… eloquence, from UD‘s Montgomery County neighbor.
… the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The university has closed down and asked students and anyone else on campus to shelter in place.
A campus policeman responding to a disturbance call at MIT has been shot and killed outside one of its buildings.
People are being advised to stay indoors; the shooter is at large.
It’s unlikely to be connected to the marathon bombings, but it’s not impossible.
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Situation escalating, with what appears to be a police chase, many gunshots, and even explosions reported, in Watertown, where UD‘s sister-in-law lives.
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AP reports “an arrest is imminent” in the marathon bombings.
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Mr UD just spoke to his sister, who lives in the center of the activity. She had not long ago been awakened by a phone call from the police – they told her to stay inside. Just after that, she heard two explosions.
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Confirmed: The Watertown suspects are the marathon bombers. One of the bombers has been killed. The other remains at large.
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Police are now going door to door in Watertown.
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Events as of 8:00 AM Friday:
[T]he suspects [Chechen brothers with military experience, both of whom had been in the States for about a year] approached a police officer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and shot him in the head.
The two then stole the officer’s cruiser, robbed a nearby 7-Eleven, carjacked a Mercedes SUV and briefly kidnapped the driver, the sources said. The suspects threw explosives out the window during the chase that followed, they said. A Boston transit police officer was shot and wounded, authorities said.
The dead suspect — the man in the black hat from the FBI photos — had an improvised explosive device strapped to his chest, law enforcement officials said.
Kitzenberg said that the firefight ended when one of the shooters ran toward the Watertown officers and ultimately fell to the ground. Kitzenberg said he could not tell whether the man was tackled or had been shot.
The other drove the SUV through a line of police offcers at the end of the street, he said. A bullet from the gunbattle lodged in the wall of Kitzenberg’s apartment, he said.
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Remaining suspect just graduated from Rindge and Latin School, steps from our Cambridge house.
News flash from this year’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina.
Who knew?
… is probably better to let you go.
UD has seen, over the life of this blog, very similar abuse of students. Often, as in this case, it’s political. You decide you’re not going to teach the math or physics class students signed up for. You’re going to corral them into voting for your candidate. You’re going to acquaint them, intimately, over the course of fourteen weeks, with your solutions to the world’s political, environmental, and spiritual problems.
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By the way – one more note about professors. I share it with you, though I know not what to make of it.
In my Aesthetics class this morning, we were talking about poverty, and in particular the homeless. A number of students began discussing a woman who stands outside their dormitory begging.
“We all,” said one of them, and all of the others nodded in agreement, “think she looks like a sociology professor.”
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UPDATE: UD‘s buddy Veblen sent her this quiz:
http://individual.utoronto.ca/somody/quiz.html
UD got nine out of ten!
Mr UD got seven out of ten.
And he’ll stay there. He’s paid his way out of his trouble. And he’s endowed the school of finance with his (possibly) ill-gotten gains.
Nothing to see here. Fine model for the finance students.
If this is true – how remarkably fast.
The Titanic end of one politician’s career.
Whether it’s charity tax write-off luxury boxes in university sports arenas full of drunk local businesspeople, or pharma-sponsored institutes that produce pill-friendly research, or big oil-sponsored institutes (big oil money makes pharma money look sparse) whose directors live exactly like big oil executives, it’s all good. It’s all good for the American university, which after all has to support its operations somehow.
Local news reporters seem to think the University of Houston – ground-zero for big oil money – overlooks the unseemly greed of its oil-subsidized faculty. But these reporters are operating with an outmoded notion of what universities are. UH is fine with it.
Life imitates art – Molly Bloom and gambling emerge in the real world, on the front page of the New York Times.
This Molly totally approves of gambling.
Her soliloquy – a tell-all, just like Leopold Bloom’s Molly’s – will appear in 2014.
It’s not clear if Bloom herself will appear in order to promote it. She might be in jail.
Ouch. Ooch. Eech. When three whippersnappers from a public university accuse a couple of fancy-pants Harvard economists of having messed with data, it does rivet the attention.
Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff are accused of having fudged their stats in order to argue that high levels of public debt create economic stagnation or decline. Republicans have used the study to justify their sharp attack on the budget deficit.
Details here.
More details here.
The bombs hit university students hard.
An unnamed Boston University graduate student has died.
This is all unconfirmed, but there are reports of many injuries.
Two explosions confirmed; many injured. Three deaths reported.
Raw video on this page.
Ongoing coverage, harrowing videos.
At least two more explosive devices have been found in the same area; they are being dismantled.
Reports of yet more explosive devices around Boston.
This reports twelve dead and a suspect in custody.
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Death toll remains at three, among them an eight-year-old boy.
Sunset, Malta. La Kid.
Who has, for a week,
left dark chilly Galway
for the sun.
Next week, she starts
an internship at the
Abbey Theatre.
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Whew. Took a bit of work but I found
Malta in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.
I said I was tired we lay over the firtree cove a wild place I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence the galleries and casemates and those frightful rocks and Saint Michaels cave with the icicles or whatever they call them hanging down and ladders all the mud plotching my boots Im sure thats the way down the monkeys go under the sea to Africa when they die the ships out far like chips that was the Malta boat passing Yes the sea and the sky you could do what you liked lie there for ever
(UD had lunch last week with a
woman her equal in Joyce madness.
This woman named her daughter Molly,
while UD‘s La Kid is Anna Livia.)
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A completely, completely charming and
hilarious poem about Malta by Richard
Blanco, whose work my friend d. has
been after me to read:
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WE’RE NOT GOING TO MALTA. . .
because the winds are too strong, our Captain
announces, his voice like an oracle coming through the
loudspeakers of every lounge and hall, as if the ship
itself were speaking. We’re not going to Malta–an
enchanting island country fifty miles from Sicily,
according to the brochure of the tour we’re not taking.
But what if we did go to Malta? What if, as we are
escorted on foot through the walled “Silent City” of
Mdina, the walls begin speaking to me; and after we
stop a few minutes to admire the impressive
architecture, I feel Malta could be the place for me.
What if, as we stroll the bastions to admire the
panoramic harbor and stunning countryside, I dream
of buying a little Maltese farm, raising Maltese horses
in the green Maltese hills. What if, after we see the
cathedral in Mosta saved by a miracle, I believe that
Malta itself is a miracle; and before I’m transported
back to the pier with a complimentary beverage, I’m
struck with Malta fever, discover I am very Maltese
indeed, and decide I must return to Malta, learn to
speak Maltese with an English (or Spanish) accent,
work as a Maltese professor of English at the University
of Malta, and teach a course on The Maltese Falcon. Or,
what if when we stop at a factory to shop for famous
Malteseware, I discover that making Maltese crosses is
my true passion. Yes, I’d get a Maltese cat and a
Maltese dog, make Maltese friends, drink Malted milk,
join the Knights of Malta, and be happy for the rest of
my Maltesian life. But we’re not going to Malta. Malta
is drifting past us, or we are drifting past it–an
amorphous hump of green and brown bobbing in the
portholes with the horizon as the ship heaves over
whitecaps wisping into rainbows for a moment, then
dissolving back into the sea.