Baby, baby, baby don’t sue me
Ooh, please don’t sue me for forty mill
I’ve got this red-faced shame-faced flustered feelin’ inside me
Ooh, deep inside me and it hurts so bad

Baby, baby, where did our love go?
Ooh, don’t you sue me
Don’t you sue me no more (baby, baby)
Ooh, baby

… (they’ve been out of touch for years) just won the Democratic US House primary in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Twenty-five years ago, we all traveled to the Greek island of Santorini and rented a house during the meltemi winds season. Sometimes the house rocked like a little boat in the labored, hours-long gusts.

That was strange: The beyond-brilliant sun, the faint caldera out to sea. And the bright blue water in the swimming pool turbulent, taking a beating from the air.

When things calmed down, we piled into the open top jeep Scott rented and drove the treacherous island roads to a black sand beach or an obscure diner or the chic shopping district.

We celebrated my birthday at a restaurant high high up on the white cliffs — the lot of us hypnotically suspended over a world of ocean.

Today I was on campus to have lunch
with a Canadian student getting ready
to start law school at Osgoode Hall;
to pick up a student’s final exam from
Disability Support Services; and to
check out a third student’s photography exhibit.

Here the photographer talks about her project:

An image from the show.

On my way back to the Foggy Bottom metro,
purple irises bloomed between buildings.

Parents have made a number of attempts to sue the universities where their children commit suicide. These suits usually fail, as they usually should.

[T]hough colleges and universities bear some responsibility in protecting their students from harm, “universities are not responsible for monitoring and controlling all aspects of their students’ lives.” A key factor is whether a school or its employees could reasonably anticipate harm coming to the student from the school failing to take steps to protect him or her.

“[Han Duy] Nguyen never communicated by words or actions to any MIT employee that he had stated plans or intentions to commit suicide, and any prior suicide attempts occurred well over a year before matriculation,” the ruling states. “There was no evidence that [his professors, whom he sued] had actual knowledge of Nguyen’s plans or intentions to commit suicide. Both were academics; neither was a trained clinician.”

His Open Society Foundation, under unceasing harassment from Hungary’s paranoid, reactionary government, will leave Budapest and move to Berlin; his Central European University, also based in Budapest and also under unrelenting official harassment, will stay. For now.

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Berlin’s gain.

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But UD must say… I mean, on the matter of Hungary… On one level she’s forced to admire the belligerent and thoroughgoing regressive approach to global coexistence coming out of that country. It’s the Saudi Arabia of Europe.

The only part of this story UD doesn’t believe is the part where this guy, shot in the leg by his dog, has his gun safety on.

A person dumb enough to keep his gun on his belly while at home playing with his dog is far too dumb to figure out how a safety works.

Multiply Einstein by millions of Americans and understand how gun daddies are always killing their babies.

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

UD thanks dmf.

… sets itself up as a moral arbiter of Greek soccer fans.

On this side, ladies and gentlemen, FIFA – arguably the world’s current most corrupt high-profile organization – and on the other side, waves of psychotic Athenians. Will FIFA expel the Greeks for their years of gunplay and bloodshed and bombings?

Oh, sweetie. Wake up and smell the money.

Mitzi, with one of her award-winning
English Cocker Spaniels.

Even red-as-a-baboon’s-butt Oklahoma won’t let you carry unlicensed.

And then there’s the Fuck the NRA ad everyone’s talking about.

***********

And about that fuck. There happens to be a perfectly unprotested, completely legitimate charity called Fuck Cancer.

The NRA is a cancer.

We shouldn’t therefore be surprised to hear citizens saying Fuck the NRA. Lots of Americans have been explicitly saying Fuck the NRA for quite some time – long before this congressional candidate said it in his ad. The same red-hot anger that produces Fuck Cancer produces Fuck the NRA. Both kill a lot of people.

I’m sure the NRA’s new gunrunner president can handle Fuck the NRA. It goes with the territory.

WSU’s athletic department’s deficit ballooned to more than $50 million the past several years [AD Bill Moos] was at the helm, and in 2018, it grew another $9 million…

This is in addition to the university’s $30 million deficit outside of athletics that has already led to budget cuts. Oh, and the school now needs to take on a $30 million project to install a computer system so employees can be paid on time, among other crucial university functions.

… The university tried punching above its weight in the Pac-12 by building a shiny new football operations building and hiring expensive coaches.

… Many are still mourning the loss of the university’s performing arts program due to budget cuts.

They don’t come no dumber than WSU.

You don’t need David Lynch to tell you that it’s always kinkiest in the heartland.

Amanda Petrusich, on the suicide of Frightened Rabbit singer Scott Hutchison:

Frightened Rabbit was virtuosic when it came to expressing the odd anxieties of an early, hungover morning, when a person wakes up and has to reckon with herself, again — the relentless ennui of being, and being, and being, and being.

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

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.

Utah has long been one of America’s suicide-friendliest states, and now in just a few short months seven students at a high school there have killed themselves.

Says here parents should lock up their guns! I guess the idea is that if you have simple 100% fatal devices all over every countertop in your house, your moody impulsive fourteen year old might just grab one!

But even if you did go to the trouble of locking up your extensive arsenal, there’s the fact that Utah is also one of America’s friendliest open carry states. UD was there not long ago, and was pretty unnerved to see big ol’ guns bouncing off of people’s jeans while they walked through supermarket parking lots. You figure your moody impulsive fourteen year old might get ideas every day, simply by walking around town. I mean, it’s inspiring.

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

The statistics are pretty shocking. If there’s ever a Book of Mormon 2, it would need to feature half of the original group of young missionaries going back to Salt Lake City and blowing their heads off.

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

Fascinating comment thread here. Most commenters put the blame on religion. But there’s this:

If you have a teenager and a gun in your house, choose one and get rid of the other.

… about the sordid sell-out (“probably the most damaging thing I’ve seen personally”) its curriculum turned out to be in the exposure of its world-famous athletics scandal. The article is, in the words of Roger DeBris, drenched with historical goodies, including the altogether too fine irony of the provost lecturing UD‘s buddy Jay Smith on the ever-so-important business of curricular integrity:

I strongly believe that University leaders can and should maintain oversight over course offerings, which includes the right to participate in individual course selection decisions. [While faculty have the right to teach, investigate and publish freely,] the exercise of these rights should not interfere with the overriding obligation of an institution to offer its students a sound education.

This from the school whose leaders for twenty years oversaw hundreds of totally bogus courses. This by way of explaining why Jay’s course in the history of the scandal and the corruption of university sports generally just… wouldn’t do… wouldn’t be up to the strict intellectual standards of… oh, let Jay say it:

It’s so great. It’s a great irony, that we had such lax oversight for so long, that completely phantom classes just fell off the radar of the dean’s office and were allowed to propagate, and proliferate, for two decades. And that a course that, in part, examines the culture and the mechanisms that made that failure possible, and puts all of it in historical context, is regarded as suspicious.

It’s the Blanche DuBois syndrome down there, y’all. I mean, when you’re a totally broken down ol’ thing and not only do you not know it, but you’re flouncing around all superior-like…

… has been murdered in his Brooklyn home, during what police think was a botched robbery.