She’s got a little house in nowheresville upstate New York, no lights anywhere, a true dark sky, and she has sat in its front meadow many a chilly August night over the years, looking up at the enormous firmament. (Actually, news flash: UD‘s country house has suddenly gone from a nowheresville location to a destination location! Look what’s moved down the lane. That pond you see if you check out the photos on the website was the work of UD‘s old friend, Wojciech Fangor and… well, you can put Fangor in my search engine if you want that story…) But for all her effort, she’s never experienced a true meteor shower – just occasional shooting stars in the course of a few hours.

This year, Les UDs are going to Shenandoah National Park – two hours from ‘thesda – because it’s apparently the best place for hundreds of miles around to see the perseid meteor shower.

There will be a Night Sky Festival at the park while we’re there. So even if UD is again disappointed this year, she will at least be surrounded by experts telling her precisely what’s up there and why.

Obviously, she will extensively blog this experience.

We need to go back to Tom Lehrer to begin to approach the ongoing Zach Smith story.

EX-OSU COACH ZACH SMITH
APOLOGIZED FOR STRANGLING EX-WIFE

… Guv.

Meanwhile – thousands of people are sending thoughts and prayers.

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UD thanks dmf.

Postmodern techno-efficiency dispenses with irrational exuberance about suicide rates in America. If you want to keep rates high, make the act very simple and one hundred percent fatal.

The founder of Liberty University gave us both the language and the concepts within which to understand the biblical flooding that currently threatens Lynchburg, Virginia. Watch and learn.

For the Twitterverse, which spent the past week snickering at “#GymJordan,” the “King of the Sauna,” the obvious explanation [for his total denial of knowledge of sexual abuse of wrestlers at Ohio State University], of course, is that [Jim] Jordan is covering up his own hidden homosexuality or, far worse, that he may have participated in the abuse himself. There’s no evidence of either – but Jordan should have known he was opening himself up to practically everyone on Earth suspecting it.

Should Ohio State at some point move to fire [Urban] Meyer with cause, he would almost certainly then sue the school for breach of contract. Meyer would stress, among other points, that [Zach] Smith was not convicted of any crimes. In addition, Meyer would argue that he was under no legal obligation to fire Smith and that none of Meyer’s superiors instructed him to fire Smith. Meyer might also express or imply that other university officials, such as the athletic director, general counsel and dean-level administrators, had multiple opportunities to learn of, and respond appropriately to, the allegations against Smith. To the extent Meyer could implicate other university officials in any wrongdoing, the school might seek to avert a lawsuit and negotiate a settlement with him.

Yes, let’s hop forward to how much the taxpayers of Ohio will be out to get rid of Urban Meyer. Lawyers, years of legal wrangling, pr firms, replacement of all the university administrators outed and implicated, and then the settlement, will cost the suckers MILLIONS. And millions.

And of course OSU is looking at scads more expensive lawsuits arising out of both the Meyer/Smith and the Dr. Richard Strauss scandals.

But then Ohio is such a rich state.

The coach explains his no weapons policy for University of Florida football players.

“It’s a no-weapons policy in certain situations of how to be educated to not have (issues)…No weapons, that’s easy to remember. If I write out all the different (scenarios)—no weapons in these situations or have a weapon for a hunting situation, if I’m doing this, I store it at this location, I keep it here, I have gun safety rules and knowledge—that’s not a quick catch to them to register in their mind. Does that make sense?”

Which neatly explains why one of his players, found to have a loaded AR-15 in his car, will suffer no punishment.

As a Deadspin columnist rather querulously notes, ‘If a “no-weapon” policy isn’t designed to keep players from carrying assault weapons for the purposes of shooting people during altercations, there really is no point at all in having any weapons policy.’

Maybe it applies to nuclear weapons.

We shouldn’t forget, amid the current wrestling sex scandal and football domestic abuse scandal, significant alumni of that biggest of big-time sports universities. These are people whose words and actions speak the sorts of truths normally buried at places like OSU.

