“I will prove that as a former Olympic champion I still have perseverance,” the 69-year-old Schmitt said. “I will prove … that I can write a so-called Ph.D. dissertation and obtain my doctorate in this manner.”

No-Quit Schmitt announces the next phase of his Embarrass-Hungary-to-Death project.

… ALL forms of anxiety, including moral panic. You’d expect their organization’s recent appointment of the notorious Charles Nemeroff to their scientific council to have occasioned in them at least mild palpitations… But nah.

OTOH, there’s now a petition from some of their members asking them to rescind the appointment of the guy, which might produce a flutter or two…

If they do begin getting symptoms, they can consult their own Managing Stress in the Workplace page.

Meanwhile Gov. Robert Bentley announced that general funding to the Department of Public Safety and other state agencies would be cut by 10 percent because of revenue shortages. Public Safety director Hugh McCall said he hopes to avoid layoffs of state troopers and other employees.

They don’t need public safety. They’re safe in The Divine Huddle.

The Italian professor who led an experiment which initially appeared to challenge one of the fundaments of modern physics by showing particles moving faster than the speed of light, has resigned after the finding was overturned earlier this month.

In Part I, Hungary’s president was cleared of plagiarizing his university thesis, even though he plagiarized his university thesis. Now the university that gave him a summa for his efforts is going to strip him of his degree, even though he didn’t do anything wrong.

Hungary’s Semmelweis University plans to strip the country’s president of his doctorate for plagiarism even though an investigative committee cleared him of wrongdoing, its rector said on Thursday.

At this rate the guy’s going to have to resign the presidency, even though he did absolutely nothing wrong.

… If the doctor spends too much of your 15-minute visit typing or staring at a screen, you have to wonder: What if I have a symptom that just got missed?

“If the screen is turned away from the patient, they don’t know if you’re looking at their electronic health record or playing solitaire or looking up stocks,” notes Dr. Glen Stream of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Stanford now trains med students in the appropriate use of laptops while the students are with patients.

… has died.

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

XVI

Across a city from you, I’m with you,
just as an August night
moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep,
the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table
cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight —
or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side
watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin,
G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder,
falling asleep to the music of the sea.
This island of Manhattan is wide enough
for both of us, and narrow:
I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face
lies upturned, the halflight tracing
your generous, delicate mouth
where grief and laughter sleep together.

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

This is one of her series of love poems, Twenty-One Love Poems. I find it a truly powerful love poem, powered by the passion of Rich’s love for her lover — a passion, as the poem tells us, that transcends time and distance.

Across a city from you, I’m with you,

Miles away from each other in the big city, we’re nonetheless together, our closeness so close it’s metaphysical.

And then she remembers, so beautifully and delicately, a scene from their life together. We’re as close now as we were then, at that moment of intense closeness, intense perfection:

just as an August night
moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep,
the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table
cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight —
or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side
watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin,
G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder,
falling asleep to the music of the sea.

One night, during one of our summers at the sea, the weather was so warm, it felt as though we were wrapped in a private, protected inlet of warmth, a world entirely our own… How glorious to lie in that bed after a day of creative work together and see “the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table” on which lay the instruments of our pursuits – brushes, books – with the clear well-used wood of that table conveying the authenticity and clarity of our summer lives. We’re just as close now as we were then, gazing at an orchard misted with seawater, listening to Mozart and to the music of the sea – beauty, natural and composed, all around us…

One of the great beauties, for UD, of this sort of modern poetry, is its strange and moving personal fabric which is not personal, because whether it’s Frank O’Hara or Adrienne Rich in this associative mood, writing this weave of place and time, UD‘s been there, listening to similar particular music over the music of the sea, watching the sunset through a screen door, and, like Rich, at once excited by the perfection of the moment, and about to fall asleep.

Great poets evoke these moments, these specific and fantastic atmospherics, generously; they make room for our own variations on them.

This island of Manhattan is wide enough
for both of us, and narrow:
I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face
lies upturned, the halflight tracing
your generous, delicate mouth
where grief and laughter sleep together.

