Comical fledglings now appear out of the striped planter (kind of like this, only deeper) in which they’ve been nesting. I watch them blunder into the ivy and try to fly out of it.

These are house wrens with a vengeance. The planters sit inches from UD‘s front door; the birds seem positively to want my company.

You could say wrens are dull. A poet picks up a dead wren, and when he lets it drop

my hand changed for a moment
By a thing so common it was never once distracted from
The nothing all wrens meant …

But my wrens sing beautifully, even meaningly; and they have an alluring Madeleine Albrightesque insistency about them, emanating from their sharp eyes and puffy chests. They certainly mean to reproduce, and to express themselves – which covers a good deal of what anyone does…

May is busting out all over in Garrett Park; the wren nest is one of several in UD‘s front yard. Yesterday a caterpillar worked its way along Mr UD‘s arm as he sat on the deck reading. Rabbits of course are everywhere.

I’ve been spraying the front steps to get rid of wasps in the brickwork. I’ve been poisoning the poison oak. My neighbor Caroline has installed elegant high black fencing to keep out deer. Only a bright red door in the fence gives you access to her back garden.

We are all trying to hold back, even as we invite, the natural world.

Monika Juneja, who rose to become deputy leader of the Conservative group at Guildford Borough Council…
pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to three counts of forgery dating back to 2000, obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception, and a charge of “wilfully pretending to be a barrister” between January 2010 and May 2014.

As in many of these cases, she seems to have spent a good deal of her non-working time forging academic papers – degrees, certificates, approvals… A fraudster’s work is never done until she – or he, like Michael Martoma – has to go to jail.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm might quibble with the order of adjectives here – isn’t childish a bit weaker than ugly, kitsch, ridiculous? Those are stronger words, and I think you should build up to your stronger words to avoid a letdown at the end of a sentence. SOS might have started the list with childish and then continued by means of ascending number of syllables:

kitsch (1)
ugly (2)
ridiculous (4)

“Childish, kitsch, ugly, and rather ridiculous.” Or drop the rather. “Childish, kitsch, ugly, and ridiculous.”

The ur-text for thinking about the style and content of lists is The Importance of Being Earnest:

ALGERNON. [Speaking very rapidly.] Cecily, ever since I first looked upon your wonderful and incomparable beauty, I have dared to love you wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly.

CECILY. I don’t think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?

Doesn’t make much sense and is, again, a bit of a letdown.

In the case of practically bankrupt Louisiana State University finding money to buy “a ‘lazy river’ on the LSU campus in the shape of the letters L-S-U,” it doesn’t really matter how the LSU Faculty Senate president organized his list – the remarkable nature of the construction certainly comes across. Students whose campus is in the tank will soon be literally in the tank, paddling while Rome burns.

University Diaries has followed the very strange public university system of Massachusetts for quite some time. Virtually all of its campuses clamor for attention. There’s the pointless bankrupting football program, the drunk and violent students… and, of course, the spanking new law school.

Yes. Law school. New law school. In the current climate for lawyers, U Mass opened, just a few years ago, a new law school.

Everyone with half a brain tried shouting it down, but up it went, with all sorts of cretinous promises (“the state would even earn a profit as enrollment was projected to more than double by 2017″). Its first president was quickly fired for financial malfeasance. It’s almost four million dollars in debt, and it’s shrinking its enrollment. Plus it’s not yet accredited.

UD is speechless.

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UD thanks Andre.

The lake is near the beach.

Very strange weather here at Rehoboth. Close to the beach, it’s moodily overcast. As you walk from the beach, things suddenly clear up.

And I’m not too sure they care much about negative coverage.

… but still I’ve been sitting outside gazing at the patch of sky I’ve got above my house, looking for vintage planes. I figure maybe some of them on their way to or from the National Mall for today’s flyover (it starts in ten minutes) will putter through the ‘thesdan blue. (Watch it here.)

So far all I see are the usual silent thin contrails streaming out of jets taking off from one of DC’s three airports. Loud birds and squirrels take up most of the aural landscape. In particular, a wren couple built its nest in one of our rather deep containers just at the front of the house, so there’s pretty much continual hysteria as they attempt to feed the hatchlings amid many interruptions.

Tomorrow La Kid takes UD to her beloved Rehoboth Beach for a Mother’s Day weekend. UD grew up in a house where the words bogus and kitsch and commercial were attached to Mother’s Day. But La Kid is pious about it, and UD‘s not complaining.

