… and ready for takeoff the day after tomorrow. Assuming the launch happens, UD will drive from her nearby hotel room in Chincoteague, Virginia, to Wallops Flight Facility so that she can watch real close-up.

It ain’t that UD‘s a space maven or anything – in fact, as I’ve noted on this blog in the past, UD has trouble believing in the reality of the solar system, much less the cosmos.

It’s clear that whoever created her gave UD one hell of a parochial mind… As in: The earth will do. Even the earth is a bit on the bulky side for UD… The east coast she finds intellectually manageable… As in the famous New Yorker cover…

But as you can tell from her trip to Shenandoah National Park/Big Meadow to watch meteors at 2 AM while freezing her ass off, she’s definitely up for fireworks, definitely interested in what nature can do, and what we can do, by way of celestial effects.

Faced with empty or near-empty professional and college stadia all over the country, thoughtful observers offer explanations, theories… This Cal Poly fan, marooned in the stands, sketches a phenomenology of the game he fled at half-time.

[W]hy is Alex G. Spanos Stadium on Saturday nights as empty as a bird’s nest in the winter? One of the first things that comes to mind is the style of football Cal Poly plays. Cal Poly’s offense is a variation of the triple option, which is why you hear people in the stands calling for the Mustangs to “throw the damn ball.”

The goal of the triple option, in an extremely reductionist sense, is to almost always run the football while making it extremely difficult for the defense to identify who has the ball. However this entails a lot of repeatedly running right up the middle of the defense. While this bears a lot of strategic purpose, running straight into a wall of defenders is definitely not the most fun thing to watch, especially when it is the 30th time you’ve seen it in a game.

I suppose you could make a bunch of helmets bashing another bunch of helmets – or pocketbooks – over and over again interesting – or comic? – (“Repetition is the essential comedic device.”) – but interest and amusement is not really football, is it? Football is mad screaming hyperdrive…

And she’s the state of Arizona’s newest Senator.

Its third stanza has become part of my mental life.

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

1. Prelude: The Troops

Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom
Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals
Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots
And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky
Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down
The stale despair of night, must now renew
Their desolation in the truce of dawn,
Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.

Yet these, who cling to life with stubborn hands,
Can grin through storms of death and find a gap
In the clawed, cruel tangles of his defence.
They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy
Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all
Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky
That hastens over them where they endure
Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,
And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.

O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.

— Siegfried Sassoon

The suit alleges that Rabbi Yechezekel Wolff reneged on an agreement whereby he would lease the building housing the synagogue on West 23rd Street in exchange for paying operating expenses and covering repairs.

Instead, Wolff ripped out old pews from the 100-year-old building and turned off the heat in the winter time in order to ‘kill off the congregation,’ the lawsuit alleges.

A UM professor keeps his job, but because he’s a moral degenerate he won’t be teaching or doing anything else there. Just collecting his salary.

As soon as he’s back from four months in prison (this was his financial fraud case, not his buying an arsenal of illegal guns case), he’ll rejoin his colleagues. I guess. I mean, will he even show up? No one wants him to. I guess UM would simply like to send him a big fat check every month.

Now if he takes a couple of those guns and shoots up the student center, then, maybe… Maybe he’ll get docked some salary…

Say it with me: Your tax dollars at work.

[C]omplicating a personnel decision that might otherwise seem obvious is [football coach Bobby] Petrino’s $14 million [!!!!] buyout and U of L’s comparatively shallow pockets.

Having depleted the Hickman Camp Fund to pay Tom Jurich’s settlement [!!!!!] and Chris Mack’s buyout [!!!!!!] from Xavier, ULAA’s largest source of discretionary dollars has shrunk from $16 million to $8 million. Though Petrino would not have to be paid off in a lump sum — his contract calls for quarterly payments on an unspecified schedule — the costs associated with firing him (and, presumably, buying out his replacement from some other school) could create significant cash-flow concerns for a department still burdened by its exposure in Rick Pitino’s breach-of-contract lawsuit [!!!!!!!].

Moreover, financial irregularities found in [UL president] James Ramsey’s U of L administration [!!!!!!!] and recent budget cuts imposed across campus pose a contextual challenge to an eight-figure buyout. It promotes the perception of athletics as apart from rather than a part of the university [LOLOLOL] and, at a minimum, invites blowback.

This is a public university, kiddies.

… fall needle drop …

…and sticks it in her green watering can.

