Kansas State’s president, much in the news of late, puts his son (UD assumes it’s his son) on the faculty (scroll down to the last name).

UD thanks a reader for pointing this out to her.

… in the Harvard murder case. Why was a non-student inside a dorm? Was he a drug dealer, and did a Harvard client buzz him in?

A man’s been arrested for his murder — also a non-student, also inside the dorm.

Cosby was shot inside the J-entry way of Kirkland House around 5 p.m. After being shot he ran up Dunster street to Mt. Auburn street where he collapsed. He died Tuesday morning in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Copney [the man charged with the murder] is not a Harvard University student, but investigators were probing whether Cosby was selling marijuana to Harvard students as they sought his killer. Copney [who lives not in Cambridge, but in New York] is charged with murder, accessory after the fact to murder, and unlawful possession of a firearm.

Prosecutors said in [a] statement that they learned Copney “was visiting friends at the campus. It is alleged that the defendant, along with others, confronted Cosby in a common area inside the Kirkland House. During the course of the confrontation, multiple shots were fired. One of those shots struck Cosby, resulting in his death. It is believed that the defendant and Cosby were known to one another.”

So two non-students happen to be inside the same dorm at the same time. They happen to know each other. One, “along with others,” confronts Cosby and then shoots him. Who the hell are the others? And how likely is it that two non-students who happen to know each other will be in a dorm at the same time, one of them with a gun on him?

If the British tabloids knew about the sex-advice column Heather Brooke wrote for the University of Washington Daily nearly two decades ago they might run with it as a salacious news item.

Click the link for more.

Y know, every now and then
I think you might like to hear something from UD
Nice and easy

But there’s just one thing
You see UD never does nothing
Nice and easy

She always does it nice and rough
So we’re gonna take the beginning of this song
And do it easy

Then we’re gonna do the finish rough
This is the way we do Proud Mary

And we’re rolling, rolling, rolling on the river
Listen to the story

She left a law job in the city
Working for the man every night and day
And she never lost one minute of sleeping
Worrying bout the way things might have been

Big wheel keep on turning
Proud Mary keep on earning
And we’re rolling, rolling
Rolling on the river

Ate a lot of roe in Russia
Had a chauffeured car in Gay Paree
But she never saw the good side of her marriage
Till she got a job at the UNC

Big wheel keep on turning
Proud Mary keep on earning
And we’re rolling, rolling
Rolling on the river

… that Justin Crosby was probably on campus to sell marijuana to students.

Which doesn’t explain why he was shot.

… now being conducted by researchers from the University of Prince Edward Island (where UD once gave a paper about James Merrill’s poem Santorini) gives UD an excuse to update you on her own singing.

Faithful UD readers already know that UD loves to sing Henry Purcell’s songs (This year is the 350th anniversary of his birth.)  (And look what I get when I Google News him!  From an interview with British musician and novelist John Wesley Harding:

Purcell is kind of a bit of an obsession of mine, and my third novel [coming out this year] is about a composer who writes the first great English opera since “Dido and Aeneas.” … Singers like myself — folk singers or pop singers or whatever — there’s a real kinship with the baroque because it’s based on the same song structures as I use.

Er, close parenthesis somewhere.

UD also loves to sing jazz, and her latest enthusiasm there is Witchcraft by Carolyn Leigh in The Collection of Jazz Music. (Lyrics and a recording here.)

While the song doesn’t have a challenging range (only goes up to a D, a note UD can hit in her sleep), it moves sexily up the scale and has clever, naughty words. The last phrase is hokey (’cause there’s no nicer witch than you!), but the rest of the song shimmers.

… but one takes one’s commemorations where one finds them.

[Come to] the 10th anniversary of the Agee Crash Bash Monday at the Clinton Highway bar that sits almost astride the very spot where James Agee’s father had his legendary fatal accident. [This crash inspired] the Pulitzer Prize winning autobiographical novel, “A Death in the Family.” … [W]e usually have readings and … local music stars to serenade us. The mythic “Cotter Pin of Destiny” will once again change hands for a year’s keeping by some thus blessed individual. It is currently in the hands of an actual second cousin of James Agee. This being the centennial of Agee’s birth lends some additional psychic heft to the event, don’t you think?

This is where we’ll be — the Checker Flag Sports Bar, 7428 Clinton Hwy, 947-8667. The bar is in a shabby little commercial strip in the southeast quadrant of the intersection of Clinton Highway and Emory Road in Powell.

Like the wife of Maryland’s governor many years ago, Easley will not be moved.

Bootsie wouldn’t leave the governor’s mansion, while Mary won’t leave her amazingly lucrative patronage job at North Carolina State University.

Is UD the only person who recalls Bootsie?

