… “Afghan human rights activist, ex-minister and burka opponent Sima Samar is …seen as a possible winner” of this year’s Nobel Peace prize. This would be spectacular publicity for the effort to get women and children out from under this grotesque garment.

Plus of course UD‘s beloved Don DeLillo is again being shortlisted for the literature prize. He and Philip Roth always show up together on this list.

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I thought of DeLillo’s novel Mao II tonight while reading again – for the first time in forty or so years – Catcher in the Rye. Almost at the end of that novel, Holden Caulfield has a heart-to-heart with one of his teachers, the very smart, alcoholic, Mr Antolini. Antolini recognizes Caulfield’s intelligence, sensitivity, moral rigidity, and self-destructiveness. He understands how the trauma of Holden’s beloved brother’s death has set on him on a nihilistic, existence-loathing path. He also sees how this rage, combined with Caulfield’s restless intellect, could make him some sort of dangerous fanatic. Here’s one of the things he says to Holden:

“Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it’ll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”

This know-yourself haberdashery put me in mind of a very similar piece of advice DeLillo’s hero, the totally Salingeresque writer Bill Gray, recalls having read and heard growing up:

He remembered the important things, how his father wore a hat called the Ritz, gray with a black band, a raw edge and a snap brim, and someone was always saying “Measure your head before ordering” which was a line in the Sears Roebuck catalogue…”

As he’s dying, Bill repeats this phrase to himself.

Know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly. Measure your head before ordering.

… of the Alabama university student who got naked and went to the campus police station, where he banged on windows and threatened the policeman who came outside to investigate, ended as badly as it’s possible to end. The policeman, after repeated threats from the student, shot and killed him (there’s a security tape of the incident).

It’s too soon to say anything with confidence about this event, beyond the fact that it’s heartbreaking. The student was a freshman, a wrestler, and, according to his friends, had no record of this sort of behavior. Theories abound – a psychotic break, drugs… Many observers wonder why the policeman was unable to find a non-lethal way to calm things.

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David, a reader, reminds UD that a couple of years ago the Georgia Tech police (actually, now that I look at the link, it’s not clear they were campus police) were able to do enough roughing up and pepper spraying of a crazed student to take him down:

[S]everal officers had their handguns trained on Shrotri and were ordering him to drop the sword, according to another report also obtained by the AJC.

“You will have to kill me,” Shrotri responded.

A scuffle ensued after one of the officers squirted pepper spray at Shrotri. Officer Robert J. Turner, 29, of Griffin, had his right hand cut as he tackled Shrotri.

…UD‘s poetry MOOC, for which you can sign up here. It’s free.

The puffballs are migrating. The giant puffball mushrooms UD‘s forest/meadow produces every autumn have begun breaking through the soil (just like the first photo of this sequence), but this year they’re appearing much closer to her house — four of them, so far, in a line along a little path she cleared between the pachysandra and the woods’ edge. There are another five somewhat hidden in the woods.

UD wants to photograph all of this and put it on her blog, and in fact she’s about to have brunch with her neighbor and photographer, Tamara Trocki, in order to get some picture-taking training. She was disappointed not to get a photograph of the big beautiful spider web suspended from her dogwood tree last Sunday morning. It had rained the night before, and the water drops and the sun brought out every filament. But by the time UD began thinking about taking a picture, the web had collapsed. (It looked more or less like this.)

As the puffballs grow (this is a matter for anxiety too, since the squirrels and who knows what else scratch and eat away at the mushrooms as they enlarge) – and they get enormous (this is some of last year’s crop) – I’d like to keep taking pictures, to chronicle the grotesque size and shape of these things over the next couple of weeks.

When they reach full size they do what they’ve been waiting to do – blow their top and disperse their spore cloud through the universe. Smashing ripe puffballs is a fine old American pastime.

Hoo boy. That’ll be the day. Talk about a jockstravaganza! Let’s see… Whoever the president is, we know he’ll be a jock who couldn’t care less about how corrupt and mercenary the relationship is between the NCAA and sports schools. Or hey maybe we want the vice-president to get involved! There’s Paul Bionic Man Ryan… Joe Weight Lifter Biden… They’re all physical fitness freaks, and they’re all mad sports fans… So forget the executive branch.

Senators and congressmen… yeah, they’re going to want to fuck up the comfy relationship between the NCAA and their home teams… They’re going to want to uncover decades of academic fraud back home and berate the NCAA for overlooking it…

… telling the truth. In a student-athlete variation on the Kinsley Gaffe (“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”), Jones, an Ohio State football player, tweeted:

Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.

