The Washington metro is jammed with people visiting the cherry trees down the block from UD’s Foggy Bottom office. After class last Tuesday, she asked a cabbie to drive her around them. He said it would take forever – sightseeing traffic was at a standstill.

There are cherry trees everywhere around here, including at the front and back of UD’s house.

Months ago a rainstorm took down a massive cherry at the back of UD’s half-acre wood. Its three branches look very beautiful, very rested, on their sides. Their mottled charcoal barks are spun with old vines.

Some of the tree’s root system must have stayed in the earth, because it’s not dead. Smaller branches have suddenly produced bouquets of yellow-studded white flowers.

So there’s this froth of cherry blossoms at eye level. UD will collect some of it and put it in the biggest vase she can find.

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

Done.

… and now geese at the University of Waterloo.

… takes no risks.

Though sometimes this strategy can backfire. As it were.

Surrealistic layering, I guess you’d call it, in this story involving a grad student scheduled to teach a course called Health and Illness who is herself so unwell that rather than meet the class she phoned in bomb threats to empty the building.

You’re up!

You don’t want well-written and well-reasoned letters like this one fucking with your core business.

… to an American problem.

After doing absolutely everything he could to hold onto his job – lying, blaming his plagiarism on his ghost writer, lying low and hoping it would blow over, smearing a dead man, pompously claiming that quitting would be “desertion” – France’s chief rabbi Gilles Bernheim has been pushed out.

… can be found here, at Inside Higher Education.

James Barseness, an art professor at the University of Georgia, interacted with one of his students in a town in Costa Rica – during a UGA study abroad thingie – and is in the process of losing his job because of it. Sex with students is one thing; sex in public, in front of other students, is another.

“You are charged specifically with engaging in sexual activity with an undergraduate student … under your supervision in a public area during the Costa Rica 2012 Maymester study abroad program held on the UGA Costa Rica campus. This sexual encounter was witnessed by students and caused substantial disruption in the program,” Mick wrote in a February letter to Barsness. “You later told (the student) that she should not tell anyone about the sexual encounter and you were going to deny that it occurred so that you would not lose your job.”

The frustration is all too evident in this editorial, written by the head of Youngstown State’s student government. Recent statements by the associate director of athletics about where and how athletic money is spent anger him. Scholarship money doesn’t come out of ticket sales, as the associate director implies; it comes from students:

All of the scholarship money is paid for out of the $810 per student (roughly 10 percent of overall tuition) that goes from our tuition through the general fund to athletics.

The associate director also talks as if the budget is in good enough shape to fund capital projects, etc. The SGA president notes:

Athletics brings in $2.9 million in revenue and spends $11.96 million, resulting in a deficit of more than $9 million.

Youngstown State athletics boasts a 300 percent deficit.

No, YSU athletics isn’t dramatically awful, like Rutgers. It’s just typically cheesy.

… that one responds to stories like this with relief. That he didn’t have a gun.

The suspect is a 21-year-old student.

UD‘s poetry MOOC gets a wonderful review here. She is very grateful.

A New Yorker writer anticipates the release, next month, of the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He finds it bizarre and unsettling, as does UD, that so many Americans are willing to medicalize their experience of life. Their children’s experience of life. He wonders why this organization, the American Psychiatric Association, retains its mental illness franchise.

The market for mental disorders is already enormous, thanks in part to the relentless effort of the A.P.A. to use the D.S.M. to convince us that our psychological suffering is best understood as diseases that should be treated by doctors.

Early spring, and UD‘s been
creating a system of paths through her
wooded half acre. Mr UD has
given names to the paths, and he has
called the entire complex
Ferdinand House and Park.

(Munro Leaf, author of Ferdinand the Bull,
was the last owner of UD‘s house.)

Here are some highlights.

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

The first path, The Meadow Path,
starts here, at the
Balinese Wind Chimes.

Now you begin walking
The Meadow Path.

Many old vine-covered
trees have fallen.

Weather Vane at the beginning
of the Road to Nowhere.

The Middle Way,
with Poet’s Table in the
background.

Ferdinand the Bull.
And Isabella.