Something to live for.

Ah the Gophers! Gnawing their way, for centuries, through the foundation of the University of Minnesota! Now they’ve got a nearly nine million dollar athletics budget deficit, and what to do? Hm, hm…

How bout we hit the students up for an extra one hundred dollars to pay for coach buyouts, litigation costs after scandals, upkeep on a massive underused stadium, etc etc etc.

Far as I can tell, UM students already pay 300 a year for sports whether they like it or not, so it looks as though UM is charging 400.

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Did they mention cutting down on travel expenses?

… in the Bonhoeffer Garden.

 Tommy Fargis [is] the pastor at Deep Creek Baptist Church [NC], which is situated within earshot of [a] gun range’s location.  Fargis conceded that [the range owner’s] seemingly cavalier attitude about his church’s repeated complaints have tested even his own capacity for Christian forgiveness.

“He promised me on two different occasions that ‘we’ll stop shooting on Sunday until after your service,’” Fargis [said]. “That lasted one week. And I don’t take kindly being lied to because as pastor of Deep Creek Baptist Church, I represent Jesus Christ.”

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“The peace of the Lord

CHOOMCHOOMBLAMCHOOMBLAMPOPOPOPOPOPOP

be with you and also

WHEEEEPOPPOPWHAMBANGBANGBANGBLAMCHOOM

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Anyhoo the pastor’s client got His own back.

No one yet seems willing to broach the child custody dispute that was almost certainly behind the killing. But as the story picks up steam, that should start to happen.

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Wow. Okay; let’s go.

A third double fault from Anisimova on the opening point. Followed by another errant shot. And another. 0-40, three more break points. This is uncomfortable viewing. She just can’t shake the stage fright off. She needs the crowd to help her get into it, but they’re as subdued and shocked as she is. Even more so when Anisimova concedes the break to love. Anisimova has been known in the past for sometimes being fragile mentally on court, but had held her nerve so well in this tournament, especially when seeing off Sabalenka in the semi-finals. But she just can’t get going here.

Wow! Talk about cultural dominance!

Richmond Va. already has a shockingly high gun homicide rate; the good citizens of that city have long since proven their brilliance at getting guns and shooting them at people they want to kill (often turns out to be everyone). Folks from six to sixty are out there bangbangbanging.

UD therefore wonders whether the city needs yet another massive shooting range (these are only the best ten local ranges).

The annual Richmond murder rate has dipped a bit in the last couple of years, so maybe it’s as simple as Richmond not wishing a further drop in the rankings.

But it’s the best place to die! Especially if you’re a child.

Slurp! We scarf up fake memoirs.

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In hindsight, some of the details in the book did feel vague. The loss of the couple’s home was never quite explained and Moth’s physical issues never seemed enough to stop him walking on. However, I saw that lack of detail as part of Raynor ‘s intention not to dwell on the darkness, but to focus on the light...

 Raynor claims that Moth is told by a consultant that he has corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare and terminal neurological condition, related to Parkinson’s, that causes sufferers debilitating symptoms: tremors, loss of limb control, dementia and devastating and irreversible brain damage. With no treatment, and no cure, life expectancy for CBD sufferers is typically six to eight years from diagnosis. Moth, however, has lived with the condition for 18 years. In fact I recall, having read the book, googling the couple out of curiosity and being surprised at how well he looked, but then thinking, “What do I know?”.

Gevalt, woman. You know a lot. You preferred to walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain! Though your dreams be tossed and blown, walk on walk on with hype in your heart…

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A writer for the Independent:

… I was an audience to two early Salt Path haters: my mother and grandmother. “A load of crap,” my grandmother exclaimed between bites of a pub lunch. “It was all a bit neat, wasn’t it?” added my mother.

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Full disclosure: I can be a credulous fool too.

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[T]here were a few nagging doubts in my mind: if the supposedly mortally sick husband ‘Moth’ was really suffering from an incurable and debilitating degenerative disease, why does he appear perfectly well in the many interviews that the couple have given to promote their story; and what exactly was the nature of the vaguely described bad ‘investment’ that lost them their home?…

 [I]t is for me a real disappointment to discover, with a sense of weary inevitability, that they are probably just another pair of dishonest grifters making money out of our gullibility.

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Only last week, I was having lunch when The Salt Path came up in conversation. ‘That’s the one about the woman with the terminally ill husband who went off round Cornwall, wasn’t it?’ said one friend. I responded, perhaps a little heartlessly: ‘Yeah, and then the husband weirdly failed to die and she got a couple of sequels out of it.’

