… after a snowfall.

Taken by UD‘s friend Ari.

Nice writing about choosing the right vacation while still deeply mourning the sudden death of your husband.

As autumn approached, my parents agreed that it would be good for my mental health to skip my first holidays without Peter. “Let’s go on a trip,” my father said. “Anywhere but Asia or Australia. I don’t want too long a flight.”

“Let’s go to Peru,” I suggested. An avid bird-watcher, I had always wanted to visit the Tambopata region of Peru, home to the largest known clay licks on Earth. (A lick is a cliff where macaws, parrots, and parrotlets congregate to ingest mud, a vital source of sodium.) I can think of no more breathtakingly gaudy sight in the world. As our guide marched us through the jungle, day after day, in search of an ever-narrowing list of the area’s antbirds and antthrushes and flycatchers and manakins, I came to see the trip as avian psychopharmacology. It was a perfect, if privileged—and wet and buggy—way of avoiding the tinselled and ornamented triggers of the holidays.

Ronan Collins calls for no half-way measures – not a harmless nick here and a harmless nick there – but full surgical removal of the faculty member at Trinity College who loves him some mutilated female genitals.

Collins says: “I will be handing back my academic title of clinical associate professor [of medicine] if I feel the university’s response is not clear and firm in dealing with the matter.”

Especially if you’re a professor of medicine, the realization that there’s another professor somewhere at your university, in a position of authority and respect, who thinks torturing and mutilating little girls is a good idea — it’s simply too disgusting. Unbelievable, actually. Bravo, Collins.

Sing it.

An AR-15, peaches and cream,
Hair that sparkles and shines.
You’re nineteen, you’re lunatic, and it’s fine.

High velocity disintegrates me
Now I’m your angel divine
You’re nineteen, you’re lunatic, and it’s fine.

Dan Hodges’ verdict on Sandy Hook covers the latest child massacre.

NRA darling Marco Rubio gushes at this country’s amazing gun technology, and our amazing ability to put that technology in the hands of insane teenagers.

It’ll be even more amazing to see how much carnage a gang of insane teenagers will carry out. Hold onto your hats!

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

Now 17 high-school kids and teachers are dead in Rubio’s backyard. And the man who has taken more than any other Florida politico from the NRA — $3.3 million as of this past October — still doesn’t want to talk about what he’s going to do about it. That’s because he’s going to do jack fucking nothing, which is exactly what the NRA pays for him to do.

A response to all the prayers.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
This tyke’s AR-15
Is aimed right at you

Dublin’s Trinity College has not yet fired the female genital mutilation enthusiast on its faculty. So far, all it has done is hire another person to teach the same material at the same time, so if you, say, would rather not learn from a depraved person, you don’t have to.

On the other hand, for those female students who enjoy sitting in a room for hours, looking at an adult male, and finding it impossible to avoid imagining him slicing off their clitoris, you’re good to go. He’s still on the faculty, and you can enjoy his company for the rest of the semester.

The president of the Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union – quoted in my headline – thinks he should be fired right away, but… well… you know. Some people think it’s culturally insensitive to respond strongly to rituals that to be sure might be alien to us but no doubt have some good in them… I mean, it’s his religion and all.

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

The obvious upside: People in Ireland are really stirred up. The fact that Trinity – Ireland’s most important university – harbors a barbarian has galvanized millions of people. The more attention female genital mutilation gets, the better.

Dear Lord forgive us our buyout and our fraud
And all else we do unworthy of our God;
Show mercy, in thy holy name!
For nothing matters more than football games.

N.V.N.

Those who try to come near it are insane
and those who reach it are shaken by grief,
So now you know exactly why
my heart beats no faster under your hand.

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

[From Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated from the Russian by Jane Kenyon with Vera Sandomirsky Dunham (1985)]

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

One does feel this –
That everything from paper hearts to fervid verse
Only faintly approaches the insane grief-shaken
Love the free soul can conceive.

We are therefore kindest to ourselves
When we close our mind-forg’d manacles
Somewhat
Around our too-fast-beating hearts.

UD.

UD has long said that in a few years schools like Rutgers – run by jokesters and jocksters – will begin phasing out their economics departments, or at the very least introducing litmus tests for new hires.

Econ professors are among the very few on any campus who can actually run the numbers on athletics programs. The loudest among these professors often have access to the local newspaper’s opinion columns, and they can stir up outrage against massive sports deficits. The cleanest thing to do will be to shut them, and their departments, down. You could, short of that, hire only economists who have demonstrated that no amount of sports-related deficit is too great to outweigh their adoration of athletics.

Meanwhile, Rutgers has the curse of Mark Killingsworth, an econ prof who relentlessly, in opinion piece after opinion piece, chronicles what he describes as the brainlessness and insanity of that school’s president and board of trustees as they drive the place into incredible debt.

[The] real [athletics] deficit for 2016-17 can now stand up and be counted: it comes to a total of $35.4 million plus $11.9 million, or $47.3 million — the largest deficit in the history of Rutgers athletics. Despite [President Robert] Barchi’s oft-expressed pious hopes for athletics self-sufficiency, the program has now blown through a grand total of $193.1 million in deficit spending since he arrived in New Brunswick.

If you think this is bad … there’s worse. From the university’s response to another OPRA request, I learned that Rutgers currently has an outstanding total of $33.13 million in “internal debt” — the last of which won’t be paid off until 2030.

… The members of Rutgers’ Board of Governors have shown that, collectively, they are either too ignorant or too timid to do anything to restore even the most modest degree of fiscal sanity to Rutgers athletics: for them, anything goes. Apparently, they don’t understand, or don’t care, that athletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.

The only way to shut this guy up is to dump his entire department – call it a fiscal emergency, brought on by a temporarily high athletics deficit.

Yes, we’ve learned our lesson: More ex-MSU football and basketball players on the board of trustees!

… this is the best account of his remarkable rise I’ve read.

Former MLB pitcher Esteban Loaiza was arrested in San Diego on Friday on three drug-related felony charges, including possession of more than 44 pounds of cocaine and/or heroin.

… According to Baseball Reference, Loaiza made more than $43.7 million over his career.