Some good news.

But this frees her up to be appointed Secretary of State.

… where you can rent a handgun lickety-split and blow your head off no muss no fuss. In the last two years, two Purdue students have indeed applied the ballistics the range offers in order to solve their personal problems forever.

When students use exactly the same method/location like this, the poor school gets to worry about copycat suicides.

Shooting ranges are somewhat popular places nationwide to commit suicide – it happens enough that many have rules that no one can come in alone, everyone has to be assessed in various ways by staff, etc.

There have apparently been three student suicides at Purdue in the two-year span. (The third was more conventional: The student simply walked outside to a wooded location and used his own gun.) Yikes.

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PS: Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes: Editors at the University of Texas San Antonio newspaper should know that you can edit stuff out of what people say. You don’t, for instance, have to scrupulously retain every one of this student’s likes:

“It was kind of an eye awakener, there, for me a little bit. But there’s, like, people, like, go through this, like, on a daily basis, which is really sad,” she added.

So after the latest bloodletting at the school’s 100th homecoming a few days ago, officials have closed the campus, and everyone’s gotta wear an i.d. at all times. The tyke who likes to shoot his machine guns into crowds at events like homecomings has been arrested, while sixteen people try not to die of the wounds he inflicted. One person has already died.

Ooh, wonder what his motive was! I’m thinking someone inadvertently shoved him. It was crowded and all.

No, you don’t have to react that strongly to an image of a woman in a hijab, and yes, hijabs obviously should be tolerated (UD‘s readers know she ain’t crazy about them); but the city of Montreal was kinda dumb to feature an image of a hijabi beetled over by two men in western garb in its WELCOME TO THE CITY sign in the town hall. The mayor has announced that it will be taken down — oodles of Montrealers have complained that this pic represents quite the opposite of the secularity near and dear to their hearts — and though there’s the usual insistence that acts of this sort will bring Montreal’s democratic values crashing down, everyone knows that this will not happen.

A small point also, but UD has noticed that, in discussions of the hijab, people tend to overlook the larger total body wrapping that often accompanies the headgear and certainly features in this image. It ain’t just that Montreal is boasting that it welcomes the hijab; it welcomes the total draping of the female body in a modesty gesture that tells the world the female body must be hidden. I wonder why it must be hidden.

Anyway, you’re welcome to traipse about Mont Royal all covered up except for your face and hands, but Montrealers have a right to object to that look for women being made a symbol of their city.

This blog, recognizing that fatal shootings are standard at university homecoming events, now calls homecoming guncoming, that special time of year when young Americans gather, get excited, and do what they do when lots of them are armed.

For Tuskegee’s all-important one hundredth guncoming the other day, bang went the weapons and down went the students, faculty, alumni, and other celebrants. One dead, multiple serious injuries. And of course PLENTY of raw footage from various vantage points for you to enjoy. “The amount of bullets shot last night in Tuskegee amidst their homecoming weekend celebration is terrifying,” writes one audience member. “I couldn’t even finish the video.” (Reminder from SOS: The correct word is NUMBER, not AMOUNT.)

The world’s press is covering this latest guncoming. American rituals are so interesting.

See you next year, Golden Tigers! Crouch low.

— PLUS as a special bonus you get to live down the street from Cletus Spuckler and his AR15.

Cletus don’t right know why he sits on his porch shooting off a pistol and the AR but he just do it and neighbors call the cops and Cletus shoots at the cops even though they very clearly and loudly tell him to put the guns down.

Maybe he celebrating the election. Maybe he just all drunk as a skunk.

UD thinks most likely his thinking was something like “Paid 4 thou for these fuckers and gonna use em.” An economic decision.

Monroe Louisiana isn’t Number One every year, but it’s always up there, esp. for violent crime, and this blog has followed its bloody fortunes for years. “If you want nothing more out of life than bass fishing, drugs, deer hunting, corrupt cops, high school football and crime, then Monroe is the place for you,” says a knowledgeable source, and UD doesn’t see “a college education” on that list.

There are four schools in and around Monroe, with Grambling a huge violence standout, but get a load of this wittle Louisiana Tech student’s dorm room! Not just tons of Nazi material; not just drugs all over the place being readied for sale; but “a 9mm handgun with one magazine, a .38 revolver, and the lower portion of an M4. An M4 is similar to an AR-15.” The tyke was manufacturing machine guns in there.

Even by San Diego State standards, this is really something. Good ol’ Monroe.

Kakuzo Okakura’s 1906 Book of Tea, standard reading in aesthetics courses, sets out The Way of Tea Retreat, sets apart the tea-room as the very heart of considered, intentional, beautiful separation of oneself from a world which has suddenly become crushingly vile.

