… has been successfully accomplished. We drove from ‘thesda to Longwood Gardens, PA (questions under consideration during the drive: Why are people so upset about the Duke undergraduate who pays her tuition by appearing in pornographic movies? Is UD shocked by Russia’s vile aggression in Ukraine because she was born after World War Two, or is she just naive by nature? Should we use the GPS on our new Prius to get to the gardens, just because we can? Will we get over 51 miles to the gallon on this trip? Where’s a good place for dinner in Newark Delaware?), and we tromped all over the place. Our favorite location was a simple woodland garden through which a modest waterfall fell, but most of Longwood was of course far flashier than this – an orangery with massive palms and ferns, and bright blue hydrangea flowers interspersed with bright yellow lilies; smartly symmetrical European water gardens with toad sculptures… We also liked very much the not there yet wisteria-on-pergolas garden. It didn’t interest anyone else – most people were oohing at the just-opened tulips – but we found the dark, about to green trees moodily pretty.
We’re at our bed and breakfast now, resting up before dinner in Newark. We go to Port Deposit tomorrow morning.
From 1938 to 1968 (I’m totally guessing these dates – I know they include the war), UD‘s grandfather, Joseph Rapoport, ran Rapoport’s department store in Port Deposit, Maryland, a small town on the Susquehanna River (vintage postcards here). He did pretty well there at first; and then, starting in 1942, when Roosevelt opened the Bainbridge Naval Training Center and thereby doubled the population of Cecil County, he did spectacularly well. He was able to put my father, as well as his two sons-in-law, through graduate school.
Wee UD visited her grandfather in Port Deposit, staying with her parents and siblings on the second floor apartments (with balcony overlooking the river) that you can see in the photograph in this post’s first link. She remembers sitting on the balcony and chatting while looking at the river and the train tracks beside the river. She remembers visiting the family that lived in the stone house (also visible at the link) across from the store. There was a bar on the other side of the street, and she remembers being wakened at night by drunks.
All of these buildings remain intact because all of Port Deposit is on the National Historic Registry. So UD can see it again more or less as it was, the whole streetscape, and that’s what she’s going to do this weekend. She and Mr UD will spend today, tomorrow, and Sunday at a nearby bed and breakfast in Cecil County, and then walk around Port Deposit, while UD sees whether it stirs any more memories. They will also visit the world’s most persistent “brownfield” site, what’s left of the naval base, which itself used to be the beautiful Tome School. We’re not sure how much access we’ll get to the ruins, but it’s clear that they’re pretty cool, set on a bluff overlooking the river.
They will also visit nearby Longwood Gardens, not only one of the world’s great gardens, but liable to look amazing (spring; floods yesterday; sunny today), and walk (sail?) along the Chesapeake Bay, and who knows what else.
UD will insta-blog every millisecond. Stay tuned.
East Tennessee State football signee Shawn Prevo has been arrested on a charge of aggravated domestic assault.
… Prevo went into his 19-year-old brother’s room Friday and asked for a cigarette. According to police, when Prevo was told to leave, he grabbed his brother by the throat, slammed him on the bed and struck him in the chest and stomach with a closed fist.
Thrilling on and off the field.
And he hasn’t even taken the field yet.
As UD‘s metro train, yesterday afternoon, lifted itself out of the tunnel under Wisconsin Avenue and ran above Rock Creek Park, UD looked down and saw thick brown water heaving past the creek’s banks. Croppings of wildflowers barely showed through the flood, and the sycamores were all shaken up. UD was shaken. This scene, usually a calm span of green between the Beltway and Parkside Apartments, was turbulent and strange; and the rainfall wouldn’t break for awhile.
Earlier, in Foggy Bottom, she’d watched the sky disappear, watched her office windows go gray and fill with long streaks. She had the closed-in feeling you get in an airplane taxiing in a storm: There was the turbulent world, inches away; here was a world weirdly – barely – immune.
