Half Full

Halfway up my back half-acre, I see a fox,
Beautifully camouflaged in the forest,
Winding through trunks in morning fog.

Send half-notes to half-there dog-
Woods. The fox is at his farthest.
He leaves the world as white as chalk.

My alma mater, the University of Memphis, paid its coach Larry Porter about $750,000 for one win – one.

David Hampton, Mississippi Clarion Ledger

Innovative thinking from Japan: Throw out all that crap.

Apparently people can be made to think for themselves.

… about a “wet house” in Minnesota.

… has killed himself.

… is packing them in today.

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I myself (It’s not important. I wasn’t going to mention it. But since you insist… and since it’s topical…) almost landed in GW Hospital yesterday evening.

It was six o’clock, and I was rounding Washington Circle on my way to the Foggy Bottom metro. The emergency room entrance was directly across the street from me.

As I crossed the street, with traffic from the Circle on its way to where I was rapidly walking (you only get a few seconds to cross), I saw a patch of what I assumed was water in the street. How could it be ice? There wasn’t any ice anywhere else. (I didn’t know there’d been water main breaks here earlier in the day.)

It was the last day of class, and I was holding twenty or so student papers in my arms.

I went straight down, hard, papers flying.

My first thought was Get up immediately or get run over.

I did this, and was instantly surrounded by a small crowd of Washingtonians who were worried about me and wanted to know if I was okay. One of them marched out onto the ice and – somehow avoiding the cars – picked up every one of the papers. Another pointed out that if I needed medical attention I’d fallen in one of the best locations ever – three feet from an emergency room.

But I was okay. Okay and grateful.

Sure, my coccyx hurt; but I was okay.

It’s total Monty Python at corrupt and incompetent Alabama A&M. Although its meetings are supposed to be public, it can under special circumstances go into hidden ‘executive session.’

So here’s how it goes, as recounted by the excellent Huntsville Times.

… as only the most bourbon-soaked university in the world can do it.

Notice that degeneracy levels at the University of Kentucky have gotten to the point where no one talks anymore about problems or investigations or commissions; the liquored up folk of Lexington have become, as it were, mere visuals for the rest of us. People with cameras follow local sports heroes around and wait for the good stuff.

… has been arrested on one count of incest with his daughter; he could go to jail for four years.

UD looked him up at Rate My Professors, but he’s not listed.

She did discover, though, that Columbia University has a way low Professor Average: 2.37. That’s just about the lowest PA I’ve seen at RMP. No wonder Columbia’s president is part of the million dollar club.

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UPDATE: G., a reader, notes:

“To be fair, Columbia University has their own version of Rate My Professors (some sort of in-house website). RateMyProfessors.com does not provide an accurate rating for Columbia professors because the majority of students choose to use Columbia’s website.”

… UD reported – merely reported, mind you – on the director of the University of California at Davis Campus Violence Prevention Program.  My post on the subject is long gone, but it linked to an article about her probably having “inflated the number of forcible sex offenses that took place on campus in 2005, 2006 and 2007 in reports required by federal law.” As in at least doubled them. In a 1999 grant application, she said around 700 women on that campus had been attacked sexually that year.

UD well remembers the shit that got thrown at her from some of her readers for passing along the story’s claim that the woman had made up hundreds of assaults. The claim was a politically motivated attack on Jennifer Beeman, and on women generally…

Beeman – who got her ass out of Davis as soon as the university realized what she was doing with the numbers – has now been arrested for embezzlement.

… Beeman embezzled between $2,000 and $13,000 by asking for travel reimbursements and mileage to attend meetings that didn’t occur…

UC Davis returned more than $100,000 to the U.S. Department of Justice after determining that unallowable expenses had been charged to a violence prevention grant Beeman administered, the university announced Thursday…

… Beeman will be arraigned on Jan. 7 on one count of embezzlement of public funds by a public official, three counts of misuse of funds by a public official, four counts of false accounting, and one count of fraudulently altering an account. All the charges carry potential jail terms.

