… Strega Nona territory.

Much too much pasta.

Despite his history of conflict with her, Michael Chertoff, “the lead Republican lawyer on the Senate committee investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater scandal,” endorses Hillary Clinton:

[Trump’s] decision to spend last week attacking former Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, a woman Trump once called “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping,” proved to the former homeland security secretary that the Manhattan billionaire is too impulsive to be president.

“This issue came up at the debate about Miss Universe,” he said. “Not only did he seem at the debate to lose his temper, but to get up at 3:30 a.m. and reach for your smartphone is to me a hysterical reaction. If you’re president, the button you reach for is not the Twitter button; it’s the nuclear button.”

A situation where [Harvard’s] in-house investment managers are getting paid 50 times more than university professors, while delivering lackluster returns, is “politically not feasible,” [one expert] says.

Indeed, the news about Harvard’s endowment [the school just lost two billion dollars] led many to question the university’s approach and its costs. Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan at Flint and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that Harvard spends at least $70 million on its endowment-management office. That’s almost enough to cover Harvard’s $45,000 tuition for its 1,600 freshmen.

… [I]f Harvard had passively invested in a standard mix of 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds, it would have gotten a higher rate of return — 8.9 percent over the past five years, versus 5.9 percent with its active in-house management …

E.J. Dionne.

(Sing it.)

The last time Trump paid taxes
The year was ’95
The OJ Simpson trial began
My students weren’t alive

Oh the last time Trump paid taxes!
So many years away!
No matter how they change the rules
He’ll never ever pay.

In private conversations this week, Trump’s high command has sought to reassure party figures, including Senate and House leaders, that there is no reason to be alarmed by the debate or by Trump’s ensuing theatrics, explaining them away as part of his appeal to the masses.

What does Tim Williams’ arrest on a misdemeanor gun charge in Tuscaloosa early Thursday morning mean for Alabama at the outside linebacker position?

When the sun is high in the afternoon sky
You can always find rallies to lead
But from dusk till dawn as the clock ticks on
Your poor heart starts to bleed

When your bitter heart has learned its lesson
You’ll be Prez! … But she might have you beat…
In the wee small hours of the morning
That’s the time you have to Tweet Tweet Tweet Tweet Tweet

… which is why he’s featured so much on this blog. But there’s so much more to say about universities buying out coaches! UD‘s friend Andrew sends her this inspirational account.

The university foundation – the shady organization of rich boosters who want to do nice things for a particular university without having to be bound by the board of trustees and other pesky official organizations/rules – is often a very naughty thing. Sometimes it’s a slush fund for the president and his or her cronies, as at the University of Louisville, where its main function was loading more and more dollars onto the president’s personal haul. God only knows (channeling the Beach Boys) what many campuses’ sports and administration figures would do without The Foundation.

Iowa State University, the inspiration for Jane Smiley’s novel, Moo, has a typical foundation. It buys stuff the administration is too embarrassed, or legally unable, to buy. Until ISU’s president crash-landed one of the planes the foundation bought, no one seems to have been prompted to ask what Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, has asked: “Why does a university need to buy a plane at all?”

In answering that question, UD has always sought the guidance of Purdue University trustee Joanne Brouillette:

Excluding one flight to Naples with several other trustees and administrators, [Purdue University trustee JoAnn] Brouillette’s [twelve private, university-paid] flights [since the beginning of 2008] were to and from Fort Wayne, Ind., only spending 30 minutes in the air. Out of these flights, five of them carried no other passengers.

Big people like go UP and DOWN and UP and DOWN and UP and DOWN!

*****************
UD thanks dmf.

Almost any serious football school in this country can promise its students a small but significant shot at having their jaw broken by a football player. According to UD‘s rough analysis, one student jaw gets broken by one student athlete approximately once a week somewhere in the US.

This week’s “displaced fracture of the left mandible and a non-displaced fracture of the right mandible” took place at Purdue University, a perennial violent-arrest powerhouse.

A racist clown rolls through a small Black Lives Matter rally at East Tennessee State University, and because of the inherent drama of a person with a Confederate flag, hanging rope, gorilla mask, and bananas, he attracts far more attention to the rally than it would have had without him. Not only did the crowd grow; thanks to “fervent Trump supporter” Tristan Rettke, the rally has enjoyed big national coverage for the past few days.

Last Saturday in [the University of Tennesse’s] Neyland Stadium, former state Rep. Jeremy Durham, R-Franklin … reportedly got into a fracas with a Florida fan during the Vols’ eventual win over the Gators…

[A] particularly boisterous Florida fan was yelling loudly. At one point, Durham responded to the yells. The Florida fan started yelling at Durham. Once the Florida fan yelled at Durham, … Durham turned around and hit the man in the face.

… Durham was ousted from the state legislature earlier this month after accusations of sexual misconduct toward at least 22 women. Saturday, he was ousted from Neyland Stadium by security …

[S]eated next to Durham during the episode was [state Sen. Brian] Kelsey …

Despite Kelsey’s shoulder-to-shoulder proximity to Durham at the time of the exchange, the reported slapping of the Florida fan, and the ejection, Kelsey told The Tennessean [newspaper] he was unaware of anything.

College men from LSU
Went in dumb
Come out dumb too

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

It’s a whole new day!

Plunging the future of the 2016 Presidential debates into doubt, Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday morning that he would not participate in the remaining two debates if Hillary Clinton is there.

Trump blasted the format of Monday night’s debate by claiming that the presence of Clinton was “specifically designed” to distract him from delivering his message to the American people.

“Every time I said something, she would say something back,” he said. “It was rigged.”

Well, let me tell you ’bout the way she looked
The way she acts and the color of her hair
Her voice was soft and cool
Her eyes were clear and bright
But she’s not there

Well, no one told me about her
What could I do?
Well, no one told me about her
Though they all knew