… is titled Splashdown at Penn Place.
A snapshot of life in the town in which UD grew up. The town where, after college, grad school, and ten years on Capitol Hill, she bought a house.
(The zzz is a typo.)
… striding the campus. A camera crew trails him. He’s got the whole get-up, including the funny white ponytail. Like this.
I’m pretty sure this is related to the fact that prospective students are here this weekend (what luck for the school – it’s one of the most beautiful spring seasons I’ve seen in DC) to decide whether, having been admitted, they’d like to attend GW.
I just got out of a lunch for students admitted to the university honors program (UD teaches university honors courses). Families were there too, asking questions about the program, some of which UD tried to answer. We were in the City View Room in one of the newer buildings on campus, and after the lunch UD went out to its balcony to see about that city view.
Quite wonderful – the shining river, monuments galore, the grasses and trees of a heavily gardened city. Less thrilling were the squat brown buildings (State Department, etc.) that huddle everywhere and make up most of official Washington. I watched some planes land at National and then went downstairs and walked around.
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Yesterday was mild and sunny – a quintessentially April day in Garrett Park, with the white blossoms popping out on UD‘s dogwood and the hydrangea budding like mad.
For a dead end street in a rather obscure town, the setting was noisy: Our neighbors across the street are selling their house (yours for a million dollars), and they had a large crew duding up the garden; other neighbors were leaf blowing and lawn mowing and playing basketball. Trains occasionally steamed through along the nearby CSX tracks, and large groups of cyclists bombed by.
A cardinal kept shrieking at me. It has built its nest in one of our front bushes, and it wants me to get the hell out of my garden.
UD herself was noiseless: She just stood in her front yard like a dummy, staring up at the clear blue sky and marveling.
It’s a mental process we don’t know too much about yet, but we can sometimes see its tragic effects in the jock school’s chief executive. No one wants to depose the doddering old thing, but as the athletic deficits increase, and his or her tendency to give ever more bizarre public statements about them grows, faculty and students begin a popular revolt.
No one can predict the outcome of this volatile situation. At University Diaries, our obligation is simply to report its phases.
Rutgers University, having bled athletics money at a grotesque rate for some years, and now subsisting under a leader determined to hemorrhage yet more, has entered The Era of High Restlessness. Economics professors in particular, having run the numbers, have begun issuing denunciations (“To try to do any sugarcoating of the magnitude of (this) financial loss is just not being honest … We’re No. 1 in financial losses … by a mile, we lose more money than any other university on athletics.”), and the student newspaper, as in this article, routinely confronts the fond foolish old man with the ruins of his hopes and dreams. It cites such things as comparative loss charts and statistics on ranking (“After investing about $250 million [in athletics] across the last decade, the University fell down 12 spots in college rank, declining from No. 58 to No. 70, according to U.S. News and World Report. Rutgers also fell to No. 177 on Forbes magazine’s Best Colleges list, a collection of 650 liberal arts colleges and universities, a spot that gives the College of New Jersey a nine-rank advantage over the Garden State’s flagship state university.”)
President Robert Barchi has not yet started hiding out from the press (that will come), but his interviews have become strange affairs. Amid a nationwide trend of much higher foreign student enrollment, Barchi insists that the increase at Rutgers is because of the worldwide renown of their football games (“The University’s 40 percent increase in admissions applications from international students can be attributed to greater name recognition from Rutgers’ presence in the Big Ten, Barchi said.” — Hubba Hubba Hubei!). Amid a monumental financial disaster, he says, “If we were to not remain in the Big Ten, we would have a monumental financial disaster on our hands.” And though there’s no indication the alumni give a shit one way or another about belonging to the Big Ten, he says, “Administrators also feel the need to satisfy the University’s alumni base, composed of many who are interested in intercollegiate sports.”
What’s next? After the Era of High Restlessness, we can expect – as I suggest above – the Era of Not Available for Comment.
… a trip to Italy that featured a visit to La Rondinaia, Gore Vidal’s famous house above the Amalfi Coast. The library, they said (scroll down to the second picture), is dominated by books by Vidal’s favorite author.
They posed the question to UD: Who do you think that was?
When UD instantly answered Gore Vidal, they were impressed.
Lots of stupid commentary has been generated by the events at Panama City Beach. This is the first smart opinion piece UD has read.
[R]esearch has shown that NFL trust has slipped to a point where the league is comparable to brands such as Malaysia Airlines and Wal-Mart.
No need to worry, universities! I’m sure none of this holds true for college football.
Trout lilies? Never heard of them. Had to Google various descriptions for quite some time before they popped up. When I typed brown and green leaves I kept getting plant diseases, things that put brown splotches on leaves.
But I knew this was wrong. These were elegant splotchy leaves, a hardy ground cover scattered among my masses of vinca. Some of them had delicate yellow flowers dangling above the leaves.
So this was UD‘s own Trout Lily Discovery Walk – she happened on the things on one of her many walks along the paths she’s created through her back woods.