The littleness and fragility of the tea-room expresses its temporary nature: This is no permanent escapist chamber, but rather a place to which we have recourse, perhaps daily, to learn and relearn the discipline of “properly regulating our own existence on this tumultuous sea of foolish troubles which we call life… The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings. Taoism accepts the mundane as it is and, unlike the Confucians or the Buddhists, tries to find beauty in our world of woe and worry.” And the art of tea – Teaism – lies in the quiet preparation and enjoyment of the smoky transformative brew which will somehow in its modest way be part of reconciling you to a hateful world, be part of allowing you a kind of flourishing within it. “We stagger in the attempt to keep our moral equilibrium, and see forerunners of the tempest in every cloud that floats on the horizon. Yet there is joy and beauty in the roll of billows as they sweep outward toward eternity. Why not enter into their spirit, or [even] ride upon the hurricane itself?”

Inside the personal sanctuary of the tea-room, where “even in the daytime the light in the room is subdued, for the low eaves of the slanting roof admit but few of the sun’s rays. Everything is sober in tint from the ceiling to the floor; the guests themselves have carefully chosen garments of unobtrusive colors. The mellowness of age is over all,” you may engage in soul-reanimation. The universe is dimmed for the ignition of your spark, something in the way of Henri Bergson’s élan vital, the creative energy immanent in us and subject always to diminishment by the world of other people. “It is an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment,” because all effort is toward the emergence of your presence and spiritedness; “fugitiveness is suggested in the thatched roof, frailty in the slender pillars, lightness in the bamboo support, apparent carelessness in the use of commonplace materials,” because the strength at issue here is your own.

Retreat, as of today, is in the air. We dynamic postmoderns will race through the 5 Stages (Incredulity, Anger, Irony, Snark, RETREAT), and conclude on the one that will have us eyeing that extra, kind of do-nothing room in the house and sizing it up as a site of Stoic Elaboration — a place where you bolster yourself with Marcus Aurelius and with bolsters.

This sort of thing.  Ideally, you want high windows and a view - urban or rural, but something of interest to contemplate as you sip your Senecan Brew.  On stormy days, switch to What does not kill me makes me stronger-esque Nietzschean aphorisms.  Or the astringent poetry of Weldon Kees.

... Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love
Are but interruptions. And the world, like a beast, impatient and quick,
Waits only for those who are dead. No death for you. You are involved.

You are involved; no point, even in your tranquil new tearoom, in being uninvolved.  Daily books and teas and views stimulate and calm you (all good tea stimulates and calms), and ready you and steady you for the bellowing bastards abroad.  Your tearoom is indeed a retreat from imperiling stupidity; but, you know, as Henry James put it:

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

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More on emergent tearoom culture after I sit on the beach for awhile.

And UD will proceed on the assumption that a democratic system is in fact what the people continue to want.

For me, it’s a dark day. But an American majority has spoken, and respecting the will of the people lies at the heart, etc.

And so. We proceed.

Capitol rioter who broke flagpole over officer saw Trump as replacement father figure, attorneys say in bid for leniency

The main thing to convey is the silver blue of the sand; but all elements – all – shone with overwhelming clarity.

Words like pellucid, electrical. Gulls cut hard against the ultramarine. You could feel the sunlight on your back at four pm in November.

The unseasonable. The uncanny. The great calm of the ocean summoned a mirage of whales. The great sweep of beach and water.

And so your psyche sought the same level, the same evenness of temper; and the land and seascape was so overwhelming

That it wasn’t serenity but absence: The surrender of your turbulence to an airtight argument.

… so can we!

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LOLOLOL

[In a 2016 presidential run,] Sandu faced open discrimination during the race for being a single woman, and was openly attacked by former Moldovan president Vladimir Voronin who accused her of betraying “family values” and calling her the “laughingstock, the sin and the national disgrace of Moldova” in remarks widely regarded as profoundly misogynistic. She rejected the insults in an interview, replying that “I never thought being a single woman is a shame. Maybe it is a sin even to be a woman?”

UD voted awhile back, by mail, and would now rather ponder the cosmos than catastrophe. Catastrophic it would certainly be if my fellow Americans carry the clown show to victory, but meanwhile there are dolphins riding the waves, and there are meteor showers, and UD wants to see them.

Silly police lieutenant John Rodgers has not been listening in church! His announcement to the Ohioans in his district that he’ll let them die if they’re Democrats overlooks the fact that, as a saved Christian, his job is not to help Satan’s spawn SURVIVE the Rapture: God has decreed that he need only enjoy his own transport to Heaven. Recall the old verse:

We are the pure and chosen few, and all the rest are damned.

There’s room enough in hell for you — we don’t want heaven crammed.