A student has apparently been shot at the school where my colleague Faye Moskowitz taught for years; two other people, near the apartment of our old friends the Elkins, have been shot. Hundreds of rounds went off, they say, and hordes of heavily armed police are still seeking the gunman. The area for blocks around has been locked down. The gunman is/was reportedly in this building.

Upper Connecticut – a broad beautiful leafy thoroughfare.

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I was sitting in the den overlooking Connecticut, Steve just told me, and I heard what sounded like some sort of machinery. Then I realized it was repeated gunfire. Di was just in its vicinity, at the grocery. I tried calling her, but she didn’t pick up. She just bought a new phone and doesn’t know how it works. I was frantic.

Finally she figured out how to make a call. She didn’t lock down. She sneaked across Connecticut and took a long roundabout way home. I met her outside our apartment, and at first we couldn’t get back in. I had to convince the police blocking the door that I live there.

Right now I’m looking at an incredible police presence up and down the avenue. I’ve never seen anything like it.

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Update: Now dead by his own hand, the Connecticut Avenue shooter seems to have lacked the whatever to massacre in the way of his role model, Vegas massacrist, Stephen Paddock.

[The] alleged shooter [on Connecticut Avenue] died by suicide while officers were entering a fifth-floor apartment where he had set up a “sniper-type setup” with a tripod. Six firearms, including several long guns, and multiple rounds of ammunition, were found inside the apartment.

Compare that to his hero, Paddock.

Twenty-four firearms, a large quantity of ammunition, and numerous high-capacity magazines capable of holding up to 100 rounds apiece were found in the suite. Fourteen of the firearms were .223-caliberAR-15-typesemi-automatic rifles: three manufactured by Colt, two by Daniel Defense, two by FN Herstal, two by LWRC International, two by POF-USA, one with a .223 Wylde chamber by Christensen Arms, one made-to-order by LMT, and one by Noveske. The others were eight .308-caliber AR-10-type rifles, one .308-caliber Ruger American bolt-action rifle, and one .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 342 revolver. Some of the AR-15 rifles were fitted with vertical forward grips and bump stocks, the latter of which allowed for recoil to actuate their triggers at a rate of 90 rounds in 10 seconds. The AR-10 rifles were equipped with various telescopc sights and mounted on bipods. Paddock was found to have fired a total of 1,058 rounds from fifteen of the firearms: 1,049 from twelve AR-15-style rifles, eight from two AR-10-style rifles, and the round used to kill himself from the Smith & Wesson revolver.

You’ve been gone so long!

Once again we get to hear your song.

Aesthetic

Garden piano starlight and stone:
The pursuits of my parents
Present as my own. 

Also dogs, and birds.

The play of words.

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Is there nothing that is mine alone?

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Instead of her spaniels a runty pit.
Purcell in place of his Hindemith.
And perseids more than constellations.

For eight years, police have been trying to prove that Charles Adelson had Dan Markel killed. Anyone who followed the appalling story of a man killed simply because he wanted to share custody of his children knows that the evidence has always pointed to the brother of Markel’s ex-wife, but authorities only recently had sufficient proof of the conspiracy. Now a trial can proceed.

Benson failed to detect on John Eastman

Any obvious Mark of the Beastman.

‘It was only much later

He came out as a traitor!

We ask you to leave us in peace, man.’

This writer stresses America’s fast-growing 4 – 14 shooter cohort: The NRA’s putting Glocks in Christmas socks, and our littlest ones are shooting them all over the place — at themselves, at party guests, at their families.

It’s a curious development. The onrush of America’s infantile infantry.

… they will come.

Spring, UD‘s garden.

Leave it around and it just might kill your kid.

Bravo.

To be sure, they’ve got the weapons to deploy. But it seems increasingly important to call the Russians exactly what they are.

THE BIRD THAT WANTS TO NEST IN MY RAFTER

The bird that wants to nest in my rafter

Has birdlike clarity what it’s after:

The comforts of home.  Of course I agree

That water source, sight-line, privacy

All make for quite the nest.  The question though

(As I sweep off twigs and it returns

Tirelessly, with energy to burn)

Remains:  Which one of us will have to go?

… “perimeter walk,” when Les UDs walk the length and breadth of their property. This often coincides with sunset, but this evening was so beautiful that we took our walk early.

The main thing I wanted to say about this image is that you’ve GOT to imagine the sweet powerful aroma coming off those white viburnum flowers. It says here that the scent is a “sweet, rich, spicy vanilla,” which sounds about right. There’s something of chai tea to it.

But that was 2019. Little Oberlin’s endowment currently stands at $1.09 billion.

A few years ago, Oberlin College did a hell of a lot of damage to a local bakery – falsely accused it of racism, got tons of people to boycott it – and a jury’s decision that it pay the bakery $33 million in compensation doesn’t sit at all well with the school. But the decision has been upheld; the school’s only option at this point is to kick things up to the Ohio Supreme Court… or hey, maybe the US Supreme Court would like to air, for the nation and the world, a billion dollar school’s vicious attack on a local small business.

Let’s wait and see what Oberlin decides to do. Not paying will expose it to yet further penalties, one assumes; so it can’t do nothing forever. I’m figuring an Ohio court at any level will share the outrage of an Ohio jury in regard to the arrant vileness of Oberlin’s behavior. I doubt the Supreme Court would look at the case. And, you know, Oberlin has enough money in its endowment to pay what it owes.

It’d be nice if they concluded something humane and useful for themselves as a result of all of this, but that ain’t gonna happen. Mob rule will prevail.

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UD thanks David.

… group. There’s insider-trading-charges-evading-tho-no-one-knows-how-the-hell-he-pulled-THAT-off Steven Cohen; there’s all-round terrific guy Ron Perelman; most recently, there’s New York’s naughty Lieutenant Governor, just today arrested on big ol’ fraud charges.

It is UD‘s considered opinion that Brown is in some kind of obscure competition with Yeshiva University (Madoff, Merkin, and oh so many more) for grubbiest greediest grotesquest trustees.