… yet this chronicle of university life would be incomplete without recording the New York attorney general’s comment on our sketchy president-elect.
In 2013, my office sued Donald Trump for swindling thousands of innocent Americans out of millions of dollars through a scheme known as Trump University. Donald Trump fought us every step of the way, filing baseless charges and fruitless appeals and refusing to settle for even modest amounts of compensation for the victims of his phony university. Today, that all changes. Today’s $25 million settlement agreement is a stunning reversal by Donald Trump and a major victory for the over 6,000 victims of his fraudulent university.
UD says: This is true leadership. Having been shown the way by the highest office holder in the land, the rest of this country’s attorneys general can now go after their states’ fraudulent universities.
Depends on what you mean by “return.” If you’re attending a university in order to watch professional football, “returns” mean a world-class stadium, professional-league players, and a multi-million dollar coach. It doesn’t bother you that your sports program is a “Ponzi scheme. Universities pay and pay and pay, but because they’re late to the party, they never see any payback.” Actually, students pay and pay and pay, as tuition and student fees spike to meet the humongous debt on new facilities and on a fleet of private planes for recruiting visits etc etc …
And even when, as at Western Missouri, things turn toward the “unsustainable” as your school loses gobs of money year after year after year, you’re going to want the place to keep fielding teams to the bitter end.
On an unsustainable budget, Western Missouri just “approved the installation of six new athletic programs,” so hubba hubba.
… Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold.”
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UD‘s woods, on a cold
bright windy autumn day.
Headline:
A Place Where People Happily Pay $600 for Afternoon Tea
New York’s most expensive tea service offers caviar and Champagne at the Baccarat hotel.
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[SOS so far withholds comment. But she wonders how, even with caviar and champagne, a tea service could cost six hundred dollars.]
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First Section:
Key Details: Focusing on caviar and champagne, Tsar Nicholas II is Baccarat hotel’s new, luxurious take on the classic afternoon tea.
Competitors: The Peninsula ($60–$72 for classic afternoon tea, $285–$395 for afternoon tea with caviar and champagne); Mandarin Oriental ($48 for classic afternoon tea); Ritz-Carlton Central Park ($56–$89 for classic afternoon tea)
Price: $400 paired with Lung Ching Imperial tea, or $600 paired with Krug Grande Cuvée NV 750ml
Why It’s Worth It: If you’re going out for Champagne and caviar — not afternoon tea — you’ll spend as much anywhere else. And the interiors at the Baccarat are like no other.
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[The article appears in Bloomberg, a business publication, so maybe the author figures the busy Wall Street people scanning this piece will expect it to look like a consultant’s report, extracting key details up front for a person in a hurry. Quite the ethos of the tea ceremony, yes? I wanna take high tea, and make it snappy… Figure I’d like to spend say six hundred dollars for the forty minutes I’ve got available for this. Is it worth it? … Peninsula’s got the same deal for $60. So… $60/$600… But there’s that ‘like no other’ hotel interior… What did it cost me last time I sat down inside the Baccarat? Oh yeah, nothing. OTOH, that Nevada Cuvée sounds intriguing…]
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Take the elevator to the second floor of the glitzy, year-old Baccarat hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and the doors will open in the Grand Salon, a bright and dazzling parlor with giant windows that overlook the Museum of Modern Art and Baccarat crystal dangling from every nook and cranny. Since the hotel’s opening, it’s been a place filled with women in fur coats and business meetings over $24 whiskey cocktails. Now it’s also home to the city’s most expensive afternoon tea service.
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[I like the murdered Tsar theme, and women in fur coats is also good. In a better world, I’d have bragging rights once I did the most expensive tea in the city, but what hedge fund guy gives a shit about anything that only costs six hundred?]
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At $600, the Baccarat’s Tsar Nicholas II menu is 10 to 20 times as expensive as those of most of its competitors. For comparison’s sake, you can spend just $30 to $70 and sip premium teas at the Peninsula, or nibble on dainty pastries from three-tiered trays at the Mandarin Oriental. The hotel is also outdoing its own self; it already offered two excellent tea services called the King Louis XV ($95) and the Prince of Whales ($110), both with artisanal-leaning offerings such as rose-scented madeleines and tomato-white cheddar brioche.
[Wow! Prince of Whales! That must be with caviar from the Beluga whale rather than the sturgeon. Far out. But shouldn’t that cost more than Tsar Nicholas?]
