The University of Idaho is paying a Minnesota consultant who spends less than two weeks a month on the Moscow campus $112,500 to serve as its “chief inspiration officer,” according to public records.

This one takes UD‘s breath away. Read the whole thing.

The only precedent she can find is from her favorite university, Southern Illinois Carbondale. Remember?

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

Update: Chronicle of Wasted Time. And Money. DO NOT READ if you are currently on any form of depression medication.

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

Update: Google Image, Chief Inspiration Officer.

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

Gotcha.

… only the beginning for Oprah. Misleading millions of people with patent bullshit is what she does for a living.

[Oprah] Winfrey allowed a physician called Christiane Northrup to claim – in contradiction to almost all scientific evidence – that “in many women, thyroid dysfunction develops because of an energy blockage in the throat region [after] a lifetime of ‘swallowing’ words one is aching to say”.

Last year, one of them – with a dozen drugs in his system – flew his plane into a mountain.

Now one of them drowned in his home pool. He couldn’t swim.

Atherton police on Sunday said they are waiting for an autopsy before investigating the apparent accidental drowning death of Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford professor who inspired the co-founders of Google and influenced a generation of computer scientists.

“We’re kind of in limbo,” Atherton police Sgt. Tim Lynch said. “It could have been a simple accident or many other things.”

One of Motwani’s friends said the professor held a party at his home Thursday night with Stanford colleagues and students to celebrate the end of the school year. He had gone outside after the guests left to wind down and enjoy a cigar. The family’s nanny found Motwani the next morning apparently drowned in the pool, said Vish Mishra, a friend and colleague of Motwani’s…

The babies are out – ugly and gray,
with loose pink gullets and random
feathers. They’re surprisingly big.

The parents seem involved in a
perpetual feeding cycle. One
stands motionless on an edge
of the deep, papery, twiggy
nest — really, at this point,
after two weeks of rain, the
thing looks like rubbish, but it’s
held through all the storms — while
the other flies away. It returns in
minutes to deposit worms and flies
into the small mouths that make a
low buzzy sound — like crickets —
in excitement.

When I stand nearby, everyone
freezes. The mother’s huge liquid
black eye is unseeing. I’ve hung
a new bird feeder on a low branch
of the dogwood in the front yard,
in case the thrushes want a treat.

Sunflower chips
and dried
mealworms.

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

The collages are the work of Randel Plowman.

… UD, as always, treats you to a series of posts about James Joyce and his novel, Ulysses.

Here’s something from an article in Thursday’s Guardian:

If you’re going to read any of Ulysses then it might as well be the racy bits at the end. And so it was with a fabulously rare first edition of the James Joyce novel which today sold for £275,000, the highest price recorded for a 20th-century first edition.

The astonishingly well-preserved and previously lost edition of the book, bought surreptitiously in a Manhattan bookshop despite it being banned in the US, was sold to a private buyer in London on the opening day of one of the world’s biggest antiquarian book fairs.

… The more salacious bits are in the last episode, where Molly Bloom’s long stream-of-consciousness soliloquy ends in her orgasmic “yes I said yes I will Yes”.

This first edition is unopened – apart from that last episode. The copy is number 45 of the first 100 and is printed on fine Dutch handmade paper.

The dealer who made the sale, Pom Harrington, said the book was one of only four copies of that first edition print run, all signed by Joyce, which had been unaccounted for. “In terms of collectability, Ulysses is considered to be the number one 20th-century book. This is such a find and it is in such fabulous, pristine condition.”

Throughout the 1920s the book was banned in the UK and the US and any import or sale involved a degree of subterfuge.

This copy was sold at the subversive Manhattan bookshop Sunwise Turn, an eclectic shop where patrons could also pick up Peruvian fabrics or the mystic teachings of Gurdjieff. It was bought by a Mrs Hewitt Morgan and then passed down the family, stored in its original box, unopened and away from the light.

“The colour is amazing – this lovely Aegean Sea, Greek flag blue which would normally have darkened into a more dirty blue but because it has been in a box it is a complete thing of beauty,” said Harrington….

Here’s a bit from the racy, salacious, orgasmic section. We’re inside the head of Molly Bloom, an attractive Irish woman in her thirties who’s in bed at night, lying beside her sleeping husband. She’s had rough sex a few hours earlier with one of her lovers, her singing partner — she’s a performer — Blazes Boylan, and she’s thinking back to that.

yes when I lit the lamp yes because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull it out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure

Ulysses is notorious for its difficulty, but really, how – er – hard is this? No punctuation, true, but Joyce is capturing the endless stream of her half-asleep consciousness as she drifts off, so punctuation wouldn’t be realistic. As you read, though, ain’t it pretty clear where the periods, commas, and question marks go? Let’s paraphrase, with punctuation.

