[T]he new allegations involved potential violations of university policy and were separate from the November 19 shooting of a student from the University of New Mexico. 

[T]he allegations involved multiple players hazing a teammate more than once with a police report filed.

What can we say on this blog about nauseating New Mexico State that we haven’t already said a hundred times? (All the up-to-date details you can stomach here.) In an academic landscape of booze, guns, hazing, and cheating, schools like NMSU, where reporters must distinguish among ongoing acts of vileness, stand out boldly.

You figure the highest paid person on campus must be the recruiting coach, cuz he’s the one bringing the hazers and the killers — people whose intrinsic violence does wonders on the court. And recruits can rest safe in the knowledge that the rest of the staff will hide the guns that do the killing from the cops. Definitely a team effort at this school.

I mean, some of these players make the shooter at Richneck Elementary look like a kid.

… Leandro Mathias de Novaes.

New York’s Williamsburg Charter points the way: Students enjoy multiple school-based mass shootings over the course of the school year, with all the opportunities they offer for small group discussions of violence, firearms, conflict resolution, the role of the police, and so on. As faculty who try to intervene are picked off, discussion is enriched with explorations of mortality.

The mystery of the awful 2021 Tesla crash, about which I wrote here, has been solved.

A final report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board found that a 2021 fiery crash that killed two people in a Tesla was a result of the driver speeding and being intoxicated… NTSB’s investigation determined the probable cause of the crash was “the driver’s excessive speed and failure to control his car, due to impairment from alcohol intoxication in combination with the effects of two sedating antihistamines, resulting in a roadway departure, tree impact, and post-crash fire.”

You can take the Texas good ol’ boy out of twentieth century car technology, but you can’t take him out of revving the engine plus polypharmacy.

People at the time were quick to blame Tesla.

The twenty-first century televised adaptation of William Faulkner’s Snopes family saga – As Murdaughs Lay Dying – proceeds apace, but the prosecution, which should easily take down Big Daddy Murdaugh, the obvious murderer, has run into a shrapnel of trouble.

Used to be all sorts of firearm evidence – stuff like gunshot residue – could put a case over the top; but now that all-American clans like the Murdaughs own forty trillion guns which they’re always toting around and shooting off, almost any piece of gun evidence is, er, shot down. When your entire house, car, wardrobe, fields, and gardens are gun-residue saturated, it’s hard to determine which residue comes from family-slaughtering and which comes from, you know, jest reglur family fun.

Although Scathing Online Schoolmarm is eager to introduce the Toscano Law Group, Newport News, to the semi-colon (there’s no problem with the sentence I’ve quoted in my headline, but throughout the letter the absence of the semi-colon is a problem), she nonetheless acknowledges that, effective-exposition-wise, its extended letter about the public elementary school system, to which you entrust your little ones every day, rocks.

You begin to understand homeschooling when you read about daily life at Richneck Elementary School. When your six year old tyke’s classmates aren’t smacking at/spitting on the teacher, they’re on the playground fingering their Glocks. Put aside curricular questions; your family definitely stands a better chance of not being reduced to multiple quivering mounds of blood if you stay locked in your house.

The key to transforming your school to Lord of the Flies With Firearms is the school’s administrative team. Without a strong shared commitment to violence among the principals and vice-principals you are getting nowhere in terms of mass slaughter.

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Violent cultures make violent toddlers, so for optimal school slaughter you also need a critical mass of parents who leave loaded guns lying all over the house, the way the Richneck shooter’s parents did.

Do you think, knowing all too well they had a psychotic would-be killer on their hands, these parents were “negligent”? How many guns do you think they had at home — again, knowing their kid wanted to kill? Ten? Twenty?

Babe, it’s not negligence, is it? Nor is it negligence when an assistant principal rejects desperate begging from multiple teachers and students that she check a psychotically violent student for weapons.

Let’s call it what it is.

Large swathes of the country are shooting off guns all the time. They like to. It’s exciting and satisfying, as America’s finest news source reminds us. American flag pins in Congress have been replaced by AR-15 pins. From the highest to the lowest forms of civic life in this country, guns are everything. They are everywhere. You’re a bloody fool (literally) if you don’t know this and begin to act accordingly.

Are you afraid, as Varsity Blues concludes with its mastermind’s prison sentence (he got a few years), that we’ve seen the end of colorful, fun, characters like these?

DO. NOT. FEAR. When God closes a door, He opens a window.

First of all, Philip Esformes is headed for a retrial, and nothing Varsity Blues has to offer comes anywhere near Philip Esformes.

Plus if you’re not watching the State of South Carolina’s multipart adaptation of the greatest William Faulkner novel of all time – As Murdaughs Lay Dying – you are missing the glorious reincarnation of Flem Snopes and his clan. The trial is ongoing, available live on YouTube.

… costing him quite a lot of money.

Their services are held at abortion clinics. “Planned Parenthood” is the name of their denomination. They tithe to abortion providers.

UD‘s a little astonished, but she recalls Katha Pollitt’s words: “Religion is what people make of it.”

I mean. I strongly support abortion rights, but this is really over the top.

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Sing it.

Oh come to the church at Planned Parenthood

Oh come to the church in the mall…

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And by the way – I don’t think all abortion providers are Planned Parenthood affiliated, are they? I think a better name for this denomination would be Church at the Abortion.

Virtuosity on this level, in material this ravishing, is elevating to witness — which is why, even after so many hours, I was left at the end feeling an exhilarated lightness. Like many others I saw, I drifted up the aisle and onto the street unable to stop smiling.

Does UD wish she’d been there? Sure. (She tried for a ticket long after it sold out.) Is she sure she would have stayed in her seat (well, there were intermissions) for all four and a half hours? Hm.