First let’s recall truth-bearer Cardale Jones, a football player who in 2012 tweeted:

Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.

Ol’ Cardale counts as a wise man at a place like Ohio State, that rare person willing to just come out with it. Got all kinds of heat for it, too — but looks like he’s getting a bit of his own back these days. His tweet about the domestic violence scandal is short and sweet and attracting a lot of attention:

Funny how life works.

It’s clearly a dig at the coach at the center of the scandal – Urban Meyer – who like Rick Pitino is a big fat hypocrite and no doubt gave Cardale hell for telling the truth way back when. Pretty nice karma, ain’t it, Cardale?

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And do not forget Kosta Karageorge, a mightily-concussed OSU wrestler/football player who one night dressed all in black, crawled into a dumpster, and shot his brains out. Reminiscent of Tyler Hilinski and quite a few other high-profile, macho, campus suicides, Karageorge’s mysterious gun-inflicted demise seems to carry important meanings about one form of young, heroic, American manhood.

[A UF football player] told police he needed [a loaded AR-15 assault rifle in his car] for protection from locals in Gainesville because “they be coming after us.” The stop came after tension (and at least one fight) between some Gators and Gainesville residents, including Devante “Tay Bang” Zachery.

Best part of all: Police can’t arrest him. Cuz it’s perfectly fine to drive around the state of Florida with a loaded AR-15 in your car.

The University of Florida is well on its way to being America’s first university to host a protracted armed conflict on campus. Talk about town/gown.

Maybe he can get the Ohio State wrestlers who are ready to testify that while a coach there Rep. Jordan did nothing in response to their telling him about their being sexually abused over a long period of time by the team doctor … maybe he can get them to reverse their position and say haha just kidding…!

ONLY AN IDIOT WOULD
BELIEVE URBAN MEYER

Dan Bernstein:

No reasonable person can now conclude that Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer did anything but lie through his teeth about not knowing that a Buckeyes assistant coach brutally attacked his wife in 2015.

… [Urban’s wife] Shelley Meyer [who knew about the abuse] is also an instructor at the Ohio State school of nursing and would have been bound by Title IX regulation to report such abuse — and is required similarly as a registered nurse. Her husband is also mandated to report.

… The only people who could possibly believe Urban Meyer’s version of events at this point are the willfully ignorant and the irretrievably stupid. Officials running a massive public university aren’t as likely to be the latter, but they wouldn’t be the first or last to have money and power turn them into the latest, shameful version of the former.

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Specializing in whipped toppings!

… as Simkin the lawyer says to Moses Herzog, and today’s just been a long long day of university sports corruption, topped off by the just-released big story about Ohio State’s Urban Meyer (what a beaut of a program he ran at Florida before he went to Ohio! OSU really knew what it was after when it hired him; and it got it.) probably having known about his assistant’s frequent domestic violence against the assistant’s then-wife…

Ohio State gives Urban Meyer more than seven million dollars a year to run a dirty program – even dirtier than that of his predecessor, the disgraced Jim Tressel – and everything works beautifully – the team wins games – but what are you going to do about ex-wives who give interviews blowing the lid off of everything?

OSU must be good at multitasking: there’s the sex scandal in the wrestling program too, with the lads routinely diddled by the long-serving team doctor…

University football, UD always says, is a class act. Students at Missouri State University spend a lot of money to give the AD there his couple hundred thousand a year plus country club memberships etc etc etc, and he by way of thanks attacks them publicly for being too smart to waste their time going to football games.

Stadium capacity: 17,500. Average attendance: 8,000 or so. Not a good look.

MSU even brought in liquor this year! The stadium is even named PLASTER. Could we make it any clearer? Get out here and get fucking plastered and I’ll get a salary increase cuz my salary is tied to game attendance, ya little shitskies.

WOMAN’S $2 MILLION HEALTH CARE FRAUD
INCLUDED SPEECH THERAPY FOR THE DEAD

Speech Therapy for the Dead.

One wants to write a poem with that title.