… Johanna Justin-Jinich.

… who lived in the house behind mine (and across from Nils Lofgren’s) in Garrett Park. Don’t recall how old I was — maybe thirteen? Dino’s father (here’s his obituary) owned a hair salon, House of Alexis, which Dino now manages.

I’d picked a book at random from a shelf in the Alexis living room, and it turned out to be softcore porn — not that I had that category in my head at the time. Harold Robbins kind of thing. The scene I opened to had a woman expressing her enjoyment of some mildly sadistic nipple play. “Aiee!!” she said. “Aiee!!”

This was a formative moment for little Scathing Online Schoolmarm, because it was her first encounter with the double exclamation mark. From that day forward, she gave a good deal of thought to when and how one should employ the exclamation.

Stuart Jeffries has a charming and thoughtful piece on the subject in the latest Guardian.

In general, SOS sides with those who counsel sparing use of this heavy breather; she believes that in almost all cases your prose, not funny little marks at the end of various sentences, should convey your sentiments, including exclamatory feelings like excitement, delight, surprise, rage, and love. Writing is a discipline; it’s about control. Excess exclamation marks suggest lack of control, as Jeffries notes in quoting some authors about them:

Elmore Leonard wrote of exclamation marks: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” Which means, on average, an exclamation mark every book and a half. In the ninth book of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, Eric, one of the characters, insists that “Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind.” … Fowler’s Modern English Usage [says]: “Except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.”

Jeffries goes on to note that in the age of email the exclamation mark is much-used. People say email’s a particularly cold and unemotional medium, and that the exclamation allows them to add warmth. Great to see you! Instead of Great to see you. Looking forward to seeing you! Rather than Looking forward to seeing you. We’re anxious for people to know we care, and the exclamation mark does the trick.

SOS notices that she only uses the exclamation mark in two ways in her emails. When a student she hasn’t heard from in a while writes to her — with simple greetings, or asking for advice, or asking for a recommendation — she in fact often opens her reply with an exclamation mark at the end of her first sentence: It’s wonderful to hear from you! She knows that students worry they’re bothering professors, or that professors don’t remember them, or whatever, so she wants to underline her happiness at having heard from them.

She also uses the mark ironically. Or sarcastically. Jeffries takes note of this use as well:

There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness. In this post-literal time, exclamation marks become signs of sarcasm as witty correspondents rebel against their overuse. Hence: “I loved your last email! OMG did I LOVE it!!!!!!” The point is they didn’t. They were being IRONIC.

… who now lives in Virginia, told me about Liberty University‘s plans for a snow-free ski hill some time ago.

It’s become a reality. Ski Channel reports:

And on the seventh day, God Skied.

Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian university in the world, will soon be home to the first Snowflex, snow-free ski hill in the U.S. Snowflex was a quantum leap forward for carpet skiing. The technology was invented in the U.K. in 1993 and has since been installed in a handful of facilities in Europe. The first Snowflex tiles, plastic mats that closely simulate the sensation of snow, were installed above Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia on May 1st. The 110 vertical-foot slope should be open by the summer.

Jerry Falwell, one week before his death, talked about why he wanted to remake the bald hill above the university into an all-year-round ski hill. “There are no beer bashes at Liberty, and no coed dorms, but it doesn’t have to be a monastery. We’re breaking the stereotype that Christian education is synonymous with boredom.”

Surely there will be new tricks and their corresponding trick names whose genesis will be traced back to the dry hills (pun intended) of Liberty University. How about a Jesus Air, Nicodemus Flat Spin, Switch Judas 180, or a Mute Lazarus?

House Speaker Michael Madigan’s plan to rid state government of people hired and appointed by former Govs. Rod Blagojevich and George Ryan would include university boards of trustees.

Madigan’s office released a list of about 90 or so boards affected Thursday, and the state’s public universities were among them.

If the Chicago Democrat’s legislation is eventually approved, Gov. Pat Quinn would have 60 days to decide whether or not to keep universities’ current trustees on board or not.

The news came mostly as a surprise to university officials.

… The legislation, House Bill 4450, hasn’t yet been debated by lawmakers.

… gets an up close and personal look in today’s Forbes, which proclaims it Scam Capital of America.

Prominent among its scams: Diploma mills.

There’s the diploma mill that sold 10,000 phony college degrees to buyers in 131 countries… The Internet diploma mill was run by Dixie and Steven Randock, both now serving three-year sentences. Degrees included those purportedly from Harvard University. The ringleaders’ partners in crime were, of course, their customers. One was a Spokane deputy federal marshal seeking a promotion who knew what he was getting–and got convicted for it.

One of your high-profile, highly-compensated professors is under investigation by The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee for having stolen large sums of money from NASA. His M.O. is the same as George Washington University’s Professor Bedewi: You create a private business run by your wife and kids and all, and you send your grant money there. You then use that money to buy — they all buy the same shit — massive SUVs, massive houses, etc.

It’s awkward because, although he’s on administrative leave, you’ve still got this guy’s university web page up, welcoming everyone to the Innovative Nuclear Space Power and Propulsion Institute, which he directs, and where he shows the sort of innovative entrepreneurial approach to directing an academic institute that lands you and your university in the middle of a big fat Senate hearing.

Seems to UD that the solution is something like the following: Take down the guy’s page and replace it with a generic Welcome to the Institute page, on which you note that the current director is on administrative leave.

… going cosmic?

