[R]esearch has shown that NFL trust has slipped to a point where the league is comparable to brands such as Malaysia Airlines and Wal-Mart.

No need to worry, universities! I’m sure none of this holds true for college football.

Cuz he’s so smart.

Trout lilies? Never heard of them. Had to Google various descriptions for quite some time before they popped up. When I typed brown and green leaves I kept getting plant diseases, things that put brown splotches on leaves.

But I knew this was wrong. These were elegant splotchy leaves, a hardy ground cover scattered among my masses of vinca. Some of them had delicate yellow flowers dangling above the leaves.

So this was UD‘s own Trout Lily Discovery Walk – she happened on the things on one of her many walks along the paths she’s created through her back woods.

And how did they get there? I’ve lived here almost twenty years and I’ve never seen them before.

Margaret and Munro Leaf must have planted them, and it took all this time for them to flower.

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I found the image here.

UD has covered several stories involving, er, questionable physicians on the faculty of Columbia University. (Here’s the most recent.) The place attracts an odd lot, and of course med schools don’t pay much attention to their faculties, because there are absolutely tons of people vaguely affiliated with medical faculties and they’re doing God knows what.

One Columbia med school professor UD has always wondered about is Mehmet Oz, doc to the credulous unwashed masses. You see the guy get hauled up before Congress to explain why he’s pushing treatments in which he has massive financial interests; you watch him say stuff that… Well, let’s approach the latest news story about him by citing the headline in Gizmodo’s coverage:

DOCTORS ASK COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY TO
FIRE DR. OZ BECAUSE HE’S FULL OF SHIT

A bunch of docs at places other than Columbia have written a letter to the dean of the med school (they are “all distinguished,” the letter writers note). They want him removed from the premises.

And it’s actually a very good, very strong letter. Short and sour and way to the point – especially this bit:

Dr. Oz is guilty of either outrageous conflicts of interest or flawed judgements about what constitutes appropriate medical treatments, or both. Whatever the nature of his pathology, members of the public are being misled and endangered, which makes Dr. Oz’s presence on the faculty of a prestigious medical institution unacceptable.

Whatever the nature of his pathology. Ouch. Ooch. Eech.

Of course they can’t get rid of the dude. He’s probably already preparing a defamation whatever, plus his loyal minions will stage protests in their operating rooms or something. At best Columbia will muzzle him a little.

The heartland! The heartland! It doesn’t get more all-American than Nebraska – a state that, along with Missouri, UD (an evil coastal Jew married to Euro-trash) routinely forgets exists.

My headline quotes a commenter on an article about Lawrence Phillips, the latest proud son of that state’s university’s storied football team. Now that Phillips has murdered his cellmate, the University of Nebraska enjoys the same spate of publicity it did when its beloved Richie Incognito ran into some trouble.

The article’s a bit vague on the wonderful Nebraska coaching that brought Phillips to that school and kept him there –

Phillips was a superstar running back at Nebraska who was controversially allowed to keep playing for the Cornhuskers even after multiple run-ins with the law.

– but here’s a detail from another source:

[Coach Tom] Osborne reinstated Phillips in the same season the star dragged his girlfriend by the hair down a staircase.

Same sex marriage in Nebraska? Goodness me, no! But drag your girlfriend down the staircase by the hair and … instant football star!

And talk about coacha inconsolata. Get a load of the headline on an article about Osborne:

Lawrence Phillips Tragedy Continues to Haunt Former Nebraska Coach

Wow.

When asked about keeping Phillips on the team, the coach recently said that as a coach

“You take hits.”

Hit me again! That’s it, hit me again! What do I expect? I’m a coach! I can take it…

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UD thanks the many readers who sent her updates about Phillips’ amazing career, and the totally amazing University of Nebraska.

But he’s only one of so many glorious characters the University of Florida sports program can boast. Even if he’s otherwise disposed at the moment, there are so many other calendar models.

Fraud always cheats, always lies, always scams, always eventually files for bankruptcy.

Methinks I see some crooked mimic jeer
And grace my muse with this fantastic tax,
Turning my papers, asks “what have we here?”
Making withall some filthy antic face.
I fear no audit, IRS or CIA,
Nor shall my filing one exemption lose.
Think’st thou my wit shall keep the scofflaw way
That ev’ry bracket low invention goes?
Since returns thus in bundles are impress’d,
And ev’ry cheat doth dull our satiate ear,
Think’st thou my sum shall in those rags be dress’d
That ev’ry dowdy, ev’ry trull doth wear?
Up to my pitch no comm’n assessment flies:
I scorn all earthly dung-bred scarabies.

It’s all over but the rhetoric.

Unfortunately, hosting families there is also over, at least for awhile. There’s something about mass shootings, rapes on the beach, and the confiscation of large numbers of fire arms that seems to put families off.

I hate it, but I’ll say it. It’s time for us to bring the madness of Panama City Spring Break to a halt by staying away. Parents, if you allow your children to go into that snake pit then you are simply contributing to the problem.

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

“Shame on Panama City Beach for letting itself devolve into what it has become,” said Nicki E. Grossman, now president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau.

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

“We’re in chaos right now,” says resident Wes Pittman. “This Spring Break and the way it has evolved over the last couple years has become a blight on the entire community.”

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UD finds it fascinating in a Lord of the Flies way. Allow certain ingredients to be put together in a concentrated way in a specific location, and you can actually destroy civilized life.

UD‘s poetry MOOC (current number of students: 9,821) gets a nice write-up. (Got a nice write-up. It was written in 2013. She just discovered it.)

This summer, Mr UD will co-direct the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education in Chernivtsi, Ukraine.

It’s an offshoot of his and Peter Levine’s Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts University.

This is the beautiful building in which

meetings will take place.

Managing Doctor Mahnensmith’s erections was for two decades a full-time job at Yale University, and for a nearby dialysis clinic. Various ongoing court cases describe him accelerating himself into the backs of seated nurses until he exploded.

The complaints say that in November 2013, Dr. Mahnensmith went into a conference room with several of the plaintiffs and stood behind one of them “thrusting his pelvis in a sexual manner into the back of her chair rocking it to and fro.” After another of the plaintiffs told him to sit down, the papers say, “Dr Mahnensmith replied with a smirk, ‘I’m not finished yet,’ and continued to sexually gratify himself until announcing to the group that he was finished.”

… in Panama City Beach.

Next spring: Open-air beheadings.

… has died.

UD recalls studying The Tin Drum at Northwestern, with a visiting professor of German lit whose name she has forgotten. She thought then and thinks now it’s a spectacular novel.

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

He kept secrets.

The playwright Rolf Hochhuth said it was “disgusting” to recall that Mr. Grass had denounced President Ronald Reagan and Chancellor Helmut Kohl for their 1985 visit to a cemetery in Bitburg where Waffen-SS soldiers were buried, while hiding the fact that he had been in the SS himself.

… Tidal Basin.