… The university also said its operations in the last fiscal year were dragged down by “nonrecurring” — meaning unusual — expenses.

Those included deferred compensation of $4.5 million owed to former Athletic Director Tom Jurich and a $5.5 million buyout of the contract of former basketball coach Rick Pitino, both of whom were fired after the program was swept up by a nationwide fraud and corruption sting into NCAA programs.

It’s always a pleasure to bankrupt ourselves and raise tuition by the highest percentage allowable in order to pay out huge bucks to assholes.

Oh, and on Pitino: Did you really think that $5.5 thing would cut it? He’s suing UL for FORTY MILLION.

Speaking of assholes, hold onto your hat as we sue our chiseling last president to see if we can’t get some money back from him! Meanwhile, though, legal expenses for that will add to our losses…

Constitutional questions derail America’s first FGM trial; the government will almost certainly appeal, and the beat goes on.

Saudi women are wearing their black sacks inside out as a sign of protest; their leaders are being tortured in Saudi jails.

The farcical current leaders of the Women’s March, with their passion for Farrakhan, Hamas, and Bill Cosby, are under serious pressure to fuck off. One of them, Linda Sarsour, is the Mad Trump of the movement, screaming for Ayan Hirsi Ali’s vagina to be removed, and every day sharing with us more and more of her pornographic imagination. Sarsour is in the grand tradition of

Houria Bouteldja, the [Party of Indigenous People of the Republic’s] charismatic spokeswoman, [who] has in recent years won notoriety for her defense of Muslim men accused of sexual violence. Faced with “testosterone-fuelled virility among indigenous men,” she has argued, women of color should look for its redeeming side, “the part that resists colonial domination,” and stand with their brothers.

Since Sarsour and her co-leaders represent the exact opposite of the democratic values for which the march stands, UD remains baffled as to their continued high profile. It’s precisely zanies like these who continue to sabotage the Democratic Party in this country, making it a big fat target for conservatives.

UD thinks the Hindustan Times is off by a bit; the actual number seems to be $500K.

I mean, after all… the guy’s an environmentalist… $500 million would be an excessive use of resources…

… flights.

It’s getting positively elegiac out there, as football scribes in empty stadia find themselves reduced to the elaboration of despair. At most of our universities, the whole lucrative rah-rah project has come crashing down, leaving intellectual institutions bereft of money as well as dignity as they desperately try, with cheap booze and trinkets, to get people to sit down and watch, in its full sordid duration, an unwatchable game.

It’s not just the disgusting injuries (concussions; “gruesome” fractures; coach-bullied players’ deaths from overexertion); the rampant violence against women and other students among players; the university-budget-destroying coaches’ salaries, buyouts, and lawsuits (“Schools end up not only paying millions to their former coach, and millions to their new coach; they have to pay millions more to their new coach’s previous school, so he can leave to come to their school.”); the institution-destroying bad publicity arising from corrupt merchandise and recruitment deals; the filth all over campus from drunk tailgaters the day after; student riots when they win; student riots when they lose; the school- and city-destroying insistence on building vast new indebted stadia to accommodate the two thousand people who want to attend games; university presidents pretending that borderline-psychotic players (Aaron Hernandez, Richie Incognito, Lawrence Phillips, Johnny Manziel) are just feisty charming lads; presidents honoring coaches who hang out in school showers raping children; assistant coaches who set up houses of prostitution in players’ dorms, for players and their fathers; the institution-wide academic scandals arising from the sickening compromise of faculty integrity as students admitted only for their football skills are handed bogus … not degrees, since few graduate, but bogus courses; it’s also the sheer boredom and insult of the stadium experience (“The issue for me is games lasting nearly four hours. TV commercials are killing the game … I just can’t sit in the hot weather that long in back breaking seats.”).

What a shocker that few outside of fraternity members (the functional equivalent of football players) and hopeless drunks (who aren’t even financially viable, since they typically stay just for the tailgate) want anything to do with the shit-show.

Where did the university go in all this?

Buried, under mounds of Bud bottles.

Ashim Mitra, University of Missouri, joins this remarkable crew of slave-drivers, professors for whom students represent little more than indentured servants.

Because he pulled in lots of grant money, and because … well, he’s Indian and I guess it’s his way and who are we to judge his behavior by American standards … Mitra got away with enslaving his students for decades.

A long article about the dude gives you all sorts of insight into his sweet disposition. When a colleague called him on [his] behavior at a faculty meeting, “Mitra … called … the campus police to expel [the colleague] from [the] meeting.”

A lot of us say this, since it’s true. But when it comes from people like this guy, it packs a wallop.

“Just really disgusting.” Just as true; and yet UD begins to think that many Americans love disgusting. No idea why.

Launch — in the blackest starriest sky, with Leonids streaking down on the Chesapeake, and ol’ UD thrilled speechless. On a little bluff beyond the oyster-cage-strewn Chincoteague harbor, with twenty or so other excited people, we gazed at the meteors and the galaxies and the high-lit Wallops blast-off site across the water. Even the dogs people brought were quiet; we held our binoculars and steadied our tripods and except for the occasional goose all was still.