Later, watching the fast river Rokeby Avenue became, she remembered Henry Miller’s nod to James Joyce in The Tropic of Cancer.
“I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.
Shucks, says the pure as the driven snow guy Penn State has brought in to coach football and remove the taint of its past, I can’t take credit for our terrific recruitment so far.
“It has very little to do with me… It’s the staff, it’s the players, it’s the tradition, it’s the history, it’s the fans showing out 72,000 at the spring game. … It’s the whole package. That’s why we’re being successful. We’re just, I think, doing a pretty good job of painting that picture of the vision of what Penn State can be and what it will be… I had a lot of confidence that we would be able to do a good job of finding those guys, attracting them to Penn State and getting them on board to join our family.“
The family, the family, always the family. And what a family. Startlingly dysfunctional. But you bring in a guy like James Franklin, and you’re bringing back solid values. Like for instance at his last job, at Vanderbilt, after four football players were accused of raping a student, he apparently called the student right away:
[Attorneys claim] the victim was contacted by Franklin [and Dwight Galt, also now coaching at Penn State] during a medical examination four days after the rape to explain “that they cared about her because she assisted them with recruiting.”
[Attorneys] went on to say that at some point, “Coach Franklin called her in for a private meeting and told her he wanted her to get fifteen pretty girls together and form a team to assist with the recruiting even though he knew it was against the rules. He added that all the other colleges did it.”
So Franklin means it when he says he can’t take credit for his recruiting success – at least his success at Vanderbilt. If it weren’t for the Comfort Women in the Vanderbilt family (and who knows what he’s got cooking in the Penn State family?), the magic wouldn’t have happened.
[I]f Franklin had a role in organizing a hostess program, that is a new development in the entire story.
What is probably clear is Penn State has either done an extremely thorough vetting process and determined there is absolutely nothing to be concerned with in the long-term, or the school totally swung and missed on the biggest black cloud that could potentially linger over the new head coach. Given the position Penn State has been in since 2011, the margin for error is barely existent.
Penn State. Never a dull day.
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Update: A reminder that Penn State knew what it had in Franklin.
When you turn out to have been providing a home to swindlers for thirteen years, you should probably use the discovery as a teachable moment.
UD isn’t saying there’s anything truly newsworthy in the story of two physicists on the University of Houston faculty who set up a bogus business and then lied on hundreds of federal grant applications in order to steal over a million dollars for themselves. As you know if you read this blog with any regularity, engineering professors dominate the lying on federal grant applications on behalf of bogus businesses market; but this doesn’t mean there’s no competition from others in the hard sciences. Like these guys.
The indictment describes how Bensaoula and Starikov, on behalf of their company, used false and fraudulent letters of support and made false claims about facilities, equipment and materials. In one instance, Starikov is accused of submitting a letter of support from Solex Robotics Systems, which the Houston-based company didn’t know about, to the National Science Foundation for a $499,995 grant. Other letters of support were altered and submitted with cut-and-pasted signatures from the originals, the indictment says.
In other applications, the two listed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of costs that they “well knew Integrated Micro Sensors Inc. would not incur,” according to the indictment.
When applying for funding from NASA and the U.S. Air Force, the two included costs for non-existent subcontracts with UH, according to the indictment, which also alleges the two stated in proposals that their company would pay a required subcontract fee to UH, but failed to do so on four of five contracts.
As Elvis put it, Just Pretend.
… but I don’t think J.D. Winteregg does unions.
… to understand!
UD tries to understand. She sees, for instance, that the University of Idaho is being punished because its big-time athletes have failed to meet even the teeny weeny weeny weeny academic standards set by the NCAA.
So far she has no trouble understanding. You recruit a bunch of unpaid playing-field laborers, if you will, and you do your best to make them happy and to overlook their mischief and all… And the last thing you care about, given how much cash is riding on their bodies, is their minds. We all understand this. We don’t need to study the remarkable academic rise and fall of University of North Carolina professor Julius Nyang’oro to understand it. It is structural to the enterprise.
