UD‘s buddy Peter at a forum where the stands are tree stumps.

…and another article UD found it difficult not to giggle through. (Like this one.)

Highlights from the career of Murdoch University’s Vice Chancellor Richard Higgott:

“[A]ccessed adult websites on his work laptop almost 500 times… When he was asked to return the laptop, Professor Higgott downloaded scrubbing software onto the computer in an unsuccessful attempt to delete all evidence he had accessed the websites.”

In an email to a colleague about the faculty senate, complained about the f***king cheek off [sic] these people”.

In another email to a colleague, wrote of the Chancellor, “I will not spend the next two to three years thinking he is the boss and I must seek approval before I fart.”

Circumvented hiring processes to push through the appointment of a woman who referred to him (again those pesky emails) as

“my dearest Higgy”, “Higlet” and “Your Higginess” and signed off with “xoxo”.

He refers to her as “Honey”, “Capling my luv” and “Capling my dear”.

Your Higginess is good.

University Diaries, comme vous le savez bien, loves fascinating plagiarism tales. Plagiarism being the life blood of this and almost all other nations, there are huge gobs of unfascinating plagiarism tales – the new school superintendent (yawn), the new school superintendent (did I already say that?) …

But when this nation’s Savant of the Secondary Market, when our Genius of the Jumbo Loan, turns out to have plagiarized from obscure earlier texts in his Billionaire’s Road Map to Success… well, UD sits up and takes notice.

At least 20 pages of the Trump Institute book were copied entirely or in large part from “Real Estate Mastery System.” Even some of its hypothetical scenarios — “Seller A is asking $80,000 for a single-family residence” — were repeated verbatim.

That’s why you pay so much for the Secrets of the Master at Trump Institute/Trump University!

… ready for love!”

UD sang this line repeatedly after Dr. Pollack, this afternoon, congratulated her on her incredibly clean colon. She was just coming out of anesthesia, and of course UD would, just coming out of anesthesia, sing.

She got the words wrong. It’s “Fit as a fiddle and ready for love.”

***************

This was her first screening colonoscopy. What can she say that hasn’t already been said by better writers.

She does turn out to have a tortuous colon.

… Cardinal Climber.

A local commentator in Oklahoma says there’s almost nothing in that state “to cheer for.” He says that by almost any quality of life standard Oklahoma looks terrible.

Instead of asking what in l’esprit d’Oklahome might account for this outcome, the writer proceeds to thank the state’s lucky stars for its football teams.

OU and OSU football have become sources of state pride at a time you can scarcely find them anywhere else.

But… Shouldn’t the guy be asking how it was that Oklahoma got stuck with 70,000 square miles of meh plus two university football teams?

Ask any chancellor, elected official or traveling businessperson and they’ll tell you — nothing has a bigger impact on the perception of universities or the states in which they educate than their sports teams. In Oklahoma, that means their football teams.

The general perception of Oklahoma, for reasons the writer lists (terrible schools, horrible health indicators, over-full prisons… he didn’t have time to mention stuff like the fact that the state’s senior senator showed climate change is a hoax by bringing a snowball to the senate chamber), is bad. If football teams had the biggest impact imaginable on the public perception of a state, Oklahoma would be right up there with Massachusetts and its… university football teams?

I mean I dunno. Some problems with logic here.

… sues to get out of having to cast his delegate’s vote for America’s biggest Brexit fan.

… Will.

The later it gets in the summer, the closer it gets to college football season, and UD‘s following Nevin Shapiro’s University of Miami with special eagerness. UM, with its history of spectacular on and off field violence and equally spectacular rules violations (put MIAMI in my search engine), is just now, just barely, coming off of its latest NCAA suspension (all them prossies drugs cars cash bets etc. Shapiro provided), and everyone’s watching to see whether this off-season’s flurry of player fuckups will keep them suspended.

