… Commonwealth School, has died at 97.
Charles Merrill was the son (as was his half-brother, James Merrill) of the co-founder of Merrill Lynch.
Mr UD likes to tell the story of how Merrill (also school headmaster for decades) gathered some students one day and told them he had a brother who was a poet, and they were all going to go on a field trip to hear him read.
“Eyes rolled,” Mr UD recounts. “Oh yeah, he happens to have a brother who’s a poet… Who knew he meant James Merrill??”
… tomorrow an NPR reporter, for Morning Edition, arrives to interview UD about what it’s like to live in Munro Leaf’s house.
This is all by way of preparation for the release, in a couple of weeks, of a big-time movie based on Munro’s book, The Story of Ferdinand.
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(Photo of one of UD‘s topiary bulls
with a visiting cat by Judy Folkenberg.)
In other words, at Sacramento State, it’s a win-win!
The guy’s got balls. When it comes to freeloading, the guy has major balls.
And look at his research! This is from 2016.
Yale might want to take this down.
Big award-winner.
Keeping up with the latest in France.
Houria Bouteldja, the [Party of Indigenous People of the Republic’s] charismatic spokeswoman, has in recent years won notoriety for her defense of Muslim men accused of sexual violence. Faced with “testosterone-fuelled virility among indigenous men,” she has argued, women of color should look for its redeeming side, “the part that resists colonial domination,” and stand with their brothers.
[A] Thanksgiving football game … ended in a bench-clearing brawl and led to at least one arrest… After a separate but seemingly related fight, Branden Diaz, 18, of Teaneck was arrested Thursday for allegedly assaulting a juvenile on Elizabeth Avenue, where the buses for the Hackensack Comets football team were parked… At a snowy Thanksgiving game in 2014, a Hackensack player intercepted a pass from Teaneck, going on a substantial run before veering into his team’s sideline. When Teaneck players who were trying to cut short the Hackensack player’s run also fell into the Hackensack sideline, a fight ensued… Also on this Thanksgiving, a fight broke out during the Eastside-Kennedy football game. Earlier in the month, there was a fight between the football teams of Pope John XXIII in Sparta and St. Joseph Regional in Montvale. Police also recently arrested an 18-year-old at a Ramapo High School football game. The 18-year-old was allegedly fighting an unidentified juvenile.
… “Our schools and the district as a whole recognizes that the behavior on the field on Thanksgiving Day is not the kind of behavior that is representative or reflective of the high standards we have for our students,” said [the superintendent].
Uh. Really?
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And how yummy is it that Pope John XXIII beat the shit out of Saint Joseph?
Cal football suffered a drastic year-to-year attendance drop this season after home games at California Memorial Stadium brought in an average of 36,548 fans per game — a 22 percent drop from last year’s average of 46,628.
… The drop in Cal football’s attendance comes as Cal Athletics faces huge interest payments from debt incurred by the 2012 renovation of Memorial Stadium and construction of its athletics complex. In total, Cal Athletics holds more than $400 million in debt, the most of any athletic department in the country.
… [One Berkeley student commented:] “If you see all these empty seats, you don’t feel a desire to go back.”
I can barely make time to attend drawn-out sorority meetings that usually consist of practicing chants, lining up at a door, or archaic traditions in a dimly-lit basement.
Prior to joining my chapter, I had no idea the time commitment that Greek life required. For events such as initiation, I’m trapped in the house all weekend, repeatedly chanting the same rituals on a loop every 20 minutes.
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And as for further dispatches from the frats… Not sure how many of these you can take, but…
“The quality of human life is, contrary to what many people think, actually quite appalling,” [South African philosopher David Benatar] writes, in “The Human Predicament.” He provides an escalating list of woes, designed to prove that even the lives of happy people are worse than they think. We’re almost always hungry or thirsty, he writes; when we’re not, we must go to the bathroom. We often experience “thermal discomfort” — we are too hot or too cold — or are tired and unable to nap. We suffer from itches, allergies, and colds, menstrual pains or hot flashes. Life is a procession of “frustrations and irritations” — waiting in traffic, standing in line, filling out forms. Forced to work, we often find our jobs exhausting; even “those who enjoy their work may have professional aspirations that remain unfulfilled.” Many lonely people remain single, while those who marry fight and divorce. “People want to be, look, and feel younger, and yet they age relentlessly”:
They have high hopes for their children and these are often thwarted when, for example, the children prove to be a disappointment in some way or other. When those close to us suffer, we suffer at the sight of it. When they die, we are bereft.
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The New Yorker interviewer offers Benatar a short list of reasons to live: “love, beauty, discovery, and so on.”
UD wonders about that and so on… The list’s brevity, and its termination in that vague lame und so weiter… Life is worth living, etc., etc. … The gesture is as amusingly languidly lazy as anything Algernon says in The Importance of Being Earnest. Unlike people who make an actual effort to think of one or two reasons to exist —
Music is the best means we have of digesting time. W. H. Auden
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[Sophocles wrote:] “Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words; by far the second-best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as swiftly as possible whence it came.” [H]e also let us know, through the mouth of Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens… what it was that enabled ordinary men, young and old, to bear life’s burden: it was the polis, the space of men’s free deeds and living words, which could endow life with splendor… Hannah Arendt, last lines of On Revolution
— the New Yorker reviewer seems to concede Benatar’s point (Benatar famously wrote the anti-natalist Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence) by hopelessly tossing a few easily batted-down balls at him…
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UD has the following thought: Life is worth living because it’s hilarious to watch people struggle with how life’s not worth living.