What UD‘s having trouble understanding is the content of UI’s (losing) appeal of the NCAA decision.
The NCAA requires extraordinary mitigating circumstances in order to grant a waiver for penalties assessed for low APR scores.
The University of Idaho’s athletics department included the following extraordinary mitigating circumstances in its appeal:
Upheaval among the intercollegiate athletic conferences
A loss of almost $1 million in revenue – the majority from television and conference revenue
Significant behavioral issues within the football program
“I thought we made a compelling case regarding the extraordinary circumstances that began in June 2010,” said (Athletic Director Rob) Spear. “At the end of the day, we accept the penalties and have used this adversity to make our athletic program stronger.”
So help UD out here. The reason you should waive our penalties is that not only was our football team out of control academically, it was out of control behaviorally. You should show mercy because our very expensive athletics program really, really lacked institutional control. We recruited questionable people who unsurprisingly produced “significant behavioral issues.” Plus we fucked up and lost a lot of money.
Do these seem to you grounds for an appeal? Presumably UI spent a lot of time and money coming up with their case for appeal. Does that seem to you to have been a reasonable use of time and money? UD‘s trying to understand.
Staff at Wellington’s Botanic Garden are shocked after a student function got out of control in the Dell.
Victoria University’s Law Student Society garden party turned into a drunken gathering and broken toilet bowls, vomit and defecation last month.
Reminds UD of the legendary Charleston School of Law party held at an aquarium. Guests pissed in an otter tank.
Moral of the story: Keep law students away from all living things.
… and quit his job at the University of Udine to heal the world.
Davide Vannoni is making quite a killing (in more than one sense of the word) with his stem cell pasta.
Physicians at the hospital in Brescia were in the dark about the details of the treatment administered there; the report says they used to temporarily leave the lab because a Stamina Foundation biologist “had to add a secret ingredient to the stem cells” that supposedly helped the cells develop into neurons.
Ah! Un po’ aceto balstemico! Si, delizioso…
A wood thrush sings on a high branch of a maple tree.
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When I walk by, a rabbit freezes over his patch of grass.
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The pileated woodpecker’s vocal placement is C above middle C.
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Here comes the woman who has trained five black spaniels to walk in military formation.
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The just-up sun lights the railings on my neighbor’s porch.
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I’m doing my first perimeter walk of the day.
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I’m deciding what garden work to do this afternoon.
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A robin perches on an orange butterfly chair.
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I’m manically happy.
I mean. The University of Texas considers itself a very respectable academic institution, ja? So here’s an article, plus comments on the article, in its campus newspaper.
Perhaps the most important line in the opinion piece is this:
Turner will likely turn pro after one year.
Turner is Myles Turner, a hot basketball prospect. UT’s trying to get him. UT, with the U for university.
Now the author of this opinion piece, a UT student, doesn’t even bother pretending that Turner will do anything academic while he’s at UT. He will play basketball for a season and leave. Indeed, pretty much everyone who writes about Turner agrees with this. So UT, like several other universities, is pissing itself blue at the prospect that this guy will visit campus for a few months, dribble the ball, and leave. This is the most important issue, the most riveting thing, on this American university campus at the moment. Will he or won’t he dribble the ball?
The opinion piece writer argues that Turner would actually be wise to go to another school, because despite what you’ve been told about Texas and sports, the school doesn’t really care much about basketball. The school only really cares about football. There are schools that care more about basketball, and Turner should go to one of those.
Again, note that in his arguments (he has others) against Turner coming to Texas, the student doesn’t say This guy, this Myles Turner, he might get a better education, even if only for a few months, at a better school… Because, you know, UT is a school, and … No. This guy will get nothing that UT or any other school has to offer. Too obvious even to put this down in words.
