It’s mainly about dead and mangled stuff lately. A sick rabbit hunched under the daylilies while I gardened last week; its flattened remains now add a touch of gray (with skeleton) to the area it must have staggered to in front of the rhododendrons. While Les UDs dined outside last night (July/August has been shockingly low-humidity), three crazed deer came bombing out of the woods. They’d been fighting or playing or running hard. One had a loose antler hanging over its face.

Dead, mangled, and endangered: Caroline, UD‘s master-gardener neighbor, pointed out to UD that butterflies have been pretty scarce this season. UD is so thrilled by the hummingbird sightings that she hasn’t really registered the relative absence of butterflies; but yes, now that she thinks about it, there have been fewer this year. The Washington Post explains the natural and human-made reasons for the drop in number.

Les UDs usually go to their upstate New York house in August, but they seem to have decided to stay in Garrett Park, so while preparing to teach in a couple of weeks, UD can also do a lot of garden and yard work. She loves garden and yard work. She looks forward to raking leaves.

By the way: Faithful readers know UD is a serious tea drinker. She usually goes in for black fruit teas (Mariage Freres’ Marco Polo is an old favorite), but is lately giving green a try (healthier, blahblah). Predictably, they’re very weak to her dissolute palate. Plus someone who visited her at some point not long ago gave her a canister of Pu-erh tea, and she’s been sipping some of that while writing this post. It’s certainly stronger than the greens she’s been sampling… It’s black Pu-erh, after all… But there’s the same struggle with that grassy organic taste…

Well all UD can say is that if your outfit’s always throwing around words like honor – and hey phrases like sacred honor – you deserve everything you get when you recruit shits to win football games.

UD has often said on this blog that she has no serious problem with honestly scummy schools like Clemson and Auburn which like monks who throughout their day repeat All for Jesus are forthcoming about being All For Sports. She’ll cover them on this blog because they’re good for a laugh, but she won’t give them a hard time. They’re not like Chapel Hill or Penn State. They don’t insist that they are real universities. They’re good ol’ boys. They’re trying to be bad. Their drunken tailgates are charming.

Nor do they, like the Air Force Academy – for which, in pretty much its entirety, you and I pay – natter on about their crispy ironed integrity and insist that we view their rows of bright behatted faces with unmitigated admiration. UD dislikes hypocrisy, and recent reports (UD thanks John, a reader, for alerting her to the story) confirm that the Air Force Academy has been very naughty along those lines.

Let’s start with academic honor, academic integrity, sacred academic honor and integrity, shall we?

[A]thletes cheated on tests, and in one instance, an economics professor created a special course for two basketball players – and taught it around their game and practice schedules.

Athletes cheating en masse is nothing – totally routine – but look at that thing about the special course. Julius Nyang’oro fans are going to want to keep an eye on that as details emerge. Read the article in the Gazette for damning enough details; but wait, because there will be more.

And yeah the rapes and the drugs, the whole shebang, at our most sacred honorable tax funded university…

The new superintendent “pulled coaches aside for a recent meeting and told them continued ethical lapses would send the school down the path to ‘Penn State,'” but she’s just a girl. Her All for Football jock predecessor, Mike Gould

ran the academy for three years before passing command to [Michelle] Johnson in 2013. The former academy football star required his staff to provide weekly updates on efforts to instill what he called “fanatical institutional pride” in cadets.

He ended most emails with “Go Falcons!” Johnson ends her emails with “Respectfully.”

See what I mean? Just a girl. No Falcon fanaticism at all. She needs to watch this.

Gould had everybody on campus cheering for the sports teams, including professors.

Former academy economics professor David Mullin remembered one meeting of the academic staff. “They had half the auditorium shout ‘Knowledge!'” he said. “The other half of the room shouted ‘Power!'”

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The new girl superintendent needs to watch this: POWER.

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UD figures that, professorial self-respect-wise, right behind mandated spot checks of Chapel Hill faculty to make sure they’re meeting their classes (a gift from fake-classes Nyang’oro that keeps on giving) would be academic meetings in which university-provided cheerleaders make you shout out KNOWLEDGE and POWER.

That’s it, baby! GO FOR IT. TWENTY-FIVE MIL!!!!

