… Breakfast. Elk Forge is one of those names that tells you in a small way about how the mind works. From the moment we reserved the Baltimore Suite here, I’ve had trouble remembering the name Elk Forge, while Longwood Gardens or Red Fox Inn or Seven Gables or Green Gables are all easy, though they’re a bit more complicated. Elk Forge’s two simple monosyllabic words have tended to elude me, and I think it’s because my mind fails to find a connection between an elk and a forge. Foxes come in red, and gardens may feature long woods, but what an elk and a forge are doing together I have no idea.

Plus I think I’m registering my uncertainty about the nature of those words as they’re put together. Two nouns (though forge also can be a verb). Is elk an adjective of some sort here? Are they two self-standing nouns? Nor have I ever before encountered those words together. So novelty, muddy usage, and lack of relationship, UD figures, are all scheming here to throw her off…

There’s a mild chill in the air, and a certain drippiness left over from last night’s storm, but the Elk Forge balcony is a pleasant place to watch the sun come up. There’s good tea in the “too Victorian” (Mr UD’s description) tearoom behind me (white woods and rattans, with ferny potted plants and – UD will agree – tchotchkes a mile a minute), but no one’s refilled the hot water canister yet, so UD will be patient… There’s a none too healthy oak center stage here. At its feet pond water purls over goldfish, and beside it three sort of pointless trellis arches lean toward the creek walk.

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Sun went in and it got a bit too cold out there, so I’m now in the tearoom, where naturally Pachelbel’s Canon in D is being piped in… It’s version 12,491, with recurrent piano “in imbecile symbiosis” with a violin. Water falls from an interior lovebird fountain directly to UD’s left and… You get the picture… Calming to the point of valium… And who’s complaining? Not I.

… today. For ten years it’s been an upscale seafood restaurant, Backfin Blues. They were closed when we walked by this afternoon, but UD noticed people in there, preparing for the dinner crowd, and asked if she could look around. They were glad to oblige. The manager said he knew that the place, fifty years ago, was a department store, but didn’t know it was called Rapoport’s.

This YouTube includes a shot of the front of the building – unchanged since my grandfather’s day.

UD instantly recalled the place – long, dark, narrow, with low ceilings… It hadn’t changed. Hadn’t been allowed (Historic Register) to change. An outside seating area with views of the train tracks and the river had been added, but that was the only truly new thing. The first floor balcony on which wee UD sat chatting with her grandfather was exactly the same, but with outdoor seating.

We had lunch outside at a place directly across the street from my grandfather’s old store, so I was able to gaze at the place at my leisure, recalling its massive sunny kitchen and dining room on the third floor. The manager said the floors above the place remain private apartments.

The broad beautiful Susquehanna shimmered in the background of all of this.

Loud obnoxious bikers stormed through town in groups of five and six every few minutes, reminding me what misery they brought to Key West when I lived there.

We had encounters with old-timers and new. I pushed open the door of an old Methodist church and was greeted by its groundskeeper, who showed us its unusual windows. He gave me the phone number of his aunt Audrey for more history of the town. A well-heeled character who recently bought one of the pricey riverside condos in town told me about his amazing views, but also about the frustration of living in a town that “should be like Ellicott City, but is just going nowhere.” It’s true that the endless nothingness of the Tome School/Bainbridge Naval Training Center ruins, plus the bad condition of many of the town’s historic buildings (lots of them empty and long on the market), gives Port Deposit a town that time forgot air. But the sheer trippiness of its location – one long architecturally distinguished street with massive cliffs instead of backyards on one side, and the Susquehanna River on the other – makes you excited to be there. Mr UD loved it.

… eaten at a sunny table overlooking a koi pond in Elk Mills Maryland. Over breakfast, UD tried to remember as much as she could about her grandfather’s store in Port Deposit, her visits there… She knows more about her mother’s side of the family, the Wassermans and Kirsons, than she does the Rapoports and Snyders. She knows that her father had a Dickensian childhood, his parents’ marriage a disaster, his mother eventually institutionalized with depression (she died institutionalized), no money. After her death, Joe Rapoport married Sadie Glass, a down to earth hard-working woman, and they ran Rapoport’s department store in Port Deposit together. The store thrived because of the naval training base established in town soon after they moved in. (They lived above the store.)

It must have been in the early ‘sixties that they sold the store and moved back to Baltimore, where they retired to an apartment in a part of town full of people just like them – old observant Jews. I remember visiting them there and always leaving the apartment with pickled lettuce and tomatoes that my grandfather made. He died in 1974, in his eighties.

Off to Port Deposit.