Cardale Jones is my hero. He alone speaks the truth through the bullshit of APR scores, and Sociology and Sports Management departments bursting with jockshop courses, and sweet kindly academic counselor ladies who take the boys by the arm and lead them to the courses the ladies will take for them. It’s degrading – to the school, the players, to other students, to everybody. Cardale breaks through the lies and asks an admirably rational question: Why are you making me play school?

It’s why, if you’ve read this blog any length of time, you know that I refer to sports factory personnel as Blanche DuBoises. It’s their job to live in a gaudy gauzy unreality… To lie and lie and lie and even try to believe it all…

When someone firmly based in the reality principle – like Cardale here – comes along, all the Blanches, with a sharp scandalized intake of breath, say Ah declare ah’ve never heard such manner of thing… Lord, lord, lord have mercy…

UD says: Let the Blanches blanch. We know what’s right.

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UD thanks Doug.

… a reader, Chas, tells me his and other comments haven’t been appearing on the site. I have no idea why. I’ve told my webmistress about it. Meanwhile, apologies.

A Tennessee boy with a butt
Has thus far refused to say what
Substance or dose
He somehow osmosed
Has so oddly distended his gut.

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Update: Dave, a reader, writes a limerick in response to the student’s explanation that he can’t have buttchugged because God doesn’t want him to desecrate his body. That way. Putting enough alcohol in it to kill it – however it went up or down – is another matter.

God says you can’t drink with your butt
And it’s not ours to ask “why?” or “what?”
It’s like non-cloven hooves,
Or getting tattoos,
Or leaving your penis uncut.

A former portfolio manager at Steve Cohen’s $14 billion hedge fund told the FBI that he gave his boss tips based on inside information.

Bloomberg Business Week updates us on Brown University trustee Steve Cohen, truly The Most Interesting Man in the World — at least to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

What will Brown do? Although Cohen’s not yet been charged with anything, the SEC and FBI seem awfully interested in exploring possibilities along those lines…

In the case of the also-problematic Steven Rattner, Brown seems quietly to have evicted him from the board after a certain critical mass of fines and bans and suits was reached.

With one thing and another, Brown University’s managers are becoming experienced hands in trustee-management (know when to hold ’em; know when to fold ’em) and, like Yeshiva University (home of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin), could probably start offering seminars.

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Some people seem to think this whole thing is one big joke.

So another course – Naval Weapons Systems – has broached the surface at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. We all know about the AFAM courses under Julius Nyang’oro (scroll down), and despite the administration’s insistence that that’s the end of the story, we’ve all been waiting for the rest of the bogus courses to reveal themselves. This one had no tests, no research paper, and was jammed with athletes.

… oh okay the quarterback has a drinking problem… But cast your eye back over these posts (scroll down)… TCU’s got an elaborate student drug cartel going, with football players prominent in the game.

Four score and seven years ago, I joined my beloved PIKE fraternity…

If you don’t find this oratory profoundly bowel-moving, you are no lover of freedom.

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UD thanks Ani for the link to the video. (Watch the second video on the page for the full monty.)

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Update: Reviews are beginning to chug in. This one notices something UD hadn’t picked up: “At one point, [the lawyer] says that the inaccurate story has spread across the entire ‘United Nations.'”

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Gawker‘s review here.

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UD has noted that the president of the University of Tennessee has held his tongue about this so far. But when the whole world is laughing at your university because it has devolved into very low farce, I think you have to come out and say something.

An investigative reporter badgers a University of Houston professor about how much he charges the university and his research sponsors for work-related expenses.

He’s in the UH physics department but he works for big oil and sees no reason why he shouldn’t live like his real employers — or at least a little like them. For oil executives, renting Land Rovers and flying first class ain’t worth a bucket of spit (they use chauffeurs and private jets); but for physics professors it’s way cool.

The voice of the people. Philosophy of education, American-style. If the University of Georgia students and alumni like to shit all over the campus during football games, “it’s a college campus for crying out loud.” That’s what college campuses are for.

University stories rarely offer international intrigue, but the Jorge Gilbert saga at Evergreen State College has potential.

Jorge, a charming Chilean, ran back to the mother country with tens of thousands of dollars he stole from students in the Evergreen study abroad program he used to administer. He even managed to sell his pricey Olympia condo before the hapless state could grab it.

Jorge’s not in hiding; he’s living an elegant life in a fancy apartment in Santiago and is attached to some university there. So Washington’s trying to hire a collection company to corner and fry his ass.

… Chilean collection agencies typically keep as payment about ¼ of the total debt collected- meaning any collection agency interested in tracking Gilbert … and wringing him of the money he owes Washington stands to make a cool $30,000.

I see Gilbert scaling the Gran Torre Costanera and shouting Nunca me llevan vivo.