… getting $572 million judgments wherever he goes.

… finds with ease the .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol her parents told her to use in case of an intruder. (The household has ten more weapons locked in a safe, but this one is in a bedroom, loaded.) She kills herself while her mother checks her email in an adjacent room.

Her mother says “she won’t live with guns in her home again.”

Remember 21 year old Tyler Hilinski. His college roommates had an AR-15 all ready for him.

UD is developing a sideline in spider web photography. She took this earlier shot in her woods; and this afternoon she snapped an enormous web along the side of her house.

This blog periodically notes echt-DeLillo deaths in this country, deaths that often involve that icon of affluent leisure, the golf ball. Read the opening pages of Players, or note the many pages of White Noise and other novels of his that mark the untimely death of someone while at play, or the mix of fatal violence and golf.

This is a very Don DeLillo photograph.

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If you doubt the cultural centrality of golf balls in America, read this front-page article in the New York Times, which ominously reports that errant golf balls breaking windows in retirement communities is “an increasingly prominent problem.”

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So a recent alleged murder at an expensive neighborhood in Atlanta seems to feature an attorney so incensed that someone threw a golf ball at his $60,000 Mercedes CLS 550 (no damage to the car was found, so it’s not clear anything was in fact thrown) that he took his massive car and ran down and killed a guy (a real estate investor) he thought threw it.

Scripted by DeLillo.

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UPDATE: A reader reminds me that DeLillo was far from the first. Many of us will recall this amazing little poem by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn:

The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day 
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.

Mom had a moment; Mom had a gun. Her kids – two very promising people, the daughter a journalism student at Boston University – were dispatched with ease. Give Mom (who killed herself after killing her kids) a knife, or any other weapon, and these two strong life-loving young people might have been able to fight back, to overpower her, to defend themselves.

There’s nothing like a gun to give your psychotic impulsivity episode full scope.

Did no one at all have the slightest inkling this woman was… troubled? Excessively vengeful toward her ex? Was her medical supply company being investigated? Did she have a substance abuse problem? Why did this troubled woman have a gun at home? For safety in her ultra-safe gated community? Did it occur to anyone to think about the safety of her children?

Oh, and kudos to the mayor of Atlanta, who offers us this: The peace of God… surpasses all understanding. Really?

… with a basketball court inside. Whatever the Washington Post thinks, this is the opposite of a true Garrett Park house, its owners having destroyed lots of greenery (Garrett Park is an arboretum) in order to make a very large house even larger.

UD is anxious to dissociate her beloved town from this monstrosity.

The town has excellent basketball courts in a beautiful setting, but you wouldn’t want to play with the riffraff. Much better to take up all the privacy and most of the yard on your lot, and throw massive shade over neighboring houses, in order to build an indoor basketball court and who knows what other pointless fillings-up of pointless space inside your fourteenth addition.

The property has been on the market for eighty days, while Garrett Park houses usually sell in minutes. Here’s hoping its obscene asking price plus grotesque excess keep this house on the market forever. Karma sucks, don’t it.

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UPDATE: 193 days on the market.

… is already notorious for his … unsavory legal and writing career… and, most recently, for his full-throated defense of female genital mutilation. He spends much of his distinguished-retirement time denying having taken part in an underage sex slave ring — indeed denying having had sex with one or more of said underage sex slaves. And here’s an updated snapshot from a life well-lived:

In 2015, the ABC News team of Amy Robach and Jim Hill secured an interview with [alleged sex slave Virginia] Giuffre. In a sequence of events confirmed by the network, producers paid for Giuffre and her family to fly from Colorado, where they lived, to New York City and put them up at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on Central Park South. Robach and her news crew interviewed Giuffre on tape for more than an hour about Epstein and his entourage.

“At the time, in 2015, Epstein was walking around a free man, comparing his criminal behavior to stealing a bagel,” Giuffre writes in an email to NPR. “I really wanted a spotlight shone on him and the others who acted with him and enabled his vile and shameless conduct against young girls and young women.”

“I viewed the ABC interview as a potential game-changer,” she writes. “Appearing on ABC with its wide viewership would have been the first time for me to speak out against the government for basically looking the other way and to describe the anger and betrayal victims felt.“

The story never aired. And Giuffre has said she was never directly told why.

ABC News would not detail its editorial choices.

One ABC News staffer with knowledge of events says the network received a call from one of Epstein’s top lawyers: Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz. And Giuffre and her lawyers placed great significance on that call.

