Starting tomorrow, Les UDs will be (where else?) in Rehoboth Beach, haunt of current presidents. Their leave-taking preparations, after many three-hour drives to the Bay Bridge and the long Delaware flats, feature the now-classic Can’t you take the dog to the kennel yourself? Why do you need me to ride along?, How bad do you think it will it be on the Bay Bridge?, Where’s the orange beach chair with the wide armrests that I like?, and (even though we’ve stayed there for decades) When is check-in time at the condo?
One distinctive element of this trip is the presence at the beach of tons of friends and family. Traditional Rehoboth involves much quiet gazing out to sea and to the container ships on the horizon, followed by twosomes along the boardwalk. This time, while our first week will be relatively quiet (various Garrett Park neighbors; Di and Steve Elkin), the week around Memorial Day will be a real blowout, with both of UD‘s sisters, various cousins, and gobs of buddies. UD is thrilled, but worries about crowd control, plus the difficulty of dinner reservations.
Nu, these are problems anybody would want. As is also traditional, UD‘s gratitude for life having rigged up something spectacular for her is at the full.
YOU LIKE TO THINK THE STARS ARE DRIPPING
You like to think the stars are dripping while
You sleep. You like to think you'll snap awake
And step out on the deck, and in a while,
Your eyes ready, clusters will constellate
And then start dripping, just over the oak:
A weathered black and white Jackson Pollock
Whose silvers slap the cosmic curtain.
Like to think? No - you're actually certain
That when you're not looking the universe
Loses its straight face and gets to mugging
Peeing its pants giggling and shrugging...
Stable? Who said stable? MetastableMaybe and that's only maybe. UnstableIs just as likely. Don't sleep too lightly.
--
UD had just read him this NPR article, which she thinks might be an out of season April Fool’s gag. Here are excerpts, with occasional parenthetic commentary from UD.
A fungus called Massospora, which can produce compounds of cathinone — an amphetamine — infects a small number of [cicadas] and makes them lose control.
The fungus takes over their bodies, causing them to lose their lower abdomen and genitals. And it pushes their mating into hyperdrive.
“This is stranger than fiction,” Matt Kasson, an associate professor of forest pathology and mycology at West Virginia University, tells NPR’s All Things Considered. “To have something that’s being manipulated by a fungus, to be hypersexual and to have prolonged stamina and just mate like crazy.”
… [J]ust before the cicadas rise from the ground, the spores of the fungus start to infect the bug. Once it’s above ground and starts to shed its skin to become an adult, its butt falls off.
Then a “white plug of fungus” starts to grow in its place.
… The insects have no idea what’s happening.
[It was about here – when the NPR writer reassured us that the cicadas have no awareness they’ve become buttplugged zombies – that ol’ UD began to wonder if something April Oneish might be going on… Don’t worry we’re sure they are unaware… Huh?]
… Males that are infected will continue to mate with females, but they’ll also pretend to be females so they can spread the fungus to even more partners. [Now it’s Lesbian World War Z.]
… “It’s sexually transmissible,” Kasson tells NPR. “It’s a failed mating attempt, of course, because there’s no genitalia back there.”
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The story’s origin is clearly The Golden Screw story, which my father – with lights out and much spectral OOOOing – told the four Rapp kids every Halloween. UD thought it was just her family’s story – just her father’s creation – until, for this post, she looked it up, and it’s like this major American joke/folktale. Her father’s only contribution was to Judaify the punch line: “And then… [long pause… ] his TUSHY FELL OFF.”
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Anyway, Mr UD just thought the whole thing was gross. UD of course has been laughing… her butt off.
The [staff of the film Halston included] an intimacy co-ordinator, which [star Ewan] McGregor felt was an especially important development for young female actors…
With the intimacy co-ordinator, he says, “It’s literally like, ‘Are you happy to have your bum touched?’, ‘Are you happy for somebody to put their hand on your chest?’ ‘Are you going to kiss with tongues?’”
