Noted Here and There ...

At Liberty & Power, William Campbell further chronicles the decline of the"world class" University of Southern Mississippi into a comfortable fourth class status. The University of Alabama's William Nuckolls says that the faculty's lack of backbone is part of the problem.

Nick Anderson's cartoon for the Louisville Courier-Journal was rejected by several major newspapers. As George Bush and Richard Cheney watch the coffin of the 1000th American soldier to die in Iraq coming off a carrier plane, Bush says"I guess their daddies didn't know the right people ..."

The Washington Post, New York Daily News, and Newsday refused to run Aaron Magruder's"Boondocks" today. In it, rock impressario Russell Simmons host a new reality show,"Can a N***a Get a Job?" The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a toned-down version of the strip, in which the reality show's name is"Can a Brotha Get a Job?" and the women in the third frame are not brandishing big knives.

Both Richard Yates and Francois Sagan drank to kill the pain. By the time she was 23, Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse had sold a million copies in the United States, over 800,000 copies in France, and been translated into 20 languages. The New Yorker didn't publish one of Yates's short stories until eight years after his death. When it did, his daughter shook the urn that held his ashes and said:"Way to go, Dad!" Tip of the hat to Arts and Letters Daily.