Sing it. O Bezumbia! the gem of the river, The yacht of the richest in the world, Your size makes the whole planet quiver, Before you our bridges all unfurl. Yes before you our bridges disassemble. Five hundred million spent on only you! Thy selfishness makes decent people tremble, Three cheers for the red, white, and blue. Your yacht wing'd its wide ostentation, And threaten'd our bridges to deform, An icon of super-greed's creation, Bezumbia sails its vileness thro' the storm.
… I found in front of the fireplace this morning, overturned and waving its legs about in an effort to right itself. Mr UD took it outside. I think it might have slid down the chimney, since I always forget to close the flue. The whole episode was shamelessly lifted from Metamorphosis.

And that’s what freedom looks like in Kentucky, baby!
We’re seeing a young red fox almost every morning, around 8 AM, in and around our pollinator garden. Looks like this (photo, Colleen Bruso):

It walks calmly through the bee balm, unaware of us, doing a last-minute rabbit check before returning for the day to its den. It is a beautiful, elegant animal.
The fantastic evening firefly show, followed by the morning fox, makes these summer days and nights mesmerizing and surreal.
Not that many. But the Clarence Clearance initiative is moving at an insane pace. We’re already on our way to 650,000, and new people are signing the petition every second.
Huh yeah but every one of them applied for a job at Mar A Lago last month and I turned all the losers down…

… on UD’s deck has put out tons of buds, which, dedicated readers recall, soon unfold into massive red blooms. (Images are from last summer.) UD tried getting a picture of the pale green crab spider on one of its leaves, but as she approached, it jumped away. Praying mantises, you may also recall, loved last year’s hibiscus, and I found a baby mantis on this one the other day, but there aren’t any on it at the moment. (There are probably ten on it, but, you know, camouflage…)
As UD took pictures of her hibiscus, two chipmunks on the grass near her did that frantic little dance where they take turns hopping into the air and then race off.
Yesterday, early evening, Les UDs were startled by a large dark snake on the garden pavers. I’m thinking water snake. (We live near Rock Creek.)
Donald Trump is not a rational player. I mean, he just isn’t. You can’t have a conversation with him in the same way that you can have a conversation with most other people. He is somebody that lives in a different reality. He had started the lie about the election back in 2016. What I saw after the first interview with him in the White House was that he now became someone who believed in his own lie, and that is a person who is delusional. That is a person who is incredibly dangerous, because you can’t debate with that person.
There is no way that anybody can persuade Donald Trump that he’s wrong. And this is something that’s characteristic of him all the way through his life, and the series goes into this in the sense that he will never accept that he had done anything wrong. He will always double back. He’s always right, and it’s always somebody else’s fault. I mean, he lives in cloud cuckoo land.
He’s sitting in an interview in Mar-a-Lago saying that in front of a portrait, an actual oil painting of himself painted 25 to 30 years ago in a golf outfit. I mean, I actually asked about that at the end of the interview. I was like, “You’ve got to tell me about this painting.” I mean, this is a guy who literally has paintings of himself in his house. I mean, he’s just not a normal guy. I mean, you know?
Nice writing from Dorothy Byrne on Maxwell’s long sentence.
And that’s the right.
Frenetic engineering on the part of the Dems pays off.
UD REVIEWED
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
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