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The ravished NYT reviewer offers some nice writing:

[H]er prevailing style is sprightly, which is why the concert didn’t feel like eating five slices of chocolate cake in a row…

Her pillowy chords at the close of the Second Concerto’s middle movement floated quietly into place…

This handful of measures painted a whole situation and personality: vulnerable, strong, searching but not lost...

A shivering hush in the first movement of the Third Concerto was like a snow in which Wang made soft footsteps with the palest chords.

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Gevalt. Financial Times:

[T]icketless crowds … congregated on 7th Avenue, many bearing placards — “I need just one! I’ll pay anything!” …

The audience staggered out into the Manhattan dusk, as one, all changed; all humbled; all grateful for that ticket.

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Update: Further thoughts on the Wang phenomenon. For what it’s worth. And I’m only a reasonably informed amateur pianist. And more self-deprecating stuff like that.

I want to suggest that, counterintuitively, it’s Yuja Wang’s LACK of sensibility that lifts her above other pianists, who don’t typically produce crowds of people begging for tickets outside their venues.

When I watched my first Wang YouTube, I relaxed immediately into the knowledge that she simply would never hit a wrong key. Never. Not that I could hear.

I also relaxed in the face of her TOTAL absence of neurotic ego, as in Glenn Gould or V. Horowitz… With Horowitz, for instance, his immense sadness –his ashen features as he played even the most exuberant music — for me, it’s a one-note emotional experience, hearing him. He’s in it too much. Muddies the music.

And it’s not even fair, mentioning Gould.

But consider another, contemporary performer, a great pianist, and one with whom Wang has played duets: Khatia Buniatishvili. Close to the same technical virtuosity, to my ear. And I listen to her a lot. Howsomever…

There’s still the sense she conveys of what a heavy-weight experience it is, playing this stuff. Her features are usually squinched in a private angst as she plays. Which is okay… I mean, of course it’s authentic, and it conveys the poignancy of the sound and the challenge of generating it, etc. But it disallows the thing that allows the NYT critic to note not only Wang’s effortless production of many hours of difficult playing (plus encores); just as importantly, it allows him to say this:

[H]er prevailing style is sprightly, which is why the concert didn’t feel like eating five slices of chocolate cake in a row… Virtuosity on this level, in material this ravishing, is elevating to witness — which is why, even after so many hours, I was left at the end feeling an exhilarated lightness. Like many others I saw, I drifted up the aisle and onto the street unable to stop smiling.

Ungluttonous, elevating, light, drifting… Here is a pianist who generates in her audience, and I don’t want to get too-too about it, transcendence. She literally made an enormous roomful of people transcend the weight of being human (“It’s hard to be human,” as Tommy Raskin put it.), and they naturally craved that and stayed for that and drifted into the streets retaining that for as long as one can in the middle of Manhattan.

And just how does Yuja Wang take them there? She herself transcends the dull stupid particularity of being the human being she is while she plays. She is in the transcendent realm of beautiful complete expressivity and she’s simply really happy and grateful to be there. No complex sensibility at all; just delight. Michael Tilson Thomas

 liken[s] her to a racehorse.

“She wants to run; she wants to show everything she can do.”

People wept when Secretariat pulled away; and yes of course great artists aren’t in competition yadda yadda … But the reality is that the relaxation I felt in the first seconds of encountering Wang is about this insanely rare capacity she has to stand aside and let me inside too.

… appears in UD‘s frigid garden as she takes her first walk in a month — since (almost) recovering from bronchitis.

It took a judge ruling Matthew Harris too insane to go on trial to stop the upward trajectory of this man’s academic career.

 A trail of red flags about his behavior toward women followed him throughout his academic journey to UCLA. In online class reviews, interviews and emails obtained last year by The Associated Press, current and former students at all three universities alleged negligence by the schools for letting Harris slide, despite his concerning conduct.

Here are my posts about him. An extremely obvious crazy person, sending out vile threats to female students, leaps from one great academic job to another. How ’bout that. UD thinks a class action suit might help all of these schools focus productively on their negligence; she also thinks the enthusiastic dissertation chair in the case should be handed a punitive year away without pay, during which he must take a basic criminology/psychology course in the characteristics of psychopathology. The bit where the model student/psychopath whips out his gun and blows away all the women in his class didn’t have a chance to happen in this case, but there may well be other dangerous madmen, and the dissertation chair needs help before getting enthusiastic and passing those along too.

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The lad was found with ammunition, but

[Harris] attempted to buy a “bodyguard revolver” at the Silver Bullet Shooting Range in Wheat Ridge, Colorado.

The purchase was denied.

So the gun was still a work in progress. But you and I know that, if the law hadn’t come sniffing around, he would have gotten one somehow.

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As for the larger academic village that made the world safe for this madman… oy. UD is currently tossing her hands up in the air. A whole lot needs to change for professors and administrators to acquire the balls to identify and dismiss politically trendy psychopaths.

A notorious gunplay destination. Its enraged and frightened neighbors repeatedly beg the city to shut it down. The city does nothing; the place lays on more security.

More security seems to guarantee more gunplay – I mean, all it seems to mean are more people in the hookah lounges with guns, so instead of the classic two-way shootout we get a three-way.

They killed a high school kid. [UPDATE: Two high school kids, both members of the local school football team.]

UD‘s really scratching her head here. All over the country, hookah bars are staging mass killings, and no one in authority does jack. Is it a form of amusement for city councils?

Apparently a deal has been worked out with state legislator Amanda Chase that the room will function as a JR-15 outlet, where students will be able to, in her words “purchase a gun that will get the job done.”