… has been successfully accomplished. We drove from ‘thesda to Longwood Gardens, PA (questions under consideration during the drive: Why are people so upset about the Duke undergraduate who pays her tuition by appearing in pornographic movies? Is UD shocked by Russia’s vile aggression in Ukraine because she was born after World War Two, or is she just naive by nature? Should we use the GPS on our new Prius to get to the gardens, just because we can? Will we get over 51 miles to the gallon on this trip? Where’s a good place for dinner in Newark Delaware?), and we tromped all over the place. Our favorite location was a simple woodland garden through which a modest waterfall fell, but most of Longwood was of course far flashier than this – an orangery with massive palms and ferns, and bright blue hydrangea flowers interspersed with bright yellow lilies; smartly symmetrical European water gardens with toad sculptures… We also liked very much the not there yet wisteria-on-pergolas garden. It didn’t interest anyone else – most people were oohing at the just-opened tulips – but we found the dark, about to green trees moodily pretty.

We’re at our bed and breakfast now, resting up before dinner in Newark. We go to Port Deposit tomorrow morning.

From 1938 to 1968 (I’m totally guessing these dates – I know they include the war), UD‘s grandfather, Joseph Rapoport, ran Rapoport’s department store in Port Deposit, Maryland, a small town on the Susquehanna River (vintage postcards here). He did pretty well there at first; and then, starting in 1942, when Roosevelt opened the Bainbridge Naval Training Center and thereby doubled the population of Cecil County, he did spectacularly well. He was able to put my father, as well as his two sons-in-law, through graduate school.

Wee UD visited her grandfather in Port Deposit, staying with her parents and siblings on the second floor apartments (with balcony overlooking the river) that you can see in the photograph in this post’s first link. She remembers sitting on the balcony and chatting while looking at the river and the train tracks beside the river. She remembers visiting the family that lived in the stone house (also visible at the link) across from the store. There was a bar on the other side of the street, and she remembers being wakened at night by drunks.

All of these buildings remain intact because all of Port Deposit is on the National Historic Registry. So UD can see it again more or less as it was, the whole streetscape, and that’s what she’s going to do this weekend. She and Mr UD will spend today, tomorrow, and Sunday at a nearby bed and breakfast in Cecil County, and then walk around Port Deposit, while UD sees whether it stirs any more memories. They will also visit the world’s most persistent “brownfield” site, what’s left of the naval base, which itself used to be the beautiful Tome School. We’re not sure how much access we’ll get to the ruins, but it’s clear that they’re pretty cool, set on a bluff overlooking the river.

They will also visit nearby Longwood Gardens, not only one of the world’s great gardens, but liable to look amazing (spring; floods yesterday; sunny today), and walk (sail?) along the Chesapeake Bay, and who knows what else.

UD will insta-blog every millisecond. Stay tuned.

East Tennessee State football signee Shawn Prevo has been arrested on a charge of aggravated domestic assault.

… Prevo went into his 19-year-old brother’s room Friday and asked for a cigarette. According to police, when Prevo was told to leave, he grabbed his brother by the throat, slammed him on the bed and struck him in the chest and stomach with a closed fist.

Thrilling on and off the field.

And he hasn’t even taken the field yet.

As UD‘s metro train, yesterday afternoon, lifted itself out of the tunnel under Wisconsin Avenue and ran above Rock Creek Park, UD looked down and saw thick brown water heaving past the creek’s banks. Croppings of wildflowers barely showed through the flood, and the sycamores were all shaken up. UD was shaken. This scene, usually a calm span of green between the Beltway and Parkside Apartments, was turbulent and strange; and the rainfall wouldn’t break for awhile.

Earlier, in Foggy Bottom, she’d watched the sky disappear, watched her office windows go gray and fill with long streaks. She had the closed-in feeling you get in an airplane taxiing in a storm: There was the turbulent world, inches away; here was a world weirdly – barely – immune.

Later, watching the fast river Rokeby Avenue became, she remembered Henry Miller’s nod to James Joyce in The Tropic of Cancer.

“I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love ev­erything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, ev­erything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the vio­lence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dis­solute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great in­cestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fat­uous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and par­alyzed by thought.

Florida State University. You stay classy.

Shucks, says the pure as the driven snow guy Penn State has brought in to coach football and remove the taint of its past, I can’t take credit for our terrific recruitment so far.

“It has very little to do with me… It’s the staff, it’s the players, it’s the tradition, it’s the history, it’s the fans showing out 72,000 at the spring game. … It’s the whole package. That’s why we’re being successful. We’re just, I think, doing a pretty good job of painting that picture of the vision of what Penn State can be and what it will be… I had a lot of confidence that we would be able to do a good job of finding those guys, attracting them to Penn State and getting them on board to join our family.“

The family, the family, always the family. And what a family. Startlingly dysfunctional. But you bring in a guy like James Franklin, and you’re bringing back solid values. Like for instance at his last job, at Vanderbilt, after four football players were accused of raping a student, he apparently called the student right away:

[Attorneys claim] the victim was contacted by Franklin [and Dwight Galt, also now coaching at Penn State] during a medical examination four days after the rape to explain “that they cared about her because she assisted them with recruiting.”

[Attorneys] went on to say that at some point, “Coach Franklin called her in for a private meeting and told her he wanted her to get fifteen pretty girls together and form a team to assist with the recruiting even though he knew it was against the rules. He added that all the other colleges did it.”