Dershowitz had been part of the powerhouse legal team that earlier kept Epstein from facing serious federal charges in Florida, which also included former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr and renowned Miami defense attorney Roy Black.

Dershowitz tells NPR he intervened after learning ABC was on the brink of broadcasting its interview with Giuffre. He says he believes he spoke with two producers and a lawyer within the same 24-hour period.

“I did not want to see [Giuffre’s] credibility enhanced by ABC,” Dershowitz says.

In a December 2014 court filing in another accuser’s lawsuit, Giuffre had alleged Dershowitz was among the prominent men Epstein had instructed her to have sex with when she was a teenager. In early 2015, Dershowitz had rejected her account out of hand in his own court filings. (The nature of his denials were such that Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation earlier this year. Dershowitz has asked the court to dismiss that lawsuit.)

I think we can all understand Dershowitz’s frantic desire to shut Giuffre up. He continues to try intimidation and lawsuits and all and he’s obviously had some success. Wonder for how much longer.

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UPDATE: Mulling over Alan Dershowitz’s life, UD thinks he can continue to make a contribution to Harvard University by appearing… not as a guest lecturer, but as … a kind of exemplar… in Michael Sandel’s famous discussion of Kantian ethics. Students may gaze upon and ask questions of a human being who has, apparently all his life and quite consistently, used people as means rather than ends. If reports are to be believed, he has done this in a myriad of ways for sixty years to achieve the classic payoffs: money, sex, power.

Could Sandel coax him to speak honestly? I think yes. After all, he will die pretty soon (he’s eighty) and he’s basically gotten away with it, so you have to figure he’s proud. It can be done – a life of cruel self-seeking – and this is the moment, if there’s going to be a moment, when he takes a public victory lap.

A naughty young man from Fuzhou

Thought China should equally know

Our every analysis

Regarding catalysis.

And now off to prison he’ll go.

… vagina…’

… and nobody came.

Poor Rutgers.

Read this. How are you doing? Do you have your Petrino and Pitino under control? Have you been able to add Ecarma and keep the balls in the air, or are there too many slimy coaches at UL for you to get a grip on? Do you understand why some of the slime has been bought out while some is fired with cause, generating zillion dollar lawsuits against the university?

But, er, what about the lawsuit UL has filed against its last president, UD?

Gevalt! One thing – three things – at a time.

Fans used to kill each other; now they go right for the players.

… on the balcony of Big Meadows Lodge, Shenandoah National Park.

August 14, 2019

SUNSET OVER THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY LAST NIGHT…

…was like a Hubble shot of Jupiter. Whirling skirling swirling squirreling grays and blues. The cloudy sky that ensued was all wrong for perseids, so we passed on the whole get up at two AM and drive down the hill to Big Meadows (we’re talking Shenandoah National Park here) thing. Talking to a guy who drives here every year from Michigan, UD learned that last night was unusually cloudy, so we’re hopeful at least one of the next three nights will be clear enough for fireballs.

Meanwhile, we hike among the deer and the bear (UD dreamt of bears last night, natch), and gawk at the long mountain/valley/mountain views. Gophers scurry the hallway outside our room.

Big Meadows Lodge is already the land that time forgot, but they’re celebrating their eightieth birthday (UD, tomorrow, in Luray, Virginia, will celebrate her 66th), so here in the main room (only place with internet) they’re piping in nonstop forties swing.

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August 15, 2019

A MOON UNLIKE ANY UD HAS EVER SEEN

The irony was that we were there for the perseids; but sitting on our rickety beach chairs at the Big Meadows clearing last night, the real show turned out to be an absolutely full brilliantly lit moon that insinuated itself as a silver glint among horizonal clouds and then raised itself up to surreality right before our eyes. UD grabbed her binoculars and attempted to make credible the massive and intricately legible orb, its hollows and craters so blatant… When it climbed to higher clouds, they made a golden aura together, the moon now and then blindfolding itself with a black ribbon of atmosphere, and I sat there thinking about my mother who loved the night sky. And of course immediately came the thought that has so often for so long come to UD: We are here to experience the terrestrial wonder that our dead don’t get anymore. We’re doing it for them.

