Arkansas athletic director Jeff Long says he isn't interested in leaving, refuting a report that said he was a candidate for the athletic director position at Stanford.
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Anthony Hecht had three RBIs to lead Arkansas State to an 8-5 victory over Arkansas-Little Rock in Sun Belt Conference play.
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U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor covered his social conservative flank for 2014 on Wednesday. He voted against extending job benefits to same-sex partners of federal workers. Many enlightened corporations provides such benefits. It makes for happier workers and more stable homes.

Pryor’s lame excuse — he was the only Democrat in opposition — was that benefits conflict with the federal Defense of Marriage Act, currently challenged in court. He also said that he remains opposed to same-sex marriage. That, arguably, is a religious issue on which many have understandable differences. But he took pains to also note his continuing support of the Arkansas constitutional amendment that bans not only same-sex marriage but also civil unions with legal protections for couples.

Pitiful. We head again to another one of those terrible dilemmas. No, he won’t be as bad as the Republican alternative. But nose-holding won’t be sufficient prevention for a gag reflex.

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Authorities say city workers have found a decomposed body near railroad tracks in Trumann.
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Line is open. You got anything? Famous last words:

* 2014: Lots of “considerings” emerging from the horde of Democrats and Republicans likely to run for governor in 2014. This one angle interests me. U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin, presuming he survives Herb Rule this year, is widely believed to be planning a run for governor. This makes some sense. He could try to cast himself as having crossover appeal in a general election. Based on the facts, that’s a joke. He’s been a rigid right-wing Tea Party conservative in every way. Still. He’s a formidable candidate. But could he beat a strong Northwest Arkansas candidate in the Republican primary — Darr, Hutchinson, Womack, whoever? He’d need a huge vote in Pulaski, presuming his home county likes him much.

* ‘ADULT NOVELTIES’ STOLEN: KAIT in Jonesboro reports that UPS dropped off a box containing $ 530 worth of “adult novelties” from the retailer For Your Pleasure in the carport of a local home, but the box was gone when the homeowner arrived.

* TALK ABOUT DEATH PANELS: It has escaped notice, but this item makes clear what Republicans anticipate as an alternative to Obamacare. Nothing. Repeal. Period. Those who’d previously been without insurance or hope of getting it will be back to square one. Screwed. Die, poor folks. Or get a job. (Original link corrected. And it wasn’t nice for those who suggested the link that went to a news release about Republican Rep. Nate Bell fit an item about adult novelties.)

* FORMER LR SCHOOL CHIEF DIES IN ST. LOUIS: Henry P. Williams, a former Little Rock school superintendent who had a stormy tenure here and then got in bigger trouble as Riverview Gardens schools superintendent in St. Louis, died last month at 70, a St. Louis paper reported. He owed more than $ 300,000 in taxes and restitution for his travels and gambling on the Riverview district. He was removed in 2007 and pleaded no contest to theft and tax fraud charges. He received a prison sentence and was ordered to make restitution, but didn’t pay off the debt. In St. Louis, he directed district money to his daughter, girlfriend and her familiy. The district budgeted $ 1.7 million on travel, including tabs for flying Williams to London, Yellowstone National Park and Cape Town, South Africa. Prosecutors showed he gambled 900 days during the 1,800 days he served as superintendent and lost as much as $ 176,000.

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Arkansas State (28-21) will play its final home game of the season Tuesday when it hosts Mississippi (34-18) in Jonesboro.
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• NOT DONE PROTESTING: Occupy Little Rock, shown here at an earlier Capitol rally, isn’t ready to give up.

Occupy Little Rock, scheduled for eviction from its 4th and Ferry camp by the city of Little Rock at 7 a.m. Wednesday, isn’t ready to give up.

Spokesman Greg Deckelman said the group will file suit Monday for an injunction to stop the eviction. The suit will contend the city has acted arbitrarily and will proceed unconstitutionally if it moves ahead with the forced closure of the camp as promised Wednesday morning.

Occupy LR will have a news conference about its actions at 5 p.m. Monday at City Hall and also plans to ask to be heard Tuesday night by the City Board. It has been negotiating for several weeks with City Manager Bruce Moore about an alternative camping spot. The city contends it needs the parking lot the group has been using for auxiliary parking for Riverfest on Memorial Day weekend.

Occupy Little Rock has been working on obtaining permission to use private property as a new location for its base of protest and has made progress on a site. But it said it can’t complete arrangements by Wednesday morning.

Police barricades around the existing camp have come down and much of the tent city has already been dismantled. Police are prepared to arrest Occupy members who refuse to leave Wednesday morning. Arrests are expected, though my understanding is that the expectation is that they will be done peacefully without resistance, perhaps even with coffee and doughnuts for the police. A symbolic arrest of an LR Nine of occupiers was discussed at one point.

