Sing it.

Bleeding eye, sucker punch
You know that we love you
We can’t help ourselves
We love you and nobody else

In and out the league
You come and you go
Leaving massive bloodshed behind
We forgive you a thousand times

When you snap a football or make a sack
We come a-running to you
You leave half-dead women behind
There’s nothing we can do

Can’t help ourselves
No, we can’t help ourselves

… Black Market Bistro.

Seen on an early afternoon walk through
Garrett Park, UD‘s hometown.

[W]hile Acosta’s record covering up for a depraved plutocrat makes him a good fit for the Trump administration, it should disqualify him from public service.

The prez of LeMoyne-Owen stole some of her motivational speech to students from another writer, and the school has a right to be appalled and to seek her resignation – especially since she denies she plagiarized.

But the real ground for eviction lies in her source material. Instead of reaching for Frost or Thoreau or even Dave Barry, she went for Mr Shit-Eating Grin himself, Joel Osteen.

This is not Ray Rice 2.0. Maybe we need to say that plainly, because this is another video of another NFL running back being violent with a woman in a hotel. People made that connection immediately… But [Kareem] Hunt is not dragging a woman he beat unconscious across the floor.

… appears in this New York Times essay about Brutalist architecture in Poland.

Poland’s Modernist structures had, in fact, first appeared as a form of change within the Communist system, a vernacular of liberation for the country’s architects, who were finally permitted to move beyond the strictures of Stalin’s Socialist Realism. Amid the general thawing of the Khrushchev era, many of these architects — among the most prominent were Halina Skibniewska and Jerzy Soltan, the latter of whom studied under Le Corbusier — were for the first time permitted to travel to countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The style they adopted was largely a replica of Western Modernism.

… okay, why do I love, found objects?

Why is the tan fringed scarf
I found on my morning
pick-up-trash-in-Garrett-Park walk
— filthy, soaked, trampled in the
street beside the Saturday market —
the scarf I love the most?

Why are the black riding gloves
I picked up on a sidewalk in downtown
Bethesda the ones I wear the most?

Why is this Martha Stewart Everyday
towel, left foul and abandoned on a
bench in our town’s cool new children’s
playground by the hapless Liz, and
lifted by UD only after weeks
of abandonment, my clear favorite?

Why is this log covered in fungus,
found while walking the dog through
our forest, worthy of display?

And why is this 1982 National Geographic,
which I found in our upstate house, discarded
by some guest or other, so cherished by me
that I ordered another one for Mr UD‘s last
birthday (the original remains in the house)?

It contains an article – “The Incredible Potato” –
whose enthusiasm for the spud I found hilarious.
Throughout that stay at the house, I read
excerpts – breathlessly – to anyone who would listen.

This is my trauma
Had it from birth
This is my trauma
Grandest on earth

But this is my trauma
To have and to hold

So maybe it’s a bit of a footnote to the big fat endless domestic abuse story in professional football, but University Diaries remains amazed at the failure of universities to delete webpages boasting about their luck in having recruited men who beat women. Way back in high school, coaches knew Kareem Hunt was bad news; despite his amazing game skills, mainstream universities wouldn’t take him, and he ended up at the University of Toledo, where, judging by his hero’s page, he remains a god.

…the Washington Redskins!

Grijalva attacks Ryan Zinke
Who hits back with G.’s problem with drinky.
Each man is a schlump
In the era of Trump;
It’s hard to say which is more stinky.

UD‘s only on the second paragraph, and already she’s cheering. Thanks, dmf, for the link.

For my own modest contribution to the Leadership thing, go here, here, and here.

Oh, and here.

Central European University, under relentless pressure by Hungary’s popular prime minister to get the hell out, is about to do so. It will probably move to Vienna. Lots of people are upset about it. Hungary’s only world-class university has been chased away by paranoid hyper-nationalist know-nothings.

UD proposes that this might be for the best. The ultimate provincial backwater and proud of it; known, if known at all, for its suicide rate, Hungary, like our own Mississippi, elects chauvinistic dolts and ejects the non-doltish. Mississippi and Hungary are hemorrhaging population, whereas Vienna – precisely the sort of place (despite its own rightish political leadership) to which intelligent Hungarians flee – is growing.

If it is the will of people that the places they call home dissolve into nothingnesses ruled by Ubus, if they want to be places outsiders visit to track the spread of wisteria over Faulkner’s manse, or get soused with the ghost of Gyula Krúdy in his favorite watering hole, eh. It’s their right; precisely because of their “shabby littleness,” these places threaten no one.

Hungarians are the west’s Sentinelese. Really best not to intervene. Sad but true.

Multiple people with direct knowledge of Damascus’ football program have stated “brooming” was an annual event. Suspect Will Smith, for instance, reportedly told police, “’the broom’ started generations ago.”

During a press conference Monday, Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy acknowledged he too has heard similar claims about a violent, twisted ritual.

… So far no civil lawsuits have been filed against Montgomery County Public Schools regarding the Damascus incident. However, a source has confirmed to ABC7 that two of the four victims have retained a prominent local attorney.

“I think the victims in this case may have some civil causes of action against the school system,” McCarthy concluded.

They seem to take things like this more seriously in Canada.

From the same article:

“There’s this really odd dynamic of ‘I really want to belong, I really want to be part of this team… and at the same time, you have to put up with this assault about something very personal, very private, and very scarring in order to prove your worthiness to be a member.”

Liberals, argue Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty, are people who believe that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.” UD agrees; she has always found the very deep, very twisted, very sexual masochism/sadism of this apparently common child’s play baffling and frightening. But UD has to deal with the fact that all over the globe the human race is cutting off clitorises with dirty knives and lacerating anuses with broken broom handles because …

What’s the cliche? Love is stronger than hate?

Nope. Hate – abundantly obviously – is stronger than love.

And not only stronger. Socially acceptable. If Argentine fans hate opposing teams and try to kill them, fine. If Reuben Foster hates his girlfriend and tries to kill her, fine. My beloved country elected a cruel paranoid as its leader; maybe, to reward him for killing our decency along with our institutions, it will reelect him. We like violence, we like hatred, we like cruelty. Liberal is a dirty word.