When I lit the lamp I was amazed to realize that he must have had three or four orgasms with me. What an enormous penis he has! Erect, it was so enormous I thought it would explode. Since I believe the size of men’s noses indicates the size of their penises, I’m surprised his nose is so small.

I’d gone to a lot of trouble to perfume and dress myself for him, but he just threw me down and did me.

And really – his penis was so hard and big. Like iron, like a crowbar. He must have eaten a dozen oysters — oyster being an aphrodisiac — to get that sexually aroused.

He sang during some of this. And he sang well.

But back to his penis. It was so big it totally filled me up. Afterwards, he must have eaten a whole sheep.

As for my anatomy: Why did God make women with a big hole in the middle of them? Men are so determined to get in there and drive it up in you – they’re like horses panting away. It’s quite bestial, not human at all, and the vicious look in his eyes as he was at it so disconcerted me that I half-shut mine.

Considering how big his penis is, he doesn’t produce that much come. Which is just as well, since I don’t want to get pregnant.

It’s quite annoying to me that men get all the pleasure.

… is one of the country’s least impressive.

Last year, Ron Turner, the Bears’ offensive coordinator, was paid $235,000 by the U. of I. in the final year of a settlement reached after he was fired five years ago — an amount that’s more than the president of Governors State University made.

… that technology is the solution to the campus budget crisis.

[L]et’s develop more online courses, because there’s no classroom limit. Instructors don’t have to lecture, so pre-prepared texts could be uploaded for students, and an expert scholar isn’t needed. Videos and Powerpoint slideshows will fill the time and can be used repeatedly, saving costs.

The profound teacher-student discussions in “chat rooms” may get unwieldy with hundreds of students logging in, but most will vanish soon enough when they realize that no one knows they are there. It’s not much of an education, but it’s cheap, and there [are] few enough jobs out there for “graduates” anyway.

From a comment thread at Inside Higher Ed.

ROSE: SAT::

1.  Student: Test

2.  Player: Problem

3.  Flower: Day

4.  Verb: Verb

5.   Dozier: SAT

… about ethics pledges and MBA programs and, in altering its headline, made it far more interesting.

The original headline:

A PROMISE TO BE ETHICAL IN AN ERA OF IMMORALITY

The ProJo headline:

IN AN ERA OF IMMORTALITY, MBAS PRESS FOR CODE OF CONDUCT

ProJo’s focus on eternal life puts the question of how graduates of MBA programs conduct their business in sharp relief.  If you live forever, do you have a special obligation to be ethical?  Or, knowing that whatever you do, you will continue to exist, do you not really care whether you are good or bad?  Or again, are we to understand immortality here as eternal life in the Lord after physical death?  If so, should MBAs be ethical in order to protect their eternal souls?  In an era of secularism, are religious warrants sufficient to restrain unethical behavior?

… you could possibly want: Athletic. Administrative. Money. Everything. University Diaries has to step lively to keep up with it.

Now the president of this hapless school, where faculty and students suffer constant cutbacks and compromises of quality, has taken a 35-percent bonus —$115,000 on top of his already very big salary. The trustees have decided he should be rewarded for a job well done.

William P. Tucker, an eloquent and outraged writer, asks him to refuse the bonus. Seems to think the man is greedy.

Tucker also knows there’s no way James Ammons will not take this money. I mean, he can’t. The trustees insist.

… the state of Arizona now boasts the largest human-designed chasm in the world.

Gaze in wonder at the gap between the University of Arizona’s students and their professors in redesigned Centennial Hall:

Incoming UA freshmen — already paying the highest tuition in university history — could find themselves sitting in some of the largest classes in the country this fall.

After promising that state budget cuts in the past year would lead to larger class sizes, University of Arizona officials will offer three classes in Centennial Hall, the largest of which will seat 1,200 students.

Officials plan to spend roughly $300,000 to retrofit the 2,500-seat performance hall with Wi-Fi, computers and projection equipment that will have to be mobile to accommodate the hall’s primary purpose of hosting music, dance and other cultural performances.

… Those involved say the courses will be successful despite their large size because of the quality lecturers heading the classes and a new pilot program to help mentor and support students.

