glass has a wry sense of humor, but it is unclear whether that is the cause or the effect of his choice of research subject. If you’re interested in studying biodiversity within animal populations, he said, “one way to do it would be to go to the Serengeti and look at lions.” He’s pretty much to the opposite side of the spectrum, and as a result, Baltimore rats got their very own Boswell.

The study details how researchers picked Baltimore alleys – mostly older neighborhoods known from previous studies to harbor rats in ample supply. Or, as the paper describes them in the kind of language that would make a real estate agent faint: “Areas characterized by row houses with small backyards comprised of concrete parking pads and small garden areas often occupied by rat burrow systems.” The lucky areas had what the researchers estimated was, on the average, a density of about 50 rats per alley.

Glass’s interest in rats comes from a public health rather than a cultural standpoint. While the rest of us view rats as horrid creatures that basically spread revulsion, he studies them for how they spread viruses and bacteria. Although most rats don’t stray much, enough do – they’re known as the “super spreaders” – that they remain potential carriers of various diseases.

Still, I have to ask Glass: Why does the rat, unlike the chicken, generally not cross the road?

Blame it on the two-legged creatures and their generosity, putting trash in plastic bags.

“Rats will move a long distance to get food,” Glass said. “But if they can get food, get a drink where they live, they won’t.”

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

My favorite part of this very nice piece of writing appears after the article:

RELATED TOPICS: Population, Biotechnology Industry, Ecosystems, Genes and Chromosomes, Conservation, Human Body, Real Estate Agents

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

The University of Idaho is paying a Minnesota consultant who spends less than two weeks a month on the Moscow campus $112,500 to serve as its “chief inspiration officer,” according to public records.

This one takes UD‘s breath away. Read the whole thing.

The only precedent she can find is from her favorite university, Southern Illinois Carbondale. Remember?

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

Update: Chronicle of Wasted Time. And Money. DO NOT READ if you are currently on any form of depression medication.

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

Update: Google Image, Chief Inspiration Officer.

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

Gotcha.

… only the beginning for Oprah. Misleading millions of people with patent bullshit is what she does for a living.

[Oprah] Winfrey allowed a physician called Christiane Northrup to claim – in contradiction to almost all scientific evidence – that “in many women, thyroid dysfunction develops because of an energy blockage in the throat region [after] a lifetime of ‘swallowing’ words one is aching to say”.

Last year, one of them – with a dozen drugs in his system – flew his plane into a mountain.

Now one of them drowned in his home pool. He couldn’t swim.

Atherton police on Sunday said they are waiting for an autopsy before investigating the apparent accidental drowning death of Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford professor who inspired the co-founders of Google and influenced a generation of computer scientists.

“We’re kind of in limbo,” Atherton police Sgt. Tim Lynch said. “It could have been a simple accident or many other things.”

One of Motwani’s friends said the professor held a party at his home Thursday night with Stanford colleagues and students to celebrate the end of the school year. He had gone outside after the guests left to wind down and enjoy a cigar. The family’s nanny found Motwani the next morning apparently drowned in the pool, said Vish Mishra, a friend and colleague of Motwani’s…

The babies are out – ugly and gray,
with loose pink gullets and random
feathers. They’re surprisingly big.

The parents seem involved in a
perpetual feeding cycle. One
stands motionless on an edge
of the deep, papery, twiggy
nest — really, at this point,
after two weeks of rain, the
thing looks like rubbish, but it’s
held through all the storms — while
the other flies away. It returns in
minutes to deposit worms and flies
into the small mouths that make a
low buzzy sound — like crickets —
in excitement.

When I stand nearby, everyone
freezes. The mother’s huge liquid
black eye is unseeing. I’ve hung
a new bird feeder on a low branch
of the dogwood in the front yard,
in case the thrushes want a treat.

Sunflower chips
and dried
mealworms.

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

The collages are the work of Randel Plowman.

… UD, as always, treats you to a series of posts about James Joyce and his novel, Ulysses.

Here’s something from an article in Thursday’s Guardian:

If you’re going to read any of Ulysses then it might as well be the racy bits at the end. And so it was with a fabulously rare first edition of the James Joyce novel which today sold for £275,000, the highest price recorded for a 20th-century first edition.

The astonishingly well-preserved and previously lost edition of the book, bought surreptitiously in a Manhattan bookshop despite it being banned in the US, was sold to a private buyer in London on the opening day of one of the world’s biggest antiquarian book fairs.

… The more salacious bits are in the last episode, where Molly Bloom’s long stream-of-consciousness soliloquy ends in her orgasmic “yes I said yes I will Yes”.

This first edition is unopened – apart from that last episode. The copy is number 45 of the first 100 and is printed on fine Dutch handmade paper.

The dealer who made the sale, Pom Harrington, said the book was one of only four copies of that first edition print run, all signed by Joyce, which had been unaccounted for. “In terms of collectability, Ulysses is considered to be the number one 20th-century book. This is such a find and it is in such fabulous, pristine condition.”

Throughout the 1920s the book was banned in the UK and the US and any import or sale involved a degree of subterfuge.

This copy was sold at the subversive Manhattan bookshop Sunwise Turn, an eclectic shop where patrons could also pick up Peruvian fabrics or the mystic teachings of Gurdjieff. It was bought by a Mrs Hewitt Morgan and then passed down the family, stored in its original box, unopened and away from the light.

“The colour is amazing – this lovely Aegean Sea, Greek flag blue which would normally have darkened into a more dirty blue but because it has been in a box it is a complete thing of beauty,” said Harrington….

