… which, if I’m not mistaken, is one short of 5,000. The number continues to grow at a healthy pace, and UD is thrilled.

If you’ve found any of UD‘s posts on poetry – of poetry – of interest, you’ll find at the link a systematic presentation of her take on the form.

… for some time (background here, here, and here). Here’s an update on continued, increasingly desperate, protests.

The nation’s young people are tired of enduring one of the world’s highest inflation rates, highest murder rates, scarcity of basic staples like toilet paper, and the near certainty that things are going to get worse before they get better. A few days ago, the Associated Press reported on Venezuelans camping on the sidewalk to get information about emigrating to Ireland.

… This week, the streets of Caracas, Maracaibo, and the rest of Venezuela’s largest cities saw large protests that ended in violence. Three people were shot dead, with dozens more wounded. Many eyewitnesses lay the blame for the violence on government-sponsored armed motorcycle gangs, similar to the ones used to suppress pro-democracy protests in Iran in 2009.

… They see a dark future ahead, one in which Venezuela’s slow slide into a Cuban-style autocracy accelerates and is finally realized in its entirety.

… of the chair of SUNY Broome’s criminal justice program having apparently died of a heroin overdose.

There’s no nothingness like University of Hawaii nothingness. Nothing happens, and Hawaiian students and taxpayers pay through the nose for the privilege.

There’s big nothing – like the Stevie Wonder scam – and there’s small nothing, like the $64 student fee for nothing.

A UH student noticed a big jump in his fees one semester, and he went to the local investigative news reporter (there’s no there there to go to at UH itself). She immediately established that the fee was bogus (outright theft or incompetence, you make the call) and immediately got a hell of a comment from a high-ranking nullity on campus. That’s life, he said. Sometimes in life you pay for stuff you don’t get.

Time to build a $173 million basketball arena!

Interview with Timothy Delasandro, Republican candidate, Texas House of Representatives.

Q On your website, you offer a chance to win an AR-15 in exchange for a $12 contribution. Even in a culture pretty heavy into guns, isn’t this a little over the top, pretty close to pandering?

A I wouldn’t say pandering, but we do want to put our credentials on the Second Amendment out there. So, yes, we’re trying to make a statement. If you want to talk about Second Amendment issues, I support open carry, which the current incumbent didn’t co-sponsor during the last session. I support campus carry. And while the incumbent did vote for that, since then he’s had a couple statements where he’s been more ambiguous about that and says he wants to listen to the presidents of the universities more. So I wouldn’t say we’re pandering, we’re just trying to make a statement.

Q It’s a pretty wild website of yours, with you firing that AR-15.

A Well, that’s the point. And you’ve got the incumbent who is in Texas Monthly for saying that ping pongs kill more people than guns. We are trying to show there is a difference in records.

Q Are you getting lots of feedback?

A We are getting lots of feedback. We have it on Facebook as well. What we hear the most is, “Is that legal?” If you click on it and look at the small print, you can do an entry by mail for free, so you don’t have to contribute to enter. We gave a 12-gauge shotgun away earlier. One of the Baylor University students won it right before Christmas. It was actually funny. The day he won it, his dad posted on our Facebook page that “This is so cool. My son doesn’t have to figure out what to get me for Christmas now!”

Tajikistan wigs out.

… James Joyce.

Higgledy piggledy
Natalie Higley’s
Wanted for theft
Of unusual things.

Hand saws and tractors and
Lumber extraneous…
And they’ve charged her with RICO
‘Cause she worked in a ring.

(UD thanks polisciprof.)

… at the University of Nebraska, where he continues to be lionized online. You’d think that university would rouse itself to remove their we love richie page – not only because he was a vile bully while at Nebraska, but because he’s now an international object of contempt. (They let him play there for two years before – under the pressure of his incredible behavior – letting him go. But if you Google his name and the word Nebraska, you find that the university cannot bring itself to take down his official hagiography.)

(A walk down memory lane with Nebraska’s “little puppy” and his similarly “intense” fellow Husker, Dominic Raiola.)

And here’s Richie today:

It’s tempting to say something far-reaching and wide-ranging about The Game and how its structure and mores retard human development. It’s tempting to indict the league and the Dolphins for continuing a tradition of slipshod treatment of mental-health issues through their lack of follow-up after [Jonathan] Martin was treated for depression last spring. It’s more than tempting to take one last run at excoriating Incognito for his seemingly sociopathic behavior and its ability to flow seamlessly through the daily routines of NFL life.

… Incognito was the “team” guy, right? Member of the Leadership Council, bell cow for the offensive line, self-appointed hardener of the soft, he comes across in the report as a terribly divisive man whose bizarre and disgusting behavior cost the team a starting offensive lineman and subjected it to a phenomenal amount of unwanted scrutiny.

… [Jonathan] Martin’s feelings of inadequacy seemed to stem in large part from his academic success. An upper-middle-class black man with a run of good schools in his background, he was looked upon skeptically, as someone who might commit the unforgivable offense (in Incognito’s world) of having more than one thought running through his head at any given time. Martin wrote, “I mostly blame the soft schools I went to, which fostered within me a feeling that I’m a huge p—y, as I never got into fights.”

Martin’s upbringing stifled him, rendered him speechless amid the hypersexual, hypervulgar, hyperracial world of the Dolphins’ locker room, and it underscored a point worth considering: Education is not always a valued commodity in the NFL. It can be looked upon with derision, as a sign that its owner lacks a certain desperation needed to succeed. Martin might be the first person to express shame at having a Stanford education.

Nebraska will never truly repudiate its Jim Jones, the Dolphins “team guy” who brought to a university everything that “retards human development.”

As this professor quickly discovered, Nebraska, like Sandusky’s Penn State, is a cult. It continues its masochistic worship of mad sons of bitches. It is a university dedicated to blitzing the capacity to think.

Only in America.

Commentary on the release of the Richie Incognito investigation’s results.

What did you think you were watching all these years? What did you think football was?

… The report over and over again mentions the workplace, and what is appropriate in the workplace. Well, what do these men do for work, at their workplace? “Not an ordinary workplace,” as the report’s conclusion, doesn’t quite cover it. The employees slam into people running at them, over and over again. Sometimes they slam into someone’s upper body, and sometimes they go for the legs. In their free time, when they’re not slamming into others, they train, so that they can weigh more, with more muscle and less body fat, for the next time they slam into others.

Of course UD has no objection to American football. People like freak shows. Let them have them. Just get it out of our universities.

LOL. Only the best writers manage to make their point in this elegant off-hand final phrase of the sentence way. Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: BRAVO.

**********************
Perkins, by the way, has the floor (post-Kristallnacht) and clearly intends to use it. Here is his latest proposal.

In order to vote, he proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in taxes.

“And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes,” he continued, “should have a million votes.”

He said later he was just kidding, but the comment has hit the airwaves hard (sample headline: TOM PERKINS CALLS FOR END TO UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE).

This idea of his – a million points of votes – for some reason reminds me of a proposal UD herself has put forward for years, but no one will listen to her. It came to her one summer morning as Les UDs were crossing the long, long Chesapeake Bay Bridge on their way to Rehoboth Beach.

Instead of each car paying whatever it is – ten, fifteen dollars – to cross the Bay, UD proposes that each car pay fifty thousand dollars. During the time the car is on the bridge, this money will be invested. (High-speed computers.) When the car gets to the end of the bridge, if the investment has paid off or broken even, all the money will be returned to the driver. Any profit will go toward maintenance of the bridge.

… turns into homicide.

… Ohio State.

… Male Homosocial Desire.