Or, how not to get a bachelor’s degree:

According to UK Police, UK statistics instructor John Cain had been working late in his third floor office in the Multidisciplinary Science Building on Rose Street on Tuesday night. About midnight, he left to get something to eat. When he returned about 1:30 a.m., he tried to unlock the door, but it was blocked by something.

“He yelled out that he was calling the police and then the door swung open and two young men ran down the hallway,” recounted UK spokesman Jay Blanton.

Shortly after police arrived, one of the students returned and confessed. Henry Lynch II, a 21-year-old junior majoring in biosystems engineering, gave police an earful, including that he’d climbed through the building’s air ducts to the ceiling above Cain’s office and dropped down into the room, then unlocked the door and let in his friend, sophomore Troy Kiphuth, 21, who was not in Cain’s class.

Lynch also told them he had already tried to steal the exam earlier that evening around 6 p.m., but couldn’t find it. And, he said, it wasn’t the first time: Earlier in the semester, he’d successfully stolen another exam from Cain’s office, but he assured officers that he had not shared the answers with other students.

Lynch apparently gained access to Cain’s office all three times by climbing through the building’s ducts, and dropping down through the ceiling. How he got into the core of the building remains under investigation.

I rather doubt that Mr Lynch will be graduating from the University of Kentucky, nor will Mr Kiphuth, who deserves to be kicked out for the stupidity of trying to help cheat on an exam in a class he isn’t taking.

I think there’s probably a way to get into my office by removing some of the ceiling tiles in the hallway and working your way through the space above (which isn’t structurally strong enough to hold your weight), and then crashing through the tiles in my office. But then they too would be foiled by my filing system and never find what they’re looking for.

I ought to sit back, laugh, and drink champagne, except, unfortunately, that tomorrow the deluge of term papers and lab reports washes up to my door and inundates my office with work. Then there’s the small matter of a final exam next week.

I’m thinking I may actually be done done next Wednesday.

But I’ll still find time to see the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie tomorrow!

I grew up in Kent, Washington (so did my wife). That was long after this photo, though:

It was named for the region in England where hops were grown because, again before I was born, hops were the primary agricultural product around there. What I find fascinating, though, are the vestiges. The article names some of the early pioneers in that area — Ezra Meeker, Everett Titus — and I lived on Titus street, and the central business district was on Meeker. And that practice left a mark on the economy of the town.

The legacy of hops continues today, even though the Kent Valley is no longer farmland. When produce and dairy farming went away, existing railroad networks and flat farmland helped Kent scale up as a center of manufacturing and warehousing.

“We really built an infrastructure that even after hops left has become fertile ground for industry, for manufacturing, for warehousing,” Garfield said.

Yeah. I detested Kent when I was growing up. Warehouses. I lived through a transition, when the city was taking everything that was lovely and green and pleasant about the place, covering it with asphalt, and putting up warehouses all along the river, with the bonus of tearing down businesses to build more gas stations for the commuter population. Kent was a desert for human beings for a long, long time. I hear it has improved since then, but it couldn’t help bet get better.

But then, I also liked the novel, which is not to everyone’s taste. It was refreshingly pagan, with a plethora of gods, and not much difference between a leprechaun and the king of the gods — they’re all manifestations of human belief, and since they merely reflect humanity, they tend not to be very nice. The show has an element of the surreal to it, too.

If you’ve read the book, you know that one of its featured elements is the Upper Midwest. In an interview with Neil Gaiman, the author makes that explicit.

“I couldn’t have written it without living in Wisconsin, and Minneapolis and St. Paul being the nearest big cities,” said Gaiman, chatting last week from a Los Angeles hotel where he was preparing for the world premiere of Starz’s TV adaptation of the book. “It just wouldn’t have worked.”

Gaiman, so thoughtful in responding to questions that you sometimes worry the phone line has gone dead, wasn’t referring so much to specific landmarks, such as the House on the Rock or the wintry landscape, both of which play pivotal roles in his 2001 book. He’s talking about the region’s general weirdness.