Now read through the comments on the article from other UT students. Most of the commenters are very angry because the author, Evan Berkowitz, has dissented from the piss yourself blue with excitement position that all true UT people must assume on the question of recruiting Turner. Some say Berkowitz is a faggot Jew who should shut the fuck up. Others seem embarrassed by their fellow students’ anti-semitism.
How to explain any aspect of this to anyone with even a vestigial brain?
… that will almost certainly hurt its sports recruiting.
Iowa freshman basketball player Peter Jok was arrested early Saturday for drunken driving, according to police reports.
Jok, 20, was arrested on a black 2013 moped …
Something’s terribly wrong at Iowa. Jok was supposed to have been arrested driving a 2014 Chevy Tahoe. If word gets around that local dealers aren’t feeding SUVs to recruits, look out.
In Athens, the Olympic Ideal is not just for the Olympics. Scenes from the Greek Cup final:
[The game was] halted when a firecracker was thrown onto the pitch.
Before the match Panathinaikos supporters threw broken plastic seats at riot police on the pitch and flares, firecrackers and other objects were thrown between supporters.
Police used tear gas to bring order and the presidents of both clubs, Giannis Alafouzos of Panathinaikos and Ivan Savvidis of PAOK, pleaded to fans from the stadium’s loudspeakers for calm.
Outside the stadium a police car was destroyed by a firebomb thrown by a motorbike rider.
One coach carrying PAOK supporters was attacked with rocks by Panathinaikos fans causing minor damage to the vehicle.
A large section of Athens Olympic Stadium was left empty to separate the two groups of supporters while a police helicopter kept a watch from above.
… Police … arrested the two owners of a PAOK supporters’ clubhouse in the centre of Athens after confiscating fireworks, iron bars, bottles filled with petrol, knives and baseball bats.
Some 4,000 police officers were deployed to keep the peace in the Greek capital for the match.
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And as for the Platonic Academy:
Photini Tomai, a Wilson Center favorite, and Director of the Service of Diplomatic and Historical Archives of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is running for the European Parliament. Her background:
Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos appointed her as the country’s special envoy for Holocaust issues, a decision that withdrawn that June after 40 historians and other figures petitioned the minister over their concerns at the “unethical way” Tomai has run the ministry’s archives.
They said access to the archives involved “a very complicated and lengthy process in which the head of the archive takes part herself, and sometimes intrusively”. They also claimed that the “30-year rule” is not applied in many cases, meaning files from the 1950s remain inaccessible. Nevertheless, Tomai publishes extracts from files otherwise out of bounds to researchers in her Sunday newspaper articles.
“In a time when dozens of civil servants are suspended without judicial or disciplinary convictions, we, the undersigned, believe that if Ms Tomai remains the head of the Diplomatic and Historical Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, especially after her conviction, it will raise major issues in academic ethics and in equal treatment. For the same reason we believe that Ms Tomai could not represent Greece in international organisations, conferences and meetings, jeopardising the prestige of our country.”
But that’s not all, folks!
In an October 2013 appeal court decision that has only recently been published, Photini Tomai, director of the foreign ministry’s archive, was told again that she must pay €20,000 in compensation to two authors after she published a children’s book that they wrote under her own name.
The decision confirmed an earlier ruling by Athens first instance court that Tomai was guilty of copyright infringement. That court ruled that a book entitled 1,2,3 … 11 True Olympian Stories, … was the work of screenwriter Eleni Kefalopoulou and her husband, film director Aris Fotiadis.
The couple told the court that, ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, they came up with an idea to make an animated series on ancient Greek Olympians and sent a script to the national broadcaster ERT and a number of private companies. On the recommendation of friends, they also sent a copy to Tomai, in her position as head of the foreign ministry’s archives.
The authors received no offers and animation was never made. But in 2008, they noticed 1,2,3 … 11 True Olympian Stories in a bookstore and immediately recognised the characters in it as ones they had created. In many instances, they saw that text had been copied verbatim and the court agreed.