I’ll blog from the beach.

… she pointed out that one of many reasons professors don’t fuck with their universities’ often fucked up athletics programs has to do with simple abuse. Criticize campus sports and every yahoo from the chair of the board of trustees to the local wino who doesn’t go to games but joins fellow drunks to trash the town during tailgates is going to come after you. You’re going to be called names six ways to Sunday.

Few people want to spend their lives dealing with dicks. So few people squawk about sports.

But over the years this blog has accumulated a pantheon of professors, a handful of heroes, who have been willing to stand up to the abuse. (Some of them are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Mark Killingsworth, an econ professor at Rutgers, is one of these. As that absurd school sports itself to death, Killingsworth hammers away at the obvious point that it ain’t got no moolah. “I have to assume that so far the plan [to expand athletics] is to keep [the] status quo, to keep taking money out of academics,” says he, and ain’t it the truth. But no one else in the state of New Jersey (with the exception of Killingsworth’s father-god, William Dowling) cares, and indeed if you go by most of the comments on all the articles about Killingsworth in the local press it’s pretty clear that many people in New Jersey think poorly of Killingsworth.

Moral: Think twice before getting between a boy and his concussion.

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Update:

Rutgers is an enormous public institution, with an annual budget of $3.6 billion. It is responsible for educating 65,000 students. Why isn’t that more important that competing in the Big Ten?

Just how good?

FAMU fans want to know when the football and basketball teams will be eligible for postseason play again. [Both are currently under academic sanction.] They want to see how [the coach will] tackle a budget millions of dollars in the red. Above all, they want to know if the athletic department is moving in the right direction after eight years with six different people … at the helm.

Well. Now that the tax syphons have syphoned up our taxes and subjected a population used to exploitation to yet more exploitation, what’s next? Goldman Sachs has made its money on the for-profit ed scam and will no doubt soon be getting the hell out while the getting’s good. Goldman Sachs stands at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the exploited masses. Goldman Sachs knows what’s what, and is unhampered by morality.

As for the suckers left holding the bag (you, me, and the students of for-profit schools): I’m sure Lloyd Blankfein has a little lecture to give us all on how markets operate.

And it’s only May.

This sort of team record doesn’t come cheap. Nick Saban’s currently at seven million a year.

A football coach whose salary is the talk of the town.

A team whose arrest record is also the talk of the town.

Bama!! Life of the mind, Bama!!!

… they recruit to their already arrest-ridden football team a person with a long and ugly police record, and then they finally suspend him after, er, let’s see…

The charges stem from the April 5 beating of two men, moments after they kissed at 5th Avenue and 9th Street in Huntington. Criminal complaints charge Butler witnessed the kiss, exited a passing vehicle and proceeded to shout derogatory words toward both men related to their sexual orientation. Butler then struck the face of both victims with a closed fist, the complaints charge.

Put Marshall University in this blog’s search engine to feast your eyes on one of the scummiest campuses in Christendom. I mean, it’s not just the sports-only nature of Marshall. Marshall is hideous all around. Pity its poor faculty.

Football hero, gentleman. And now that Frank Clark’s in the news all over the country, all the glory goes to Michigan as he is universally described in these accounts as a University of Michigan player.

Why pick a player in round 2 (Michigan defensive end Frank Clark) who was kicked off his college team because of a domestic violence charge, a player who also was convicted of felony theft for stealing a laptop?

You might as well ask why Michigan held onto him as long as they did. Why his bio is still emblazoned on UM’s Go Blue site. If Michigan didn’t give a shit, why should the Seahawks? After all, you’re looking for a guy who can hit.

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Just Another Stat

But this is the sort of writing that makes it all worthwhile. See if you can spot the domestic violence charge!

And the NFL just gave up its tax exemption.

Just sayin’.

UD walks into the room in GW’s Elliott School building where she’s giving her Modern British Poetry final exam. No students are there yet, but a man, a Muslim, is on the floor praying. The exam takes place in minutes, so UD silently – as silently as she can – puts her computer on the front desk and prepares to hand out blue books.

The man stands up and looks at her. “Is there a class in here?”

“I’m giving a final exam.”

“Ah. Well, I’ll finish somewhere else.”

“Sorry to interrupt you.”

“No problem. What’s the class?”

“Modern British poetry.”

“Do you read Kipling?”

“He’s not quite modern enough. More of a Victorian.”

“Ah. Well, nice to meet you.”