If I know the authoritarian bent of the city directors who’ve been irked for weeks by the protest camp by the freeway, this will irk them even further. Expect some stern lectures from them about these agitators if given a chance at Tuesday’s board meeting. Too bad. These directors could learn something from the determined, mannerly and well-informed activism that has marked the Occupy LR action from the start of its action in October. The most disgruntled board members — and Occupy has some supporters on the board, by the way — remind me of nothing so much as the sort of teenagers who got so offended by long hair in the 1960s that they gathered accomplices to forcibly cut the hair of those who dared to present an appearance that didn’t conform to the norm. You’d think history would teach you can tear down tents and arrest dirty hippies and cut hair, but you can’t eradicate speech or ideas, not even with guns.

Occupy LR has been meeting with attorneys and, as in other endeavors, doesn’t enter the next phase of protest unprepared.

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• GOOD BUT PRICEY: College-acquired knowledge is spurring an increasing debt load.

The New York Times today undertakes a major look at the enormous increase in college loan debt.

No reason to think the theme isn’t applicable to college students here.

94 percent of college graduates nationwide borrowed money to complete their education, against 45 percent in 1993.

Average debt $ 23,000. Only 38 percent are making payments.

The extraordinary debt load is compared with the mortgage crisis, though a mass default isn’t yet predicted. However … Those loans are hard to pay off waiting tables, as many graduates interviewed in the article are learning to their despair.

State and federal spending for education, adjusted for inflation, is at a 25-year low. State and local support of students has dropped by 24 percent since 2001 while tuition at state schools has increased by 72 percent. See Arkansas where tuition increases shouldn’t take long to eat up the (declining) value of the vaunted lottery scholarships. (State support continues to trend down here, with higher ed spending by the state dropping from 16.8 percent of total budget in 2009 to 15.9 percent in 2011, according to a national collegiate group.)

The decline in state spending on higher education has not been saved but spent on, among others, exponential increases in prison costs. Which is ironic, or something. Said the article:

The new financial reality for colleges has left administrators scrambling to maintain academic quality and all-important rankings with diminished state resources. That puts an even higher premium on attracting top-tier students — the rankings depend on them — and playing down the burdens of college debt.

Many students, the article says, don’t have a firm understanding of the cost of college or the debt they’ll incur. Colleges don’t do much to educate them, not wanting to discourage enrollment. This is particularly true of the for-profit schools, where default rates are highest.

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Arkansas' women's golf team has advanced to the NCAA Championship by claiming the last spot from the Central Regional by one stroke.
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The Trinity contemporary art gallery of the Historic Arkansas Museum and the hallways outside are hung with art by four artists who know their media and their minds. Nate Powell, mentioned here earlier, is a master of the pen and ink graphic novel and his works, original sketches for pages from his books, show a sure and unique hand. Emily Wood uses plywood as a metaphor for her subject matter — scenes of family relaxing in the country — and as clever way to add atmosphere and texture to her sketchy acrylic and graphite portraits. Jason Powers has perfected the use of the pencil and airbrushed graphite so that he can get right to the point in his work, some of it so detailed and abstract that it would be right at home in the Arkansas Arts Center’s drawing invitational, “Singular Drawings,” works that feature an obsessive line. Tim Imhauser knows exactly what he’s doing with his wood, though of the four he is the only one who is all over the place in style, with neatly turned vessels, bowls with metal inlays and barely worked chunks of wood that have been carved and painted. They have all reached a point in their careers where their footing feels sure, if not rooted in one spot.

Powers’ “The Ritual” — one of the obsessive works — uses abstracted images of animal forms that come from the creepy crawly world of herps and weird animals: fins and spikes and eyeballs and hoses and articulated tails and scales and frogs, things that are drawn beautifully and deeply uncomfortable to look at. (Please forgive the quality of the phone photos that follow.)

• Powers’ “The Ritual”

In his portraiture, Powers uses a soft line (sometimes airbrushed) to create dimension, so that while we don’t have the satisfaction of seeing the individual strokes the way we would in, say, Chuck Close, there is a sculptural effect. It verges on the superficial at times but is still finely done:

• Jason Powers

Wood on wood: smiling, warm happy people, the sketchy pretty opposite of Powers’ nightmarish and tightly drawn figures. In a painting of two men, she shows that she can go beyond sketch into more completely rendered faces, as the detail below shows.

• Emily Wood

One of my favorite Imhauser pieces is called “Tribute to Elizabeth,” as in blacksmith Elizabeth Brim, whose terrific work you might have seen at UALR in the 2009 exhibit “Form Follows Function, Or Does It?” and elsewhere. Imhauser has added a forged iron knob and legs to his spalted ash bowl:

• Imhauser’s “Tribute to Elizabeth”

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