Drovers Cattle Network reports on a study just out of McGill University:

The Montreal Gazette reports a study by McGill University in Canada says the sight of meat has a calming effect on men, which could help make the upcoming holidays more jolly.

The results are the opposite of what McGill psychology department researcher Frank Kachanoff expected. He anticipated men would become more aggressive, falling back on their instincts like barbarians at the sight of dead animal flesh.

McGill said men associate meat with gatherings of family and friends and thus feel more comfortable when they see a plate of turkey, beef or ham. The study used 82 male subjects who were asked to inflict varying degrees of punishment on actors if they made errors while reading scripts. The subjects also sorted images while the actors read. The study found the subjects were less likely to inflict pain on the actors if they were sorting images of meat when a mistake was made.

If you’ve hung around University Diaries for a long time, you know that UD hugely admires the writing of Anthony Tommasini, the New York Times music writer. The man’s got style.

Yet UD freely admits a struggle, all these years, with Tommasini’s adjectives. They are many and pretty and … baffling, especially when they are characterizing a person’s singing voice. Here he describes the great Polish contralto, Ewa Podles:

It’s the dark coloring, earthy character and plummy richness of her sound that define her powerful contralto voice. Even in its upper register, it has dusky tone and throbbing intensity.

Dark, earthy, plummy, dusky, throbbing… I sort of get it, but I have to say that I’ve been pondering plummy ever since this review appeared in 2006. Plummy.

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This morning was another challenge.

The tenor Marcello Giordani brings his beefy, ardent Italianate voice to the role of Ramerrez…

I read it aloud to Mr UD, who sat across from me drinking Starbucks Italian Roast Sweet Slightly Smoky X-Bold Whole Bean Coffee and eating one of his horrid Atkins bars.

“Listen to this. It’s describing a tenor’s voice. Beefy. Ardent. Italianate.”

Mr UD looked confused. “Beefy? How does a beefy voice differ from, say, a porky voice?”

“I think it means to convey masculinity. A beefy voice is a macho voice. Muscular.”

“Italianate? Aren’t buildings Italianate? What if he’d written Italian? How does an Italian voice differ from an Italianate?”

“I do not know. But here’s one of those damned if you do damned if you don’t things in the same review:

As always, Ms. Voigt’s singing will stir debate within the opera world. Given the competition around right now, I cannot think of a soprano who could sing any better this demanding role, which requires luscious legato phrasing, a powerful top range and stamina. But the Deborah Voigt of more than a decade ago, before her surgery to help shed excess weight, had a richer, warmer, more gleaming sound. For Minnie, she has found a way to soften the sometimes harder edges of her voice and sing with lyrical pliancy while still cutting through the orchestra for big climaxes, including a fearless high C in Act I.

Voigt was teased and tormented and denied roles because she was so fat. So she did the bariatric thing and now she looks good. But they surgically removed her voice! The surgeons are going to have to reinstall her stomach!”

“What is a gleaming sound?”

… in the insider trading racket.

The University of Pennsylvania school is pumping out insider traders a mile a minute.

Hard to keep up.

Lawdy!

She wore a new law school, boys, she wore a new law school.

… have gathered a good number of faculty at the University of Minnesota to request a review of Markingson’s case. The Regents will at least look at the letter Elliott and others have written to them. Maybe the Regents will act on it. This blog will follow the story.

University of Minnesota counsel Mark Rotenberg will meet with the Board of Regents to discuss a letter requesting an independent investigation into events surrounding Dan Markingson’s 2004 suicide.

Eight U of M bioethicists sent the letter last week detailing potential ethical lapses that may have led to Markingson taking his own life while enrolled in a clinical study at the college. Several more faculty members have since sent a subsequent letter to the Regents supporting the call for an investigation.

The story is complicated and long, but essentially involves a claim that University of Minnesota researchers, eager to enroll subjects in an experiment, enrolled Markingson, even though he was reportedly in no mental shape to give informed consent.

Long article by Carl Elliott about the Markingson case here.