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Think of those endless airport books promising businessmen that they are just a mindset tweak away from becoming a billionaire, or evangelical converts who turn out to be running from some abominable secret. It’s even worse when it is combined with this sort of weatherbeaten tweeness, a sentimental, live-laugh-love vision of Britain in which whatever your situation – brain disease, homelessness, poverty – you are only a thermos of tea and a chat with a crofter away from happiness. 

Nicely put.

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Even the film-makers appear to have baulked at some of what Winn describes. In the book, the disasters of homelessness and terminal disease are further exacerbated by the tragic death of her favourite old ewe, Smotyn (Welsh for spotty): “I curled on the grass next to her and sobbed… Let me die now, let me be the one to go, don’t let me be left alone, let me die.” This scene was quietly dropped from the film.

Well, you can compare UD‘s honest real estate copy with the actual thing.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes a striking connection between weapons laxity and bad language skills.

First, keep this in mind. “South Carolina has weak gun laws—missing the vast majority of the 50 key policies—and suffers one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the nation.”

Arguably less important than – what’d that lady say down there? – a bloodbath every day – a grasp of grammar/vocabulary nonetheless counts for something, SOS would urge, and as she …. rifles … through articles about guns she is often struck by a general need for correction by, well, SOS, so let’s …. take aim at some of this. Let’s unload. Let’s choose some targets.

Like the journalists and spokespeople of li’l all shot up Lake City SC! A typical article in the local press — daily bloodbath bad, oughta do something — includes more than a few solecisms.

The police chief talks about a kiddie shooting off a gun at Walmart just t’other day. “That incident could have went extremely bad, extremely quick. It’s something that socks the conscience, that’s not something we want.”

SOS likes his use of “socks” – an unexpected, vivid, choice; socked in the gut, go for it. Socks and conscience have a nice assonance on the o.

Note that it’s almost the famous shocks the conscience – which the speaker might have meant, but in messing it up he came up with something better.

Could have went should be could have gone: A straightforward error. If you want to be prissy about it, badly would be better than bad but ain’t no big deal.

The journalist:

He says they are seeing a troubling trend called “straw purchases.” That is where someone who legally can purchase a gun and does so. That person will then sell the gun to someone who cannot legally own or possess one.

What would an elitist at the NYT do with this same material? Fewer words, I hear you say. Subordination. Stuff that lets you combine in one or two sentences material that sounds redundant and slow-witted cuz like a kindergarten teacher you carefully separate it into short sentences. So something like this will be the NYT version:

Straw purchases are a troubling trend in which a legal purchaser sells a gun to an illegal.

Forty words versus sixteen! And note that the SC journalist even includes a thing that isn’t a sentence (That is where someone who legally can purchase a gun and does so.) This happens when you’re all tied up in verbiage and, in this case, forget to dump the “who.”

Back to the police chief.

“There’s no one single incident that you can point to that, in my opinion, there’s a it’s a gambit of things, and I think it starts with straw purchases.”

Now of course the journalist could clean a lot of this up with the use of ellipsis and [sic] and all – as a writer, you’re not duty-bound to record every stream of consciousness that flows out of a speaker. But the glaring error here is a gambit of things. The speaker meant gamut. One way to remember how to use gamut is with Dorothy Parker’s famous review of a theatrical performance:

“Miss Hepburn ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.” 

The absolutely disgusting murder of Berkeley professor Przemyslaw Jeziorski, possibly engineered by his Greek ex-wife, echoes the equally disgusting murder of law professor Dan Markel, engineered by his ex-wife’s family.

It took eight years, but three people so far are serving life sentences for Markel’s killing, and a fourth will be in prison for around twenty years. The vindictive ex-wife’s vindictive mother – reported to be the ringleader of the conspiracy – is in prison awaiting her trial, and it’s not yet clear whether the ex-wife will also be tried, but she may well be. All this because the ex-wife didn’t want to share custody of their children.

Perhaps the motive was similar in the case of poor Jeziorski.

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UD worries that Greece’s pathetic justice system will find a way to fuck this up and let the guilty parties walk. It took far too long to deal with the Markel murder, yes, but we did get to it and we have been putting the killers away.

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You can donate to help his family with legal and other expenses here.

 “Representative Tillman, Sellers, and Hendrix, we went to the Speaker. We begged the Speaker, ‘Listen, Birmingham is a blood bath every day. Can we try to move this Glock switch bill?’”

How legislation gets done in Bama.

‘America’s gun violence undermines the legitimacy of its efforts to challenge other countries’ treatment of their own citizens.‘

Meaning: No one in a position to do something here cares that we regularly slaughter our schoolchildren, so where do we get off lecturing other countries on good behavior?

Plus we’re exporting our bloody gunlove to the rest of the world.