And how did they get there? I’ve lived here almost twenty years and I’ve never seen them before.
Margaret and Munro Leaf must have planted them, and it took all this time for them to flower.
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I found the image here.
UD has covered several stories involving, er, questionable physicians on the faculty of Columbia University. (Here’s the most recent.) The place attracts an odd lot, and of course med schools don’t pay much attention to their faculties, because there are absolutely tons of people vaguely affiliated with medical faculties and they’re doing God knows what.
One Columbia med school professor UD has always wondered about is Mehmet Oz, doc to the credulous unwashed masses. You see the guy get hauled up before Congress to explain why he’s pushing treatments in which he has massive financial interests; you watch him say stuff that… Well, let’s approach the latest news story about him by citing the headline in Gizmodo’s coverage:
DOCTORS ASK COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY TO
FIRE DR. OZ BECAUSE HE’S FULL OF SHIT
A bunch of docs at places other than Columbia have written a letter to the dean of the med school (they are “all distinguished,” the letter writers note). They want him removed from the premises.
And it’s actually a very good, very strong letter. Short and sour and way to the point – especially this bit:
Dr. Oz is guilty of either outrageous conflicts of interest or flawed judgements about what constitutes appropriate medical treatments, or both. Whatever the nature of his pathology, members of the public are being misled and endangered, which makes Dr. Oz’s presence on the faculty of a prestigious medical institution unacceptable.
Whatever the nature of his pathology. Ouch. Ooch. Eech.
Of course they can’t get rid of the dude. He’s probably already preparing a defamation whatever, plus his loyal minions will stage protests in their operating rooms or something. At best Columbia will muzzle him a little.
The heartland! The heartland! It doesn’t get more all-American than Nebraska – a state that, along with Missouri, UD (an evil coastal Jew married to Euro-trash) routinely forgets exists.
My headline quotes a commenter on an article about Lawrence Phillips, the latest proud son of that state’s university’s storied football team. Now that Phillips has murdered his cellmate, the University of Nebraska enjoys the same spate of publicity it did when its beloved Richie Incognito ran into some trouble.
The article’s a bit vague on the wonderful Nebraska coaching that brought Phillips to that school and kept him there –
Phillips was a superstar running back at Nebraska who was controversially allowed to keep playing for the Cornhuskers even after multiple run-ins with the law.
– but here’s a detail from another source:
[Coach Tom] Osborne reinstated Phillips in the same season the star dragged his girlfriend by the hair down a staircase.
Same sex marriage in Nebraska? Goodness me, no! But drag your girlfriend down the staircase by the hair and … instant football star!
And talk about coacha inconsolata. Get a load of the headline on an article about Osborne:
Lawrence Phillips Tragedy Continues to Haunt Former Nebraska Coach
Wow.
When asked about keeping Phillips on the team, the coach recently said that as a coach
“You take hits.”
Hit me again! That’s it, hit me again! What do I expect? I’m a coach! I can take it…
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UD thanks the many readers who sent her updates about Phillips’ amazing career, and the totally amazing University of Nebraska.
But he’s only one of so many glorious characters the University of Florida sports program can boast. Even if he’s otherwise disposed at the moment, there are so many other calendar models.
Fraud always cheats, always lies, always scams, always eventually files for bankruptcy.
Methinks I see some crooked mimic jeer
And grace my muse with this fantastic tax,
Turning my papers, asks “what have we here?”
Making withall some filthy antic face.
I fear no audit, IRS or CIA,
Nor shall my filing one exemption lose.
Think’st thou my wit shall keep the scofflaw way
That ev’ry bracket low invention goes?
Since returns thus in bundles are impress’d,
And ev’ry cheat doth dull our satiate ear,
Think’st thou my sum shall in those rags be dress’d
That ev’ry dowdy, ev’ry trull doth wear?
Up to my pitch no comm’n assessment flies:
I scorn all earthly dung-bred scarabies.
It’s all over but the rhetoric.
Unfortunately, hosting families there is also over, at least for awhile. There’s something about mass shootings, rapes on the beach, and the confiscation of large numbers of fire arms that seems to put families off.
I hate it, but I’ll say it. It’s time for us to bring the madness of Panama City Spring Break to a halt by staying away. Parents, if you allow your children to go into that snake pit then you are simply contributing to the problem.
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“Shame on Panama City Beach for letting itself devolve into what it has become,” said Nicki E. Grossman, now president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau.
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“We’re in chaos right now,” says resident Wes Pittman. “This Spring Break and the way it has evolved over the last couple years has become a blight on the entire community.”
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UD finds it fascinating in a Lord of the Flies way. Allow certain ingredients to be put together in a concentrated way in a specific location, and you can actually destroy civilized life.
UD‘s poetry MOOC (current number of students: 9,821) gets a nice write-up. (Got a nice write-up. It was written in 2013. She just discovered it.)