When cats purr and dogs invite more, more, more tummy scratching, their human friends assume the animals are enjoying themselves. But we have no ultimate proof that animals feel pleasure. Research scientist Jonathan Balcombe (Knoxville ’91), who has spent years studying animal behavior, posits in his book Pleasurable Kingdom that humans aren’t the only animals capable of feeling pleasure.
Like many youngsters who grew up in the 1950s, Michael Lofaro enjoyed watching Fess Parker portray frontiersman Davy Crockett on television. Eventually his interest in Crockett and Daniel Boone led him to a career teaching and researching early American literature and folklore. Lofaro keeps an autographed photo of Parker wearing the famous coonskin cap on a bookcase in his office at UT Knoxville.
President George H. W. Bush enjoyed showing his friends the White House painting of President Abraham Lincoln and his Civil War generals. Bush would point to the painting and assert that all of America’s great presidents were tested by fire. Bush, a decorated World War II hero and experienced Cold War warrior, would have an opportunity to prove himself as America’s commander-in-chief during the l991 Gulf War. His son George W. Bush, only the second U.S. presidential offspring to also hold the presidency, will be judged for his own wartime decisions.
Jan Simek steps in as interim Knoxville Chancellor, forensic science on display, and UT Extension’s efforts to put Tennessee’s winemaking industry on the map—these and other stories in this edition of UTopics.
I gave my first reading of my children’s novel, Gentle’s Holler, in Sylva, North Carolina, in the spring of 2005. I noticed a woman in the front row, Dot Connor, in her sixties with a shy smile and eyes bright and alive with curiosity. I wondered why she was there, because it was mostly children gathered. I learned she was the daughter of Mary Jane Queen, a mountain ballad singer, and my book reminded her of her own large family.
UT is a leader in the development of alternative fuels, the university is enjoying its best year in recent history in terms of state funding, and Dr. Bill Bass has solved the mystery of “The Big Bopper”—these and other stories in this edition of UTopics.
For years Cormac McCarthy, Knoxville’s most famous living literary son, had something of a cult following. He seemed doomed to labor under the aesthetically fulfilling—if financially problematic—moniker of “writer’s writer,” a serious craftsman whose work remained a secret shared among a few fiercely loyal souls. The secret is now out.
The new Glocker Business Administration -Building is well on its way to a 2008 opening in Knoxville. This is one of the many items in the Summer 2007 installment of UTopics.
SENATE LAWYER BECOMES UNPAID SMOKIES MEDICAL RECEPTIONIST! I fully expected to see this newspaper headline. Most of the things I worked on made national news. But maybe not this time.
A book about butterflies, solving the mystery of The Big Bopper’s death, a fat camp for pets, and other stories in this issue’s installment of UTopics.
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