**:(**

A missing freshman was found in one of the ponds on campus today. Been missing for a couple days. The pond is maybe 500 feet from my office window. Fire trucks, cherry pickers, divers and the wondering have made thinking about anything else, difficult to say the least.

Stories are circulating about possible connections string of suspicious deaths of young college men around the country over the past 11 years - 40 of them. One happened at my alma mater about 4 years ago.

The family is here from the midwest. I can't even comprehend their grief. I need to see my kids. soon.

**Across the Street**

Sometimes I wonder if I bought our house not for what is on our property but, rather, what is across the street. I feel personally responsible for its maintenance, so that downed limb will be cleaned up.



















One set of stones (not pictured here), upon careful reading, reveals that four children all died in a very short window back in the mid to late 1800s. Illness? accident? How does a parent recover from that? A lot of the stones - more likely concrete, are broken, or worn down so you can't see the information.

**End of the Semester**

**The Dawg**

Seems to finally have adjusted to NY.

**Observations on Office Pixs**

E. noted an interesting part of my office picture. I would say it pretty much sums up the yin/yang of my academic life- Buddhist prayer flags next to Post It notes.

**Sorry Ma'am, I am Here To...**

enumerate your dog. Yes, there IS a Dog Enumerator for this county. Knocked on the door. Handed us an enumeration letter. Fined us for not having a license for the dog (who made it hard to deny her existence over her incessant barking).

The remaining mystery: Who narc'd?

I do have a better sense of what the INCREDIBLY high property taxes fund in this county.

**Spring and the Office Window**

While it is the 21st of April and the trees have not yet fully leafed out, the grass IS greening and forsythias are blooming. At least in town. The view out the office window is improving with all the sunshine. I think the view of the lake will be more obscured when the trees are full of leaves. When I squint I can see sail boats on the lake. Nice.












Then there is the fact that I miss E. more and more each day. It is time for her to come home. I hung the Ecuadoran weaving she gave me. It goes nice with the Starbucks yellow on my office walls.

**Yes Everyone Else is...*

posting this, but for good reason. I watched it about 10 days ago when the story appeared in the NY Times. Best use of a lunch hour in a long time.

**Heard it on the radio**

In one of my classes, students do a mock oral argument before a mock Supreme Court. The case we just completed was an invasion of privacy suit against Playgirl magazine. The suit was filed by Jose Solano, who played a lifeguard named Manny on the show, Baywatch. The cover of Playgirl showed him in his Baywatch swim trunks. The text on the cover suggested he was nude inside.

He wasn't.

Solano, was/is apparently quite religious, and wanted to protect his image as a role model for Hispanic youth. Notable aspirations, albeit somewhat diluted when I imagine him testifying in those swim trunks.

That aside, I was amused by a recent story about how Hugo Chavez banned the Simpsons from Venezuelan television because he felt it wasn't the best program for children's moral development. In a move that will help you understand why I am writing this entry, Chavez replaced the Simpsons with......

**Frak me**

Starting watching my Tivo'd episodes of the final season of Battlestar Galactica. As gripping as ever. But now I am faced with the looming reality of the series ending. This at the same time I am about to watch the final season of The Wire. Need good TV suggestions. Now. Gotta keep Netflix busy.

**College Branding**

In an age of college admissions that is ALL about branding and creating a sense of specialness, Harvard has taken it to a level that other schools can only watch and weep:

Read and weep for yourself in this NY Times op-ed:

Teaching near to, but not exactly at, an ivy league school, I can only saw....

I bow to the master.

**Pissed**

It is one thing to have a public administrative position against abortion, but it is another to rig the most comprehensive medical database so that one can't find information, or after allowing use of the search term again, removing articles that are pro-abortion. What happened to the the principle of challenging ideas one opposes with other ideas? Mill and Milton and Justice Holmes are probably turning over in their graves.

From the NY Times:
April 5, 2008

Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore ‘Abortion’

By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — Johns Hopkins University said Friday that it had programmed its computers to ignore the word “abortion” in searches of a large, publicly financed database of information on reproductive health after federal officials raised questions about two articles in the database. The dean of the Public Health School lifted the restrictions after learning of them.

A spokesman for the school, Timothy M. Parsons, said the restrictions were enforced starting in February.

Johns Hopkins manages the population database known as Popline with money from the Agency for International Development.

Popline is the world’s largest database on reproductive health, with more than 360,000 records and articles on family planning, fertility and sexually transmitted diseases.

Mr. Parsons said the development agency had expressed concern after finding “two articles about abortion advocacy” in the database. The articles, he said, did not fit database criteria and were removed......

For the rest of the story: click here.

**For Rosie**