There’s no doubt your Reagan book has been plagiarized, and quite grotesquely at that, with your plagiarist contorting himself in various postmodern ways to pretend that’s not happening:

[I]n “A Note on Sources,” [Rick] Perlstein writes that rather than “burden the end pages” of his book with footnotes, “my publisher and I have decided to put the source notes for my book online, with clickable URLs whenever possible.” He gives his website, rickperlstein.net. [Craig] Shirley’s work was noted more than 100 times online, a spokesman for the publisher told the New York Post.

… “Perlstein’s personal delusions notwithstanding, the only possible aim of an arrangement like this is to discourage the confirming of citations,” [one reviewer] said.

So yes you’ve been wronged, in a variety of ways. But TWENTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS. UD has to hand it to you. You’re right up there with the University of Virginia student who got roughed up a bit by some cops and has sued for… Hold on, lemme check the post… FORTY MILLION. (Update on the UVa thing: VICTORY! She got $200,000 and some change. Plus she gets to go through life as the jerk who sued Virginia for forty million dollars.) Though now that I check her demands, I find myself disappointed in you. Why only 25? Why not 40? 50? Why not 500 million?

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UPDATE: The story jumps to the New York Times.

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Update: Jesse Walker makes a persuasive case against the charge of plagiarism. There’s no doubt that Perlstein picked up various words and phrases from Shirley’s descriptions of events about which both authors wrote, and it was this that initially made me call plagiarism. But I suppose what it is, instead, is laziness. It doesn’t rise to plagiarism because it’s not extensive enough.

Two football players [just recruited to play for Capital University]… were taken into custody after a SWAT standoff [in Texas] Thursday night that lasted more than three hours. They’re accused of several burglaries, including stealing high-powered rifles.

Both appeared before a judge Friday morning on charges they burglarized a home in the northern part of Harris County.

… [At another home, investigators recovered] five AR-style weapons [and] a handgun…

If these two aren’t ready to join American university football culture, UD doesn’t know who is. They’ve already got it all.

And it never has had any comment since the curious 2008 death of one of its faculty in a private plane crash. People who knew John Borchers at Stanford added their praise to this glowing obituary; and only if you bother scrolling down to the very last comment on the story do you discover (details here) that Stanford had hired a man with ten years of substance abuse behind him, and that Borchers took his plane up with the following substances in his body:

In addition to cocaine and Prozac, toxicology tests by the FAA turned up opiates, mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic drugs…

A raging addict was treating addicts at Stanford University, and Stanford never got anywhere near acknowledging that, much less explaining why it thought it was safe to have this man in patient care.

… Borchers was … under investigation by the Medical Board of California and in danger of losing his medical license. According to the NTSB, an April 22, 2008, accusation by the [Medical Board of California] “documented a history of substance dependence and abuse for more than 10 years preceding the accident, involving the misuse of at least four different substances (including alcohol) and treatment through at least six different programs for substance-related disorders during that period.”

A raging addict took a plane up at night, and if he hadn’t managed to crash it into a mountain, he might well have crashed in nearby Incline Village, killing people.

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So, the problem with failing to acknowledge mistakes like this is that they keep getting made. Look, for a recent case, at how many incidents it took before the University of New Mexico dismissed its chief lobbyist.

Chief lobbyist. The person who represented the university to the state government. A huge alcoholic, he’d racked up his third DWI (plus a non-DWI alcohol-related arrest) before the university finally pulled itself together and fired him.

This man is well-connected (‘son of longtime state Rep. Henry “Kiki” Saavedra’) and in a vastly corrupt, crony-ridden state like New Mexico I suppose that takes you some distance. But even in that context… Jeez.

It pales next to their plagiarism case, but editors at the New York Times can also overlook mixed metaphors:

The drug-testing provision, its sponsors said, is an inducement that bubbled up in the course of a freewheeling focus group of voters testing arguments that could persuade people to support a higher damage ceiling in malpractice lawsuits.

SOS recognizes that “damage ceiling” is a technical term; but when you put that ceiling next to a free wheel that bubbles you get a mess of a sentence.

Nor does it help that a “focus group” (another technical term) is described as freewheeling. One gets what the writer means; yet how many even very competent readers of English would be able to make sense of a focused thing that is also freewheeling?