During months of campus protests here, the only serious violence erupted one evening when student activists got in a fight over which movie to show during the all-night occupation of a large classroom.

Police rushed in after one side started shattering windows, student strikers recalled, but the officers were quickly ordered to back off, and the strike went on. And on. For more than three months, Paul-Valery University, the University of Montpellier’s liberal arts campus, was paralyzed by an ill-defined movement set off by changes that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government tried to impose on France’s long-ailing public university system.

“Block everything,” a slogan spray-painted on a classroom wall, became the university fight song. Student protesters, allied with some professors, prevented anyone from entering offices or classrooms, caused classes to be canceled and grades to be withheld, and threatened to stop final exams.

Paul-Valery, with its leafy campus in a suburb of this southern French city, was one of more than 20 universities — a quarter of the country’s university network — that ground to a halt when the “blockages” began in February, affecting more than 350,000 French students.

… [B]efore long, in the course of endless student assemblies, the strikers slipped toward broader political goas… Non-students and other activists joined, steering student anger toward Sarkozy’s business-friendly government, the world financial crisis, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and, one student said, even a debate over the qualifications of Vladimir Putin to be Russia’s leader.

“You start with a clear goal,” [one student] said, sucking on a cigarette during a break from researching her thesis. “But you end up talking about the war in Israel, swine flu and all the rest. And pretty soon, outsiders come and things harden.”

Worried about impending exams and no longer entirely sure what the protests were about, students voted in recent days to lift the strike at several universities, including here…

Authorities late Thursday arrested the suspect in the slaying of a Wesleyan University student who police said had threatened to kill other students and Jews.

A police spokesman said 29-year-old Stephen P. Morgan was taken into custody in the central Connecticut town of Meriden, about 10 miles from Middletown, and turned over to police investigating Wednesday’s fatal shooting of 21-year-old Johanna Justin-Jinich.

A law-enforcement officer in Washington said Morgan turned himself in. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because it was not his case…

The trustee overseeing liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff’s assets sued New York financier and philanthropist J. Ezra Merkin on Thursday, seeking more than $500 million Merkin withdrew from Madoff’s investment business.

… The suit describes Merkin as a “sophisticated investor” who “knew or should have known” that Madoff’s investment firm “was predicated on fraud.”

According to Picard’s suit, Merkin and Madoff had more than a business relationship. The two were also close socially, sitting together on the Board of Trustees of Yeshiva University. That relationship should have allowed Merkin access to Madoff’s often secretive operations, the suit contends…

I knew that Yeshiva trustee thing would come back to haunt him…

Merkin is an influential figure, especially in New York, where he was prominent both on Wall Street and in social and charitable circles. While he and Madoff were still riding high, Merkin sat on the boards of such New York institutions as Carnegie Hall and the Fifth Avenue Synagogue.  [Er, I think he’s still riding high. He remains President of Fifth Avenue Synagogue.]

… in a kingdom by the sea…

Or make that a city by the lake, and my friend Taraneh, who was taking some courses at the Illinois Institute of Technology, drove me over there. I was stunned.

This was the coldest, ugliest campus ever. The synergy between the flatness of Chicago’s plain, and the plainness of IIT’s flat architecture, was deadly. The place was a morgue, the buildings slabs.

To make matters entirely morbid, it was a dreary winter day. No one around, dark empty sky.

I fled, never to return. Modernism’s one thing, brutalism another.

Now the proposed demolition of this IIT beauty —

— to make way for a public transit stop — has Mies van der Rowe enthusiasts up in arms. Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she beautiful? Who else could’ve raised those brick shithouse walls like Mies?

… reports police activity, but it’s not clear whether the man they’re arresting is Johanna Justin-Jinich’s killer.

The same blog, Wesleying, features, one post down, a surveillance photo of the killer — a very angry man with a gun in his hand.

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Update: The suspect has not in fact been found. Wesleying is a good place to go for the latest information on the search, and for details of daily life, at Wesleyan.

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Second Update: Horrible event, getting more horrible. Wesleyan is essentially locked down as the shooter — a madman who has made threats against Wesleyan students and Jews (Johanna Justin-Jinich was Jewish) — remains at large. Again, Wesleying has details. Their blog is overwhelmed with traffic, so you may need to be patient.

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Third: Bloomberg News:

Justin-Jinich filed an aggravated harassment complaint against Morgan when they were both students at New York University in Manhattan, WNBC News reported. The station said Justin-Jinich was 21 years old.

… the idiots running university sports.

[An NCAA report shows] no connection between coaches’ salaries and winning. “The only category of spending that has a statistically significant effect on performance,” the authors say, “is ‘team expenditures’ .” — recruiting, equipment and other “game-day expenses.”

Co-author Jonathan Orszag, an economist who once served on President Clinton’s National Economic Council and as assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, says there are instances in which big salaries for coaches prove to be sound investments. But “on aggregate,” he says, that’s not the case.

“There’s a lot of pressure on university presidents to hire an expensive coach,” says Orszag, whose brother Peter is the new White House budget director, “but the evidence suggests that spending more on coaches does not bring the benefit to the university that they expect.”

Headlines like this.

But that’s just the latest.

… cynical recruitment strategies for its men’s basketball team produce all kinds of problems — including, most recently, loss of a scholarship. Having “fail[ed] to meet the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate cut score,” it is now “the highest-profile of three area programs to suffer penalties in the annual evaluation.”

… magician??

Just who is David Lounsbury, international man of mystery?