Here’s a bit from the racy, salacious, orgasmic section. We’re inside the head of Molly Bloom, an attractive Irish woman in her thirties who’s in bed at night, lying beside her sleeping husband. She’s had rough sex a few hours earlier with one of her lovers, her singing partner — she’s a performer — Blazes Boylan, and she’s thinking back to that.

yes when I lit the lamp yes because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull it out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure

Ulysses is notorious for its difficulty, but really, how – er – hard is this? No punctuation, true, but Joyce is capturing the endless stream of her half-asleep consciousness as she drifts off, so punctuation wouldn’t be realistic. As you read, though, ain’t it pretty clear where the periods, commas, and question marks go? Let’s paraphrase, with punctuation.

When I lit the lamp I was amazed to realize that he must have had three or four orgasms with me. What an enormous penis he has! Erect, it was so enormous I thought it would explode. Since I believe the size of men’s noses indicates the size of their penises, I’m surprised his nose is so small.

I’d gone to a lot of trouble to perfume and dress myself for him, but he just threw me down and did me.

And really – his penis was so hard and big. Like iron, like a crowbar. He must have eaten a dozen oysters — oyster being an aphrodisiac — to get that sexually aroused.

He sang during some of this. And he sang well.

But back to his penis. It was so big it totally filled me up. Afterwards, he must have eaten a whole sheep.

As for my anatomy: Why did God make women with a big hole in the middle of them? Men are so determined to get in there and drive it up in you – they’re like horses panting away. It’s quite bestial, not human at all, and the vicious look in his eyes as he was at it so disconcerted me that I half-shut mine.

Considering how big his penis is, he doesn’t produce that much come. Which is just as well, since I don’t want to get pregnant.

It’s quite annoying to me that men get all the pleasure.

… is one of the country’s least impressive.

Last year, Ron Turner, the Bears’ offensive coordinator, was paid $235,000 by the U. of I. in the final year of a settlement reached after he was fired five years ago — an amount that’s more than the president of Governors State University made.

… that technology is the solution to the campus budget crisis.

[L]et’s develop more online courses, because there’s no classroom limit. Instructors don’t have to lecture, so pre-prepared texts could be uploaded for students, and an expert scholar isn’t needed. Videos and Powerpoint slideshows will fill the time and can be used repeatedly, saving costs.

The profound teacher-student discussions in “chat rooms” may get unwieldy with hundreds of students logging in, but most will vanish soon enough when they realize that no one knows they are there. It’s not much of an education, but it’s cheap, and there [are] few enough jobs out there for “graduates” anyway.

From a comment thread at Inside Higher Ed.

ROSE: SAT::

1.  Student: Test

2.  Player: Problem

3.  Flower: Day

4.  Verb: Verb

5.   Dozier: SAT

… about ethics pledges and MBA programs and, in altering its headline, made it far more interesting.

The original headline:

A PROMISE TO BE ETHICAL IN AN ERA OF IMMORALITY

The ProJo headline:

IN AN ERA OF IMMORTALITY, MBAS PRESS FOR CODE OF CONDUCT

ProJo’s focus on eternal life puts the question of how graduates of MBA programs conduct their business in sharp relief.  If you live forever, do you have a special obligation to be ethical?  Or, knowing that whatever you do, you will continue to exist, do you not really care whether you are good or bad?  Or again, are we to understand immortality here as eternal life in the Lord after physical death?  If so, should MBAs be ethical in order to protect their eternal souls?  In an era of secularism, are religious warrants sufficient to restrain unethical behavior?

… you could possibly want: Athletic. Administrative. Money. Everything. University Diaries has to step lively to keep up with it.

Now the president of this hapless school, where faculty and students suffer constant cutbacks and compromises of quality, has taken a 35-percent bonus —$115,000 on top of his already very big salary. The trustees have decided he should be rewarded for a job well done.

William P. Tucker, an eloquent and outraged writer, asks him to refuse the bonus. Seems to think the man is greedy.

Tucker also knows there’s no way James Ammons will not take this money. I mean, he can’t. The trustees insist.

… the state of Arizona now boasts the largest human-designed chasm in the world.

Gaze in wonder at the gap between the University of Arizona’s students and their professors in redesigned Centennial Hall:

Incoming UA freshmen — already paying the highest tuition in university history — could find themselves sitting in some of the largest classes in the country this fall.

After promising that state budget cuts in the past year would lead to larger class sizes, University of Arizona officials will offer three classes in Centennial Hall, the largest of which will seat 1,200 students.

Officials plan to spend roughly $300,000 to retrofit the 2,500-seat performance hall with Wi-Fi, computers and projection equipment that will have to be mobile to accommodate the hall’s primary purpose of hosting music, dance and other cultural performances.

… Those involved say the courses will be successful despite their large size because of the quality lecturers heading the classes and a new pilot program to help mentor and support students.

However, an administrator who’s helping organize the plan admitted that it’s not ideal.

Another administrator who recently was removed from the project and an outside teaching expert also cautioned there’s a lot that could go wrong.

Chief among their concerns: Centennial’s seats don’t have lap boards, meaning students won’t have a place to take notes. There also is the difficulty of holding the attention of hundreds of laptop-toting students in a large hall, said Joni Finney, a teaching expert and vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

“The tendency is to reduce excess expenses and pack them in like a cattle car, and whoever makes it out, makes it,” she said. “That’s really not doing students any kind of service.”

… “My biggest concern [one professor remarked] is not keeping their attention on the lecture, but what they would be doing on their laptops,” she said. [Bit confusing there. If you’re worried about what they’re doing on their laptops, aren’t you worried that their attention is not on the lecture?  Or are you worried that while they’re listening intently they’re also pleasuring themselves?]

… taken down the webpage of Blazej Kot, a computer science graduate student now a suspect in the death of his wife, a post-doc in biomedicine at Cornell.

Looks as though in a rage Kot killed her, then torched the apartment and attempted suicide. Police got to him before he did away with himself.