She may not look it, but UD’s quite sentimental, and she found herself choking up as she read this beautiful evocation of her hometown.
[The] red-brick mansion, [on the market for $23.5 million,] sits on [a] gated two-acre property, which [has] six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and three half-baths. Inside are six fireplaces, a library, a wine cellar, a recreation room, a fitness center, a billiards room, … a guest suite [,] an infinity pool and hot tub, an English garden, and a two-car garage… [The current owner] used the residence for entertaining and only spent a few nights there.
[Jason] Keys and his wife, Charae Williams Keys, were getting into their car after a Father’s Day visit in 2021 with her grandparents in a leafy neighborhood near Walnut Hill Park in Columbus, Ohio. A 72-year-old neighbor carrying a rifle accosted them in the belief, he later told the police, that Mr. Keys had let the air out of his daughter’s tires and poisoned his lawn.
Mr. Keys, who was carrying a pistol in his waistband, and his father-in-law tried to disarm the man, knocking him to the ground, while another relative ran back inside to get a .22 rifle. While Ms. Keys ducked behind the car to call 911, she heard multiple gunshots. She emerged to find her husband mortally wounded.
It took a moment for everyone to realize that the shots had come from a fourth gun across the street. Elias Smith, a 24-year-old ex-Marine, had stepped to his front door with a so-called ghost gun, an AR-style rifle that Mr. Smith had assembled from parts ordered online. Within seconds, he opened fire, hitting Mr. Keys five times.
“What are you shooting for?” a relative of Mr. Keys can be heard asking on surveillance video that captured parts of the incident.
Mindless evangelical fervor and a world of guns: This witches’ brew placed Bob Baker’s daughter and son-in-law in Haiti, where both were just slaughtered.
How does any father allow his 21 year old daughter to do that? To go to one of the most dangerous, gun-ridden countries in the world? Did he at least try to dissuade the idiot, or did he love the image of her as a Christian martyr in a world of weapons and anarchy?
… UD‘s evil parents kept in their house for the moral undoing of their children the songs of Tom Lehrer.
From the age of nine onward, UD has been singing nonstop his greatest hits, so she’s intrigued by a new British play about him, Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You. The playwright pens a fine appreciation of Lehrer here, featuring Lehrer’s comment on his artistic output: “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worthwhile.”
The preeminent German poet-philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously described architecture as “frozen music,” opining that “the state of mind produced by architecture is similar to the effect of music.” Over 150 years later, Frank Zappa—a somewhat less august personage, perhaps, but nevertheless prescient—reframed Goethe’s meditation on the corporeal and the ethereal: “Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance space is sculpted into something,” Zappa professed. One wonders what type of music might be frozen in the bold volumes and interwoven planes of the Jamaican pleasure dome created by Grammy-winning celebrity DJ and producer Thomas Wesley Pentz, better known as Diplo.
[C]itations matter the most, and if you look at the ranking systems, it’s all right there. The Times Higher Education world-university rankings, U.S. News — look at whichever you want, and somewhere between like 30 percent and 60 percent of those rankings are based on citations. Citations are so easy to game. So people are setting up citation cartels: “Yes, we will get all of our other clients to cite you, and nobody will notice because we’re doing it in this algorithmic, mixed-up way.” Eventually, people do notice, but it’s the insistence on citations as the coin of the realm that all of this comes from.
The whole je ne sais quoi of Idaho finds espression in Michael Neil, proud son of the Gem State. After a passerby witnessed Neil accidently shoot himself inside his car, she called 911. Neil, carrying multiple felonies for, among other things, beating up nurses during a recent hospital stay, lied to police… Something about a man “in a red hat” who shot at him…
Legally unable to possess guns, Neil was found to be carrying in his car (who knows what weaponry he keeps at home):
Ruger 9mm handgun
Sig Sauer 10mm
(‘The Ruger had been reported stolen in Idaho Falls in 2021, while the Sig Sauer was reported stolen in Rexburg earlier in 2023, according to the affidavit.’)
“Ghost gun” replica of a Glock, no serial number
Precision X15 AR-15 style rifle
Remington 12-gauge shotgun
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The real magic of Idaho is in the mugshot, where the freest state in the union shows you what it looks like when the police let you dress any way you want for the camera!
Yes, yes, there should be gaping holes in the fabric. But this isn’t Hollywood, man. It’s real.