So Franklin means it when he says he can’t take credit for his recruiting success – at least his success at Vanderbilt. If it weren’t for the Comfort Women in the Vanderbilt family (and who knows what he’s got cooking in the Penn State family?), the magic wouldn’t have happened.

[I]f Franklin had a role in organizing a hostess program, that is a new development in the entire story.

What is probably clear is Penn State has either done an extremely thorough vetting process and determined there is absolutely nothing to be concerned with in the long-term, or the school totally swung and missed on the biggest black cloud that could potentially linger over the new head coach. Given the position Penn State has been in since 2011, the margin for error is barely existent.

Penn State. Never a dull day.

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Update: A reminder that Penn State knew what it had in Franklin.

When you turn out to have been providing a home to swindlers for thirteen years, you should probably use the discovery as a teachable moment.

UD isn’t saying there’s anything truly newsworthy in the story of two physicists on the University of Houston faculty who set up a bogus business and then lied on hundreds of federal grant applications in order to steal over a million dollars for themselves. As you know if you read this blog with any regularity, engineering professors dominate the lying on federal grant applications on behalf of bogus businesses market; but this doesn’t mean there’s no competition from others in the hard sciences. Like these guys.

The indictment describes how Bensaoula and Starikov, on behalf of their company, used false and fraudulent letters of support and made false claims about facilities, equipment and materials. In one instance, Starikov is accused of submitting a letter of support from Solex Robotics Systems, which the Houston-based company didn’t know about, to the National Science Foundation for a $499,995 grant. Other letters of support were altered and submitted with cut-and-pasted signatures from the originals, the indictment says.

In other applications, the two listed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of costs that they “well knew Integrated Micro Sensors Inc. would not incur,” according to the indictment.

When applying for funding from NASA and the U.S. Air Force, the two included costs for non-existent subcontracts with UH, according to the indictment, which also alleges the two stated in proposals that their company would pay a required subcontract fee to UH, but failed to do so on four of five contracts.

As Elvis put it, Just Pretend.

… but I don’t think J.D. Winteregg does unions.

… to understand!

UD tries to understand. She sees, for instance, that the University of Idaho is being punished because its big-time athletes have failed to meet even the teeny weeny weeny weeny academic standards set by the NCAA.

So far she has no trouble understanding. You recruit a bunch of unpaid playing-field laborers, if you will, and you do your best to make them happy and to overlook their mischief and all… And the last thing you care about, given how much cash is riding on their bodies, is their minds. We all understand this. We don’t need to study the remarkable academic rise and fall of University of North Carolina professor Julius Nyang’oro to understand it. It is structural to the enterprise.

What UD‘s having trouble understanding is the content of UI’s (losing) appeal of the NCAA decision.

The NCAA requires extraordinary mitigating circumstances in order to grant a waiver for penalties assessed for low APR scores.

The University of Idaho’s athletics department included the following extraordinary mitigating circumstances in its appeal:

Upheaval among the intercollegiate athletic conferences
A loss of almost $1 million in revenue – the majority from television and conference revenue
Significant behavioral issues within the football program

“I thought we made a compelling case regarding the extraordinary circumstances that began in June 2010,” said (Athletic Director Rob) Spear. “At the end of the day, we accept the penalties and have used this adversity to make our athletic program stronger.”

So help UD out here. The reason you should waive our penalties is that not only was our football team out of control academically, it was out of control behaviorally. You should show mercy because our very expensive athletics program really, really lacked institutional control. We recruited questionable people who unsurprisingly produced “significant behavioral issues.” Plus we fucked up and lost a lot of money.

Do these seem to you grounds for an appeal? Presumably UI spent a lot of time and money coming up with their case for appeal. Does that seem to you to have been a reasonable use of time and money? UD‘s trying to understand.

Staff at Wellington’s Botanic Garden are shocked after a student function got out of control in the Dell.

Victoria University’s Law Student Society garden party turned into a drunken gathering and broken toilet bowls, vomit and defecation last month.

Reminds UD of the legendary Charleston School of Law party held at an aquarium. Guests pissed in an otter tank.

Moral of the story: Keep law students away from all living things.

… and quit his job at the University of Udine to heal the world.

Davide Vannoni is making quite a killing (in more than one sense of the word) with his stem cell pasta.

Physicians at the hospital in Brescia were in the dark about the details of the treatment administered there; the report says they used to temporarily leave the lab because a Stamina Foundation biologist “had to add a secret ingredient to the stem cells” that supposedly helped the cells develop into neurons.

Ah! Un po’ aceto balstemico! Si, delizioso…

A wood thrush sings on a high branch of a maple tree.

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When I walk by, a rabbit freezes over his patch of grass.

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The pileated woodpecker’s vocal placement is C above middle C.

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Here comes the woman who has trained five black spaniels to walk in military formation.

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The just-up sun lights the railings on my neighbor’s porch.

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I’m doing my first perimeter walk of the day.

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I’m deciding what garden work to do this afternoon.

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A robin perches on an orange butterfly chair.

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I’m manically happy.