But as much as the Baccarat is playing in a crowded market—there’s an afternoon tea for every need, style, and mood in New York—it’s also reigniting a culinary tradition that can often feel neglected or worn. Its strategy? Make afternoon tea feel indulgent again.
[Yeah, those hundred dollar teas … You feel like you’re at a Walmart cafeteria…]
Whereas Baccarat’s other two services make for beautiful, light afternoon meals, the Tsar Nicholas II is primarily and unabashedly about two things: caviar and Champagne. And tea, if you’d like.
A third of that $600 price tag is allocated to Champagne. The service is meant to feed two, and comes with 750 milliliters of Krug Grande Cuvée NV. You can opt to skip the Champagne and stick to “just” tea for $400.
Another third of that price, roughly, goes to caviar: a generous 30 grams of Petrossian’s Tsar Imperial Ossetra, one of the higher grade caviar offerings from the brand. (The Petrossian shop a few blocks away sells this 30-gram tin of Tsar Imperial Ossetra for $170.) It comes with classic accoutrements of chives, egg yolks and whites, red onions, and crème fraîche, all presented on a tiered Baccarat crystal stand.
[Two hundred bucks for caviar that sells down the street for $170. But that doesn’t take into account the setting and service and crystal plus the whole thing of jamming 30 grams of caviar down your throat at one sitting… What? Are you gonna ask them to put it in a doggie bag? Fuhgeddaboudit! You are not asking for a doggie bag at the Baccarat!]
Pay attention to the warm blinis on the second tier. See that light, reddish tint? The blini batter is infused with Ruschka, a Mariage Frères tea blend with citrus and Silver Needle, a rare white tea made from only the top buds of the tea plant. The infusion is one of the many small touches that differentiate the service and make it memorable. Others include appropriately knowledgeable but not obtrusive servers and sharp attention to details — like not overfilling each tea cup and offering perfectly polished silverware and glassware. It’s the little things that make a big difference in an affair so delicate as afternoon tea.
[The people pouring your tea know how to do it so it doesn’t slop over the sides. Plus the cutlery’s clean.]
Aside from caviar and accoutrements, the Tsar Nicholas II comes with a few additional courses, including an amuse-bouche of pickled sable with fingerling potatoes, sweets of Stoli Kvass sorbet infused with rooibos, and a pair of bonbons filled with Earl Grey caramel. Notably absent are the traditional trappings of savories, scones, and sweets. In their place, however, are exemplary lavender shortbreads, which were flaky and delicate — so good in fact, that Baccarat should consider offering them as a standalone item on the menu.
[Yeah, me neither. Turns out to be a teeny bite-sized bit of food usually offered for free at a restaurant. Literally, a mouth-amuser.]
As for the tea itself? The suggested pairing for this service is Lung Ching Impérial, also by the acclaimed Parisian tea-maker Mariage Frères. It’s made up of prized green Dragon Well and Long Jing leaves from China’s Zhejiang province, signaling a sophisticated (and welcome) departure from the tried-and-true Japanese teas so popular in New York and beyond. These tea leaves are pan-roasted and flat-pressed, rather than balled-up or twisted into little tea pellets as most green teas are.
[I’d pay a lot to avoid the vulgar balling and pelleting you see in most green tea preparation… Flat-pressing is incredibly labor-intensive, as in this advertisement for tea:
Crafting this tea is done entirely by hand, pressing all the leaves flat over hours for each tiny three to four pound batch.]
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Final paragraph:
Save for the Baccarat Blend, any of the dozen teas offered in the Grand Salon (including the Lung Ching Impérial) can be easily purchased online. So: Is Tsar Nicholas II worth it? If you approach the service not as a traditional afternoon tea service but as an over-the-top, multi-course caviar service, then the answer is yes. The Grand Salon is expansive and luxe, transporting and celebratory in its mood. You come for the food and service as much as the dazzling ambiance (which certainly factors into the price). But don’t expect an afternoon tea that will satisfy like a proper meal. Tsar Nicholas II is purely about pleasure.
[It’s worth it if you don’t want a proper meal, and if you think gorging on thirty grams of caviar is pleasurable.]
The street in front of UD‘s house.
Early sunset.
Seen from a screened window.
Just outside UD‘s office window (she’s not on campus today), one of the many food trucks along GW’s main drag is on fire.
Social media means that there are many excellent photographs of the smoke and flames. Apparently it’s the Falafel Bus. Lots of smoke – visible across the river in Virginia.
One student tweets:
Currently a falafel food truck on fire on campus and I just really feel like this is somehow something that would happen.