And I’m sure we’re very happy CHS did so well (its CEO made $9.1 mill ), though when you read the fine print it turns out they did it through a wily combination of government handouts and suing – during a pandemic – patients who couldn’t pay their bills.
These sorts of suits are such a disgusting practice that almost no other hospital chain files them.
CNN interviewed more than a dozen people sued by CHS hospitals. Most said they had tried to communicate with the company’s lawyers, collections agents or the hospitals directly and found them unresponsive or unwilling to agree to a settlement they could afford.
Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins University professor who has studied hospital lawsuits around the country, said CHS was far more litigious than most hospital groups, and that the company’s financial aid policy didn’t go nearly far enough. “It’s like Marie Antoinette saying, ‘if somebody came to me begging for food, I would give them cake,'” Makary said. “It’s completely blind to the relentless, aggressive, predatory nature of debt collection on the ground.”
(One simple form of self-defense for some patients involves checking yourself out of the hospital. “[A patient being sued] said in an interview that his bill came after the hospital kept him longer than he had wanted.” You’re almost always free to leave a hospital when you want to – check out the AMA option. If you feel comfortable doing it, you’ll save yourself thousands of dollars, and spend less time living cheek by jowl with those pesky hospital-borne infections.)
Listing agent Dan Dockray of LIV Sotheby’s International Realty said [Tom Cruise’s $39.5 million Telluride Colorado] property was actually in contract within roughly the first week. “It all really depended on who had their Gulfstream warming up on the tarmac to get out there first,” said his colleague Eric Lavey, who also worked on the deal.
Well, not exactly in the bedroom; but late this morning as I sat in bed news-scrolling, I looked through the sliding glass doors to the garden to see a very big mammal of some sort staring at me. I mean, quite big. Perched on a paver among the lavender and bee balms. We looked at each other for a few seconds, after which the thing trundled off, dark flat tail trailing… A hurried Google search turned up this helpful graphic
on which my choices were American Beaver, Muskrat, and Groundhog. I went with Door Number Three and then of course read about what a spectacular garden pest it is, etc., etc. Again consulting the poster, and trying to put it in perspective, I concluded that a bear would have been worse.
We’ll be seeing a lot of these valedictories: Bloomsburg University has just shut down its entire Greek system. Typical reason: A dead freshman and a big ol’ lawsuit.
Who knows why the University of South Carolina president, addressing a proud contingent of students and parents on an important day, referred to the students as lucky graduates of the University of California? Who knows why he for the third time (reportedly) recycled in this speech a plagiarized paragraph from a speech by a famous Navy Seal? Who knows why (according to some observers) he slurred his words throughout?
I don’t know why. But let me speculate about Bob Caslen, who has now resigned. Let me begin with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips:
These are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.
I think anyone reviewing Caslen’s odd behaviors (which, according to some, predate this speech) would want to entertain the possibility that he hates his job (the university bestowed it unwillingly; he has been an unpopular president) and wants out; but rather than grasp that fact forthrightly (a military man, he has always done his duty) he has at it were allowed his unconscious to have its way with his situation. He has allowed his recalcitrance to what is supposed to be his project to emerge, and USC got the message.
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For a wee bit more insight into the whole “unconscious” thing, consider the fact that in Donald Trump the USA experienced its first president with no apparent unconscious. He lost an election and this made him mad; to get the election back he sent a mob to the Capitol to kill his vice president (who made him mad), take out the Congress, destroy democracy, and get back what he wanted. When desperate allies called him from the besieged building, he blew them off and went back to enjoying the riot’s tv footage. Now THAT’S having no unconscious. Recalcitrant to his project? Just like Ubu the King, Trump was happily blowing up the world to achieve his project.
But this is very rare. Outside of select psychopaths, most everyone has an unconscious.
The sole purpose of the male fish is to help a female reproduce, reads the post. “Males latch onto the female with their teeth and become ‘sexual parasites,’ eventually coalescing with the female until nothing is left of their form but their testes for reproduction,” reads the post.