In the case of UM, the NCAA should probably institute a Permanently Suspended status… Something that’s not quite the Death Penalty but conveys the idea that this majorly criminalized institution will never be able to join that venerable community of nations which is America’s Football Nation…

This time around it’s all about a local dealer giving Yukons and Escalades to a bunch of players which, speaking of venerable, is truly one of the very old-style violations, truly one of the fuckups that goes all the way back to the birth of college football.

One of the players currently being, er, investigated by UM

missed 2014 due to suspension. He was reportedly involved in an altercation with his roommate, who is said to have broken his nose in the incident.

UD appreciates the writer’s delicate, passive-voice, way of putting it… Not that his fellow player smashed his fist into his face and broke the guy’s nose… That would be, description-wise, rather unseemly… No… He is said to have somehow who knows how have experienced an outcome from the incident which involved his apparently having broken his nose… Or some such thing…

“Reportedly” (which doubles up on the said to have) and “altercation” are also very good. The lads had a bit of a set-to. Bit of an altercation.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: There is much to be learned from the American school of writing SOS calls Rich White Treatment. You can bellyache all you want about income inequality and Two Americas and Listen Liberal, but until you’ve bothered to acquaint yourself with RWT writing, you’re not getting it.

RWT appears in our classiest, highest-profile, most influential journalism, as in this piece from the New York Times (Business Section) through which SOS will now scathe. As SOS does her thing, read the piece not as if you’re its intended audience – a few hundred rich white people, many of whom will read to the end only because they know Thomas Davis and in fact probably did some insidery trading with him themselves (the guy’s a nobody who did absolutely boring white bread dull as dishwater insider trading, so why would anyone read past the first paragraph except out of schadenfreude + anxious self-interest?). Don’t even read as a member of your social class … as a typical NYT reader…

No – try reading what SOS is about to quote and analyze as a common petty criminal, or as an ordinary struggling non-golf playing, non-bigtime gambling, non-private plane using, non-criminal living in Idaho. As you read, ask yourself why our nation’s paper of record is wasting ink on this guy, whose crimes, in a nation of insider traders, in a nation about to be presided over by a man with a court date for massive fraud, are totally undistinguished and unworthy of notice. Also ask yourself questions having to do with the writer’s point of view. From what point of view is this information being amassed and organized? What is the point of this article? What is the writer trying to accomplish?

The title of the piece announces its moral. The article will indeed be a morality tale.

HOW KEEPING UP APPEARANCES RUINED A FORMER DALLAS BANKER

Strap yourself in for The Great Gatsby. Prepare to appreciate the pathos of a man captured by a culture of status and ostentation.

The piece opens onto a blur of turfgrass.

At age 67, Thomas C. Davis should be enjoying all the perks of a long and distinguished career at the pinnacle of Wall Street and the Texas business elite. These include golfing at the prestigious Dallas Country Club and Preston Trail Golf Club, where he was a member; trips to Las Vegas and golf tournaments on the private jet he co-owned; and fractional ownership of two professional sports teams, the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Stars.

The blur of turfgrass never leaves this article; it’s sprayed all over like aromatherapy spritzer. There are charity golf tournaments (Davis stole the proceeds), “golf legend Lanny Wadkins,” golf legend Phil Mickelson, naughty sports gambler William Walters (“The two often played [golf] together, especially when they were both living in Southern California.”), and “wealthy friends and fellow golf club members.” (Poignantly, Walters himself was arrested at the Bali Hai Golf Club.)

But don’t let the blur occlude the bullshit that announces itself outright in this first paragraph, which stuffs itself full of words one associates with Winston Churchill (distinguished, elite, prestigious…) even though if you read the whole article it’s clear that Davis was always a measly garden variety crooked mid-level capitalist pig. The very first thing the writer tells us about Davis – his very distinguished very advanced age – means to make him an elder statesman brought tragically low by late-life seduction into a world of shiny appearances.

