UD‘s friend Jay Smith offers a very popular course on the history of college athletics that so terrifies faculty and administrators at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill — a place that felt perfectly comfortable offering for twenty years Julius Nyang’oro’s Bullshit for Jocks course — that they’ve cancelled it.

Ol’ UD is more than familiar with the Kafkaesque absurdities of football factories like UNC; but she will admit that the leadership of a school peeing itself at the thought of an eminent historian offering a course on a subject arguably more urgent than any other for corrupt jock-worshippers like UNC to think about is – well, hilarious. Truly a new low.

Here’s a school made sordid by athletics, and it’s now trembling at the possibility of merely thinking about the roots of its depravity.

Read the emails in this article.

Years after Jerry Sandusky went after a little boy in a Penn State University shower, that school’s president at the time faces sentencing in court.

… (see last three paragraphs), UD has followed the predictable – predicted – demise of Western Kentucky University as it embraces big-time football. As object-of-ridicule-and-contempt Professor Robert Dietel tried to tell the WKU idiots more than ten years ago, it’ll bring expensive slimy coaches and violent players to campus. It’ll drain the already paltry funds available for academics, and the steady march of player arrests will associate WKU’s name with criminality. The latest big roundup of players – for beating the shit out of a fraternity guy – on camera – is getting the national publicity it deserves.

I hope the WKU trustees who attacked Dietel are proud of themselves.

… as well they should, since it’s not every day that a fraternity enters a national forest with a gun and hatchets and starts chopping (shooting?) it down.

The lads continue to try to lie their way out of it, but the evidence against them seems to be overwhelming.

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A good lawyer, though, might say something like this to the court.

Your honor: This was Chico State. This was a fraternity. These people had firearms and hatchets. Did they use the secrecy of tree cover to murder and behead their pledges? They certainly could have. Others might have. But these young men held back, instead channeling their aggression into the far less anti-social flattening of a forest.

Rehoboth Beach, this afternoon.

After UD took this picture, a man
who was birding (we were at Cape
Henlopen State Park) came along and
suggested that we see if the
horseshoe crab was still alive.

He picked it up by its tail and showed
me its still-wriggling legs. Then he
gently placed it and its mollusks back
in the surf.

I felt dirty and gross for going to football games or supporting the school; I stopped going to games after my junior year.

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When it started to come out, some of my professors would [make] little sacrilegious jokes; they’d say things like “our good Baptist institution,” and there was just a level of acrimony to it.

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

[T]he law students felt like their law degree was being cheapened by the scandal. It’s frustrating to be tied to a school that’s so obviously misogynistic. A lot of it was us being like, ‘Are you serious? It’s 2015, ‘16, ‘17; it’s an actual joke that people still think we can favor football over the safety of women on campus.’

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

Football was fun, and it’s not as much fun anymore because it’s like, look at what some members of the football team have been accused of doing. For me there’s also some frustration there because we have a really good product in the education we offer our students, and it’s like, ‘You all tarnished that.’ When people hear ‘Baylor,’ they think about the football team. Our reputation has been tarnished, and it shouldn’t be.

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

None of the women interviewed above mentions Waco’s great bar scene, so UD will. Those who think the Twin Peaks shootout was the only opportunity for Baylor women to get shot as well as raped need to know that the fun continues.

And George Soros seems to think Hungary’s president will take that as an insult.

The driveway.

Mr UD’s sister’s car.

**********

UD will celebrate her mid-August birthday in NY.

Yeshiva University benefactor Zygi Wilf is at it again.

An East Hampton property owner has been flagged for a penalty for injuring or removing trees on public property.

… A code enforcement officer responded [to a complaint] and directed the contractor “to cease all work on the village easement until he gets further direction and/or approval” from the village.

[A]lmost all Swiss bank accounts set up by Scandinavians are being used for tax evasion.

A judge has granted an alleged pill mill operator’s request to travel to the University of Richmond’s law library to fine tune his claim that federal courts have no jurisdiction over him because in 1874 the United States joined the Universal Postal Union.

On May 22, he filed a document with the court titled “Response to the Indictment” that says in part: “I do not accept this jurisdiction According to the treaties in which the United States Corporation signed when joining the Universal Postal Union this court is violating International Law. You are hereby compelled to cease and desist on any further action.”

He wrote that he [is an], “American National privately residing in a private domicile outside of Federal District in a non-military private estate located outside of a federal District not subject to the jurisdiction of the ‘United States.’ ”

There’s plenty of intriguing precedent for this sort of thing; and, speaking as an English professor, UD is impressed that the man has clearly read his Thomas Pynchon.

An investigation by the [University of Arizona] alleges members [of a fraternity kicked off campus and seeking recertification] hazed pledges by blindfolding them and forcing them to drink alcohol at an event at the off-campus fraternity house on March 23.

One pledge was shoved into a pillar as he made his way down the hallway at the fraternity house, according to the UA’s investigation.

He was later seen hunched over, complaining of stomach pains and was taken to the hospital. The student required “long-term hospitalization,” UA officials said.

…

In a letter to the fraternity, the Dean of Students Office said they talked with witnesses who feared retaliation. “A witness was allegedly told by members of the fraternity the night of the assault that ‘we kill rats.'”

8:32 AM, from our balcony.
Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Reed College graduate Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche ’16.

Click on his graduation photograph to see his laurels.

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May he live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.