Wide and narrow; grief and laughter – all oppositions are resolved in love. And all distances overcome, as the disparate lovers are brought so close together that I can hear your breath.

Laced with a deadly zinc phosphide, wildlife officials predict the rats will die after consuming it while burrowed underground.

Scary wildlife officials.

The world press is doing its best to report the plagiarism that wasn’t plagiarism story. Sample headline:

HE COPIED, BUT HE’S NOT A PLAGIARIST

Hungary’s president has also “become a favored target of Internet users, who mock him with memes like Ph+D = (Ctrl+C) + (Ctrl+V).”

… realize just how powerful a condemnation of their school they’re expressing.

Roughly a third of the classes I have taken towards my bachelor’s degree have been general education requirements, and those have almost all been lecture, test, repeat. Since most of the information we are tested over is straight out of the textbook, is it really necessary for me to be there and watch a professor read from PowerPoint slides for an hour?

Is this in fact the way general education is taught at Southern Illinois University?

Never! And this book tells you how to keep doing it.

Full of helpful, step-by-step, descriptions of violence against women, A Gift for the Muslim Couple is sold out at this bookstore, but I’m sure it’s on back order.

… transition to Division I (details here) to notice who they’re hiring. As chair of a department.

One of her students has complained to a dean, but, you know… it’s just an anonymous student… Fuck him. And the staff members who keep resigning? Ditto…

But hey… WE’RE GONNA BE DIVISION I!!!

“PowerPoint is not very interactive and (presentations) tend to be very canned,” DeLoach said. “Students are more engaged when a professor is passionate, and it’s hard to be passionate (with a canned presentation).”

I’m filming a series of lectures – something I’ve never done before – and the experience brings home to me the curious fact that I never shut up.

The knack of never shutting up is a nifty one to have if you’re a professor. Professors lecture constantly; and there’s the extra matter of directing discussion, responding extemporaneously to comments, holding forth during office hours. Mix in campus and professional meetings, and being a motormouth is all to the good.

I talk fast too. I’ve had to slow myself down for these lectures, which are going out to the world. I think I enunciate pretty well, even talking fast, but I have to slow down for the lectures.

Even when I’ve got bronchitis I’m jabbering. I might stop singing when my lungs get so bad I can’t make a good tone; but I never stop talking.

UD grew up with lots of animals – dogs (her mother bred them), guinea pigs (her father experimented on them), etc. And she always talked to them when there weren’t human beings to talk to – long monologues incorporating their many nicknames, their odd and winsome ways, memories of how they behaved when they were babies… At the moment, Les UDs have no dog, and UD still talks her strange dog talk. To the air.

Also, when there aren’t human beings to talk to, UD sings. She used to be uncomfortable, singing to herself on metro platforms and all, but now people with wires coming out of their ears talk out loud everywhere, so she’s comfortable.

UD gathers she’s pretty silent while sleeping, but her dream self blabs like mad.

Of course I knew I never shut up before I started the lecture series – my husband, a rather quiet person, has pointed this out to me. He has said You never shut up, especially during conversations in which I leap into his sentences, helpfully finishing them for him. Like some professors (the non-mouthy ones), he’s a careful, deliberative speaker, and you have to be willing to wait, sometimes, for him to formulate a thought. I can’t wait. I want to talk.

I can go on and on and on, class after class, about characters like Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener, who never says anything, or Kafka’s man of few words, the hunger artist, or Beckett’s Krapp with his sputtering tape. As the twentieth century wears on, twentieth century literary characters say less and less, and UD says more and more. She can yammer about the eloquence of silence til the cows come home. She’s like a preacher who gasses on every Sunday for decades about the ineffability of God.

She wants her students to be like that – verbally fluent, in on the bull session, piping up. “Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality,” writes Simone Weil. Joy is the overblowing of one’s bag of wind.

An investigating committee has cleared Hungary’s president of plagiarizing his 1992 doctoral thesis, despite the inclusion of many pages copied from other sources and a long list of errors.

A five-member committee at Budapest’s Semmelweis University says academics at the then-independent University of Physical Education should have noticed and called attention to similarities between large parts of Schmitt’s thesis analyzing the Olympic Games and works by other authors.