…this Thursday on Wallops Island, Chincoteague. Will she and her sister have the whatever to leave their hotel at one AM, when the NASA facility opens, and wait there until 5:00 AM for the launch? Or will they simply watch the launch from their balcony? Will the launch be canceled (weather is supposed to be perfect, though)? Will (this is her sister’s question) the rocket explode?

Of course I’ll blog the experience…

…worse.’

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

There are many degrees of complicity in the moral universe, apart from simple guilt: unconscious collusion, deliberate negligence, and gross deliberate negligence among them. Historians of violence will consider all these in passing verdicts on our gun-obsessed society and on the politicians who did nothing to rein it in.

Now, you make sure you put it somewhere he can find it, ya hear?

We’ll tell it to the UN, we’ll tell it to the world! We’re here, we’re clit-slashers, get used to it.

… nobody came?

… which, typically, is stupid enough to think that people are more interested in getting riled up against elites than in saving their children’s lives.

With a nation’s daily carnage fully before their eyes, with our hospitals overflowing with the dying, the NRA tweets this:

Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control.

Enraged, heartbroken, doctors are tweeting back.

Unless you are working beside me in my Pediatric ER while I code a child dying from a gun shot wound while his mother screams in a way that will stay with you forever you need to STAY IN YOUR LANE. Gun control and gun violence is ABSOLUTELY my business.

There’s a lot more where that came from.

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

Should this get ugly, UD has a helpful hint for the NRA: Send out a tweet saying that George Soros is funding the doctors’ tweets. Jewish doctors, you know … Soros is a Jew …

They wallow. They simmer in their own juices. They don’t get nowhere.

To be sure, they’re corrupt. I don’t want you to think they aren’t corrupt, or that there isn’t a connection between their being corrupt and their wallowing. There’s a direct connection. People can certainly make money off of wallowing.

On this blog, we make a point of following the nothingness of these schools, with a particular eye on their sports programs, since here the futility, absurdity, and nihilism is at its most obvious.

Take New Mexico. Here’s a typical recent article about it in the local press.

First sentence:

Missed budget projections, lingering debt and low game attendance have all contributed to serious financial troubles at the University of New Mexico Athletics Department.

There’s no there there, see? No one’s at the games – UD is surprised the teams show up – nobody’s in budgeting … The schools I’m talking about, located in America’s nature wonderlands, are an extension of their magnificent silent mountains, their deep echoing oceans, their stretches of frozen tundra…

Crucial to this vast chasm is a really stupid and corrupt state legislature, and all three of these states have them. A certain dance is danced, to be sure… I mean, like clockwork, when a school like New Mexico is in such profound shit that it demands more money from the state, the state says whoa wait uh what’s up over there? What you guys been doing? Didn’t we, uh, give you some money…? Don’t we give you some money every year…? So the head of the House appropriations committee pledges to

take a “fine toothed comb” to the UNM Athletics budget before determining what additional funding looks like, if any.

“We are going to dive into these numbers very closely,” Rep. [Patty] Lundstrom said. “The questions I am going to ask are about compensation packages. I want to know what benefits these coaches and the athletic director have. I want to know how much over their base pay they are receiving of taxpayers’ dollars.”

Yeah cuz for the last hundred years or so while the school lies there on the ground dead all the money we send you goes to the athletic staff and NOW’S THE TIME WE MEAN IT THIS TIME WE’RE REALLY GONNA …

UNM’s Athletics administrators and coaches are among the highest paid state employees. While [AD Eddie] Nunez has made cuts to programs to save dollars, he hasn’t made any cuts that would personally affect his own personal finances or the personal finances of his staff. The high salaries and many benefits that UNM Athletics administrators and coaches are entitled to by their employment contracts have remained untouched…

…[S]everal salaries [are] above $300,000 per year with a variety of 13 different types of benefits ranging from free-use vehicles to media pay, promotional pay, incentive bonuses, season tickets to games, country club memberships, retention bonuses, free spouse travel to games and in one case a relocation expense totaling nearly $20,000.

[Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: a variety of 13 different types is redundant. Just write 13 different types. You could even write just 13 types. The high number jumps out more if you just go directly for it.]

The AD’s response to this fact is a beaut. In an entire culture of stupidity, it still manages to stand out.

“I am a supporter of incentives because to me, it incentivizes people to do something. If they achieve it, some great things are happening.”

SOS will not attempt to parse this, because she is old and fragile; she will merely remind you that the athletic program at New Mexico is a debacle.