A clustering of white clouds at the base suddenly; then a gold lozenge lifting into the ether, arching over our heads and disappearing as it shed its segments. Only when this stage was accomplished, when the invisibility trick worked, did everyone applaud and cheer.

We felt our ways back to our cars, to the honk of hundreds of indignant geese.

Photo: UD‘s sister.

I can see the pulsing red yellow and white lights of Wallops Flight Facility from my bed; I can also see miles of marsh and bay.

Sand kicked by the storm lies on the pier below me. The wind’s still way up.

Above, whenever the clouds part, astonishingly clear stars emerge, and it occurs to me that tomorrow’s dark clear early morning skies (we’ll be freezing under them along with a crowd of other people to see Antares lift off) might yield not merely a shattering rocket blast, but Leonids!

This cosmic amazement will happen with the Chesapeake flowing at our feet. If UD can for once in her life actually dress warmly enough to stand around for awhile in cold weather, she might be in for the sight of her life.

*********************

At tea yesterday, we talked to a disappointed scientist. Her muscle-growth experiment, part of Antares’ cargo, has been compromised by the delays.

I called the tearoom Thursday morning, fully expecting to be told that – in all this offseason chill – they were closed.

“Are we holding tea,” said a very British voice. “Now that’s a question.” I loved her voice; I loved the way she said Now that’s a question.

“Hold on. Let me ask the breakfast guests. Anyone here coming to tea at three? … Okay, enough guests are returning for tea, so yes, we’ll do it.”

In driving wind and rain, we walked through a half-English, half-Japanese garden to the inn’s front door and were greeted at the tea table by a young woman wearing a gray t-shirt with dripping black letters that read Walking Dead. The four-course meal was strictly British and just the thing for the bleak winter setting. Talking to the scientist and her colleagues made Antares much more real.

On our way out, as we readied ourselves for the tree-bending storm, I congratulated the innkeeper on her gardens, which shined through the gloom. “I love to garden,” she said, with the same flat, casually disclosing tone I’d loved on the phone, “but I can’t do it anymore. Can’t bend.” She lifted one of her pant legs slightly. “I call her Edna. Prosthetic. Cartilage cancer. I knew something was wrong and went to a local idiot here who dismissed it as arthritis. So I went to Johns Hopkins and they knew right away and did the surgery right away.”

“I always say,” replied UD, “that it’s very much worth living within reasonable range of a major metropolitan center.”

“Goodness, yes.”

“If I lived here, I’d help with the garden.”

Yukata be kidding.

… lots of experimental aircraft circling the Wallops Flight Facility. The Antares launch has been moved to tomorrow morning, so we’ll spend an extra day here. Our desk clerk told us exactly where to go to get the best view – past the harbor, up a little knoll…

UD has so far walked the length of Chincoteague’s chilly desolate main street, sat on her hotel’s dock (from which she chatted with various people floating by in motorboats), and made a reservation for dinner.

My Country

We’re proud to acknowledge that it’s
A cultural mandate to blitz
The joy of our girls
By taking their pearls
And blasting their pleasure to bits

God sayeth Lo cut off their clits!
Uncastrated woman commits
A sin in my sight!
Under cover of night
Take babies and rip out their slits!

… and ready for takeoff the day after tomorrow. Assuming the launch happens, UD will drive from her nearby hotel room in Chincoteague, Virginia, to Wallops Flight Facility so that she can watch real close-up.

It ain’t that UD‘s a space maven or anything – in fact, as I’ve noted on this blog in the past, UD has trouble believing in the reality of the solar system, much less the cosmos.

It’s clear that whoever created her gave UD one hell of a parochial mind… As in: The earth will do. Even the earth is a bit on the bulky side for UD… The east coast she finds intellectually manageable… As in the famous New Yorker cover…

But as you can tell from her trip to Shenandoah National Park/Big Meadow to watch meteors at 2 AM while freezing her ass off, she’s definitely up for fireworks, definitely interested in what nature can do, and what we can do, by way of celestial effects.

Faced with empty or near-empty professional and college stadia all over the country, thoughtful observers offer explanations, theories… This Cal Poly fan, marooned in the stands, sketches a phenomenology of the game he fled at half-time.

[W]hy is Alex G. Spanos Stadium on Saturday nights as empty as a bird’s nest in the winter? One of the first things that comes to mind is the style of football Cal Poly plays. Cal Poly’s offense is a variation of the triple option, which is why you hear people in the stands calling for the Mustangs to “throw the damn ball.”

The goal of the triple option, in an extremely reductionist sense, is to almost always run the football while making it extremely difficult for the defense to identify who has the ball. However this entails a lot of repeatedly running right up the middle of the defense. While this bears a lot of strategic purpose, running straight into a wall of defenders is definitely not the most fun thing to watch, especially when it is the 30th time you’ve seen it in a game.

I suppose you could make a bunch of helmets bashing another bunch of helmets – or pocketbooks – over and over again interesting – or comic? – (“Repetition is the essential comedic device.”) – but interest and amusement is not really football, is it? Football is mad screaming hyperdrive…

And she’s the state of Arizona’s newest Senator.