Saw one years ago, and now here’s another (I wasn’t fast enough to take a picture of my own), and it makes perfect sense that we have minks (I suspect there’s a family living under our deck). We have endless rabbits, and minks like to eat rabbits. We have everything minks like: snakes, birds, mice.

The notes I took are gone, but I remember certain things. The pleasant disorientation of watching Augie March teach Nathan Zuckerman, for example. And the week we discussed Ulysses. That morning, we sat nervously as Bellow took his seat. “Have you finished the book?” he said. Had we read every page of one of literature’s most famously difficult offerings? In a week? Not one of us had gotten to that last Yes. Bellow laughed — not the marvelous, head back, teeth-bared laugh for which he was famous, but a small laugh — and brandished an ancient copy of the book, which, he said, had been smuggled into the country for him in the 1930s. And for the next hour, he read to us from Ulysses and, without notes, annotated it. Bellow’s deep recall, fluency, and confidence seems, now, to be a beautiful, cerebral high-wire act.

Bellow was eighty-five then…

A liberal Muslim woman, she has already been shot and beaten up by Muslim men.

But here she is again, opening a no-burqas mosque.

Read the details, and join UD in fearing for her life.

… coach a bit of a hassle.

Louche Louisville again. Yes.

Now Coach Pitino’s guys argued that the penalty for running a long-established house of prostitution in a special dorm just for its teenage basketball recruits and their fathers should be, like, almost nothing because

… the “monetary value” associated with the strippers was so low — reasoning that Jo Potuto, who previously chaired the NCAA infractions committee and is a constitutional law professor at the University of Nebraska, found “absurd.”

… “To suggest it’s not as significant because there’s no monetary value,” [she] said, “well, I think parents would think paying a kid $1,000 is a whole lot more respectful in the way college athletes should be treated rather than giving them a prostitute.”

Babe.

First, the parents didn’t mind fucking low monetary value whores either.

Second: Tell an eighteen-year-old lad trembling on the brink of the joy of sex that he has a choice between an orgy for him and his dad, with professionals who’ll do anything for them, and a check for a thousand bucks. Other opportunities to make a thousand dollars will present themselves to him; but this precious chance to bond with the old man while balling his brains out may never come again.

***********

UD thanks Wendy for the update.

They sat together in the park
As the evening sky grew dark
She looked at him and he found the Spark…

Chick claimed that our blessed Joe Tumpkin
Was doing some violent humpkin.
This hysterical muff
Tried to mess up our Buffs!
We ignored the embarrassing lumpkin.

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

UD thanks Keith for the update on this story.

A local mosque was paying a physician to perform female genital mutilation on young girls, an attorney serving as a guardian for the doctor’s children alleged in court Tuesday.

It don’t get no more American than that.

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

Rand Paul, who was on the field during what “would have been a massacre,” will be UD‘s colleague next semester; he will “teach DC college students about dystopias.”

First Lesson Plan: Imagine a place where you can’t go outside to play ball because nothing stops nuts from getting semi-automatic rifles.

Discuss.

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

Hard to keep up.

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

Australia banned semiautomatic weapons [in 1996], and required everyone to sell those they already owned to the government. There have been no mass shootings in the country since then.

NYT.

No kidding.

The leadership of the Israeli city Beit Shemesh has told that country’s courts that everyone’s too afraid to go in and enforce legal decisions. The latest one orders the town to take down its many threatening and humiliating signs — signs that not only tell women how to dress, but order them to keep their vileness away from sacred areas. Ultra-orthodox fanatics in town are now so violently out of control that the whole place has become a no-go zone.

[T]he central commercial area of Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet has become so notorious that it has become known by some non-haredi residents as “The Heart of Darkness.”

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

In his ruling on Wednesday, Judge Yigal Marzel decried the lawlessness in the extremist neighborhoods of Beit Shemesh, in which, he noted, the authorities appear to have abandoned the area to violent radicals.

Marzel quoted the response of [the town’s mayor] and the Beit Shemesh Municipality, in which they described the situation in the city as “a war” and “catastrophic,” where extremists are violent toward IDF soldiers, pedestrians and police personnel, throw stones at people and vehicles, and harass and curse people.

“[The state] cannot reconcile itself to this situation, and all the authorities need to take the necessary steps to restore order and observance of the law,” wrote the judge.

The state cannot reconcile itself… Interesting language. It’s like saying I can’t fucking believe this. It doesn’t get you anywhere.

And just as there are people with deep pockets paying the fines of women who keep wearing the burqa where it’s illegal, so UD feels certain there are people with deep pockets happy to pay the penalty ($1,400 per sign every day) the judge will soon impose on lawless Beit Shemesh. For this religious state is in the peculiar position of having decided that the ultra-orthodox of Beit Shemesh are the world’s realest Jews, and thus the very heart and soul of Israel. And now the courts of that country are living with this decision.

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

A peculiar position? Only if you forget what Ronald Dworkin said about religious states.

What’s next? France?

Oh. Right.

Longtime readers know that Munro
Leaf, author of Ferdinand the Bull,
lived in UD‘s Garrett Park house.

Les UDs bought two topiary
bulls in his honor.

Here’s Judy’s wonderful blog.

Once he’s been removed, you’ll be much better off.

It won’t be traumatic. It’ll be good for you.

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

Meanwhile, UD‘s pretty excited to see all the national and global news coverage that’s finally being brought to female genital mutilation. When American doctors with medical degrees from Johns Hopkins University are doing hundreds of them in Michigan, it’s time to make noise.

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

Who knew?

It’s on the telly too.

Her punishment is severe, though: she undergoes a forced clitoridectomy. …[T]he programme makers [had] consultations with the UN over the importance of highlighting female genital mutilation…

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

Creating a bit of a stir.

Good. Time to pay attention.

Scott Karsten, who represented the [Wesleyan] fraternity in …negotiations [toward going co-ed], testified this week that the chapter was at a disadvantage in complying because Wesleyan provided only vague descriptions of what it meant by coeducation and never specifically defined its expectations.

[The president of Wesleyan] said he never felt an explicit definition was necessary.

… Digest.