So next we get some paragraphs recounting his many disgusting crimes – not just theft from a charity and insider trading, but lying to the SEC and trying to destroy evidence and all kinds of other shit.

Some story elements are good from the point of view of a reader looking for vivid detail, but even they could be better in obvious ways. Here’s an example:

And after the F.B.I. agents left, he took a prepaid cellular phone he had used to leak the information and threw it into a creek near his Dallas home, destroying evidence and obstructing justice.

Yes… okay… but shouldn’t that have been a water trap?

After acknowledging that this guy’s crimes “have received relatively little attention” – without stating the reason for this (they don’t merit attention), the NYT writer now moves to the weighty question of Why. Why would a rich person seek greater riches? Hm. Hm.

He wasn’t really rich. He was “desperate for money.” He was a “distinguished” (there’s that adjective again: “the distinguished white-haired…”) desperado desperate for money. Why was he desperate for money?

Well, because he was essentially a career criminal who gradually (I’m sure his lawyers will argue it was his advanced distinguished age and its depredations) got sloppy. He was a greedy amoral motherfucker who over time lost the knack of being a successful greedy amoral motherfucker. Happens to the best of us. Only the New York Times business page would try to turn it into a national tragedy. Only a culture committed to criminalizing its undistinguished criminals and decriminalizing its distinguished would write articles like this. His Wall Street friends are “shocked” and “stunned” (an easily stunned lot, that) that this “pillar” (I am not making this up) would fall… Because after all until very recently he didn’t do things like owe

the I.R.S. $78,000. His brokerage account was heavily margined, and he had run up tens of thousands in credit card debt. He owed $550,000 to one of his investment funds.

Mr. Davis sought salvation in gambling…

Sought salvation. Sweet. And SOS is sure he never amassed credit card debt or owed stuff to an investment fund or had a big IRS bill or tried to gamble his way to God before the great fluted pillar he used to be crashed shockingly to the ground.

And now, as his morality tale wraps up, as darkness begin to shadow the turf, bad things happen fast and furious to this desperate man.

In just one month, March 2011, Mr. Davis ran up gambling losses of $200,000 at one Las Vegas casino. He owed $178,000 for the private jet. And he had to cover the $100,000 he had taken from the charity.

SOS is particularly fond of this line, appearing almost at the end of the tale.

The government has shed little light on Mr. Davis’s motive, other than that he needed money.

She loves the image of the NYT writer squinting with all his sympathetic might over the question WHY? WHY? He even asks the government!

And what does the government say? Fuck you! He wasn’t a distinguished anything! He was a greedy motherfucker who got caught.

It maketh SOS giggle.

… UD went right to this YouTube; and though she hasn’t sung this song in decades, it came right back. Go ahead and join in on the beautiful chorus.

Just because.

… by a reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Subject: Mental health problems among university professors. Of course she’ll link you to whatever article arises from it.

Karen Wagner, a psychiatry professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, seems to sound a repetitive theme in her work: Accept undisclosed money from drug companies; put your name on articles substantively ghostwritten for drug companies; and just generally over many years demonstrate the sort of behavior that gets you … named president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Rewards in this field, after all, go to people able to increase the probability that drug firms – eager, in the latest case involving Wagner, to rain anti-depressants upon the heads of our teeniest tots – will get FDA approval for their products.

Does the pill do anything a placebo doesn’t… ? Might it have dire side effects… ?

**********************

UD‘s friend Barney suggests some ways out.

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Oh – and speaking of kiddies and the makers of fun adorable stuff for them to play with, like Risperdal blocks – a new movie about that drug is coming out, and UD is way excited at the possibility that it will star one of the most… intriguing characters we’ve met on this blog: Harvard’s Joseph Biederman.

Arrests and apologies… Losing much of your university football team because your recruitment staff is incentivized to bring people with a propensity toward violence onto college campuses has become so much part of the story of American life that sports writers are getting downright poetic about it.