1 Rich Rod is our shepherd; we shall not want.

2 He maketh us to lie to his wife: he leadeth us to his erection.

3 He bribeth our staff: he leadeth us to the path of visually enhanced underwear for his cock’s sake.

4 Yea, though we plead for jobs in other departments, we will get no response: for “Coach Rodriguez would be pissed.”

5 Our school preparest six million dollars for him to go away; yea, he will take the money and sue us for forty million more.

6 Surely his woman-beating players will follow us all the days of our life: and we will dwell in the house of The Rod for ever.

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

UD thanks David and John.

Eve Sedgwick’s devoted brother, my old boyfriend and friend, died seven years ago at the age of 57.

The turn of the year decided me to go to the basement where, over a decade ago, he asked us to store boxes of his books, tapes, clothing, and papers. Time to deal with the books.

I’d already gone through the papers, and sent Eve’s letters and photographs on to her widower, Hal, in New York City; I’d already given David’s clothes to Goodwill. The tightly taped and roped boxes of books, however, daunted me – their physical and emotional weight sat in a dark corner, fit to burst.

Yesterday, out under a winter sky, the sun piercingly clear, I watched a red fox slip across our yard and take the small hill up to our neighbor’s, and this somehow sealed the deal: I’d go down with a sharp pair of scissors and cut the ropes and shelve the books.

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

Not everything was a book. There
was a colorful, wonderful, untouched
Indonesian journal, in which I’ll
write lecture notes for this
semester’s classes.

There were 36 Heroes of the
Blues cards.

David’s mother inscribed a copy
of Orwell’s writings to him.

A Straussian in his teens, David
held on to this 1967 pamphlet.

At the end of the copy of A Dialogue
on Love that his sister gave him, she writes:

It never seems sensible to pass along moral injunctions.
I sometimes think that beyond the Golden Rule,

the only one that matters is this:
If you can
be happy, you should.

An animal study that I wrote about in July, for instance, found that frail, elderly mice were capable of completing brief spurts of high-intensity running on little treadmills, if the treadmill’s pace were adjusted to each mouse’s individual fitness level.

… that great writing is mysterious and rare and always worth revisiting.

This is Jan Morris, fifty years ago, describing La Paz at night.

The scene is shadowy and cluttered, and you cannot always make out the detail as you push through the crowd; but the impression it leaves is one of ceaseless, tireless energy, a blur of strange faces and sinewy limbs, a haze of ill-understood intentions, a laugh from a small Mongol in dungarees, a sudden stink from an open drain, a cavalcade of tilted bowlers in the candlelight — and above it all, so clear, so close that you confuse the galaxies with the street lamps, the wide blue bowl of the Bolivian sky and the brilliant cloudless stars of the south.

Puh-leeze. Get with the program. Nine coaches make over five million. Saban makes eleven million.

“Since 1009 is a prime number, there are only four numbers that divide 2018: 1, 2, 1009, and 2018.”

The merry, the musical,
The jolly, the magical,
The feast, the feast of feasts, the festival
Suddenly ended
As the sky descended
But there was only the feeling,
In all the dark falling,
Of fragrance and of freshness, of birth and beginning.

… FIFA’s association with corrupt behavior now runs so deep that [one observer suggests] the 113-year-old Fédération Internationale de Football Association should consider a name change.

“Why not? … They need to get bright thinkers to repackage the whole thing. There’s just too much baggage to carry. It’s just an absolute mass of information about corruption wherever you look. The word FIFA globally has got just the worst image in the world: If you are trying to sell the FIFA brand, if anything those four letters stand for absolute total corruption and it’s so unattractive.”

UD says go completely the other way: Transparency. Embrace who you are. Become who you are.

Steal Til You Can’t Steal No More

“Let’s say you’re a super-wealthy single dude who just sold your company,” [says the real estate agent for a $500 million Los Angeles house]. “You’ve just moved to L.A. and you don’t know anybody, so you hire someone to fill your house with partyers. You want everyone to know who you are, but you don’t want to talk to anybody. So you go sit in your V.I.P. room.”

… [One] buyer, from Malaysia, paid [the agent] $40 million for [another LA] home and then promptly gutted it. “That house looked like this,” he said, stretching his arms out wide for emphasis. “Furniture! Beautiful! Everything!” Eventually, he said, the Department of Justice took possession of the home after the owner ran into legal trouble. It’s been empty ever since.

Ah. The lifeblood of this blog.

Anna Muzychuk, chess champion, boycotts vile Saudi Arabia, at great cost to herself.

In a few days I am going to lose two World Champion titles – one by one. Just because I decided not to go to Saudi Arabia. Not to play by someone’s rules, not to wear abaya, not to be accompanied getting outside, and altogether not to feel myself a secondary creature. Exactly one year ago I won these two titles and was about the happiest person in the chess world but this time I feel really bad. I am ready to stand for my principles and skip the event, where in five days I was expected to earn more than I do in a dozen of events combined. All that is annoying, but the most upsetting thing is that almost nobody really cares. That is a really bitter feeling, still not the one to change my opinion and my principles.

She stands to lose a couple of million dollars.

She once played in Iran, where she was forced to cover her head, and you know what? She didn’t like it. So she’s not doing it again.

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

And oh yes – SA is becoming ever so much more free for women… For instance, if Muzychuk follows new, slightly less repressive orders on what she can put on her body, she’ll be allowed to play.

Yes sir! Right away sir. Thank you sir.

But no. Muzychuk is one of those women you can never satisfy… One of those loose Western types who fail to see themselves as secondary.

It will be fun to watch SA’s amazement as it liberalizes this and liberalizes that to no avail. Franchement, SA could become Paris entre deux guerres and UD – and, she suspects, millions of other women – wouldn’t darken its door. The big one at Yellowstone will blow before Saudi Arabia begins to look like any sort of destination for a self-respecting woman.

-o – o – ld.

We’ve chronicled for years on this blog the remarkable number of truly out-sized financial criminals who got their training at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Here’s another one – a Muslim who used some of his money to “to undo negative misperceptions of [Muslims] in [the] media.”

Well…

A gray dawn breaks
Over the deaf-mute space ocean
And UD shuts the window of morning readings
To tap out electric greetings:

The better part of wisdom is to share
Keep your mind in hell and do not despair.
In interludes among fests of nativity,
Do not forget the voice of our declivity:

“Why do people fear dying alone and unloved?
What difference does it make?”
“You know in the end, none of it matters,
What happens to you in your life. Not suffering.
Not happiness or unhappiness. Not illness. Not prison. Nothing.”

Among some porcelain, among some talk of you and me
Do not forget: The blood jet is poetry.