This morning I stood on the lodge’s balcony and watched three gold finches massacre the petals of some purple wildflowers. If butterflies are endangered, there’s no sign of it here. Fern oceans cover acres of woodland floor, and I’m not sure why but it’s very cool when your hike intersects with the Appalachian Trail. Zero-luxuries, zero-prestige Big Meadows Lodge draws an intriguing mix – Mennonites, naturalists, intellectuals, hikers. To my eye, plenty of Paul Fussell’s X’s (scroll down) populate the place, keening over their wildlife books and adjusting the length of their walking sticks. The stolidly downscale Great Room, all dusty wood floors and dusty jigsaw puzzles, buzzes with women in gingham dresses and sweaty kids playing checkers.

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August 16, 2019

UD/BIRTHDAYS

She’s had a ton of great ones. At a restaurant on the edge of a Santorini cliff; in a cafe by a fast-rolling river in Telluride; at a balcony dining room at the top of a hotel overlooking Mexico City’s zocalo; and, many times, at the Bear Cafe (also alongside a babbling brook) in Woodstock, near our upstate NY house. Last night was another one of the greats – a big, boisterous gathering of family and friends at Moonshadows in Luray, down the hill from Shenandoah National Park. There were glitches galore – an immense detour plus immense thunderstorms on their trip from Washington for a group of late-arriving guests; worries about night vision for a guest who would need to drive the dark winding Skyline Drive back to the lodge… But in the event everything worked out perfectly, and UD felt love for all of these people who had gone to so much trouble for her.

Today the rain has cleared out and we’ve done a ton of hiking. If the sky stays clear, we’ll do another wee hours visit to Big Meadow (as close to a true dark sky as you’re likely to find on the east coast), set out our beach chairs, and look up. UD is so full of gratitude and joy today that she doesn’t care whether she sees any fireballs at all.

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August 17, 2019

SKYLAND IS THE OTHER LODGE IN THE PARK…

… and unless you feel like a twisting hour-long drive down the hill and back, it’s the one and only meal alternative to Big Meadow Lodge. Our foursome (Peter Galbraith, first American ambassador to Croatia; Sarah Peck, recently retired Foreign Service officer; Mr UD, and UD) met there and on arrival stared from a silent stony hilltop at a garish orange sun settling into pink clouds. The nature/culture clash was equally garish, with raucous country tap dancing in the bar next to the dining room as we entered Skyland. Fa rumore, as the Italians have it; human beings love to make noise. Indeed after a long day of quiet hiking together, we ourselves really went at it over the meal, yelling about the partisan Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and what to do with ISIS prisoners languishing in camps.

Return with me now to those glory days at one of this country’s establishments of higher learning, when Rick got down on his knees and begged Sebastian Telfair to gain his education at the University of Louisville. Telfair said yes! I will pursue my scholar/athlete career at your fine school, playing basketball, living in a university-provided brothel, and giving a big ol’ fuck you up the ass to my fake classes, all on the taxpayers’ dime — and the people of Kentucky could not have been more grateful and excited. To make matters even more wonderful, sports-mad James Ramsey, who would go on to become the nation’s highest paid public university leader by the simple expedient of stealing everything at UL that wasn’t nailed down, had just been appointed UL president!

Truly the stars were aligned at this fine school which some have taken, cruelly, to calling the U of Smell.

And now… Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! as Humbert would say: Look at this tangle of thorns.

Rick had to be gotten rid of because of sex, recruiting, financial and anything else you’d like to add scandals. Reduced to coaching Greek basketball, where the chain smoking, flame throwing fascists in the stands turn every game into a terrifying slaughter (holy shitkos), he is currently suing UL for forty million dollars haha nahnah got you you’ll pay up the ass for being mean to me while I was building a winning team even though we had to vacate all our wins cuz they was SO SO SO dirty. I’ll get you back, UL.

President Ramsay was forced to resign in disgrace for the aforementioned larceny plus overseeing the most pornographic sports program in the United States. UL’s suing him to try to get a few tens of millions back (it’s all been plowed into multifarious mcmansions up and down the Florida coast), and the latest on that is that during his reign Ramsay apparently told the then-chair of the board of trustees that a fellow trustee had bankrolled the brothel for the boys!! I do declare (fanning my lace stays with my perfumed hankie), it takes a whole lot for UL to do anything that would generate italics, bolding, and double exclamation marks, but this school constantly exceeds expectations.

… Uh, where we were? Oh, the hotly recruited Telfair... He was last seen ranting like a madman in court, where he was sentenced to prison for carrying spectacular weaponry (‘three loaded handguns, a submachine gun, ammunition, extended magazines and a ballistic vest’) in his car.