However, an administrator who’s helping organize the plan admitted that it’s not ideal.

Another administrator who recently was removed from the project and an outside teaching expert also cautioned there’s a lot that could go wrong.

Chief among their concerns: Centennial’s seats don’t have lap boards, meaning students won’t have a place to take notes. There also is the difficulty of holding the attention of hundreds of laptop-toting students in a large hall, said Joni Finney, a teaching expert and vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

“The tendency is to reduce excess expenses and pack them in like a cattle car, and whoever makes it out, makes it,” she said. “That’s really not doing students any kind of service.”

… “My biggest concern [one professor remarked] is not keeping their attention on the lecture, but what they would be doing on their laptops,” she said. [Bit confusing there. If you’re worried about what they’re doing on their laptops, aren’t you worried that their attention is not on the lecture?  Or are you worried that while they’re listening intently they’re also pleasuring themselves?]

… taken down the webpage of Blazej Kot, a computer science graduate student now a suspect in the death of his wife, a post-doc in biomedicine at Cornell.

Looks as though in a rage Kot killed her, then torched the apartment and attempted suicide. Police got to him before he did away with himself.

Be there or be square. June 13. Warwick. Remember: This year is the 350th anniversary of his birth.

They’re doing the song Sweeter Than Roses, which UD considers the sexiest song alive.

UD’s many Henry Purcell posts may be found here.

… UD had finished her Asian salad and was digging in again to Google News when a very old lady maneuvered her walker to the table next to UD‘s. There are lots of assisted living joints around Panera, so the place is full of oldies.

This one was lovely — a full head of white hair, lively brown eyes, clear skin. She had dressed up for lunch in an off-white pantsuity sort of thing. Her attractive look put downscale UD — black shorts she grabbed off a street rack in Key West, a stained black shirt, a green scarf, stupid teeny white socks, scuffed sneakers — to shame. Under her shirt UD wore a bra so old she expected it to explode off of her body at any moment. (This actually did happen once to UD, who has a tendency to hold on to clothes longer than she should. Her bra exploded. She handled it with aplomb.) (Bras explode under a variety of conditions.)

Anyway, UD‘s bra is not the point. The point is that this woman looked good.

UD exchanged a few words with the woman, who worried that her walker might be in UD’s way. Not at all, UD assured her; and, now that she had a really good look at this woman’s eyes, she felt like talking to her at greater length. Especially once she determined that the woman was alone.

“I’m ninety-two years old,” she said in a very strong New York accent. “I lived in Far Rockaway for years. Worked for Social Security. But my son-in-law moved here, so I live in Ring House across the street. They provide breakfast and dinner. I like to go out for lunch.”

“Is there a traffic light at the crossing?”

“Yes. There’s a light. It’s safe. I like to go to the Italian place sometimes. Sometimes this place. But this place can get very crowded, and it’s not easy for me to make my way.”

“Do you miss New York?”

“No. I like it here. And I get away a lot. I’ve been on thirteen cruises. I’m ninety-two. [She repeated herself a lot.] I like the food on the cruises, and the entertainment’s great. I pay for my son-in-law and his family and we all get rooms with balconies.”

“I hope it’s okay if I tell you that you look absolutely wonderful for ninety-two.”

She smiled.  “People tell me that a lot.”

“Do you know how to use a computer?”  UD glanced at her laptop.

“No, no.  I’m too old for that sort of work.”

An anxious young woman with a French accent — UD thought she might be Haitian — suddenly appeared.

“Mommy,” she said, “I’m thinking I’ll walk you back.  I’m thinking I’ll wait for you to finish your lunch.  I’m thinking you shouldn’t walk back by yourself.”

“This is Janine,” the lady told me.  “She takes care of me for a few hours every morning.  But she’s so devoted that she hangs around after that too.  Thank you, Janine.”

“You’ve been looking after Mommy,” Janine said to me.  “Thank you.”

… at Harvard. There are plenty of nuances in COI, and the piece touches on some of them.

Comments from a Harvard med student:

“This isn’t about a few bad apples,” says David C. Tian, a first-year medical student who joined the AMSA protesters early this year in their quest to revamp the school’s conflict of interest policies. “This is a systemic issue that requires policy-making on the institutional level. Harvard Medical School should represent the practice of medicine as a whole.”

… “Starting with our third year, our teachers are doctors who are interacting with industry on a daily basis in ways that the Medical School currently doesn’t standardize or set standards for,” Tian told The Crimson last fall.