The Flumo Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison advertises itself as a great place to hold retreats, but I’m gonna guess there’s a noise issue. And noise ain’t the half of it.
The situation has gotten so bad that the Fluno Center, a nonprofit conference center with guest rooms affiliated with UW-Madison that is located across the street from the bars, has added extra security and patrols, general manager Andy Abelman said.
Abelman said it’s just a matter of time before the fist fights [among hundreds of gun-toting gang members] turn into gunfights. “I think there’s going to be one or multiple fatalities,” he said.
On the up side, a local reporter notes that “[n]obody has been shot in the area this year.” Which is great. Great. Massive brawls, yes; pretty constant gang warfare… And gang members seem to like to “pick fights with drunken students”… But so far everything’s just fine! UW students can breathe easy.
Watch closely.
[New South Wales] is planning for the likelihood that its new $700 million Allianz Stadium will be more than half-empty most of the time…
There are only three events that might draw more than a half-full crowd to the new stadium (and there’s no guarantee that its other events will fill even half of it), and Allianz will be competing to host those three with other, and in some respects superior, venues.
NSW plans to rebuild Allianz with two seating plans: a championship mode for the full 45,000-seat capacity and a “club” mode for only 30,000 where the upper stands will be blocked by a large advertising and information screen.
See how it’s done, every public university in the south? You simply block that vast empty acreage with vast advertising screens — a significant enhancement of the fan experience, for what fan doesn’t pant with excitement at the prospect of inescapable miles and miles of shrieking advertisements?
It was perhaps inevitable, in the intellectual life of our nation, that when one university rose above all others to express the essence of higher learning for so many of our citizens, it would happen on a basketball court among the scholar/athletes of the University of Alabama.
Their triumph was so intense that my own paltry rhetoric fails me. I will defer to one of countless chroniclers who, this morning, are celebrating this great academic institution.
A SPORTING EVENT FOR THE AGES: ALABAMA FIGHTS BACK AGAINST MINNESOTA WITH THREE PLAYERS
… In a match-up that was primarily seen on Facebook live, the 25th ranked Alabama basketball team played in one of the most incredible sporting events I’ve ever watched against the 14th ranked Minnesota Gophers… [After a huge on-court brawl,] the entire bench got ejected from the game, leaving Alabama with five eligible players for the rest of the game… That’s when the game truly started getting incredible.
A couple minutes later, [an Alabama player] picked up his fifth foul, leaving Alabama with only four eligible players for the final 11 minutes of the game. Less than a minute later, freshman John Petty landed awkwardly and needed assistance getting to the bench with an ankle injury. Alabama was down to THREE eligible players [who] fought back valiantly to make this a truly incredible game.
… I’m usually not glued to my screen during an early season college basketball match-up but this was a sporting event that I’ll never forget. Anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to watch this live should definitely check out the highlights.
The only thing UD can think of that would make this set of events more valiant and incredible would be if someone in the arena – or, hell, on the team – had a gun, and there had been an incredible and valiant massacre. It will happen. But we will have to wait. Meanwhile, anyone who has been watching higher education in America knows that the University of Alabama, in all its splendor, would be the place where this incredible breakthrough in the life of the mind would occur.
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UD thanks dmf.
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And don’t forget! It’s football season!
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Plus: If you want to keep up with the global bloodbath, a suggestion: Type FOOTBALL BRAWL into Google News.
If you’re interested in how the organizations that run all of these teams are completely corrupt, type FIFA corruption for international; for national, read University Diaries.
UD applauds Daniel Muehring, a Southern Methodist University student, for posing the crucial question about pledgicide.
What’s the principle of brotherhood behind torturing, humiliating, and killing your brother?
I think the answer to the question is implicit in Muehring’s mistaken use of the term “constructive.” He assumes that the pledgicidal motive is constructive, when of course it is destructive. This is the reason Andrew Lohse correctly identifies ritual behavior in many fraternities with “a biker gang.” Both cults like to hurt themselves (body scarring, alcoholism, reckless driving, gun-play, fights) and to hurt others; both constitute a brotherhood of mutually voyeuristic sadism. For both, women represent fuckable or non-fuckable scags. In time, both typically drift toward organized crime (several frats over the last few years, with San Diego State’s frat system the standout, have been found to be running high-level, heavily-armed, drug distribution businesses).
Hyper-masculine, hyper-ritualized, sadistic, homicidal, secretive, criminal subcultures are unfortunately common in America; what’s shockingly uncommon is their placement and certification in universities.
UD thinks we should spend less time agonizing about the motives and deep meanings of fraternities and more time asking the following question: Why do American universities allow tribes of undergraduates to reduce the universities themselves to the status of pledges, to whipped and whimpering bodies?