That’s the question. Certainly the entire Westfield State University board of trustees should go. But there must have been others at the university who hired as president a man whose character and actions were already fully known.

… [Evan] Dobelle [got] into similar trouble for his lavish spending at previous jobs, including at the University of Hawaii and the New England Board of Higher Education. In Hawaii, the board of regents unanimously voted to terminate his seven-year contract in 2004 after just three years because of his wasteful spending and ever-shifting explanations…

“There has been a lack of accountability, lack of fund-raising progress, lack of a sense of stewardship, ignoring the most basic policies,” then-regents chairwoman Patricia Lee said, according to the minutes of the Hawaii board’s June 15, 2004, meeting. “But, most importantly, his dishonesty and lying are most troubling.”

How stupid does your institution have to be to hire a person with this record?

He … commissioned a portrait of himself, contacting a local artist in 2013, and sent the $777.75 bill to [Westfield State’s] foundation after the fact. The portrait remained in a closet to be unveiled at an event for the 175th anniversary of the university in 2013. After Dobelle resigned, school staffers didn’t want the painting and shipped it to Dobelle.

So okay. Here are a couple of names for you. Diamandopoulos. Slade. So now we have the names of three university presidents who came in with crushing egos and big talk and proceeded to strip everything on campus except the interior wiring. Can even schools like Hawaii and Westfield State learn from this?

A local reporter interviews a gun guy about Peter Steinmetz:

Me: Do you need to be toting around an AR-15 on your shoulder in a busy airport?

Korwin: “Lots of people ask ‘Do you need this kind of gun?’ That’s the Marxist model. Do you need 10 pairs of shoes and somebody’s supposed to be in charge and decide whether you need things or not and whether you can have them or not.”

Me, trying again: Do you have a concern that a guy can freely and legally walk through the terminals of a busy airport with an AR-15 on his shoulder?

Korwin: “Let’s frame the question differently. Can he walk anywhere with an AR-15?”

Me, one last time. Do we need these things in an airport?

“There you go, back to need. That’s Marxism again. Each according to his need. Do you need 10 pairs of shoes? Do you need a refrigerator the size of a closet? And in America we’re starting to ask, do we need something and who’s in charge of deciding what you need? Do you need 10 pairs of shoes when there are people with no shoes? You don’t need 10 pairs of shoes and you’re asking me questions about need and in America, that’s not how we do things. That’s not how a free country operates.”

As hard times hit big-time college sports, the brilliant ideas keep coming. Sell naming rights to your stadium to a for-profit prison; dismiss six football players in the space of a two days (five more dismissals may be on the way); raffle off a year’s tuition to students willing to buy season tickets.

Of these three desperation moves, only the purge of players at the University of Texas is proceeding unimpeded, though fans are beginning to grumble that the last coach didn’t mind having a flock of felons…

And you do have to wonder what happens when the new coach removes so much of the team that he doesn’t really have a … team left…

Florida Atlantic University Owls fans (and every late night comic in America) shot down the prison thing; and it turns out state gambling laws might wreak havoc with the University of Iowa’s pioneering approach to tuition payment.

Our universities (using our tax dollars) are paying coaches and ADs millions upon millions of dollars a year, so UD is sure they’ll keep coming up with winning initiatives.

… tax syphons.

“Well,” replied La Kid, “everything’s fine but I’m running around getting ready to go to the Galway Races. Can you call back tomorrow?”

La Kid‘s outing gives UD an excuse to feature this poem about the event, by Yeats.

AT GALWAY RACES

Here where the course is,
Delight makes all of the one mind,
The riders upon the galloping horses,
The crowd that closes in behind:
We, too, had good attendance once,
Hearers and hearteners of the work;
Aye, horsemen for companions,
Before the merchant and the clerk
Breathed on the world with timid breath.
Sing on: somewhere at some new moon,
We’ll learn that sleeping is not death,
Hearing the whole earth change its tune,
Its flesh being wild, and it again
Crying aloud as the racecourse is,
And we find hearteners among men
That ride upon horses.