Yesterday UD had Indian food for lunch from the truck parked next to the Falafel Bus … There are food trucks everywhere, and maybe the student’s right that midday, with tons of students lined up for a meal, the situation is a grease fire waiting to happen.
Three injured people are at GW Hospital.
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A 2012 New York City fire department study on food trucks found several common fire hazards that could cause explosions, including the presence of multiple propane cylinders, hot fryer oil and grills, compressed gasses, high voltage electricity and bio hazards from unsafe sanitary conditions.
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Taken by a student from his dorm across the street.
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UPDATE: The likely cause:
A fire that destroyed a food truck Wednesday at George Washington University, leaving three workers injured, started when an employee tried to fill a gas generator while the vehicle was running and food was being prepared and served, according to the D.C. fire department.
A spokesman for the department said the fire started on the outside of the Falafel Bus and quickly spread to the interior, where fuel feeding hot stoves added to the fire’s intensity and helped it quickly spread…
Safety guidelines prohibit mobile vending trucks from refueling while engines are running and while still open to the public. Ideally, the fire department says, the trucks are shut down and driven to a gas station where generators can safely be refilled. At least, officials said, the trucks should be shut to the public, turned off and allowed to cool down before refueling.
As Oberlin College finally rids itself of a really florid Jewish-conspiracy devotee on its faculty, as we deal with yet another (there have been several in the last few years) serious embarrassment to a respectable institution — is there actually much of use to be said about this?
A racist conspiracy theory powered the political career of our president-elect. These things are apparently mainstream and can get you places. If some professors at our universities believe Jews brought down the World Trade Center and the New Town massacre was a federal government simulation meant to undermine gun rights, so what? For forty-two years a professor at Northwestern who seems to be a Nazi-symp has been (in the words of NU’s president) a “reprehensible… contemptible… embarrassment” to the place, and assuming the guy is hardy enough to continue teaching past his current eighty-three years of age, NU will continue being embarrassed for some time.
No doubt people with sociopathic and inane beliefs and belief systems crawl the woodwork of plenty of universities. Most are with-it enough to figure out that they should keep their views – at least in their most overt forms – out of their classrooms; but social media and other forms of publication betray them, for eventually some student or colleague is going to discover the place where they park their deepest, most delirious, convictions. Then the press, which is under the impression that professors have something to do with rational and responsible teaching/scholarship (no one cares if the dude bottling vitamins next to you in the vitamin factory writes Facebook postings blaming the Waco biker shoot-out on Muslims), will talk it up, and in seconds a university’s got one hell of a bimbo eruption on its hands.
But what is to be done? How can we avoid it? How should we think about it?
Well, as to the selection and cultivation of faculty on the fringe… Look to your recruitment committees, o ye sinners, and repent. Everyone knows that America has universities that pass all the way to the PhD people whose views move them from the provocative subversive margins (see Trump supporter S. Zizek) to flat-out beyond the pale, and it’s not that hard for hiring groups to check these people out. I mean, they’re not shy about putting what they think about the CIA, the Zionist conspiracy, and black presidents out there. Just take a look. Decide how important it is for your students to understand the links among the Trilateral Commission, King Edward’s abdication, and fluoridation.
As to how we should think about it – well, UD can offer this. People do not like evidence. They really do not like evidence. Americans have just elected an evidence-execrator. More than a few American colleges and universities teach their students that the earth is six thousand years old. Anything goes, and, as Don DeLillo points out in his hilarious novel White Noise, the more sources of information Americans enjoy, the stupider and more credulous they become. Why should one person with a vicious racist conspiracy get to be president, while another person with a vicious anti-semitic conspiracy have to lose her job? Just because, as one of her colleagues correctly points out, her arguments about the world lack evidence?
[Y]ou don’t generally hear such things being espoused by scholars with PhDs. That is because such unsubstantiated, unfalsifiable, speculative hypotheses are not only overwhelmingly wrong, but are also the opposite of research.
But nobody much cares about substantiation – including, on occasion, PhD and hiring committees. In fact a lot of people, inside and outside of universities, have a strong preference for big ol’ crazyass bullshit.
In 1906, Kakuzo Okakura told us what we’ve got to live through now, and how tea of all things can help us endure it. The Book of Tea paints the tea room and the tea ceremony within it as a refuge of stillness, simplicity, freedom, and meditation in a frenzied and convoluted world. In Don DeLillo’s novel Players, both of the main characters worry repeatedly that they have “become too complex” – incapable of a reflective inner life, and equally incapable of navigating the dizzying postmodern city outside themselves, a city full of egotistic pleasures, but at the same time oppressive and threatening. DeLillo’s postmodern city is Okakura’s early modern city greatly elaborated, and both writers seek ways to escape or at least distance themselves from it.