“There’s that tiny off-kilter nature in the Midwest that’s in the details,” said Gaiman, 56, who moved from England to Menomonie, Wis., in 1992. “I would enjoy stopping at a little restaurant somewhere and half the place would be selling peculiar stuff like … warrior princess dolls. That’s weird.”

As someone who has lived in the Pacific Northwest, the Desert Southwest, the East Coast, and now, Minnesota, I can confidently say that everywhere is a tiny bit off-kilter from everywhere else. The Midwest is not weirder than any other part of the country, but it does have a different flavor, and as someone who grew up in a place with mountains and evergreen trees and the ocean and temperate weather, long-term residence makes it feel like home-but-not-home, if you know what I mean. You live in it, but you’re not of it, and that small element of disconnectedness makes it uncomfortably interesting.

After a harrowing weekend of grading exams and lab reports, I’m kinda sorta done. All that’s left is the potential for revising lab reports, and an optional final exam (it replaces your lowest exam score; it’s more of a hedge for students who had one bad day or an unavoidable absence). Today I’m handing everything back with a summary of their tentative final grade (cue howls and gnashing and wailing), and doing a post-mortem of the last exam, which had the standard bimodal grade distribution — either students sailed through it, laughing at how easy it was, or they missed key concepts and melted down completely (cue more howls, wailing, etc.).

The results do rather mess up my plans for the last lecture on Wednesday. I was hoping to do something more advanced and give them a peek at where they can go with genetics, but instead I think I’m going to have to pick 20% of the class up off the floor and review the basics, so they can possibly pass the course with a successful surge on the final. That’s disappointing, but I have to make sure people who pass my course are at least somewhat capable on the topic.

Anyway, the current statistics: the mean on the last exam was the lowest so far this term, at 66%, or roughly a C-. Overall in the course 4 students so far, out of 31, have earned an A. A few more might join those exalted ranks by doing well on the final.

Also, more fun: today is the day for student evaluations. I try to do this after I’ve broken the news to them about their tentative final grade, which is probably a poor strategy for getting good evals but I like to think it makes for more honest ones.

Because of snow. Sorry, gang, Minnesota has decided to celebrate the first of May by dropping some snow on us, so we’ll have to wait.

Also, this is the last week of classes. I spent the weekend catching up with most of my grading — not quite all, because I need something to elevate my anxiety, to keep my heart beating — so this week is going to be fierce. Happy dance next weekend? Celebrate labor and promote the proletariat then?
Overthrow the government then, too?

I just realized — it’s not May Day. According to Trump, it’s Loyalty Day. Maybe the snow is to let me know I’m supposed to be disloyal today?

After the last election, a lot of my friends told me that it was more important than ever that we support good journalism — and I agree fully. Then they told me I should subscribe to the New York Times — and I hesitated. I’ve been disappointed far too often by the NY Times. Have we all forgotten Judith Miller, and how the NY Times was the staid, sober, disciplined news source that was beating the drums for the Iraq war? OK, maybe that was too long ago. So have we all forgotten how the NY Times was constantly promoting the “Hillary’s e-mails!” story just last year?

So I didn’t subscribe. And I felt mildly guilty about it.

But now…fuck the NY Times. Once again, they decided to fill a slot on their opinion pages with a conservative ideologue, a dolt formerly of the Wall Street Journal opinion pages (and we all know what a shithole that is), and the first thing Bret Stephens writes is an embarrassingly vapid apologia for climate change denial.

I can thank Stephens for one thing, at least. I no longer feel guilty. I’m even feeling a bit lucky to have avoided one waste of money. I guess a lot of people are feeling this way now.

One of the dudebro organizers of the Fyre Festival, on being told there was no way they were going to pull it off short of spending $50 million:

Let’s just do it and be legends, man.

If that isn’t enough absurdity for you, you can read a personal account from an attendee.

I’m beginning to wonder if this was a trial run for the revolution. No tumbrels, no guillotines this time — we just advertise on Instagram for a party with supermodels in some exotic location, charge the rich for their own transportation, and drop ’em off in a tarpit somewhere. Fyre Festival was the ‘B’ Ark.