So of course it’s really a complaint; and not too far off from what ol’ UD‘s always on about – it’s easier to excite people with sports events than with poetry (or, to go to the subject of universities, with the thrill of thought about poetry, or thought about anything else worth thinking about). Commercialism and bureaucracy rule now, and you can’t expect timid clerks and merchants to get a charge out of being confronted with challenging aesthetics and metaphysics… But take heart! Although we live in an unpoetic world now, sleeping isn’t death – it’s a kind of preparation, a hibernation… Because the basic truths about human beings never change – our earthy flesh is wild, and ultimately in search of the unfettered “delight” of art as much as the delight of the races.

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And here’s La Kid herself,

with her man Ed Fitzgerald,
at the races. It looks sunny!

No, because the poljocks telling the NCAA to ditch Penn State’s four-year sports ban and sanctions see what happened as – in their words – “a purely criminal matter.” Had nothing to do with the university itself; a bad man happens to have done his naughty deeds in an on-campus shower stall – c’est tout.

“Your organization, for the moment, is the sole arbiter of conduct in college athletics,” the congressmen wrote. “Surely there is enough to be done in reforming the NCAA’s due process standards without injecting the organization into a purely criminal matter.”

Poljocks are brilliant strategists; they know that the best way to get what you want is to insult the outfit from which you’re trying to get something. I mean, I’m sure they’re right that the NCAA will in five or so years bite the dust; I’m just not sure telling them that is the way to get to yes.

Anyway. Lemme tell you. A story like this, there’s no one to like. Poljocks vs Kiss My Porsche Emmert…

I mean, what I’m trying to say is that it’s not just that there’s no one to like. There’s no one for whom might one even feel dislike. Dislike is a mild emotion.

A director of ours name of Peter
Likes to whip out and point his big heater.
Hip hip hip hooray
He so blows us away
We decided to make him our leader.

Of course now that we all know Barrow’s (named after Clyde, I presume) neuroengineering director likes to take semiautomatic rifles off his shoulder at the airport and point them at people, the place has had to drop him like a hot AR-15.

But where’s the NRA? They’ve got plenty of money to defend Second Amendment martyrs (“[H]e’s putting his life, his fortune and his sacred honor on the line for his beliefs…”). Why the silence?

… and other responses to America’s open carry movement.

… starts here, on the second floor cafe of the Barnes and Noble. UD‘s outrageously high-functioning world whisked her here in a quiet elegant metro car, past Medical Center (the National Institutes of Health, where UD‘s father, an immunologist, spent his career) and then to Bethesda, in two minutes.

‘thesda’s churning with construction zones, most of which seem to be luxury condos. The twin buildings in progress directly facing her are The Darcy (named after Fitzwilliam?); the one she passed on her way to the bookstore is The Lauren (named after the designer?). Whether you choose Darcy or Lauren, you’ll get the same outrageous delights in exchange for your million dollars – servile waitstaff, excessively equipped gyms and pools with personal trainers available, spa beyond belief, etc. etc. It’s ‘thesda.

Now UD… UD goes way back (to 1962, to be precise), when ‘thesda was the Baronet movie theater and the Hot Shoppes restaurant. Maybe a few doctors’ offices.

It’s a city now, a rich city, streets jammed with happy people and fragrant tearooms.

I wanna tell you it’s a mitzvah. I wanna tell you I’ll remember you from heaven if I go up there.

An old guy at the next table speaks.

UD drinks overpriced sparkling mineral water and thinks about the remarkable wealth of this country, and the smooth lovely technology all around her. Even the construction sites seem smooth, the teeth of their cranes silently, healthily, munching down on the old townhouses (probably built five years ago) they’re collapsing.

Now she sees the white Maplewood bus. Rita Kosofsky, mother of Eve Sedgwick and David Kosofsky, lives in one of Maplewood’s upscale retirement condos. I guess every day Maplewood residents can go to ‘thesda on the bus.

It’s a peaceful postmodern life replete with pleasures.

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UPDATE, Instablogging: After the cafe, UD walked the Capital Crescent Trail from downtown ‘thesda to McArthur Boulevard, and then she had Mr UD rescue her because she couldn’t make it all the way back to downtown ‘thesda. With her usual absurdity, she took the trail never having looked at a map of it, so when she saw a large building in the distance she figured it must be Friendship Heights, where she could hop on the Metro. She was nowhere near Friendship Heights, but she kept walking the trail in search of it…