Starting with the roji – the garden to the tea room – one is meant
to break connection with the outside world, and produce a fresh sensation conducive to the full enjoyment of aestheticism in the tea-room itself. One who has trodden this garden path cannot fail to remember how his spirit, as he walked in the twilight of evergreens over the regular irregularities of the stepping stones, beneath which lay dried pine needles, and passed beside the moss-covered granite lanterns, became uplifted above ordinary thoughts. One may be in the midst of a city, and yet feel as if he were in the forest far away from the dust and din of civilisation. Great was the ingenuity displayed by the tea-masters in producing these effects of serenity and purity.
Irregularities matter; one seeks to avoid the modern cityscape’s inhuman and destabilizing tendency toward massive symmetrical perfection (one of the characters in Players works in one of the twin World Trade towers, but she often gets lost and can’t figure out which one) by creating a small, imperfect, unsymmetrical space. The core value and central gesture here is much like the one Roland Barthes finds in the paintings of Cy Twombley: “a blur, almost a blotch, a negligence.”
The simplicity of the tea-room and its freedom from vulgarity make it truly a sanctuary from the vexations of the outer world… Nowadays industrialism is making true refinement more and more difficult all the world over. Do we not need the tea-room more than ever?
Does true refinement sound too ladidah? Consider the real-world importance of the tea ceremony for Vaclav Havel during his years of imprisonment:
What comforted him most, almost to the point of obsession, was the ritual he made in preparing tea. It was, as he wrote Olga, a pleasure, an extravagance of a sort, something he could control in a thoroughly uncontrollable situation.
“When I was outside, I didn’t understand the cult of tea that exists in prison,” he writes. “…I wasn’t here long before grasping its significance and succumbing to it myself…Tea, it seems to me, becomes a kind of material symbol of freedom here: It is in effect the only fare that one can prepare oneself, and thus freely: When and how I make it is entirely up to me. In the preparation of it, I realize myself as a free being, as it were, capable of looking after myself.” …I schedule (tea) carefully, so it does not become a formless and random activity…”
Well, all of this is a variation on the currently fashionable business of “mindfulness,” which can be undertaken with varying degrees of formality and spirituality; but especially now that so many of us are in a sort of vexatious fog about the fate of our shared world, ol’ UD thinks it makes sense to think about/indulge in the strange formal/informal, ritualized/negligent gestures that somehow calm and focus and even transport us.
And equally special is this Deadspin update on that… peculiar institution.
Headline:
Baylor Confirms [Head Fooball Coach] Art Briles Knew About Alleged Gang Rape And Chose Not To Report It
Puke.
Former Baylor head football coach Art Briles and former athletic director Ian McCaw knew about an alleged group sexual assault and chose not to report it, according to a statement issued yesterday by the university.
A woman at the university, a student, told whoever would listen that five football players attacked her. At the highest levels, Baylor University did nothing.
This confirmation also indicates that the assistant coaches who spoke out last week in defense of Briles weren’t being truthful about his role in the scandal.
Moral squalor in defense of football is no vice.
Retch.
The majority of the football staff (including offensive coordinator Kendal Briles, son of Art) pushed back on [the claim about Briles] with a statement laying out an alternate version of events where the allegations were reported to the judicial affairs department. Now, the university has released a statement confirming that Briles and McCaw were both aware of the alleged group sexual assault and neither chose to report it.
Family values, university football.
Heave.
Baylor says that McCaw initially denied knowledge of the allegations when first asked about them in 2015, after other reports of sexual assault involving the football team began to surface. He then backtracked to tell the university that he had in fact been made aware of the allegations in 2013. The university’s statement does not say whether McCaw had any contact with the female athlete, but he said he chose not to report because he did not believe she wanted a report to be filed. This is not how university employee reporting responsibilities work.
AD leadership, Baylor-style. First lie through your teeth. Then when too much raping makes it impossible to continue to lie, tell the truth. Then lie again and say that your understanding, as AD, about reporting responsibilities, was that if someone doesn’t want you to report (itself almost certainly a lie) you don’t report.
Hurl.
Gag.
Spew.
A noise complaint led to the arrest of seven University of Albany students for hazing, police said.
Police said they arrived at an off-campus sorority house and found four young women being forced to eat mud and garbage.
Sorority members were also accused of pour[ing] fowl smelling liquids onto the women.