Bootsie Mandel, perhaps not everyone remembers, was the aggrieved First Lady of Maryland who, in 1973, refused to vacate the governor’s mansion when the governor (I remember her name but not his) [Marvin] declared he was maritally moving on. Needless to say, the standoff was a jolly media occasion, which ruined the forgotten governor’s career.

While Bootsie said many memorable things (“I don’t know what everyone’s talking about. The governor left my bed this morning.“), Mary’s kept absolutely silent as everybody screams at her to haul ass.

Leaders in the state’s university system moved publicly Monday to force the resignation of Mary Easley, the former first lady criticized over a $170,000-per-year position she holds at N.C. State University.

The chairwoman of the UNC Board of Governors, the president of the UNC system and the chancellor at N.C. State University all said Easley should give up her job.

… has died.

Justin Cosby was a student at Salem State College. Police aren’t clear about the motive behind the shooting.

He was snobby. “I gave the department secretary the syllabus for this course to type up,” he told us, his Northwestern University undergraduates in a course called Joyce/Nabokov. “She said Oh, I’ve heard of Joyce Nabokov.” Imitating her uneducated speech.

A few students laughed. Most of us were taken aback.

Alfred Appel, who has died, was very kind to me. Had me over to his house and showed me his inscribed Nabokov novels, in some of which the writer had drawn butterflies. He was funny. His Annotated Lolita (which Gore Vidal thought a creation of Nabokov… Vidal thought Alfred Appel was a creation of Nabokov…) is hilarious.

While [Ezra] Merkin faces an intense legal onslaught, he also must cope with a thorny situation at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue, where he serves as president and where his father was a co-founder. According to The Jewish Week, Mr. Merkin is slated to become chairman [Replacing Ira Rennert! Way non-stringent admissions criteria.] on Wednesday.

Although the title is largely ceremonial in most congregations, the promotion has infuriated at least some members, with one calling it “the height of chutzpah” for Mr. Merkin to stick around.

… correcting UD‘s misunderstanding of the nature of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston:

First, disclosure: I am on the verge of graduating from UTMB with a Ph.D in ethics & medical humanities, so my affiliation most assuredly colors my views.

Second, some of my academic work involves COIs in research and medicine.

But I do think it is important to understand a bit more of the local context re UTMB. UTMB is indeed part of the UT system, but to assert that it shares in the Adzillatron and what that represents is something of an error or at least an oversimplification. Some knowledge of Texas politics is required in order to explain why. UTMB may “share” in the Adzillatron, but its share is pitiful compared to the two flagship institutions, UT-Austin, and Texas A&M. These two are both extremely wealthy institutions, with literally every other UT scrabbling for scraps. UTMB itself is near the bottom of this heap, since their very charter declares that the mission of the school is expressly to provide indigent care.

There is a perception that the regents have grown tired of this mission, such that the funds allocated to UTMB to provide indigent care have consistently crept lower. The regents very nearly ended the school’s clinical operations “due” to damage caused by Hurricane Ike. Only a well-positioned and powerful representative in the Texas Capitol prevented this from occurring.

None of this is to offer any opinion on the events surrounding Dr. Wagner. But it is inaccurate to argue that because UTMB is part of the UT system, it shares equally in the Adzillatron culture. UTMB has historically lacked the funds to even fulfill its charter; wealthy donors and endowments do not generally come UTMB’s way.

UD is very grateful to the reader for this clarification.

UD makes a poem out of this article.

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

A LAPTOP COOLED WITH IONIC WIND

A laptop cooled with ionic wind
Wants less power. Silent and thin,
Taking heat better than a fan,

I just thought you might like it.

The Belgian bodybuilding championship has been canceled after doping officials showed up and all the competitors fled.

A doping official says bodybuilders just grabbed their gear and ran off when he came into the room.

“I have never seen anything like it and hope never to see anything like it again,” doping official Hans Cooman said Monday.

Twenty bodybuilders were entered in the weekend competition.

Cooman says the sport has a history of doping “and this incident didn’t do its reputation any good.”

As of ten minutes ago, the Boston Globe didn’t know very much.

A man was shot this afternoon at the entrance of a Harvard University residence hall, and police were searching for several assailants. It was not immediately clear whether the victim, who was shot in the abdomen, was a student.

Sergeant James DeFrancisco of the Cambridge Police said that after authorities were alerted about 4:50 p.m. they found the victim on Dunster Street, outside Kirkland House, one of Harvard’s 12 undergraduate houses. DeFrancisco said the victim was taken to the hospital and was in stable condition.

… Residents of Kirkland House have been asked to remain there as police continue to speak with students and others. Otherwise, police have indicated that students and other members of the community are free to resume their normal activity.

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

Update: The person shot seems not to have been a Harvard student. UD speculates that this was gang-related.